"Rackets and Tea"
The Life and Writings
of William Hazlitt (1778-1830) [TOC -- Hazlitt's Page]

Chapter One
"America"

In 1775, fighting had broken out between British soldiers and the English colonists in North America. Great Britain determined to put down what they thought was a small revolt of ill-equipped men in one place in one colony, a revolt -- again, so the English thought -- that had little popular support in the colonies. It was a matter of nipping things in the bud. By 1776, the British leaders were beginning to realize they had an extensive and difficult problem on their hands.

In June of 1777, the English general, John Burgoyne, led 7,000 men south from Quebec so to occupy Crown Point and obliged the Americans to evacuate Fort Ticonderoga which the rebellious colonists had taken two years earlier. Although the long march had taken its toll on Burgoyne's soldiers, they continued to push forward, such that, by September, they were approaching Saratoga, and there a battle broke out with the entrenched Americans. In the meantime, another American force had circled around and cut Burgoyne's retreat route by destroying his boats at Lake George. On October the 16th, having no choice, Burgoyne surrendered.

The tidings of Burgoyne's surrender had reached Europe that December and the French king lost no time expressing his views on the matter. On February 6th, 1778, the French officially become allied with the new nation by concluding a treaty in respect to trade.1 At about the same time, Spain concluded a treaty with France and contemporaneously declared war on England.2 Before the year was out, on December 20th: War between Holland and England was declared.3

By 1781, the war in the colonies -- such a long way off and happening at a time when Britain's powerful enemy was but across the English Channel and posing a most serious threat -- was proving to be most unpopular at home. The Tory Government of Lord North was tottering.4 Then the news of Yorktown arrived. Yorktown was where, on October 17th, the British general, Charles Cornwallis surrendered his forces; it was an event that effectively brought victory to the Colonies.5

In November of 1782, peace terms between England and the United States were signed6; in January of 1783, with France and Spain. Peace did not stick, however. After 1789, with the outbreak of the French Revolution, there followed thirteen years of war between Britain and France. Safe to say, that William Hazlitt was born into a time, a time that was to stretch for years, during which there was always talk of war.

As for the politics of Great Britain in the last couple of decades before the end of the 18th century: The American Revolution had just ended and the French Revolution was going on. Many British aristocrats were bracing for the worst; though, the steps that the English rulers had taken a hundred years earlier made a bulwark against a bloody revolution, such as did unfold in America and (most particularly) in France. The ideas of democracy and of liberty, in England, were advanced beyond mere notions much before the Americans and the French took up arms in the cause of democracy. England had her "Glorious Revolution," in 1688; and pretty much a bloodless one at that. Democratic institutions had settled in, in Great Britain, quite nicely, much before the American and French revolutions. By the last quarter of the 18th century, the British government, or rather an orderly succession of them, were looking -- though the record is decidedly spotty -- to the business of preserving the people's civil rights. The Roman Catholic Relief Act, 1778, gave the Roman Catholics the same rights in England as everyone else.7 It was in 1780 that the British parliament, much before any other legislative chamber in the world, passed an act for the Gradual Abolition of Slavery.8 "The first great journals date from this time [c. 1780]. With the Morning Chronicle, the Morning Post, the Morning Herald, and the Times9, all of which appeared in the interval between the opening years of the American war and the beginning of the French Revolution, journalism took a new tone of responsibility and intelligence ..."10 Public opinion from this point on was moulded by what was written in the public press. The English parliament, by its acts passed in 1773, required that "milestones should be set up on the highways, signposts erected at road junctions, and that bridges should be walled or fenced."11 On August the 2nd, 1784, the first mail coach made a scheduled run. It left London at 4pm for Bristol and then 8am for London. It was too, in 1784, that the first golf club was founded at St Andrews. So too, in that year, 1784, Andrew Meikle made an invention, the threshing machine. And, in 1785, The Big Bang of the Industrial Revolution occurred in England, when, for the first time, steam engines were used to power spinning machinery. On January 26th, 1788, the first convict ship sailed for New South Wales. It was the same year that a law was passed requiring that chimney sweepers be a minimum of 8 years old (it was not much enforced).

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