Alan Taylor on Revolutionary Ironies and the Continental Civil War

Two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Alan Taylor talks with Tyler Cowen about why only 13 of Britain’s American colonies rebelled, how the Revolution made land free in Canada and dear in the United States, how close Canada came to conquest or absorption at three separate moments, and why the Mexican War’s conquered territory made the American Civil War all but unavoidable by 1850 — with Mexico, Haiti, Cuba, and the Dominican Republic living through parallel crises of their own.

Key ideas

1. The Revolution produced a genuine economic irony. Financing war debt through land sales and land taxes made American land dearer after independence, while British subsidy of Canadian government let colonial authorities give land away free to attract settlers back into the empire.
2. Rebellion tracked population and connectivity, not grievance. The 13 colonies revolted because they had the largest, best-linked population base in British North America; Canada, the West Indies, and the smaller colonies stayed loyal because they were too tenuous and too dependent on the Royal Navy to risk it.
3. Canada came close to American absorption three times, and each time the balance tipped the other way: British military and Native advantages defeated the 1812 invasion; British capital dependence deterred a ‘third war’; and a demobilised, war-weary Union public let an achievable 1865 conquest lapse — pushing Britain toward Confederation in 1867 instead.
4. The Mexican War made civil war very hard to avoid. Conquering 40 percent of Mexico’s territory in the 1840s forced the unresolved question of which labour system — free or enslaved — would govern the new land, hardening North and South into incompatible visions of the good society that Taylor sees no realistic 1850s compromise averting.
5. The 1850s–1870s were a continental crisis, not just an American one. Mexico’s own civil war between liberals and conservatives, French intervention under Napoleon III, and diverging trajectories in Haiti, the Dominican Republic, and Cuba unfolded in the same years and were causally entangled with the American conflict — the ‘continental’ framing of Taylor’s new book.

Content

Why only the 13 colonies rebelled

Taylor opens with a population argument: of Britain’s American holdings — the 13 colonies, Canada, and the West Indian islands (Jamaica, Antigua, Barbados) — only the 13 had the numbers and the mutual connections to make armed resistance plausible. Their population, at roughly 2.5 million, was doubling every 22 years, the fastest rate anywhere on earth, and 95 percent of it lived by agriculture, generating constant pressure to expand westward. Canada’s much smaller, French-speaking, Catholic-majority population had just been placated by Britain’s 1774 recognition of French Canadian law and religion — accommodations that alienated the fiercely anti-Catholic 13 colonies rather than drew them in. Both Canada and the island colonies were, in Taylor’s phrase, too dependent on the Royal Navy to risk going it alone. The same population logic explains why the British found it easier to recruit Native allies than the Americans did: British forces in Canada were thin and needed Native military support to hold their western forts, while expansion-hungry American settlers were the very threat Native nations were resisting.

The Revolution’s economic ironies

Taylor traces a specific irony from his own writing: British Canada offered virtually free land to settlers while the new United States made land more expensive. The mechanism is fiscal. Without an income tax, American states and the federal government paid off enormous war debts chiefly through import duties and land sales and taxes, driving land costs up. Britain, by contrast, subsidised colonial government in Canada directly, keeping local taxes low and letting authorities give land away — calculated to lure Americans back into the empire and build a loyal militia. Around 50,000 people made that move; Taylor estimates only a third left for political reasons, mostly in the 1780s, with the larger two-thirds following the cheaper land and lower taxes through the 1790s and beyond. The war’s broader economic toll was severe: with Royal Navy control of the Atlantic strangling transatlantic trade, the American economy shrank by roughly a third between 1775 and 1790 — by Taylor’s account the second-worst depression in American history — before a 1790s boom, arriving with a new federal government and peace, restored the lost value.

Canada and why America never conquered it

The War of 1812 should, on paper, have been easy for a United States of over seven million against a Canadian population of 300,000–500,000. It was not. Thomas Jefferson had called it ‘a mere matter of marching’; instead, an American army of just 9,000 professional soldiers, hastily expanded and poorly trained, faced better-trained British regulars, effective Native allies fighting in forested terrain, and a British supply line running smoothly along the Great Lakes and St Lawrence River against American forces struggling to cross from one watershed to another. Early defeats, rather than the quick victories the Madison administration needed, sapped public support. No third war followed in the decades after, Taylor argues, because economic interdependence made one unthinkable: the United States was Britain’s most important export market and its main source of manufactured goods, while British capital financed the canals and railroads an underdeveloped, capital-poor America could not otherwise afford. Cotton and wheat exporters on the American side had every reason to avoid war regardless of periodic diplomatic tension. The closest call came immediately after the Civil War: an angry Northern public, resentful that Britain had allowed Confederate warships to be built and had granted the Confederacy partial recognition as a belligerent, briefly entertained invading Canada with a battle-hardened, million-strong Union army against roughly 12,000 British troops — a war Taylor says the Union would ‘absolutely’ have won, though the Royal Navy could still have inflicted real damage on coastal cities like Boston or New York. What stopped it was simpler than strategy: the public wanted its soldiers home, and the Union army demobilised too quickly for any organised invasion to materialise.

