Chapter 5: Toward Independence Years of Decision

The Reform Movement, 1763-1765 I. Since the late 1740s leading members of the British Board of Trade had favored tighter controls over the colonies, and by focusing attention on America, the Great War for Empire presented them with a golden opportunity. A. As soon as victory over the French was ensured, British officials launched a concerted effort to reform the colonial administrative system. The Legacy of the War I. The legacy of the Great War for Empire was a mixed one. By driving the French out of Canada, Britain had achieved dominance over eastern North America. A. The cost of triumph was high: a mountain of debt and the need to spend even more money to sustain troops in the newly conquered provinces of Canada and Florida. B. The financial crisis prompted the British ministry not only to impose new taxes on its American possessions but also the redefine the character of the empire. Since 1689 Britain had exercised authority over the colonies indirectly, through mercantilist regulations on trade; now it proposed to govern them more directly, through Parliamentary legislation and taxation. Disputes over Troops and Trade I. The war made visible the differences between British and colonial society. A. Before 1754 only royal governors and a few merchants and naval officers had experienced life in the American provinces, but the fighting brought thousands of British troops to the mainland colonies. Few people liked what they saw. B. Americans were shocked by the arrogance of British officers. II. The war once again exposed the weakness of British administrative control, especially the lack of authority exercised by royal governors. A. For decades royal officials had struggled with the colonial assemblies over salaries, patronage, and taxes, and the war only heightened these conflicts. B. In Virginia the House of Burgesses refused to levy additional taxes to pay for the war and resorted instead to deficit financing, printing huge amounts of paper currency. C. As the colonys currency declined in value, the Burgesses passed another act that required creditors to accept money at its face value, prompting British merchants to apply to Parliament for relief. III. Other conflicts arose over military police. In theory the governors had command of the provincial militia, including the authority to appoint officers and set military strategy. In reality they had to share power with the colonial assemblies, which refused to support the war effort with taxes and troops unless they controlled military appointments and operation. IV. Imperial authorities began to strictly enforce the existing Navigation Acts. A. Before the war American merchants had routinely bribed customs officials to circumvent the Molasses Act of 1733. To curb such corruption, in 1762 Parliament passed a Revenue Act that prohibited English customs appointees from leasing their positions to deputies, who had often accepted bribes in order to pay their leases and augment their personal incomes.

B. The ministry instructed the Royal Navy to stop the American merchants who were conducting a flourishing trade between the mainland colonies and the French islands. V. Britains wartime efforts to curb American autonomy culminated in 1763 with the deployment of a large peacetime army. The decision stemmed from a number of motives. A. The ministry wanted to discourage rebellion by French residents in Quebec and also needed to safeguard its new province of Florida, which Spain wanted back and could potentially invade. B. The recent rebellion of the Ottawa chief Pontiac had underscored the need for a substantial military garrison along the frontier. C. The soldiers would intimidate the Indians and deter white farmers from migrating west of the Proclamation Line of 1763 and thus prevent new Indian wars. VI. Some British politicians feared that with the French gone from Canada, Americans would seek greater freedom and imperial control. To prevent this outcome, British ministers on a show of force. A. By stationing an army in America, the British ministry was indicating its willingness to use force to preserve its authority. The National Debt I. A more immediate problem was Britains national debt, which had nearly doubled as a result of the war. A. To pay the rising interest charges, Lord Bute, the prime minister, would have to raise taxes. B. Treasury officials advised against increasing the English land tax. Bute therefore imposed higher imposed higher import duties on American-grown tobacco and sugar, which manufacturers passed on to British consumers by higher prices. C. The ministry also increased excise leviesessentially sales taxeson domestic goods such as salt, beer, and distilled spirits, another measure that passed the cost of war onto ordinary subjects. II. To collect these taxes, the government doubled the size of the financial bureaucracy and increased its legal powers. A. Customs agents and informers patrolled the coasts of southern Britain, arresting smugglers and seizing tons of European-produced goods on which import duties had not been paid. B. The price of empire abroad had turned out to be debt, higher taxes, and a more powerful government at home. III. These developments confirmed the worst fears of Country aristocrats in Britain and radical Whigs on both sides of the Atlantic. Since the ministry off Sir Robert Walpole, these political factions had emphasized the dangers of a big and expensive government and political corruption. A. Now opposition politicians in Britain went on the offensive against the ministry. The bureaucracy, they protested, had become even more bloated. B. Distressed by higher taxes and administrative corruption, the most outspoken British reformers insisted that Parliament be made more representative of the peoples interests. C. In British domestic affairs as in American colonial policy, the Great War for Empire had transformed British political life, creating a more active and more oppressive government. British Reform Strategy I. This political transformation in Britain had a significant impact on American affairs because it brought to power a new generation of royal officials with a more expansive view of British authority.

