The French and Indian War gave many British aristocrats their first view into what their American colonists were like. They were not impressed!

War thrust people of diverse backgrounds and views into close contact, the French and Indian War was no exception.  Britons and Americans learned first-hand that many of the commonalities that they believed they held were simply not true. They were in fact, very different peoples alike. Some Englishmen came away from the war with a bitterly gained conviction that the colonials were a despicable people — hardly worthy to call themselves the king’s subjects. Their cowardice in battle was boundless, their greed and dishonesty no less conspicuous. Americans were so wedded to their own little provinces, so jealous of their neighbors, and so addicted to making money that they were incapable of working for the good of the empire as a whole. The various colonies often seemed more enthusiastic about feuding with rivals than fighting the French.

English leaders attributed these differences to a belief that Americans were a common, lowborn people. There were no true gentlemen to lead the whining, mutinous rabble they called soldiers. They were all a ‘parcel of scoundrels.’   Washington’s commander General Forbes told Secretary Pitt. ‘A few of their principal Officers excepted, all the rest are an extreme bad Collection of broken Inn-keepers, Horse Jockeys, & Indian traders, and the Men under them, are a direct copy of their Officers, nor can it well be otherwise, as they are a gathering of the scum of the worst people in every Country.’ General James Wolfe, the martyred victor of Quebec, swore that ‘there was never a people collected together so unfit … dilatory, ignorant, irresolute and some grains of a very unmanly quality and very unsoldier-like and unsailor-like. The Americans are in general the dirtiest, the most contemptible, cowardly dogs you can conceive. There is no depending on ’em in action. They fall down dead in their own dirt and desert by battalions, officers and all.’

The colonies might be rich and populous, but a sweeping disdain for all things American became pervasive in Britian.  At Court, the Kings ministers and generals a confidence that there was little risk in bullying them. Franklin remembered a British general who said ‘within my hearing’ that ‘with a Thousand British Grenadiers he would undertake to go from one end of America to the other and geld all the Males partly by force and partly by a little Coaxing.’

Many Americans reciprocated the animosity. The colonists had not encountered many British soldiers or officials before the war. Now they saw the Redcoats behaving not as a national army sent to support and defend them but rather as an occupying force subjugating an enemy land. Franklin observed of Braddock’s army that ‘from their landing till they got beyond the settlements, they had plundered and stripped the inhabitants, totally ruining some poor families, besides insulting, abusing, and confining people if they remonstrated.’ Soldiers would never have dared to disregard so flagrantly the rights of the king’s subjects in Britain.

British society had rigid class distinctions and living among the colonials, the British came face to face with the realization of just how revealed to them how rigid the British caste system was.  There was simply had no counterpart in America. When British officers from aristocratic backgrounds attempted to impose brutal Army discipline, the Americans rebelled.  English officers were arrogant and accustomed to being horrifyingly brutal toward common soldiers. The American Indians were also viewed (by both sides) as sub-human and uncivilized.

While there was slavery and social distinctions within the colonies, white colonial society was freer, more prosperous, and more fluid than the English example. The Americans became conscious of their distinctiveness. They gloried in it. They began to believe in their own moral superiority. 

By the time soldiers were sent to occupy Boston, these mutual attitudes of superiority had become firmly cemented.  British “lobsterbacks” were seen by the Americans as little more that piratical slaves of their egomaniacal masters.  Americans were viewed by all Brittons as criminals who were morally, socially, and societally unfit to govern themselves.  The dehumanizing of the enemy had already started long before the first shots were fired.  War as inevitable.

When you look at America today, we find people who behave in similar manners.  Our Two-Party system as reduced us to petty squabbles and distrust.  We dehumanize the “other” (especially in GOP/MAGA circles). It’s a power keg and the fuse is short.

“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

George Santayana

---

Want to have the
Regimental Brewmeister
at your site or event?

You can hire me.

https://colonialbrewer.com/yes-you-can-hire-me-for-your-event-or-site/