George Chalmers and the History Wars of the American Revolutionary Era

George Chalmers was a sore loser. Born in Scotland in 1742, Chalmers came to Maryland in 1763 and practiced as an attorney until 1775. Hostilities between Britain and its colonies drove the ardent loyalist to leave North America for London. In England, Chalmers began amassing documents and writing histories about colonial North America and British imperial policy in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

The George Chalmers Collection is an exhaustive archive of Chalmers’s historical work and thinking. In over twenty volumes, the Collection contains Chalmers’s hand-written copies of colonial-era documents along with some original manuscripts. The sheer size of the collection belies just how carefully Chalmers curated the volumes. He never intended his collection to be some unbiased chronicle of important moments and documents in early American history. Rather, Chalmers included documents that would best serve his two main, and interconnected, arguments about colonial American history and of the origins of the American Revolution. First, Chalmers criticized British policy makers for being too lenient on colonists. Second, he argued that the colonists grew aggressively independent and increasingly willing to flout British authority during the eighteenth century, which should have justified more stringent regulations.
For brevity’s sake, I’ll focus on some of the documents related to New York in the second quarter of the eighteenth-century, a somewhat forgotten era of American history. Flipping through the first New York volume, I was struck by Chalmers’s interest in a dispute over the salary paid to Lewis Morris, the Chief Justice of the colony. Though the New York Assembly—the legislative house elected by the colonists—owed Morris a salary of £300 in 1726, they decided only to pay him £250. Beginning with a speech he gave to the Assembly, in that same year, Morris fought that decision with language that fit Chalmers’s overarching arguments. In his initial speech, Morris questioned the Assembly’s motives for docking his salary. Since they had never complained about his performance, he intimated that something else was afoot.
Chalmers also included a letter from Morris to an imperial official in London, in which Morris suggested that the Assembly’s action was a thinly veiled power grab. He argued that the Assembly merely wanted to assert their power over judicial officers, who were appointed by the King or his ministers. Controlling salaries might give the colonists power over royal officials. The Assembly’s actions could thus have far-reaching consequences. Chalmers underlined a passage from the letter—he did this regularly to highlight what he thought was important about a document—in which Morris wondered “How mischievous in its consequences, such an example may be to the rest of his Majesty’s plantations and of what dangerous tendency to lessen … their dependence on the British government.” If Morris was correct, then the Assembly punished a perfectly capable judge simply to augment their authority. For Chalmers, this seemingly minor salary dispute demonstrated the irrational lengths to which the colonists would go to assert their independence.

Chalmers also believed that British policies compounded the problem and enabled the colonists’ independent streak. Another set of documents in the volume deal with a period of instability running from when New York Governor William Cosby died in 1736, to 1743 when his successor was finally appointed. In the interim, Lieutenant Governor George Clarke acted as the Governor, a wishy-washy status that did not command the necessary authority to control the colonists. In a statement Chalmers again underlined for impact, Clarke wrote that “an unruly spirit of independency and disaffection has at last got to such a height in that province that he, found the weight and authority of a Lieut. Governor … [not] able to subdue it.” It seemed evident to Clarke that British officials should have been vigilant in clamping down on the independent-minded colonists. But Clarke’s letter suggests that his superiors in England did not seem to understand the severity of the situation in New York. Their indecision hamstrung the King’s ranking agent in the province.

The pièce de résistance for Chalmers was a speech by Clarke to the assembly in 1741. Clarke’s address coincided with a series of suspicious fires that broke out across New York City during March and April. New Yorkers sensed a conspiracy. Clarke seems to have hoped that he could harness the climate of fear to rein in the Assembly, especially their aggressive actions regarding salaries. He began his speech by shaming the colonists.

According to Clarke, New York was “more highly favored than any other of his Majesty’s Provinces.” Despite this, the Assembly’s “lust for power” led them to usurp the authority over the salaries of government officials. Clarke understood this was an effective route to power because “men are naturally servants of those who pay them.” In asserting themselves, New Yorkers had “subverted the constitution, assuming to themselves one undoubted branch of his Majesty’s prerogative.” In the process, the Assembly came close to confirming the “jealousy which has for some years obtained in England, that the plantations are not without thoughts of throwing off their dependence on the crown of England.” In light of the crisis in Manhattan, Clarke hoped New Yorkers would take stock of the dangers that might follow if they actually became independent. Who would prevent future conspiracies?

Given that Clarke raised the salary issue in the midst of what was surely the most trying moment of his governorship, Chalmers’s focus on salaries seems well founded. But how do we understand Chalmers’s obsession with an arcane 1740s salary dispute in terms of his broader arguments about the Revolution? The issue of what governmental body controlled the salaries of royally-appointed colonial officials had resurfaced in force during the Townshend Duties crisis in the late 1760s. The Townshend Acts taxed consumer goods—glass, lead, paper, paint, and tea, among other things. Colonists opposed the taxes stridently less because of what they taxed, and more because the tax revenue would support the “administration of justice, and the support of civil government.” In essence, the Empire would use the revenue from the act to pay the salaries of officials in all the colonies they wanted.

