Chapter 5 Outline

Chapter 5 Outline
The Triumph of the British Empire
A fragile peace
King George’s War failed to establish either Britain or France as the dominant power in North America, and each side soon began preparations for another war.
The Ohio valley became the tinderbox for conflict.
It was the subject of competing claims by Virginia, Pennsylvania, France, and the Six Nations Iroquois, as well as by the Native Americans who actually lived there.
Seeking to drive traders from the River valley, the French began building a chain of forts there in 1753.
Virginia retaliated by sending 21 year old George Washington to persuade or force the French to leave
In 1754 the French troops drove Washington and his militiamen back to their homes.
Delegates from seven colonies north of Virginia gathered at Albany, NY to lay plans for mutual defense.
They endorsed a proposal for a colonial confederation, the Albany Plan of Union.
Plan called for a Grand Council representing all the colonial assemblies, with a crown-appointed president general as its executive officer.
It provided a precedent for later American unity, but came to nothing because no colonial legislature would surrender the least control over its powers of taxation.
The Seven Years’ War in America
Washington’s 1754 clash with French troops created a virtual state of war in North America.
In response, the British dispatched General Edward Braddock and a thousand regular troops to North America to seize Fort Duquesne at the headwaters of the Ohio.
On July 9, 1755, about 850 French, Canadians, and Indians ambushed Braddock’s force of 2200 Britons and Virginians nine miles east of Fort Duquesne.
Braddock’s troops soon retreated.
Because of Braddock’s loss, French troops struck hard at encroaching settlers, halting English expansion and prevented the three colonies from joining the British war against France.
Two developments turned the tide for the British.
First, the Iroquois and most Ohio Indians, sensing that the French were gaining too decisive an advantage, agreed at a treaty conference at Easton, Pennsylvania, in 1758 to abandon their support of the French.
Second occurred when William Pitt took control of military affairs in the British cabinet and reversed the downward course.
Pitt reinvigorated British patriotism throughout the empire, and by the wars end, he was the colonists’ most popular hero.
He chose not to send large numbers of additional troops to America, which generated unprecedented support, and the colonies organized more than forty thousand troops in 1758-9.
His decision was immediate.
American drove the French from northern NY the next year.
Quebec fell after General James Wolfe defeated the French commander in chief, Louis Montcalm and the plains of Abraham, where both commanders died in battle.
French resistance ended in 1760 when Montreal surrendered.
The End of French North America
The war continued in Europe and elsewhere, and France made one last desperate attempt to capture Newfoundland in June 1762.
France entered into negotiations with its enemies.
The Seven Years’ War officially ended in both America and Europe with the signing of the Treaty of Paris in 1763.
Called that France give up all its lands and claims east of the Mississippi to Britain.
In return for Cuba, which a British expedition had seized in 1762, Spain ceded Florida to Britain.
Neither France nor Britain wanted the other to control Louisiana, so the Treaty of San Ildefonso, France ceded the vast territory to Spain.
Britain reigned supreme in eastern North America while Spain now claimed the west below Canada.
King George’s War and the Seven Years’ War produced an ironically mixed effect.
They fused the bonds between the British and the Anglo-Americans, but the conclusion of each war planted the seeds first of misunderstanding, then of suspicion, and finally of hostility between the two former compatriots.
Imperial Revenues and Reorganization
Friction Among the Allies
The return of peace brought deep-seated tensions among these allies back to the surface.
British officers regularly complained about the quality of colonial troops.
Colonial soldiers complained of British officers who treated their troops like slaves.
British officers complained about colonists’ unwillingness to provide food and shelter and with colonists resenting the officers’ arrogant manners.
Pitt’s promise to reimburse the colonial assemblies for their military expenses also angered many Brits.
They thought colonists were escaping free from the war’s financial burden
They colonies had already profited enormously from the war.
Some colonial merchants had continued their illicit trade with the French West Indies during the conflict, not only violating the navigation Acts but also trading with the enemy.
Britain’s national debt nearly doubled during the war.
The colonists felt equally burdened.
Those who profited during the war spent their additional income on goods imported from Britain.
The effect of the war was to accelerate the Anglo-American “consumer revolution” in which colonists’ purchases of British goods fueled Britain’s economy, particularly in its manufacturing sector.
The wartime boom in the colonies ended as abruptly as it had begun
Many colonists went into debt
Some Americans began to suspect the British of deliberately plotting to “enslave” the colonies
Victory over the French did not end the British need for revenue, for the settlement of the war spurred new Anglo-Indian conflicts that drove the British debt even higher.
Their fears that the British would treat them as subjects rather than as allies were confirmed when General Amherst, Britain’s commander in North America, decided to cut expenses by refusing to distribute food, ammunition, and other gifts.
Squatters from the colonies were moving onto Indian lands in some areas and harassing the occupants, and many Native Americans feared that the British occupation was intended to support these incursions.
A Delaware religious prophet, Neolin, attracted a large intertribal following by calling for Indians’ complete repudiation of European culture, material goods, and alliances.
Other Indians hoped the French would return so they could once again manipulate an imperial balance of power.
Indian political leaders such as Pontiac, Ottawan, drew on these sentiments to forge an explicitly anti-British movement, misleadingly called “Pontiac’s Rebellion.
They and their followers sacked eight British forts near the Great Lakes and besieged those a Pittsburgh and Detroit.
Shortages of food and ammunition, a small pox epidemic, and a recognition that the French would not return led the Indians to make peace with Britain.
Even though the rebellion failed, Native Americans had not been decisively defeated.