A. Charles Townshend and officials at the Board of Trade had vowed to enhance British prosperity by closely
regulating colonial trade; further, during the war they had begun to reform the imperial administrative system. B. George Grenville, who succeeded Bute as prime minister, continued the reform effort. In 1764, he won Parliamentary approval of a Currency Act that protected the financial interests of British merchants in America. C. In 1751 Parliament had banned the use of paper money as legal tender in New England; spurred on by Virginias abuse of paper currency during the war, the home legislature now extended the ban throughout the colonies. All Americans would have to pay their debts to merchants with British currency foreign coins, or bills of exchange. D. Parliament had seized control of the colonial monetary system from the American assemblies. The Sugar Act I. Grenville introduced a new Navigation Act, the Sugar Act of 1764, to replace the widely evaded Molasses Act of 1733. A. The act reflected a shrewd effort by the ministry to balance American and British interests, but American merchants and manufacturers refused to accept the compromise. B. These merchantsjoined by New England distillers, who feared a rise in the price of molassesorchestrated a political campaign against the Sugar Act. Publicly they protested that the new tax would wipe out trade with the French, privately they vowed to evade the duty by smuggling or bribing officials. C. Merchants and their allies also raised constitutional objections to the new legislation. Vice-Admiralty Courts and the Rights of the Englishmen I. The Sugar Act of 1764 raised other constitutional issues. To enforce the new duty, the act extended the jurisdiction of the vice-admiralty courtsmaritime tribunals that operated without the procedures and protections of English common law. A. There was no trial by jury in those courts. B. For half a century colonial legislatures had opposed vice-admiralty courts, limiting their power by extending the jurisdiction of colonial courts to cover customs offenses occurring in the seaports or costal waters. As a result, merchants charged with violating the Navigation Acts were often tried in common-law courts. C. By extending the jurisdiction of vice-admiralty courts to all customs offenses, the Sugar Act closed this loophole. II. Consequently, the powers given to the vice-admiralty courts revived old American fears and raised new constitutional objects. A. Vice-admiralty courts had long played a major role in Britain, where they were unpopular among British smugglers who feared jail and some political leaders who feared unbridled royal power. The new legislation simply extended tough British legal practices and bureaucratic controls to the American colonies. B. What was really at issue in the conflict over the vice-admiralty courts was the British governments increased exercise of its authority over the colonists. C. Having lived for decades under a policy of salutary neglect, Americans soon realized that the new British reforms challenged the existing system if imperial politics and many of the freedoms they had traditionally enjoyed. III. British officials insisted on Parliaments power to enact such legislation and denied that the colonists could claim the traditional rights of Englishmen

A. In the eyes of most British officials, Americans were second-class subjects of the king, their rights limited by the
Navigation Acts and the national interests of the British state, as determined by Parliament. The Stamp Act I. The issue of taxation brought about the first great imperial crisis. When Grenville introduced the Sugar Act in Parliament in 1764m he also announced his intention to seek a colonial stamp tax to cover part of keeping British troops in America. The new tax would increase revenue by requiring stamps on court documents, land titles, contracts, playing cards, and newspapers. II. The prime minister knew that some Americans would object to the tax on constitutional grounds, but no one in Parliament objected to the idea. A. Confident of Parliaments support, Grenville vowed to impose a stamp tax in 1765 unless the colonial leaders rose among themselves to defend themselves against it. B. The assemblies lacked the organizational means to create a continent-wide military force and to fund it. Lack an alternative plan to raise the money and not convinced that the colonies had a constitutional immunity from Parliamentary taxation, some agents advised their assemblies to accept the new levy. III. The way was clear for Grenville to introduce the Stamp Actboth to raise revenue and to assert a constitutional principle, the right of Parliament to lay an internal tax upon the colonies. A. The House of Commons refused to accept American petitions opposing the act and passed the new legislation by an overwhelming vote. B. Parliament also approved Grenvilles