The March of Folly_ From Troy to Vietnam - Barbara Wertheim Tuchman [88]
While under the aegis of these ministers the Revenue Bill was being prepared, a measure fertile in discord was taken without act of Parliament. The Boundaries Proclamation of 1763 prohibited white settlement west of the Alleghenies, reserving these lands to the Indians. Prompted by the ferocious Indian uprising called Pontiac’s Rebellion, which swept up the tribes from the Great Lakes to Pennsylvania and threatened at one stage to drive the British from the area, the Proclamation was intended to appease the Indians by keeping the colonists from invading their hunting grounds and provoking them to renewed war. Another Indian rising could be a stalking horse for the French besides requiring new expenditure to combat it that Britain could ill afford. Behind the stated motive was a desire to restrict the colonists to the Atlantic seaboard, where they would continue to import British goods, and to prevent debtors and adventurers from crossing the mountains and planting a settlement free of British sovereignty in the heart of America. Here, out of contact with the seaports, they would manufacture their own necessities, in the dire prediction of the Board of Trade, “to the infinite prejudice of Britain.”
The Proclamation was hardly welcome to colonists who were already forming stock companies to promote migration for profit or, like George Washington and Benjamin Franklin, obtaining grants of land across the mountains for speculation. To the restless homesteader it was infuriating interference. A century and a half of winning the wilderness had not made Americans amenable to the idea that a faraway government of lords in silk knee-breeches had the right to prevent their taking possession of land they could conquer with axe and rifle. They saw in the Proclamation not protection of the Indians—whom their own volunteer forces had done more than the redcoats to combat in Pontiac’s Rebellion—but corrupt plans of Whitehall to grant great tracts of Crown lands to court favorites.
Getting acquainted is supposed to generate mutual understanding, and joining in the same fight to weld fellow-feeling, yet the reverse was the effect of contact between regulars and provincial forces in the Seven Years’ War. At the end of operations they liked, respected and understood each other less than before. Colonials naturally resented the British Army’s snobbery, the officers who disdained to accord equal rank to colonial officers, the rituals of spit and polish (British troops used 6500 tons of flour a year for whitening wigs and breeches), the extension of supreme command over provincial forces and superior airs in general. That could be expected.
On the other hand, British contempt for the colonial soldier, who was eventually (with French help) to take the British sword in surrender, was the oddest, deepest, most disserviceable misjudgment of the years leading to the conflict. How could General Wolfe, the hero who at 32 captured Quebec and died on the battlefield, call the rangers who fought with him “the worst soldiers in the universe”? He added in another letter, “The Americans are in general the dirtiest most contemptible cowardly dogs you can conceive … rather an encumbrance than any real strength to an army.” Dirty the woodsmen-rangers certainly were in comparison with the white-wigged redcoats. Brilliant exterior had become so much the criterion of a European army that it determined judgment. Sir Jeffery Amherst had a “very poor opinion” of the rangers and Wolfe’s successor, General James Murray, declared the Americans “very unfit for and very impatient of war.” Others who