THE COMING OF THE REVOLUTION- AMERICAN REVOLUTION

A

The New Imperial System

After the war the British government undertook a concerted effort to bring the colonies more firmly under its control. Prompted by an uprising of Native Americans led by the Ottawa chief Pontiac, the British king issued the Royal Proclamation of 1763. This edict restricted European settlement to the area east of the Appalachian Mountains in order to prevent new wars with the Native American peoples of the interior. It was followed by the Currency Act of 1764, which prohibited the colonial assemblies from using paper money as legal tender for payment of debts. Another revenue measure, the Sugar Act of 1764, lowered the duties imposed by the much-evaded Molasses Act of 1733, but sought to ensure that the new tariffs would be diligently collected (see Sugar and Molasses Acts). The law placed tighter administrative controls on coastal shipping. More important, it provided that violations of the Sugar Act would be prosecuted in the vice-admiralty courts, in which cases were heard by British-appointed judges with no local juries. Another innovation was the Quartering Act of 1765, which obliged the colonial assemblies to provide housing and supplies for British troops. In addition, well-publicized discussions were taking place in London about taxing the colonies for the support of British troops in Canada and in frontier outposts. Reform of the empire was clearly underway.

Coming after more than 50 years of salutary neglect, the new regulations alarmed the colonists. Then, in 1765 the British government headed by George Grenville acted to raise revenue by levying, for the first time, a direct tax on the colonists. The Stamp Act required them to buy and place revenue stamps on all official legal documents, deeds, newspapers, pamphlets, dice, and playing cards. Colonists strongly opposed the Stamp Act. In part, the colonists were alarmed by the economic costs imposed on them by the reforms. Ordinary people had always been lightly taxed in America and did not want their money to be used to support British officials.

B

The Ideological Sources of Resistance

Educated colonists mounted an ideological attack on the new British policies. They drew inspiration from three intellectual traditions. The first tradition was English common law, the centuries-old body of legal rules and procedures that protected the king’s subjects against arbitrary acts by other subjects or by the government.

A second major intellectual resource was the Age of Enlightenment in Europe during the 18th century. Unlike common-law attorneys, who valued precedent, Enlightenment philosophers questioned the past and appealed to reason. Many of them followed 17th-century English philosopher John Locke in believing that all individuals possessed certain “natural rights”—such as life, liberty, and the pursuit of property—and that it was the responsibility of government to protect those rights.

The English political tradition provided a third ideological basis for the American resistance. Early English Whigs had resisted the arbitrary power exercised by the Stuart kings before 1689 and had sought to limit the authority of the Crown and to increase the power of Parliament. Their ideas had appealed to many members of the colonial assemblies, who faced powerful governors appointed by the king.

Then, in the decades after 1720, many educated Americans followed arguments in England that attacked the power of government financiers, condemned the idea of standing armies, and accused the king and his ministers of manipulating Parliament through patronage and bribes. To these Americans, the Stamp Act was not simply an economic measure to defray the cost of the American garrisons. The colonists believed that Britain was responsible for external matters but the colonial assemblies legislated internal affairs. Therefore, the Stamp Act represented a cunning attempt by Britain to seize control of taxation from the representative colonial assemblies and to tax the colonists without giving them representation in government.

C

The Stamp Act Crisis

American opposition to the Stamp Act began shortly after its passage in March 1765. Patrick Henry of Virginia urged the House of Burgesses to condemn the Stamp Act. The Massachusetts assembly called for an intercolonial meeting, and a Stamp Act Congress met in New York City in October 1765. Delegates from nine colonies attended, and petitioned the king for repeal of the act, denouncing it as taxation without representation. Many British merchants joined in this appeal. Their exports of manufactures to the colonies had increased markedly since 1750 and they feared the effects of American refusal to pay commercial debts amounting to millions of pounds.