Hoping to conciliate the Indians and end the fighting, George 3 issued the Proclamation of 1763 asserting direct control of land transactions, settlement, trade, and other activities of non-Indians east of the Appalachian Mountains.
The government’s goal was to restore order to the process of colonial expansion by replacing the authority of the crown.
The proclamation angered the colonies by subordinating their western claims to imperial authority and by slowing expansion.
The uprising also played a factor in the British government’s decision that ten thousand soldiers should remain in North America to occupy its new territories and to intimidate the Indian, French, and Spanish inhabitants.
They appeared to many Americans as a “standing army” that in peacetime could only threaten their liberty.
Americans viewed the British troops enforcing the Proclamation of 1763 as hindering rather than enhancing that expansion.
Writs of Assistance
Even before the Seven years’ War ended, British authorities began attempts to halt American merchants from trading with the enemy in the French West Indies.
In 1760, the royal governor of Massachusetts authorized revenue officers to employ a document called a writ of assistance.
Requirements:
Enabled to seize illegally imported goods.
The writ was a general search warrant that permitted customs officials to enter any ships or buildings where smuggled goods might be hidden.
The document required no evidence of probably cause for suspicion, many critics considered it unconstitutional.
It threatened the traditional respect accorded the privacy of a family’s place of residence, since most merchants conducted business from their homes.
In response, Boston merchants hired lawyer James Otis to challenge the constitutionality of the warrants.
The court, influenced by the opinion of Chief Justice Thomas Hutchinson, who noted the use of identical writs in England, ruled against the Boston merchants
The Sugar Act
Past by Parliament in 1764
The measure’s goal was to raise revenues that would help offset Britain’s military expenses in North America, and thus end Britain’s longstanding policy of exempting colonial trade from revenue raising measures.
The Navigation Acts had not been designed to bring money into the British treasure by rather to benefit the imperial economy indirectly by stimulating trade and protecting English manufacturers from foreign competition.
English importers paid the taxes that Parliament levied on colonial products entering Britain and passed the cost on to consumers; the taxes were mot paid by American producers.
The Navigation Acts brought in so little revenue; they didn’t even pay for the cost of their own enforcement.
Requirements:
Amended the Molasses Act of 1733 (see ch. 4) which amounted to a tariff on French West Indian molasses entering British North America.
Colonists continued to import the cheaper French molasses, bribing customs officials into looking the other way when it was unloaded.
Stipulated that colonists could export lumber, iron, skins, and many other commodities to foreign countries only if the shipments first landed in Britain.
Parliament hoped that colonial shippers would purchase more imperial wares for the American market, buy fewer goods from foreign competitors, and provide jobs for Englishmen.
A captain now had to fill out a confusing series of documents to certify his trade as legal, and the absence of any of them left his entire cargo liable to seizure.
The petty regulations made it virtually impossible for many colonial shippers to avoid committing technical violations, even if they traded in the only manner possible under local circumstances.
The act disregarded many traditional English protections for a fair trial.
First, the law allowed customs officials to transfer smuggling cases from the colonial courts, in which juries decided the outcome, to vie-admiralty courts, where a judge alone gave the verdict.
Because the act awarded vice-admiralty judges 5% of any confiscated cargo, judges had a financial incentive to find defendants guilty.
Second, until 1767 the law didn’t permit defendants to be tried where their offense allegedly had taken place (usually their home province) but required all cases to be heard in the vice-admiralty court at Halifax, Nova Scotia.
Third, the law reversed normal courtroom procedures, which presumed innocence until guilt was proved, but requiring the defendant to disprove the prosecutions’ charge.
The Sugar Act was no idle threat; British Prime Minister George Grenville ordered the navy to enforce the measure, and it did so vigorously.
Rather than pay the three pence tax, Americans continued smuggling molasses until 1766.
To discourage smuggling, Britain lowered the duty to a penny.
Opposition to the Sugar Act remained fragmented and ineffective.
The immediate effect was minor, but it heightened some colonists’ awareness of the new direction of imperial policies and their implications.
The Stamp Act
Passed by Parliament in 1765 to raise revenues.
The revenues raised by the Sugar Act did little to ease Britain’s financial crisis. The national debt continued to rise equaling the second highest tax rates in Europe.
Grenville thought that fairness demanded a larger contribution to the empire’s American expenses aware of how lightly the colonists were being taxed.
Requirements
Obliged colonists to purchase and use special stamped (watermarked) paper for newspapers, customs documents, various licenses, college diplomas, and legal forms used for recovering debts, buying land, and making wills.
Violators would face prosecution in vice-admiralty courts, without juries.
External v. Internal taxes
Unlike the sugar act, which was an external tax levied on imports as they entered the colonies, the Stamp Act was an internal tax, or a duty levied directly on property, goods, and government services in the colonies.
External taxes were intended to regulate trade and fell mainly on merchants and ship captains, internal taxes were designed to raise revenue for the crown and had far wider effects.
Britain’s views
To Grenville and his supporters, the new tax seemed a small price for the benefits of the empire, especially since Britons had been paying a similar tax since 1695.
They emphasized that the colonists had never been subject to British revenue bills and noted that they taxed themselves through their own elected assemblies.
They agreed that Parliament could not tax any British subjects unless they contended that Americans shared the same status as the majority of British adult males who either lacked sufficient property or vote or lived in large cities that had no seats in Parliament. Such people were “virtually” represented in Parliament.
The theory of virtual representation held that every member of Parliament stood above the narrow interests of his constituents and considered the welfare of all subjects when deciding issues.