proposal that violations of the Stamp Act be tried in vice-admiralty courts. IV. At the request of General Thomas Gage, commander of British military forces in America, Parliament passed a Quartering Act. This measure directed colonial governments to contribute to the cost of defending the empire by providing barracks and food for the British troops stationed in America. A. During the recent war the assemblies of Massachusetts and New York refused to accept this financial burden, and the ministry was determined to force the colonists to pay for their own defense. V. Using the doctrine of Parliamentary supremacy, the prime minister had begun to replace the mercantilist system of indirect regulation with a genuinely imperial administrative regime that directly controlled the kings subjects in the colonies. A. By placing British officials in control of taxation, legal proceedings, and military finances, Grenville deprived the American assemblies of many of their traditional powers and challenged their authority. He thus provoked a constitutional confrontation not only on specific issues of policy but on the fundamental question of representative self-government. The Dynamics of Rebellion, 1765-1766 I. With the Sugar and Stamp Acts, Grenville had thrown down the gauntlet to the American colonists. Although the colonists had often opposed unpopular laws and arbitrary governors, they had never before faced a reform-minded ministry and Parliament. A. Many Americans were alarmed by the new British policies and questioned their wisdom. Some Patriotsas the defenders of the colonial rights came to be calledwere prepared to take up Grenvilles challenge by delivering speeches that bordered on treason, by rioting in the streets, and by organizing an intercolonial protest against the

new legislation. The Crowd Rebels I. The American response to the Stamp Act was more drastic than Grenville had predicted. In May 1765 Patrick Henry addressed the House of Burgesses and heaped blame not only by Grenville but the new king George III, who had appointed Grenville to office and apparently supported his policies. The Sons of Liberty I. Disciplined mobs led by men who called themselves Sons of Liberty demanded the resignation of newly appointed stamp-tax collectors. A. One of the first incidents took place in Boston in August 1765m when the Sons of Liberty made an effigy of the collector Andrew Oliver, which they burned and beheaded. Boston merchants who opposed the Stamp Act advised Oliver to resign. B. Two weeks later Bostonians attacked the house of Lieutenant Governor Thomas Hutchinson. As a defender of social privilege and imperial authority, Hutchinson had many enemies. Now, in the heat of crisis, the common people took their revenge by destroying his house. II. Throughout New England similar crowds of angry but purposeful peoplethe rabbleintimidated royal officials. The Stamp Act Congress and the First Boycott I. In the midst of this turmoil, nine colonial assemblies sent delegates to the Stamp Act Congress, which met in New York City in October 1765. Seeking to persuade Parliament to repeal the Stamp Act, the delegates issued a set of Resolves that carefully avoided any reference to the ongoing anti-imperial riots. A. In the Resolves the delegates contested the constitutionality of the Stamp and Sugar Acts, declaring that only the colonists elected representatives could impose taxes on them. B. They also rejected direct representation in the House of Commons, citing their distance from Britain and their distinct local interests. They petitioned for repeal of the Stamp Act. II. Many Americans favored a more assertive stance. On November 1, 1765, when the Stamp Act went into effect, 200 important merchants in New York City announced a boycott against British merchandise. Traders in Boston and Philadelphia also vowed not to import British goods, and most merchants in smaller ports pledged their support. III. Meanwhile, the Sons of Liberty increased their agitation against British policy. Protestors marched through the streets, breaking street lamps and windows. IV. Throughout the colonies popular resistance nullified the Stamp Act. Frightened collectors distributed few stamps, and royal officials and judges accepted legal documents without the stamps while they awaited instructions from Britain. A. Slow communication across the Atlantic meant that the ministrys response to the riots would not be known until the following spring. B. But already royal officials in America knew that they could no longer count on the deferential political behavior that had ensured stability for 3 generations. Motives of the Crowds I. The Stamp Act rioters came primarily from the middle and lower ranks of colonial society. The leaders of the Sons of Liberty were mostly minor merchants and property-owning artisans who knew each other through their jobs, churches, or neighborhoods.