To British officials, men like George Clarke, this provision amounted to a reclamation of a traditional royal prerogative that the colonists had unjustly seized, and a means to restore the balance of power in the imperial relationship. Colonists, though, would decry this as the usurpation of a power that traditionally fell to their elected representatives in the colonial assemblies. Since colonists already lacked representation in Parliament, losing their power over appointed officials would effectively deprive them of the ability to influence colonial policy whatsoever.

In short, salaries were integral to debates over the legitimacy of both British policies in the 1760s and 1770s and colonists’ reactions to them. Chalmers collected these particular documents because they called into question whether the colonists ever rightly possessed the power over salaries. In the process, these documents undercut a central justification for rebellion. Eighteenth-century American historians—namely the South Carolina doctor, David Ramsay—made essentially the opposite argument. The Revolution, in their view, was an attempt by colonists to regain rights, liberties, and independence that they had long enjoyed. The very legitimacy of the American Revolution and the foundation of the United States hung in the balance of these historical debates.

History is written by the winners. In American history, loyalists are the ultimate losers. Nevertheless, the Revolution’s losers shaped the history written by its winners. Despite Chalmers’s loyalist political sensibilities, his historical work deeply influenced nineteenth-century American writing about the colonial and revolutionary eras. In 1844, the most famous and most patriotic American historian of his generation, George Bancroft, was accused of plagiarizing Chalmers. Bancroft denied the accusation. But he and many other historians of his generation did rely heavily on Chalmers’s research. They often used the sources that Chalmers complied, only to draw the opposite conclusions. Through his collecting, Chalmers, a loyalist historian, established a narrative that infected the writing of even the most nationalistic and celebratory generation of American historians. That the NYPL has made the collection widely available to a new generation of historians begs the question: how might Chalmers’s research influence future writing on the American Revolution? The digitization this collection invites us to rethink assumptions about the power of history’s losers to shape their own stories, as well as even more basic assumption about how historical narratives come into being.

Further Reading

Chalmers’s first publication about the American Revolution, which criticized Edmund Burke and other MPs who supported the rebellious colonists’ position, was Answer from the Electors of Bristol to the Letter of Edmund Burke (London: T. Cadell, 1777). Chalmers’s two major works on American history were Political Annals of the Present United Colonies, from their Settlement to the Peace of 1763 (London: Printed for the author: and sold by J. Bowen, 1780); and An Introduction to the History of the Revolt of the Colonies: Giving from the State Papers, a Comprehensive View of their Conduct, from the Successive Settlement of Each, to their Declaration of Independence (London: Printed by Baker and Galabin, 1782). Chalmers never completed the proposed second volume of Political Annals. However, in 1868 the New-York Historical Society published a continuation of the Annals based on Chalmers’s handwritten manuscripts, which is available in Collections of the New York Historical Society for the Year 1868 (New York: Printed for the Society, 1868).

For more on Chalmers’s life, see Alexander Du Toit, “Chalmers, George (bap. 1742, d. 1825),” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004; online edition, May 2011. On Chalmers’s influence on American historical writing in the nineteenth century, see Eileen Ka-May Cheng, “Plagiarism in Pursuit of Historical Truth: George Chalmers and The Patriotic Legacy of Loyalist History,” in Remembering the Revolution: Memory, History, and Nation Making from Independence to the Civil War, ed. Michael A. McDonnell, Clare Corbould, and Frances Clarke (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 2013), 144–61.

On early historical writing about the American Revolution, see Peter C. Messer, Stories of Independence: Identity, Ideology, and History in Eighteenth-Century America (DeKalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press, 2005); Eileen K. Cheng, The Plain and Noble Garb of Truth: Nationalism & Impartiality in American Historical Writing, 1784-1860 (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2008); Michael A. McDonnell, Clare Corbould, and Frances Clarke, eds., Remembering the Revolution: Memory, History, and Nation Making from Independence to the Civil War (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 2013); and Michael D. Hattem, “Historical Charts and David Ramsay’s Narrative of Progress,” The Junto, May 26, 2015.

About the Early Manuscripts Project

With support from the The Polonsky Foundation, The New York Public Library is currently digitizing upwards of 50,000 pages of historic early American manuscript material. The Early American Manuscripts Project will allow students, researchers, and the general public to revisit major political events of the era from new perspectives and to explore currents of everyday social, cultural, and economic life in the colonial, revolutionary, and early national periods. The project will present on-line for the first time high quality facsimiles of key documents from America’s Founding, including the papers of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton and James Madison. Drawing on the full breadth of the Library’s manuscript collections, it will also make widely available less well-known manuscript sources, including business papers of Atlantic merchants, diaries of people ranging from elite New York women to Christian Indian preachers, and organizational records of voluntary associations and philanthropic organizations. Over the next two years, this trove of manuscript sources, previously available only at the Library, will be made freely available through nypl.org.