However, the broader issues at stake were temporarily obscured by the drama of immediate events. Some Americans responded with violence to the new British measures of taxation and control. On October 31, the day before the Stamp Act was to go into effect, 200 merchants in New York City vowed to stop importing British goods, beginning the First Nonimportation Movement. Then they joined storekeepers, artisans, sailors, and laborers in a mass protest meeting. On the next night, 2,000 residents surrounded the fort where the stamps were being guarded and then plundered the house of a British officer. These mob actions prompted the lieutenant governor to ask General Thomas Gage, the British military commander in North America, to rout the protesters by force.

Similar situations occurred in Philadelphia, Albany, and Charleston. Local merchants joined in nonimportation agreements. Groups of artisans, calling themselves Sons of Liberty, forcibly prevented the distribution of stamps and forced the resignation of the stamp collectors. In Boston, a mob destroyed the house of Lieutenant Governor Thomas Hutchinson. The colonial elite—merchants, planters, assembly leaders—did not condemn this resort to violence; some even encouraged it. Nearly everywhere, British authority was challenged, and the imperial forces lacked the power or the determination to prevail.

Pressure from the British merchants, who feared the nonimportation movement, persuaded a new British ministry, led by Prime Minister Charles Wentworth, Marquess of Rockingham, to repeal the Stamp Act in 1766. However, Parliament enacted a Declaratory Act that restated its traditional claim to legislate for and to tax the colonists. As Chief Justice William Murray, later 1st earl of Mansfield, stated: “The British legislature ... has the authority to bind every part and every subject without the least distinction, whether such subjects have the right to vote or not.”

D

The Townshend Acts

Mansfield’s argument was directed against the colonial position of no taxation without representation. Colonists who protested the taxes distinguished between taxes designed to raise money, which they opposed, and duties intended primarily to regulate trade, which the colonists had accepted, at least in principle, since the Molasses Act of 1733.

This distinction between revenue and regulation was subtle and somewhat artificial. And it was misinterpreted by Charles Townshend, longtime critic of the American assemblies and now chancellor of the Exchequer in the government headed by William Pitt. Townshend believed that the colonists were objecting to internal taxes, such as the Stamp Act, but not to external taxes on trade. Consequently, he assumed that the colonists would accept external taxes. The Townshend Acts, which were passed in 1767, placed duties on colonial imports of lead, glass, paint, paper, and tea. This act also specified that the revenue was to be used not only to support British troops in America but also to provide salaries for royal officials who would collect taxes. Such funding would make these officials financially independent of the colonial assemblies.

This attempt to raise revenue through trade duties and to circumvent American control of imperial officials angered many colonial leaders. John Dickinson argued in his influential Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania (1767) that the Townshend duties were “not for the regulation of trade ... but for the single purpose of levying money upon us.” Bolstered by such arguments, the colonists opposed the taxes, not with the violence of 1765, which ended with the repeal of the Stamp Act, but with a new boycott of British goods, the Second Nonimportation Movement.

E

Economic and Moral Upheaval

The Americans’ determined resistance to the Townshend Acts resulted, in part, from a profound transition in the colonial economy. Before 1754 the colonists had earned enough from their exports to pay for their imports from Great Britain. Then, British military expenditures in America during the French and Indian War bolstered the incomes of many colonists and unleashed a wave of spending for consumer items: equipment for their farms and all kinds of household goods—including cloth, blankets, china, and cooking utensils. British merchant houses aided this spree of consumption by extending to American traders a full year’s credit, instead of the traditional six months. The mainland colonists soon accounted for 20 percent of all British exports and had gone deeply into debt.

At the end of the war in 1763, the boom came to an abrupt end. The postwar recession brought bankruptcy and disgrace to those Americans who had overextended their commitments and brought hard economic times to nearly everyone else. This financial hardship generated opposition to the Stamp Act in 1765, especially among urban artisans. They had suffered from the competition of low-priced British manufactures and now feared higher taxes. Similar economic pressures fueled resistance to the Townshend Acts in 1767.

Americans also had moralistic reasons for calling a halt to the mass importation of European goods. Extravagant expenditures on luxury items—fancy carpets and carriages, elegant clothes and furniture—produced calls for a return to more frugal living standards. In New England, where Puritan influence was strongest, excessive consumption and debt was seen as a moral failing that inevitably led to a weakening of character.