British subjects, including colonists, were not represented by particular individuals but by all members of Parliament
They also denied that the colonists were entitled to any exemption from British taxation because they elected their own assemblies.
These legislative bodies were no different from English councils whose local powers to pass laws and taxes did not nullify Parliament’s authority over them.
Colonial assemblies were an adaptation to unique American circumstances and possessed no more power than Parliament allowed them to exercise
Colonists views
Colonists argued for several decades that their assemblies exercised legislative powers equivalent to those of the House of Commons in Great Britain (see ch.4).
They felt the Stamp Act forced them either to confront the issue of parliamentary taxation head-on or to surrender any claim to meaningful rights of self-government.
They accepted the theory of virtual representation as valid for England but denied that it could be extended to the colonies.
Instead they enjoyed a substantial measure of self-governance similar to that of Ireland, whose Parliament alone could tax its people but could not interfere with laws, like the Navigation Acts, passed by the British Parliament.
They assumed that the empire was a loose federation in which their legislatures possessed considerable autonomy, rather than an extended nation governed directly from London.
Resisting the Stamp Act
Unlike the Sugar Act, the Stamp Act generated a political storm that rumbled through all the colonies in 1765 because Parliament’s passage of the act demonstrated both its indifference to their interests and the shallowness of the theory of virtual representation.
Agents sent petitions to England, but Parliament dismissed the petitions without a hearing.
In late May 1765, Patrick Henry dramatically conveyed the rising spirit of resistance.
He urged the Virginia House of Burgesses to adopt several strongly worded resolutions denying Parliament’s power to tax the colonies.
The assembly passed only the weakest four of Henry’s seven resolutions
By year’s end seven other assemblies had passed resolutions against the act.
His words resonated more loudly outside elite political circles, particularly in Boston.
There, in late summer, a group of mostly middle-class artisans and small business owners joined together as the Loyal Nine to fight the stamp act.
If the public could pressure the stamp distributors into resigning before taxes became due on November 1, the Stamp Act would become inoperable.
It took place in Boston because a large portion of people lived by shipbuilding, maritime trade, and distilling so they suffered the most from the Sugar Act’s trade restrictions.
Bitterness against the Stamp Act unleashed spontaneous, contagious violence
In the aftermath of the Stamp Act, Boston’s crowds aimed their traditional forms of protest more directly and forcefully against imperial officials.
On August 14, Boston’s stamp distributor, Andrew Oliver, swung from a tree guarded by a menacing crowd.
Oliver didn’t realize the Loyal nine wanted him to resign immediately, so Ebenezer MacIntosh led the uprising. Soon the Loyal Nine stepped out of the fight, and the town continued on its own.
The crowd demolished his house and belongings, and Oliver resigned the next morning.
Two weeks later, Bostonians demolished the home of Thomas Hutchinson.
Smugglers held grudges against Hutchinson for certain of his decisions as chief justice
Many financially pinched citizens saw him as a symbol of the royal policies crippling Boston’s already troubled economy and their own livelihoods.
Reacting to Hutchinson’s efforts to stop the destruction of his brother in law Andrew Oliver’s house
Groups similar to the Loyal Nine were forming throughout the colonies.
The sons of liberty
They sought to prevent more such outbreaks such as Oliver and Hutchinson lived through.
They focused their actions strictly against property and invariably left avenues of escape for their victims, because they were fearful of alienating wealthy opponents of the Stamp Act.
They forbade their followers to carry weapons, even when faced with armed adversaries, fearful that a royal soldier or revenue officer may be shot or killed.
Stamp Act Congress
In October 1765, representatives of nine colonial assemblies met in New York City.
Only once before had a truly intercolonial meeting taken place – The Albany Congress in 1754- and its plea for unity had fallen on deaf ears.
Effects by colonists resentment
Most stamp distributors had resigned or fled by 1765
Most royal customs officials and court officers were refusing to perform their duties.
Merchants obtained sailing clearances by insisting that they would sue if cargoes spoiled while delayed in port.
The courts and harbors of almost every colony were again functioning.
Elite leaders feared that chaos could break out, particularly if British troops landed to enforce the Stamp Act.
Stamp Act’s repeal
New York’s merchants agreed on October 31,1765, to boycott all British goods, and businessmen in other cities soon followed their example
This nonimportation strategy put the English economy in danger of recession
The boycotts consequently triggered panic within England’s business community, whose members descended on Parliament to warn that continuation of the Stamp Act would stimulate a wave of bankruptcies, massive unemployment, and political unrest.
The Declaratory Act
William Pitt, a steadfast opponent of the Stamp Act, boldly denounced all efforts to tax the colonies
Parliamentary support for repeal thereafter grew, though only as a matter of practicality, not as a surrender of principle.
In March 1766 Parliament revoked the Stamp Act, but only in conjunction with passage of the Declaratory Act
Declaratory Act
Affirmed parliamentary power to legislate for the colonies in all cases whatsoever
Because it was written in general language, Americans interpreted its meaning to their won advantage.
The measure seemed no more than a parliamentary exercise in saving face to compensate for the Stamp Act’s repeal, and Americans ignored it.
The House of Commons intended that the colonists take the Declaratory Act literally to mean that they could not claim exemption from any parliamentary statute, including a tax law.
The Stamp Act crisis thus ended in a fundamental disagreement between Britain and America over the colonists’ political rights.
American’s reaction to Stamp Act’s repeal
They eagerly put the events of 1765 behind them
They showered both king and Parliament with loyal statements of gratitude for the repeal.
