The Scratch of a Pen: 1763 and the Transformation of America

Parameters, Autumn, 2007 by Alan Cate

The Scratch of a Pen: 1763 and the Transformation of America. By Colin G. Calloway. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006. 224 pages. $26.00.

The 1763 Treaty of Paris, concluded among Great Britain, France, and Spain, ended the contest known as the French and Indian War in North America and the Seven Years' War in Europe. The settlement entailed an enormous land transfer. From France, the victorious British obtained Canada and Louisiana--that is, all the territory east of the Mississippi River stretching from Canada to the Gulf of Mexico. Additionally, France's ally Spain ceded Florida to Albion. The great nineteenth century American historian Francis Parkman, in a phrase that supplies the title of Colin Calloway's new book, aptly wrote, "half a continent ... changed hands at the scratch of a pen."

This engrossing, gracefully written volume, however, isn't really about diplomacy, war, or real estate. Rather, as Calloway declares in one of his many felicitous apercus, the book is "less concerned with changing colors on the map ... than with the effects of changing circumstances on the various peoples living there." Traditionally, historians of colonial America, especially in writing about the decade prior to the War of Independence, have focused on Anglo-American society and culture rooted along the Atlantic seaboard. Calloway brings forward the many others who are equally part of the early American story. These include Indian, African, Canadian, French, and Spanish populations, as well as backcountry British settlers, whose frontier lives and interests often radically differed from those concentrated in coastal enclaves. In so doing, the author also neatly captures the multicultural and global nature of the eighteenth-century British Empire with observations such as "slaves from West Africa labored in fields in West Florida wearing textiles from West Yorkshire."

Calloway, born and educated in England, and a professor at Dartmouth College, has produced several previous books on Native American history. He sets the stage in his latest effort with a marvelous, wide-ranging opening chapter on "America and Americans in 1763." He reminds us how slow communications were back then; the peace was signed in early February, but the British commander-in-chief in North America did not receive the momentous news until May. Fewer than two million people inhabited Britain's North American colonies. Fully one-fifth of these were African slaves and, in some areas, they outnumbered free whites. Only one in 20 Americans lived in cities. Along the frontier--the Appalachian Mountain chain and points west--Anglo-Americans mixed with French and Spanish traders, and multiple Indian nations. The potential of death due to disease or violence, to a degree difficult for modern readers to conceive, hovered constantly.

Subsequent chapters treat major events set into motion by the Peace of 1763. With France eliminated as a North American power, white settlers began heading west, first in a trickle, then a steady stream and, eventually, a flood. They inevitably collided with the Indians, who had tolerated the relative handful of transient French fur-trappers and missionaries, but were unprepared for masses of land-hungry Europeans. The result was much bloodshed and the ultimate destruction or displacement of the tribes. More immediately, Indian resentment of British policies far less lenient than those implemented by the French touched off an uprising led by the Ottawa chief Pontiac throughout the summer of 1763.

John Shy, an eminent scholar of the Revolution, has observed, "Americans were never more British than in 1763." Yet the supreme irony of Great Britain's triumph over her imperial rivals in 1763 is that it sowed the seeds of colonial rebellion less than a decade and a half later. Besides ineffectually trying to thwart expansion into the vast, newly won area beyond the Appalachians, the Crown understandably sought to have the colonists help pay for the expensive war waged, at least in part, in their defense and for their continued defense against hostile Indians. Generations of American schoolchildren, of course, have been taught that this tyrannical, unwarranted "taxation without representation" was a precipitating factor in the American Revolution. And the removal of the French and reduction of the Indian threats meant the Americans no longer needed to rely upon British protection. Indeed, Calloway's final chapter looks ahead to another Treaty of Paris, signed in 1783, where Great Britain recognized American independence.

Like its companion titles in Oxford University Press' "Pivotal Moments in American History" project, this book stresses the power of contingency and individual agency. These are academic terms for the old-fashioned idea that nothing is inevitable and that it is not vast, impersonal historical forces that make a difference, but rather individuals with their decisions and actions. As such, The Scratch of a Pen represents a worthy addition to the series, and a necessary read for anyone interested in how military-diplomatic events impacted society and culture in pre-Revolutionary America.