A. The mobs they led contained a diverse assortment of artisans and struggling journeymen, many of them drawn to the streets my frustration over economic issues. B. Imports of low-priced British shoes and other manufactured goods threatened the livelihood of some artisans, so they opposed any taxes that would further reduce declining standard of living. C. Other crowd members were motivated by the religious passions aroused by the Great Awakening. These evangelical and hard-working Protestants led disciplined lives and resented the arrogance and immorality of the British military officers and the corruption of royal bureaucrats. D. Still other crowd members had absorbed from their parents and grandparents the antimonarchical sentiments of the 17th century Puritan revolution. E. A significant portion of many mobs was made up of apprentices, day laborers, and unemployed sailorsyoung men seeking adventure and excitement who were more ready to resort to violence against the officials. II. Traditional fears of tyrannical power thus merged with economic self-interest, religious passion, and class resentments to create a potent anti-imperial outlook among ordinary Americans. The resulting crowd actions imparted a democratic cast to the emerging American Patriot movement. Ideological Sources of Resistance I. Most Patriot leaders were moved by intellectual principles. These educated men drew on their reading of history and political philosophy to construct and ideology of resistance. The Actors: Merchants and Lawyers I. The colonial opposition movement began in the seaport cities because urban residents were directly affected by the new British policies. A. The Stamp Act taxed city-based products and services, such as the newspapers merchants relied on for news and the legal documents that were at the heart of the lawyers business; the Sugar Act raised the cost of molasses to seaport merchants and distillers; and the Currency Act complicated urban trade and financial transactions. B. British firms had begun selling low-cost manufactured goods directly to colonial shopkeepers, threatening the livelihood of American artisans and merchants. II. American lawyers took an especially prominent role in the protest movement. In part, this involvement stemmed from their work: merchants hired lawyers to defend them from accusations by customs officials and to prevent seizure of their ships by vice-admiralty judges. But the lawyers own professional values and training provided another motive for opposing various imperial measures. A. Most American lawyers were against the extension of vice-admiralty courts, they favored trial by jury. Although a respect for established led many lawyers to remain loyal to the Crown, younger lawyers tended to embrace the Patriot movement. III. As merchants and lawyers debated political and constitutional issues in taverns and coffeehouses and in public meetings, they broadened the terms of the debate. Initially the American Patriots emphasized economic hardship and traditional privileges. However, the Patriots gradually came to define liberty as an abstract ideala natural right of all people rather than a set of historical privileges. A. Pamphlets of remarkable political sophistication circulated throughout the colonies, swaying the outlook of the political representatives from rural communities and providing the resistance movement with both an intellectual

rationale and political agenda. The Intellectual Traditions I. As Patriot merchants and lawyers formulated their arguments, they drew on 3 intellectual traditions. A. The first was English common law, the centuries-old body of legal rules and procedures that protected the kings subjects against arbitrary acts by the government. Such customary legal practices and common-law rights, Adams and other Patriot lawyers maintained, could not be abridged by bureaucratic edict or even Parliamentary statute. B. A second important intellectual resource for educated Americans was the rationalist thought of the Enlightenment. Enlightenment philosophers questioned the past and appealed to reason to discover and correct the ills of society. Most Enlightenment thinkers followed John Locke in believing that individuals possessed certain natural rights and that it was the responsibility of the government to protect these rights. For many educated colonists this belief provided a strong philosophical justification for resistance to British authority. C. The republican and Whig strands of the English political tradition provided