Confederation, 1867: stitching together the Dominion of Canada

That invasion scare, layered onto an uneasy union between francophone Quebec and anglophone Ontario and Britain’s own fatigue with paying for Canadian defence, pushed Canadian and British leaders toward the British North America Act of 1867, which folded in the Maritime provinces and gestured toward a transcontinental union stretching to British Columbia. Quebec’s assent was bought with a looser federal structure granting more provincial autonomy than the existing Ontario–Quebec union allowed. The outcome was not foreordained: Taylor argues the Maritime provinces, more oriented toward American trade than toward a landlocked Canada with no rail link to them, seriously entertained three options in the 1860s and 1870s — staying independent colonies, joining Canada, or leaving the British Empire to join the United States outright. Newfoundland took a fourth path, remaining a separate British colony until the late 1940s: its population was small, its economy was essentially just fishing for the British market, and it saw no economic case for linking to Canada. Taylor connects Canada’s long-standing pursuit of immigration — recent quotas as high as 500,000 a year against a population of 32 million — to this same underlying anxiety about a large, thinly populated country pressed against a much larger neighbour, even as that immigration now strains housing and healthcare costs enough to generate domestic pushback.

Founding-era fears of collapse, and how democratic were the Jacksonians

Early observers in Britain, Canada, and among the Founders themselves worried the American republic would collapse — too large, too chaotic, too democratic, with no precedent for republican government at continental scale. Taylor takes those fears seriously rather than dismissing them with hindsight: the United States did fall apart, in 1860–61, and took an enormous, costly effort to reassemble. For ninety years American leaders lived with a recurrent sense of crisis about regional power imbalances and the country simply growing too large — an open question, for instance, whether Pacific-coast settlers would eventually spin off their own country. The Swiss Confederacy, notably, barely registered as a model in American political writing of the 1780s; the Dutch Republic loomed larger, until the loose-confederation experience of the Articles of Confederation itself pushed American leaders toward a stronger national government instead. On the Jacksonians, Taylor complicates his mentor Marvin Meyers’s account in Jacksonian Persuasion: by a modern standard, Jacksonian democracy scarcely qualifies, since it excluded women entirely and denied African Americans the vote outside a handful of Northern states with high property requirements; judged against its own era, though, it was a genuine broadening of the male electorate through the elimination of property qualifications. Where Taylor departs furthest from Meyers is on race and expansion, which Meyers’s generation of scholarship largely left off the agenda: American expansion into Native land, and the racial anxieties bound up with it, is central to how Taylor reads the run-up to his new book’s period.

From Mexican War conquest to an unavoidable civil war, and Mexico’s own crisis

The bill for that expansionism, Taylor argues, came due in the 1850s. The Mexican War delivered a lopsided military victory over a weak Mexico and roughly 40 percent of its territory — California, Arizona, New Mexico — but left unresolved which labour system, free or enslaved, would govern it. Northern and Southern publics had by then hardened into competing visions of the good society, each convinced only its own system could sustain a genuine republic. Asked whether civil war was inevitable, Taylor — more willing than most historians to use the word — cannot see a realistic path to compromise between 1850 and 1861: an early-1861 proposal to protect slavery permanently, divide Western territory along a fixed line, and cap federal tariff powers found no support from either a North committed to majority rule or a Deep South unwilling to remain in a nation on those terms. Alexis de Tocqueville, Taylor notes, predicted civil war correctly but expected it to run along racial lines within every state rather than as a North–South sectional conflict. Proximity to Mexico destabilised slavery directly: Mexico had abolished it (retaining the milder coercive system of debt peonage), and several thousand enslaved Texans escaped across the border despite Southern pressure on Mexico to extradite them. Mexico had its own civil war in parallel, between modernising liberals and traditionalist conservatives; Napoleon III’s opportunistic French intervention on the conservative side, driven by grandiose ambitions to unite ‘Latin’ Catholic America against the American republic, collapsed into a costly guerrilla war and discredited Mexican conservatism for a generation once it lost. The subsequent liberal triumph under Benito Juárez — establishing freer elections, a freer press, and a more equitable legal system, if not full land reform — is, in Taylor’s judgement, one of the most consequential North American events of the century, and the precondition for the railroad investment that only followed once American capital had a stable government to partner with.

Caribbean divergence: Haiti, the Dominican Republic, and Cuba

Haiti’s post-independence isolation compounds a familiar story with a specific financial one: having won independence through a slave revolt, Haiti was refused recognition by every major power fearful of the precedent, and France withheld recognition until Haiti agreed to an enormous indemnity for lost plantation property — a burden that locked Haiti into a coercive plantation-export economy to service the debt, and that Taylor identifies as a root of its enduring poverty and authoritarian political tradition. The Dominican Republic, sharing the island, never carried that specific financial burden; in the 1870s the two economies looked genuinely comparable, and it is the debt, in Taylor’s reading, that best explains their subsequent divergence. Cuba remained part of the Spanish Empire until the 1898 American conquest, and the United States’s own grudging retreat from its early promises of full Cuban independence bred a resentment that Taylor traces forward into the eventual communist revolution. Taylor closes the historical tour with two lighter asides: Uncle Tom’s Cabin is historically indispensable but, as a novel, of interest today mainly as a document of 19th-century sentimental culture rather than a good read; and Maine, overlooked as a frontier because of its Atlantic coastline, functioned as New England’s actual frontier — cheap, undeveloped farmland — well into the 1830s and 1840s.

See also

• Alan Taylor — speaker
• Tyler Cowen — host
• American Civil Wars — Taylor’s new book, the source discussed throughout this appearance (no wiki page yet)