American women, especially religious women, added their support to the nonimportation movement. Ordinarily women were excluded from prominent roles in political affairs, but the boycotts prompted a more sustained involvement by women in the public world. In Providence, Rhode Island, during the Stamp Act crisis, 18 “Daughters of Liberty” met to spin yarn for cloth, to avoid purchasing any cloth from British manufacturers. To protest the Townshend Acts, a much larger group of religious women in New England organized dozens of spinning matches, bees, and demonstrations at the homes of their ministers. Some gatherings were openly patriotic, such as that at Berwick, Maine, where the spinners “as true Daughters of Liberty” celebrated American goods, “drinking rye coffee and dining on bear venison.” But many more women combined support for nonimportation with charitable work by coming together to spin flax and wool, which they donated to their ministers and needy members of the community.

F

Constitutional Conflict

While confrontations over taxes and reforms were serious, the bonds uniting the colonies and Britain were still strong. Peace and unity were still possible. American diplomat Benjamin Franklin declared in 1769 that the British ministry should “Repeal the laws, Renounce the Right, Recall the troops, Refund the money, and Return to the old method of requisition.” Late in that year the British government, now directed by Lord Frederick North, the new prime minister and ally of King George III, went part way toward meeting these demands. Under the pressure of the American economic boycott, and a sharp drop in British exports, Parliament agreed to the repeal of most of the Townshend Acts. However, the ministry did not recall the British troops from any of the colonies and showed no disposition to return to the pre-1763 imperial system. Indeed, Parliament reasserted its authority to legislate for and to tax the colonies, retaining the tax on tea as a symbol of its supremacy.

The long debate over taxes clarified the fundamental constitutional questions at stake and posed the political issue in stark terms. “I know of no line that can be drawn between the supreme authority of Parliament and the total independence of the colonies,” declared Thomas Hutchinson, the American-born governor of Massachusetts, early in the 1770s. A committee of the Massachusetts assembly accepted Hutchinson’s challenge and drew the obvious, if nearly unthinkable, conclusion: “If there be no such line,” then the colonies would have to be “independent.” But the committee proposed a solution: If Britain and its American colonies were united by the king as their “one head and common sovereign,” then they could “live happily in that connection,” retaining their own semiautonomous assemblies.

This solution would have required Parliament to renounce its claims to sovereign power in America and was almost unthinkable given its quest for authority. Moreover, two violent incidents showed how difficult it would be to achieve any peaceful constitutional compromise. In Boston in 1770 British troops fired on an unruly mob, killing five people, an event known as the Boston Massacre. Two years later, a Rhode Island mob destroyed a British customs ship, the Gaspée, wounding its captain in the process. In both cases, the British ministry declined to take a strong stand, hoping that time and patience would resolve the imperial crisis. Many members of Parliament demanded a more aggressive stance: American violence, they said, should be met with British force.

These incidents also played into the hands of those Americans who favored independence. Following the Stamp Act crisis, the Sons of Liberty in the various colonial towns were in contact with each other. More assertive leaders of the colonial assemblies also corresponded, and gradually an organized Patriot movement developed. Following the Gaspée incident, Boston patriot Samuel Adams persuaded the Massachusetts assembly to establish a formal Committee of Correspondence, and Patriot leaders in the assemblies of Virginia and the other colonies soon followed suit. These committees exchanged information and fostered a new sense of American interdependence and identity. In any new imperial crisis, American Patriots would for the first time be able to formulate a coherent and unified policy of resistance.

G

The Tea Act and the Outbreak of Fighting

As Patriots warned fellow colonists of the dangers of imperial domination, Lord North lent substance to their predictions. He wanted to assist the East India Company, which had incurred great military expenses in expanding British trade in India. To do so, he secured the Tea Act in 1773, which eliminated the customs duty on the company’s tea and permitted its direct export to America. The company’s tea, although still subject to the Townshend duty, would be cheaper than the smuggled Dutch tea most Americans drank. If the colonists bought it, however, they would be accepting the duty. Beyond that, American merchants would lose a valuable trade, because the company planned to sell its tea through its own agents.