The Sons of Liberty disbanded
Americans concluded with relief that their active resistance to the law had slapped Britain’s leaders back to their senses.
The law led many to ponder British policies and actions more deeply than ever before.
Ideology, Religion, and Resistance
The stamp act and the conflicts that rose around it revealed a chasm between England and its colonies that startled Anglo-Americans.
For the first time, some colonists critically and systematically examined the imperial relationship that they previously had taken for granted and valued.
In their efforts to grasp the significance of their new perceptions, a number of educated colonists turned to the works of philosophers, historians, and political writers. Many more looked to religion.
Many people turned to Enlightenment thinkers
John Locke
Every man enjoyed the natural rights of life, liberty, and property.
Social contract
In order to form governments that would protect those individual rights. A government that encroached on natural rights, then, broke its contract with the people. People could then resist their government.
His concept of natural rights appeared to justify opposition to arbitrary legislation by Parliament.
Many turned to the ancient Greeks and Romans
They articulated a set of ideas termed “republican”
Republicans admired the sense of civic duty that motivated citizens of the Roman republic.
They maintained that a free people had to avoid moral and political corruption and practice a disinterested public virtue in which all citizens subordinated their personal interests to those of the polity.
Those influenced by republican ideas were a widely read group of English political writers known as oppositionists.
According to a few men, Parliament formed the foundation of England’s unique political liberties and protected those liberties against the inherent corruption and tyranny of executive power.
Influenced by such ideas, a number of colonists pointed to a diabolical conspiracy behind British policy during the Stamp Act crisis.
Over the next decade, a proliferation of pamphlets denounced British efforts to enslave the colonies through excessive taxation and the imposition of officials, judges, and a standing army directed from London.
The pamphlets, speeches, and public declarations that gentlemen like Jefferson and John Dickinson wrote resounded with quotations from the ancient classics.
These allusions served as constant reminders to upper-class Americans of the righteous dignity of their cause.
Beginning with the Stamp Act protest, many Protestant clergymen mounted their pulpits and summoned their flocks to stand up for God and Liberty.
Many ministers, whose church was headed by the king, tried to stay neutral or opposed the protest; and many pacifist Quakers kept out of the fray.
Voicing such a message, clergymen exerted an enormous influence on public opinion.
Resistance Resumes
Opposing the Quartering Act
In August 1766, in a move unrelated to colonial affairs, George 3 dismissed the Rockingham government and summoned William Pitt to form a cabinet.
After his health collapsed in March 1767, effective leadership passed to his Chancellor of the treasurer Charles Townshend.
The Quartering Act
Enacted in 1765
Ordered colonial legislatures to pay for certain goods needed by soldiers stationed within their respective borders
The necessary items were relatively inexpensive barracks supplies such as candles, windowpanes, mattress straw, polish, and a small liquor ration.
Aroused resentment
It constituted an indirect tax
Although it did not empower royal officials to collect money directly from the colonists like the Stamp Act, it obligated assemblies to raise a stated amount of revenue
Reinforced the presence of a standing army
Many troops stationed in New York so the resisted it because it was burdensome.
This produced a torrent of anti-American feeling in the House of Commons, whose members remained bitter at having had to withdraw the Stamp Act.
Townshend responded by drafting the NY Suspending Act
Threatened to nullify all laws passed by the colony if the assembly refused to vote the supplies
By the time the King signed the measure, NY had appropriated the necessary funds.
The Townshend Duties
Parliamentary resentment toward the colonies coincided with an outpouring of British frustration over the government’s failure to cut taxes from wartime levels.
Dominating the House of Commons, members of the landed gentry slashed their own taxes.
This prompted Townshend to propose laws that would tax imports entering America from Britain and increase colonial customs revenue.
He sought to tax the colonists by exploiting an oversight in their arguments against the Stamp Act.
In the stamp act, Americans had emphasized their opposition to internal taxes, but said little about Parliament’s right to tax imports as they entered the colonies
Townshend took this silence as evidence that the colonists accepted Britain’s right to tax their trade – to impose external taxes.
The Townshend’s Revenue Act of 1767 (Townshend Duties)
Passed in 1767 by Parliament
Taxed glass, paint, lead, paper, and tea imported to the colonies from England.
The act differed significantly from what Americans had long seen as a legitimate way of regulating trade through taxation.
To the colonists, charging a duty was a lawful way for British authorities to control trade only if that duty excluded foreign goods by making them prohibitively expensive to consumers.
Set moderate rates that did not price goods out of the colonial market
Its purpose was to collect money from the treasury; therefore seen just like the Stamp Act duties.
Townshend introduced the Revenue Act in response to the government’s budgetary problems, he and an ulterior motive for establishing an American source of revenue.
Through the act, he hoped to establish a fund that would pay the salaries of governors and other royal officials in America, thus freeing them from the assemblies’ control.
By stripping the assemblies of their most threatened to tip the balance of constitutional power away from elected colonial representatives and toward nonelected royal officials.
The Act would never yield anything like the income that Townshend anticipated.
Only tea produced any significant revenue
It ended up worsening the British treasury’s deficit
From Parliament’s standpoint, the conflict with America was becoming a test of national will over the principle of taxation.
The Colonists’ Reaction
Resistance to the Revenue Act remained weak
Until December 1767 When John Dickinson published twelve essays entitled Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania.
Appeared in nearly every colonial newspaper
Emphasized that although Parliament could regulate trade by voting duties capable of providing small amounts of “incidental revenue,” and had no right to tax commerce for the single purpose of raising revenue.
The legality of any external tax depended on its intent.
