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George III, by Christopher Hibbert, Basic Books, 1998, 464 pp.; $28
Sweet Land of Liberty: The Ordeal of the American Revolution in Northampton County, Pennsylvania, by Francis S. Fox, Penn State University Press, 2000, 211 pp.; $29.95
A lot of ordinary people were caught up in the American War for Independence, and a surprising number of them were of German extraction. Some, like the King of England, who conversed with his wife in German all their days, have been the subject of many books. Others, like the residents of Northampton County, Pennsylvania, where 85 percent of the county's 15,000 residents came from Germany, have not. To come once again at the question of the morality of the American Revolution but from an unfamiliar perspective—through the experiences of George III, who is deftly portrayed in Christopher Hibbert's personal biography, and of the Northampton residents, whose story Francis Fox opens up for the first time in his pathbreaking book—is to be reminded of the moral complexities that extraordinary times brought to the lives of ordinary people.
The German angle shared by these books is no more than an intriguing sidelight. George III kept self-consciously loyal to the German principality of Hanover, whose Elector he remained during his years as Britain's monarch, and he dispatched all but one of his sons to Hanover for part of their education, but he never paid a visit to these German lands. The German background of the settlers in Northampton County functioned usually as a negative reference point. Dissatisfaction with the Old World had propelled them to the New. Once having left behind the economic, religious, domestic, or political circumstances that made Germany unattractive, these migrants valued most about their new life in North America the chance to be left alone while they started a new life. When the War for Independence forced the German migrants of Northampton County to think directly about their political tie to the German-descended king of England, and when that monarch took notice of the colonists whose numbers included the Northampton immigrants, things German were not in the forefront of their thinking.
Yet what was in the forefront, as depicted in these two books, was not what we might expect. In both cases the Revolutionary War brought unexpected transformations. The conflict that transformed George III—an earnest Christian, devoted husband and father, and conscientious ruler—into a despotic ogre worked a change of similar magnitude for the much more obscure citizens of Northampton County. In George's case, the change was a matter of perception; in Northampton County, where the Revolution was marked by anything but the triumph of liberty, the changes came in response to opportunity. In both cases, the actual unfolding of events as viewed by historians more than two centuries later was strikingly at odds with popular interpretations at the time.
As Hibbert's life of George III spells out in considerable detail, the third of the Hanoverians to reign as British monarch was an unlikely candidate for the enormities with which he was charged in the American Declaration of Independence. Even when recognizing that the Declaration was never intended as a disinterested account of the actual facts in dispute between the 13 colonies and the mother country—as almost everyone at the time realized—even, that is, when the Declaration is considered as an artful bit of propaganda, its depiction of George III still amounts to an unusually violent denunciation.
For the purpose of assessing the morality of the war that produced the United States of America, it helps to remember that the critical paragraph of the Declaration—beginning "We hold these truths to be self-evident: That all men are created equal"—ended with the assertion that "The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over these states." Most of the rest of the Declaration was devoted to justifying that claim.
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