American History in the Secondary School

ARTHUR M. WOLFSON, PH.D., Editor.

THE INFLUENCE OF OLIVER CROMWELL AND WILLIAM III ON AMERICAN HISTORY.

In teaching the history of Europe from the Treaty of Westphalia to the beginning of the French Revolution, no mistake is commoner than the one of regarding the almost continuous series of wars between the European States as a purposeless struggle for territorial aggrandizement. Equally in American history, the teacher is prone to allow his interest in the growth of social and political institutions to obscure the fact that the North American continent was, for nearly a century, merely a distant battleground on which Holland, England and France were struggling for commercial supremacy. “Unity is given to the history of England in the eighteenth century,” says Seeley (“Expansion of England,” p. 77), “if you remark the single fact that Greater Britain during that period was establishing itself in opposition to Greater France.... You will, I think, find it very helpful in studying the history of those two countries always to bear in mind that throughout most of that period the five States of Western Europe all alike are not properly European States but world States, and that they debate continually among themselves a mighty question, which is not European at all and which the student with his eye fixed on Europe is too apt to disregard, namely, the question of the possession of the New World.” In the same way, the student of American history must be continually reminded that he is studying not the history of half a dozen or more isolated communities, but a phase of a great European struggle for world power.

Struggle with the Dutch.

From 1689 to 1763, this struggle is marked by an almost continuous war between France and England. An earlier generation, however, witnessed a similar struggle between Holland and England. This earlier struggle is also vitally important in the history of North America. Few students of American history are aware of the unprecedented growth of the Dutch maritime power during the first half of the seventeenth century. To most of them the founding of New Netherlands is an isolated fact, comparatively unimportant because the Dutch colony ultimately fell into the hands of the English. The fact nevertheless remains that throughout the greater part of the seventeenth century the carrying trade of the world was in the hands of the Dutch and Amsterdam was the exchange of the world. What Venice had been in the fifteenth century, Amsterdam became in the seventeenth.

“To break this monopoly was England’s object; and to raise his country to a position of leadership in the commercial world was one of the greatest ambitions of Cromwell.” (Andrew’s “Colonial Self Government,” p. 11; see also p. 15). In 1651, at the instance of Cromwell, Parliament passed the first Navigation Act, “for the increase of the shipping and the encouragement of the navigation of this [the English] nation.” In the light of later events, we in America are too apt to regard this act and its successors as designed to limit the trade of the colonies. As a matter of fact, a sufficient study of these acts, especially those of 1651 and 1660, will show that they were aimed directly at the Dutch who were at the time the maritime carriers both for England and for the other nations of Europe.

The Navigation Acts.

As a result of the first Navigation Act, England entered almost at once on the series of three wars, 1652-1654, 1665-1667, 1672-1674, which lasted just long enough to break the commercial supremacy of Holland. Every school boy knows that as a result of these wars England acquired the colony of New Netherlands, but few, even of his elders, realize that, “The Navigation Act, which remained substantially in force for nearly two hundred years is the great legislative monument of the Commonwealth, it was the first manifestation of the newly awakened consciousness of the community, the act which laid the foundation of the English commercial empire.” (Seeley’s “Growth of British Policy,” II, p. 25.)

Throughout this period of rivalry between Holland and England, especially after 1660, often against the will of the people, the English government maintained a close alliance with the king of France, the bitterest enemy of the Dutch people. In the last years of the reign of James II, however, the tide of English feeling turned irresistibly against the French alliance. Though James still looked to his cousin, Louis XIV, for aid and comfort, the people of England would have no more of him, and for this reason, as well as for purely domestic reasons, James was in the end forced to flee from the country. Thenceforward, there was a complete change in the English foreign policy.

The Dutch and English Against France.

When William of Orange, Stadtholder of Holland, the most uncompromising enemy of Louis XIV, accepted the crown of England there came not only a complete revolution in the English constitutional system, but also, and far more important for the history of the American colonies, a complete revolution in England’s foreign policy. War between England and France, in spite of the traditional rivalry handed down from Plantagenet times, had been extremely rare; Englishmen and Frenchmen had lived peacefully side by side for half a century or more in the northeastern part of North America, while Englishmen and Dutchmen were struggling for the possession of the territory between Long Island Sound and Delaware Bay. Henceforth, the English and the Dutch were to fight side by side in the effort to break the power of Louis the Magnificent both in Europe and in America. Just as between 1651 and 1689 it was the first interest of the English that the maritime power of the Dutch should be broken, so now, “it was a first interest of England that the encroachments of France should be arrested, and that the Dutch should be saved from destruction. The rivalry between the English and Dutch must cease; the two sea powers must combine in opposition to France” (Seeley, “Growth of British Policy,” II, p. 207).

How efficiently William III set this policy in motion is attested by the history of Europe and America in the eighteenth century. Though he personally never realized the magnitude of the issue, though from first to last he was primarily interested in the preservation of Holland, though had he realized that his work was to result in the aggrandizement of England at the expense both of Holland and France, he would probably never have accepted the English throne, the far-reaching effects of this policy are to be seen not only in America but in Asia and in Africa as well. The accession of William III is thus the turning point in American colonial history. Almost at once, he set in motion that series of wars which ended in America only when the last vestige of French colonial empire had disappeared from the continent. What he began, Marlborough and Pitt, in later generations, completed.

Influence Upon America.

If we keep these facts in mind: first, that the Navigation Act of 1651 inaugurated a trade policy that was to build up the English carrying trade at the expense of the Dutch; and second, that the accession of William of Orange as William III of England marked the end of the rivalry between the English and the Dutch and inaugurated the struggle between the English and the French, Oliver Cromwell and William of Orange become two of the most important figures in American history and therefore deserve far more attention than is usually accorded them in teaching American history.

For the further study of this phase of American history, the student is recommended to the works of Fiske and Parkman, and to the shorter treatises contained in the volumes of Hart’s “American Nation.” Especially important, however, are the two works of Professor J. R. Seeley which have several times been quoted in this paper: “The Growth of British Policy” and the “Expansion of England.”