No tax designed to produce revenue could be considered constitutional unless a people’s elected representatives voted for it.
After the publication of the letters, James Otis, a Boston lawyer, famed his arguments in the writs of assistance case.
He asked the Massachusetts legislature to oppose the Townshend duties.
The assembly called on Samuel Adams to draft a “circular letter” to every other colonial legislature in early 1768.
His letter forthrightly condemned both taxation without representation the threat to self-governance posed by Parliament’s making governors and other royal officials financially independent as the “supreme Legislative Power over the whole Empire
And it advocated no illegal activates.
Virginia’s assembly warmly approved Adams’s message and sent out a more strongly worded circular letter of its own, urging all colonies to oppose imperial policies that would have an immediate tendency to enslave them.
Parliaments reaction
Told the Massachusetts assembly to disown its letter and forbade all colonial assemblies to endorse it and commanded royal governors to dissolve any legislature that violated his instructions.
Many legislatures previously indifferent to the Mass. Circular letter now adopted it enthusiastically.
Royal governors responded by dismissing legislatures in Massachusetts and elsewhere.
This helped the men who started the letter because they wanted nothing more than to ignite widespread public opposition to the Townshend duties.
Although increasingly outraged over the Revenue Act, the colonists still needed some effective means of pressuring Parliament for its repeal
One approach, nonimportation, seemed especially promising because it offered an alternative to violence and would distress “Britain’s economy.
Boston merchants adopted a nonimportation agreement
Not all colonists supported it because its effectiveness ultimately depended on the compliance of merchants who se livelihood relied on buying and selling imports.
The boycott probably kept out about 40% of all imports from Britain, and was even more significant in the longer run because it mobilized colonists into more actively resisting British policies.
The sons of liberty began reorganizing after two years of inactivity
“Wilkes and Liberty”
The exclusion of 40% of imports seriously affected many people in Britain and thus heightened pressure there, too, for the repeal of the Townshend duties.
Hardest hit were merchants and artisans dealing in consumer goods.
Their protests formed part of a larger movement that arose during the 1760s to oppose the domestic and foreign policies so of George 3 and a Parliament dominated by wealthy landowners.
The leader of this movement was John Wilkes, an editor and member of Parliament who had gained notoriety in 1763 when his newspaper regularly denounced George 3s policies.
The government arrested Wilkes for seditious libel, but he won his case in court.
The government had succeeded in shutting down his newspaper and denied him his seat in the House of Commons.
He defied a warrant for his arrest, and again ran for Parliament, and by this time, the Townshend acts and other government policies were stirring up widespread protests.
People gathered around and cried “Wilkes and Liberty!”
After he was again elected to Parliament, Wilkes was arrested and the next day twenty to forty thousand angry “Wilkesites” massed on St. George’s Fields, outside the prison.
Members began throwing stones and soldiers and police responded with gunfire killing eleven protestors.
Later called the “Massacre of St. George’s Fields”
Wilkes’s cause sharpened the political thinking of government opponents in Britain and the colonies alike.
Like the colonists, they regarded the theory of “virtual representation” in parliament as a sham.
Fearing arbitrary government actions, some of them formed a Society of the Supporters of the Bill of Rights to defend and maintain the legal, constitutional liberty of the subject.
His movement emboldened them to speak more forcefully against the government, especially on its policies toward the colonies.
Women and Colonial Resistance
The tactical value of nonimportation was not restricted to damaging Britain’s economy.
The nonimportation movement provided a unique opportunity for white women to join the defense of Anglo-American liberties.
White women’s participation in public affair had been widening slowly and unevenly in the colonies for several decades.
Women far outnumbered men among white church members, especially in New England, where ministers frequently hailed them as superior to most men in piety and morality.
By the 1760s when colonial women such as Sarah Osborn (see ch. 4) had become well known religious activists.
Calling themselves the Daughters of Liberty, a contingent of upper-class female patriots had played a minor part in defeating the Stamp Act.
Many more had expressed their opposition in discussions and correspondence with family and friends.
Helping out
To protest the Revenue Act’s tax on tea, more than three hundred “mistresses of families” in Boston denounced consumption of the beverage in early 1770.
The threat of nonconsumption was even more effective than that of nonimportation, for women served and drank most of the tea consumed by colonists.
Nonconsumption agreements soon became popular and were extended to in clued English manufactures, especially clothing.
They made most decisions about consumption in colonial households and because it was they who could replace British imports with apparel of their own making.
Responding to leaders’ p[lease that they expand domestic cloth production, women of all social ranks, even those who customarily did not weave their own fabric or sew their own clothing, organized spinning bees.
These events attracted intense publicity as evidence of American determination to forego luxury and idleness of the common defense of liberty.
Spinning bees not only helped undermine the motion that women had no place in public life but also endowed spinning and weaving, previously considered routine household tasks, with special political virtue.
Spinning bees, combined with female support for boycotting tea, dramatically demonstrated that American resistance ran far deeper than the protests of a few male merchants and the largely male crowds in American seaports.
Women’s participation showed that colonial protests extended into the heart of many American households and congregations, and were leading to broadened popular participation in politics.
Customs “Racketeering
Besides taxing colonial imports, Townshend sought to increase revenues through stricter enforcement of the Navigation Acts.
While submitting the Revenue Act of 1767, Townshend also introduced legislation creating the American Board of Customs Commissioners.
This law raised the number of port officials
Funded the construction of a colonial coast guard
Provided money for secret informers.
Awarded an informer one third of the value of all goods and ships appropriated through a conviction of smuggling.
