In 1772, barely four years before the United States declared independence, the European powers of Austria, Prussia and Russia, led respectively by Maria Theresa, Frederick II and Catherine the Great, used force and law to dismember the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. At the time, Poland-Lithuania was Europe’s largest state, covering over 280,000 square miles. (The 13 American colonies in 1776 were more than 50 percent larger but more sparsely populated.) Its complex constitutional arrangements, with a weak elected monarch and a parliament that a single member could veto to a standstill, created political deadlock. Meanwhile, its extensive aristocracy dominated its society and economy. Its neighbors greedily eyed the vulnerable state: Poland-Lithuania should be consumed “like an artichoke, leaf by leaf,” Frederick wrote menacingly.
Reform efforts by Poland’s King Stanislaus II Augustus Poniatowski, a former lover of Catherine the Great, had not advanced far enough to fend off the predators. Beginning in the summer of 1772, Poland lost one-third of its population and over one-quarter of its land. Two further partitions followed in 1793 and 1795, and Poland would not return as an independent state until after World War I, at about one-third of its size before partition.
Prescient contemporaries saw the 1772 partition as a grave assault on the international order. King George III himself thought it a “very extraordinary phenomenon,” “subversive ... of the balance of Europe” and likely to produce unprecedented alliances to “extricate Poland” from the tyranny of its neighbors. Yet Britain, France, Spain and the Netherlands did not come to Poland’s aid. Such inaction led the Anglo-Irish politician Edmund Burke to call the partition “the first very great breach in the modern political system of Europe ... laying the axe at once to the root, in such a manner as threatens the total overthrow of the whole.”
Memories of Poland’s recent fate loomed large in British America. In 1775, Pennsylvania loyalist Joseph Galloway noted ominously that “the practice of conquering and dividing territories and kingdoms, is become fashionable in Europe” and could soon arrive in America. His fellow loyalist, Massachusetts lawyer Daniel Leonard, warned that France and Spain might partition North America, maybe even in cahoots with Britain: “The whole continent would become their easy prey, and would be parcelled out, Poland like.”