Although the Albany Colony was the first Colony in New York State to be founded, its membership disbanded as a result of the Depression and World Wars. In 1952, the Colony was re-organized and set about to furnish the Mayflower room, an early Dutch bedroom at Ft. Crailo. The Colony donated a Dutch chest and table, paintings, quilts and china from personal donations and fund-raising projects. The room was completed in 1962, but since then, the Fort has been taken over by the State of New York with the understanding that the Colony gifts would be used in other exhibits. The Albany Colony holds luncheon meetings twice a year.
Albany Colony Masthead
David Morton, Albany Colony Governor, Howland Descendant
Dianne Rizzo, Albany Colony Treasurer, Hopkins Descendant
Sylvia Magin, Albany Colony Chronicles Editor, Bradford Descendant
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albanycolonymayflower@gmail.com
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New York – Albany Colony Society
From the Newsletter
The Albany Colony held their Annual Compact Day Meeting on November 1 at the Albany Country Club. Greg Magin, son of Sylvia Magin, gave a presentation entitled “The Arrogance of Empire: How British Hubris Led to the Defeat in the American Revolution.”
Watch Greg’s Speech
A summary from Greg’s compelling presentation:
In the 1975 film The Man Who Would Be King, a British soldier exploring the Himalayas is asked by a native if he and his companion are gods. The soldier, played by Michael Caine, responds: “Not Gods, exactly, but Englishmen, which is the next best thing.” In a real sense, this is the way that the English of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries felt about themselves. My contention is that this overweening sense of superiority played a decisive role in the British defeat in the American Revolution.
Of course, there are a hundred reasons why the British lost. There is mercantilism, the dominant economic theory of the age, which reduced the American colonies to mere cogs of Empire; obviously, a system of such massive unfairness was not going to last forever. Then there was the seemingly endless parade of diplomatic and political actions perpetrated against American by the government in London in the 1760s and 70s – the Proclamation Line, the Sugar Act, the Stamp Act, the Quartering Act, the Tea Act, the Intolerable Acts. Perhaps worst of all, there was the incredibly reckless decision to send units of the British army into Boston in order to compel the inhabitants to a sense of duty to the Crown. And, of course, once the war broke out, there were all of the witless blunders that the British generals, carrying out the policies of the British ministers, committed on the battlefield. The unifying concept here is that arrogance underlay all of these errors – not just the intrinsic arrogance of mercantilist imperialism, but the essential hubris of the British culture itself, a tragic flaw which led an otherwise brilliant people to engage in idiotic, self-defeating policies.
When it came to America, Britain’s arrogance was born of ignorance; the two qualities fed off of one another. A point that often gets overlooked is that the British didn’t really know us. None of the British prime ministers before or during the war had ever been to America; nor had Lord George Germaine, the Secretary of State for the Colonies from 1775 to 1782. As Paul Johnson once noted, no member of the British government ever thought of crossing the Atlantic on a fact-finding mission. And why should he? The men in Whitehall thought that they already knew everything. This is the infuriating hallmark of the arrogant – they’re experts in subjects they know nothing about. When it came to conditions in America, the British government was essentially an echo-chamber of ignorance, from George III on down.
The British had several misconceptions about us, but the most damaging to their war effort was probably their conviction that America was fundamentally Loyalist. They saw the Atlantic seaboard as a vast population of Tories who had somehow lost the control of their colonies to a few thousand firebrands and insurrectionists who had seized the machinery of the local governments. The Loyalist majority needed to be rescued from this set of “dangerous and ill-designing men” (as George III called the rebels).
In fact, this concept was dead wrong – the colonies were, as John Adams calculated, about one third Patriot, one third Loyalist, one third uncommitted. The idea that all the king needed to do was to put a couple of crack British armies on American soil and the “silent majority” of Loyalists would flock to the Union Jack led the British to launch several audacious and hare-brained schemes – most notably, the campaign of Burgoyne from Canada to Albany in 1777, and that of Cornwallis through the Carolinas in 1780 – 81. Both of these operations, based in part on the notion of strong Loyalist support, ended in utter disaster, with Burgoyne and Cornwallis surrendering along with their entire armies.
The arrogance of the British, however, was not restricted to an obstinate king and his sycophants, nor to the Parliament and army. As Benjamin Franklin noted in a letter written as early as February 1767, the essence of the problem is that “Every Man in England seems to consider himself as a Piece of a Sovereign over America; seems to jostle himself into the Throne with the King, and talks of our Subjects in the Colonies.” Franklin had discovered to his heartbreak that, in the British view, the Americans were not fellow citizens of one great Empire, but rather a race of underlings and lackeys.
This arrogance needlessly resulted in the alienation of a number of great men who could have done much for the Empire, not least of them Ben Franklin. However, perhaps the most grievous example is the foolish manner in which British threw away George Washington. All Washington wanted as a young soldier in the French and Indian War was to exchange his Virginia militia commission for a royal one – that is, to be able to wear the scarlet jacket, and serve as an officer in the greatest army in the world, that of George II. Normally, a mere provincial was not awarded such an honor, but Washington – on the strength of his heroic actions at the Battle of the Monongahela, in which he saved the British army from a French ambush – thought he might be able to secure it.
After a humiliating meeting with Lord Loudoun in February 1757, Washington realized that his dream was impossible. He left the British army in the following year, and from then on, he and Britain were on a deviating path. In rejecting him so callously, the British in their snobbery and hubris had bequeathed to us the man who would become not only the greatest leader of our Revolution, but arguably of our entire history.