Townshend wanted the board to bring honest, efficiency, and more revenue to overseas customs operations.
The law quickly drew protests because of the way it was enforced and because it assumed those accused to be guilty until or unless they could prove otherwise.
Under the new provisions, revenue agents commonly filed charges for technical violations of the Sugar Act, even when no evidence existed of intent to conduct illegal trade.
They most often exploited the provision that declared any cargo illegal unless it had been loaded or unloaded with a customs officer’s written authorization.
After 1767, however, revenue agents began treating such belongings as cargo, thus establishing an excuse to seize the entire ship.
Under this new policy, crewmen saw their trunks ruthlessly broken open by arrogant inspectors who confiscated trading stock worth several months’ wages because it was not listed on the captain’s loading papers.
To merchants and seamen alike, the commissioners had embarked on a program of “customs racketeering” that constituted little more than a system of legalized piracy.
The board’s program fed an upsurge in popular violence.
Nowhere were customs agents and informers more detested than in Boston, where in June 1768 citizens finally retaliated against their tormentors.
The occasion was the seizure, on a technicality, of colonial merchant John Hancock’s sloop Liberty.
Hancock became a chief target of the customs commissioners.
They fined him an amount almost thirteen times greater than the taxes he supposedly evaded on a shipment of Madeira wine.
The violence and distrust unleashed by the crisis over the customs commissioners foreshadowed a further darkening of relations between Britain and the colonies.
The Boston Massacre
In the presence of so many troops, Boston took on the atmosphere of an occupied city and crackled with tension.
The mainly Protestant townspeople found it especially galling that many soldiers were Irish Catholics.
Tensions between troops and crowds.
A customs informer shot into a crowd picketing the home of a customs paying merchant, killing an eleven year old boy.
On February 22, 1770
The army played no part in the shooting, it became a natural target for popular frustration and rage.
A crowd led by Crispus Attucks, African and Native American descent, erupted at the guard post protecting the customs office.
When an officer tried to disperse the civilians, his men endured a asteady barrage of flying objects and dares to shoot.
A private finally did fire, after being knocked down by a block of ice.
The soldiers’ volley hit eleven persons, five of whom, including Attucks, died.
March 5
The shock that followed the bloodshed marked the emotional high point of the Townshend crisis.
Royal authorities in Massachusetts tried to defuse the situation by isolating all British soldiers on a fortified island in the harbor, and Governor Thomas Hutchinson promised that the soldiers who had fired would be tried.
The patriot leader John Adams, an opponent of crowd actions, served as their attorney.
All but two of the soldiers were acquitted, and the ones found guilty suffered only a branding on their thumbs.
Burning hatreds produced by an intolerable situation underlay the Boston Massacre, as it came to be called in conscious recollection of the St. George’s Fields Massacre in London two years earlier.
Lord North’s Partial Retreat
As the Boston Massacre raged, a new British prime minister, Lord North, quietly worked to stabilize relations between Britain and its colonies.
North favored eliminating most of the Townshend duties to prevent the American commercial boycott from widening, but to underscore British authority, he insisted on retaining the tax on tea.
Parliament agreed, and in April 1770, giving in for the second time in three years to colonial pressure, it repealed most of the Townshend duties.
Parliament’s partial repeal produced a dilemma for American politicians.
They considered it intolerable that taxes remained on tea, the most profitable item for the royal treasure.
Colonial leaders were unsure whether they should press on with the nonimportation agreement until they achieved total victory, or whether it would suffice to maintain a selective boycott of tea.
When the nonimportation movement collapsed in July 0770, colonists resisted external taxation by voluntary agreements not to drink British tea.
Meanwhile, the British government, aware of officers’ excesses, took steps to rein in the powers of the American Board of Customs Commissioners.
The Committees of Correspondence
In fall 1772 Lord North’s ministry was preparing to implement Townshend’s goal of paying the royal governors’ salaries out of customs revenue.
The colonists had always viewed this intention to free the governors from legislative domination s a fundamental threat to representative government.
In response, Samuel Adams persuaded Boston’s town meeting to request that every Massachusetts community appoint persons responsible for exchanging information and coordinating measures to defend colonial rights.
Of approximately 260 towns, about half immediately established committees of correspondence, and most others did so within a year.
The idea soon spread throughout New England.
The Committees of Correspondence
It was the colonists’ first attempt to maintain close and continuing political cooperation over a wide area.
The system enabled Adams to send out messages for each local committee to read at its own town meeting, which would then debate the issues and adopt a formal resolution.
Adams’s most successful effort to mobilize popular sentiment came in June 1773 when he publicized certain letters of Massachusetts Governor Thomas Hutchinson that Benjamin Franklin had obtained.
The publication of the Hutchinson correspondence confirmed many colonists’’ suspicions of a plot to destroy basic freedoms.
In March 1773 Patrick Henry, Thomas Jefferson, and Richard Henry Lee proposed that Virginia establish colony-level committees of correspondence.
Backcountry Tensions
Although most of the conflicts between colonists and British officials took place in the eastern seaports, tensions in the West contributed to a continuing sense of crisis among Indians, settlers, and colonial authorities.
These stresses were rooted in the rapid growth that had spurred the migration of people and capital to the Appalachian backcountry, where colonists and their governments sought access to Indian land.
Land pressures and the lack of adequate revenue from the colonies left the British government utterly helpless in enforcing the Proclamation of 1763.
Settlers, traders, hunters, and thieves also trespassed on Indian land and a growing number of instances of violence by colonists toward Indians ewre going unpunished.