Lord North knew that the Tea Act would be unpopular in America, but he was determined to uphold parliamentary supremacy. When a shipment of tea arrived in Boston, radical Patriots led by Samuel Adams prevented its unloading. When Governor Hutchinson refused to permit the tea to be reexported, the Patriots, many disguised as Native Americans, threw the cargo overboard in the so-called Boston Tea Party in December 1773.

G1

Britain Stands Firm

Events now swiftly moved toward the outbreak of war. An outraged Parliament demanded compensation for the tea. The Boston town meeting, now under the influence of the radical Caucus Club led by Adams and Joseph Warren, rejected this demand. The North ministry replied with a series of stern edicts in March 1774. These edicts, along with the Québec Act, a measure passed by the British Parliament at the same time, were known among the colonists as the Intolerable Acts. The port of Boston was declared closed; the powers of the Massachusetts assembly and local town meetings were curtailed; and two acts provided for the quartering of troops in private houses and the exemption of imperial officials from trial in Massachusetts. The ministry’s strategy was to use the destruction of tea to isolate what the British saw as the radical Massachusetts Patriots from more moderate Americans in Virginia and the mid-Atlantic colonies.

The British strategy of dividing the Americans nearly succeeded. Colonial leaders met in the First Continental Congress, held in Philadelphia in September and October 1774. In a pamphlet titled A Summary View of the Rights of British America, intended to influence the Virginia delegates to the Congress, Thomas Jefferson denounced all parliamentary legislation as acts “of arbitrary power ... over these states.” A much more conciliatory attitude was reflected in a plan presented by Joseph Galloway of Pennsylvania. Galloway proposed the creation of an American parliament that would have significant powers of taxation and legislation, but whose acts would need the approval of a governor-general appointed by the Crown. Galloway’s plan was rejected by a narrow vote. The delegates then adopted policies favored by more radical Patriots, including a petition to the king called the Declaration of Rights and Grievances. The Congress declared the British reform program “unconstitutional, dangerous, and destructive to the freedom” of America. More important, it voted to establish a Third Nonimportation Movement. To implement this boycott, which included pledges against exportation and consumption as well as importation, the Congress created a Continental Association—a system of local committees to mobilize patriotic fervor. Among these local committees were the Committees of Correspondence and the Committees of Safety. These measures were to remain in effect until all colonial grievances had been addressed.

G2

Lexington and Concord

The British government remained firm in the face of American resistance. Early in 1775 orders were sent to General Gage, who at the time was governor and military commander of Massachusetts. He was ordered to close the Massachusetts assembly, which was then meeting illegally outside Boston; to arrest its leading members; and to capture the arms being stockpiled by the colonial militia. On April 19 Gage ordered his troops to Concord. They were opposed first at Lexington and then at Concord by colonial militia, who had been warned by Patriots, including Paul Revere. At Lexington, shots were fired, but the British continued on to Concord. There they were harassed by American militia shooting from behind trees, hedges, and buildings. The British were forced to retreat, and they headed back to Boston in disorganized flight. The battle was a strong American victory. As the British retreated to Boston, they suffered more than 270 casualties. The colonists lost fewer than 100 people.

Too much blood had been spilled to allow a peaceful compromise. A final “Olive Branch Petition” approved by the Second Continental Congress in July 1775 was rejected by the king. In December, Parliament passed the Prohibitory Act, which outlawed trade with the rebellious colonies and set up a naval blockade. Consequently, when Anglo-American philosopher Thomas Paine asked in the pamphlet Common Sense (published in January 1776) whether “a continent should continue to be ruled by an Island,” only a minority of Loyalist Americans were willing to defend the connection with Great Britain. As a series of military skirmishes fostered the growth of American patriotism, the Continental Congress took the final steps. In June 1775 it had commissioned George Washington to organize and lead a Continental Army. In addition, the Congress ordered publication on July 4, 1776, of a Declaration of Independence, which recounted the grievances against Britain and declared the colonies free and independent as the United States of America.