Under such pressure, Britain and its Six Nations Iroquois allies agreed in the Treaty of Fort Stanwix (1768) to grant land along the Ohio River that was occupied and claimed by the Shawnees, Delawares, and Cherokees to the governments of Pennsylvania and Virginia.
The treaty served to heighten rather than ease western tensions, especially in the Ohio country, where settlers agitated to establish a new colony, Kentucky.
Virginia opened a campaign against the Indians known as Lord Dunmore’s War
Slaughter of the Indians
The outraged Logan led a force of Shawnees and Mingos who retaliated by killing and equal number of white Virginians.
The Treaty of Fort Stanwix resolved the conflicting claims of Pennsylvania and Virginia in Ohio at the Indians’ expense.
The Tea Act
Colonial smuggling and nonconsumption had taken a heavy toll on the British East India Company, which enjoyed a legal monopoly on the sale of tea within Britan’s empire.
If the company could only control the colonial market, North reasoned, its chances for returning to profitability would greatly increase.
In May 1773, to save the beleaguered East India Company from financial ruin, Parliament passed the Tea Act.
The Tea Act
Eliminated all remaining import duties on tea entering England and thus lowered the selling price to consumers.
To lower the price further, the act also permitted the company to sell its tea directly to consumers rather than through wholesalers.
These two concessions reduced the cost of price of all smuggled competition.
Alarmed many Americans
They saw in it a menace to liberty and virtue as well as to colonial representative government
By making taxed tea competitive in price with smuggled tea, the law would raise revenue, which the British government would use to pay royal governors.
The law thus threatened to corrupt Americans into accepting the principle of parliamentary taxation by taking advantage of their weakness for a frivolous luxury.
The committees of correspondence decided to resist the importation of tea, though without violence and without the destruction of private property.
They would keep East India Company cargoes from being landed.
Their strategy failed in Boston. – Boston Tea Party
Samuel Adams, John Hancock, and other popular leaders repeatedly asked the customs officers to issue a special clearance for the ship’s departure, they were blocked by Thomas Hutchinson’s refusal to compromise.
December 16, 5000 Bostonians gathered a Old South Church and dressed as Mohawk Indians and headed for the wharf.
They assaulted no one and damaged nothing but the cargo
Everyone left quietly and no one said anything.
Toward Independence
Liberty for Black Americans
Throughout the imperial crisis, African – American slaves quickly responded to calls for liberty and equality, after usually being an alienated group within society.
Unrest among slaves – usually in the form of violence or escape – kept pace with that among white rebels.
In 1772, a court decision in England electrified much of the black population
A Massachusetts slave, James Somerset sued for his freedom after being taken to England by his master.
Lord Chief Justice William Mansfield ruled that because Parliament had never explicitly established slavery, no court could compel a slave to obey an order depriving him of his liberty.
In Virginia and Maryland, dozens of slaves ran away from their masters and sought passage aboard ships bound for England
Madison’s fears were borne out in 1775 when Virginia’s governor, Lord Dunmore, promise3d freedom to any slave who enlisted in the cause of restoring royal authority.
As had Florida when it provided a refuge for escaping South Carolina slaves
About one thousand blacks joined Dunmore before hostile patriots forced him to flee the colony.
The Coercive Acts
Following the Boston Tea Party, Lord North fumed that only “New England fanatics” could imagine themselves oppressed by inexpensive tea.
The British government, however, swiftly asserted its authority by enacting four Coercive Acts that together with the unrelated Quebec Act, became known to many colonists as the “Intolerable Acts.”
Intolerable Acts
The first act, the Boston Port Bill became law in April 1774.
It ordered the navy to close Boston harbor unless the Privy Council certified by June 1 that the town had arranged to pay for the ruined tea.
Lord North’s cabinet deliberately imposed this impossibly short deadline in order to ensure the harbor’s closing, which would lead to serious economic distress.
The second act, the Massachusetts Government Act
Revoked the Massachusetts charter and restructured the government to make it less democratic
The colony’s upper house would no longer be elected annually by the assembly but instead appointed for life by the crown.
The governor gained absolute control over the naming of ll judges and sheriffs.
Jurymen, previously elected, were now appointed by sheriffs.
The new charter forbade communities to hold more than one town meeting a year without the governor’s permission.
The third act, the Administration of Justice Act
Colonists cynically called the Murder Act
Permitted any person charged with murder while enforcing royal authority in Massachusetts to be tried in England or in other colonies
The new quartering Act
Allowed the governor to requisition empty private buildings for housing troops.
The Quebec Act
Americans learned of this act with the other four statutes and associated it with them.
The law established Roman Catholicism as Quebec’s official religion
Gave Canada’s governors sweeping powers but established no legislature
Permitted property disputes to be decided by French law, which did not use juries
Extended Quebec’s territorial claims south tot eh Ohio River and west to the Mississippi, a vast area populated by Native Americans and some French.
The Intolerable Acts convinced Anglo-Americans that Britain was plotting to corrode traditional English liberties throughout North America.
The new Quartering Act would repress any resistance by forcing troops on an unwilling population, and the Murder Act would encourage massacres by preventing local juries from convicting soldiers who killed civilians.
Parliament would revoke every colon’s charter and introduce a government like Quebec’s
The First Continental Congress
In response to the Intolerable Acts the extralegal committees of correspondence of every colony but Georgia sent delegates to a Continental Congress in Philadelphia.
Congress assembled on September 1774, were many of the colonies’ most prominent politians
56 delegates had come together to find a way of defending the colonies’ rights in common, and in interminable dinner parties and cloakroom chatter, they took one another’s measures.
The First Continental Congress opened by endorsing a set of statements of principle called the Suffolk Resolves
Recently had placed Massachusetts in a state of passive rebellion.
The resolves declared that the colonies owed no obedience to any of the Coercive Acts, that a provisional government should collect all taxes until the former Massachusetts charter was restored, and that defensive measures should be taken in the event of an attack by royal troops.
The Continental Congress also voted to boycott all goods after December 1 and to cease exporting almost all goods to Britain and its West Indian possessions after September 1775 unless reconciliation had been accomplished.
Trimmers vainly opposed nonimportation and tried unsuccessfully to win endorsement of Galloway’s plan for a “Grand Council” an American legislature that would share the authority to tax and govern the colonies with Parliament.
The delegates summarized their principles and demands in a petition to the king.
This document affirmed Parliament’s power to regulate imperial commerce, but it argued that all previous parliamentary efforts to impose taxes, enforce laws through admiralty courts, suspend assemblies, and unilaterally revoke charters were unconstitutional.
By addressing the king rather than Parliament, Congress was imploring George 3 to end the crisis by dismissing those ministers responsible for passing the Coercive Acts.
From Resistance to Rebellion
To solidify their defiance, colonial resistance leaders coerced waverers and loyalists (or Tories, as they were often called). Thus the elected committees that Congress had created to enforce the Continental Association often turned themselves into vigilantes compelling merchants who still traded with Britain to burn their imports and make public apologies, brow beating clergymen who preached proBritish sermons, and pressuring Americans to adopt simpler diets and dress in order to relieve their dependence on British imports.
By Spring 1775, colonial patriots had established provincial congresses that paralleled and rivaled the existing colonial assemblies headed by royal governors.
Britain answered the colonies’ challenge in Massachusetts in April 1775.
Colonits ahd prepared for the worst by collecting arms and organizing extralegal militia units (locally known as minutemen) whose members could respond instantly to an emergency.
The British government ordered Massachusetts’ Governor Gage to quell the rude rabble by arresting the principal patrio leaders.
On April 19, 1775, aware that most of these leaders had already fled Boston, Gage instead sent seven hundred British soldiers to seize military supplies that the colonists had stored at LConcord.
Two couriers, William Dawes and Paul Revere, rode out to warn nearby trowns of the British toops movements and target.
At Lexington about seventy minutemen confronted the soldiers.
The British pushed on to Concord.
They found few munitions but encountered a growing swarm of armed Yankees.
Three weeks later, the Second Continental Congress convened in Philadelphia.
Most delegates still opposed independence and at Dickinson’s urging agreed to send a loyal message to George 3.
Dickinson composed what became known as the Olive Branch Petition.
Excessively polite, it nonetheless presented three demands: a cease-fire at Boston, repeal of the Coercive Acts, and negotiations to establish guarantees of American rights.
The delegates also passed measures that Britain could only construe as rebellious.
They voted in May 1775 to establish an American continental army and appointed George Washington it’s commander.
The Olive Branch Petition reached London along with news of the Continental Army’s formation and of a battle fought just outside Boston on June 17.
In this engagement British troops attacked colonists entrenched on Breed’s Hill and Bunker Hill.
On August 23 George 3 proclaimed New England in a state of rebellion, and in October he extended that pronouncement to include all the colonies.
Common Sense
Most colonists’ sentimental attachment to the king, the last emotional barrier to their accepting independence, finally crumbled in January 1776 with the publication of Thomas Paine’s Common Sense.
Common Sense Points
Monarchy was an institution rooted in superstition, dangerous to liberty, and inappropriate to Americans.
The king was the royal brute and a hardened, sullen-tempered Pharaoh
America had no economic need for the British connection.
The events of the preceding six months had made independence a reality.
America would not be only a new nation but a new kind of nation, a model society founded on republican principles and unburdened by the oppressive beliefs and corrupt institutions of the European past.
Facts
Printed in both English and German
Sold more than one hundred thousand copies within three months making it the best seller in American history.
It had dissolved lingering allegiance to George 3 and Great Britain, removing the last psychological barrier to American Independence.
By Spring 1776 Paine’s pamphlet had stimulated dozens of local gatherings – artisan guilds, town meetings, county conventions, and militia musters – to pass resolutions favoring American independence.
Declaration of Independence
Virginia’s legislature instructed its delegates at the Second continental Congress to propose independence, which Richard Henry Lee did on June 7.
Formally adopting Lee’s resolution on July 2, Congress created the US of A.
The task of drafting a statement to justify the colonies’ separation from England fell to a committee of five, including John Adams, Ben Franklin, and Thomas Jefferson, with Jefferson as the principle author.
In the document
He listed twenty-seven injuries and usurpations committed by George 3 against the colonies.
Jefferson argued that the English government had violated its contract with the colonists, thereby giving them the right to replace it with a government of their own design.
His eloquent emphasis on the equality of all individuals and their natural entitlement to justice, liberty, and self-fulfillment expressed republicans’ deepest longing for a government that would rest on neither legal privilege nor exploitation of the majority by the few.
Above all he wanted to convince his fellow citizens that social and political progress could no longer be accomplished within the British Empire.
The Proclamation that “all men” were created equal accorded with the Anglo-American assumption that women could not and should not function politically or legally as autonomous individuals.
On innocent colonists seemed to place Native American outside the bounds of humanity.
In their reading, the Declaration never claimed that perfect justice and equal opportunity existed in the US rather it challenged the Revolutionary generation and all who later inherited the nation to bring this ideal closer to reality.