the 3rd ideological basis for the American Patriot movement. Republican and Whig sentiments predisposed many Americans to distrust imperial reform. II. Thus, as the ideology of the Enlightenment thinkers altered American views of fundamental political rights, Patriot lawyers drew on common-law precedents to defend their clients, and Radical Whig politicians questioned the motives of British ministers and royal governors. By stating colonial grievances in terms of the broad principles of these intellectual traditions, Patriot leaders endowed colonial opposition to British control with high moral significance, turning a series of tax protests into a broad resistance movement. The Informal Compromise of 1766 I. As the colonists resistance intensified, the British parliament was in turmoil, with various political factions advocating radically different responses to the American challenge. II. British merchants also favored the repeal of the Stamp Act, because the colonial boycott of British goods had caused a drastic decrease in their sales. A. Hard-liners in Parliament, outraged by the popular rebellion in America, demanded that substantial numbers of British soldiers be sent to seaport cities to suppress the riots and force the Americans to submit to the constitutional supremacy of Parliament. III. Former prime minister William Pitt devised a third, more ambiguous response to the American resistance movement, demanding that the Stamp Act be repealed, primarily because it had failed to achieve its goals. Pitt argued both that Parliament could not tax the colonies and that British authority over America was sovereign. IV. Rockingham successfully reconciled these conflicting views and factions by enacting a series of related measures. To assist British merchants and mollify colonial opinion with respect to taxation, he repealed the Stamp Act and ruled out the use of troops against colonial crowds. He also modified the Sugar Act, reducing the import duty on French molasses and, to raise revenue, extending the tax to include British molasses as well. A. He pacified imperial reformers and hard-liners with the Declaratory Act of 1766, which explicitly reaffirmed the British Parliaments power to make taxes. V. The Stamp Act crisis ended in compromise. The Americans won important points: their riots, boycott, and petitions had

secured repeal of the Stamp Act and revision of the Sugar Act. Yet Grenville and other advocates of imperial reform had also triumphed by obtaining a statement of Parliamentary supremacy. A. Because the confrontation ended quickly, it seemed possible that it might be forgotten even more quickly. B. The constitutional status of the American provinces remained uncertain but political positions had not hardened. The Growing Confrontation, 1767-1770 I. The compromise of 1766 was short-lived. Within a year political rivalries in Britain sparked a new and more prolonged struggle with the American provinces over taxes. On both sides of the Atlantic, economic self-interest and ideological rigidity aggravated the conflict, resurrecting the passions and violence of 1765 and dashing prospects for a timely resolution of the crisis. The Townshend Initiatives I. Since his service on the Board of Trade in the 1750s, Townshend favored imperial reform; with Pitt partially incapacitated, the chancellor had the power to push it through. The Townshend Act I. New legislation, known as the Townshend Act of 1767, was intended to provide royal officials with a guaranteed income, freeing their salaries from the control of colonial assemblies and enabling them to enforce Parliamentary laws and royal directives. A. The tax imposed duties on paper, paint, glass, and tea imported into the colonies. To pacify Grenville, part of the revenue would be used to pay the salaries of governors, judges, and other imperial officials. B. To enhance further the power of the royal bureaucracy, Townshend devised the Revenue Act of 1767. This new act created a Board of American Customs Commissioners in Boston and vice-admiralty courts in Halifax, Boston, Philadelphia, and Charleston. These administrative innovations were far-reaching and posed a greater threat to American autonomy than did the small sums raised by import duties. The Restraining Act I. The New York assembly gave Townshend another chance to challenge the colonial assemblies when it refused to comply with the Quartering Act of 1765, which required Americans to house and feed British troops. Dissatisfied, the British ministry instructed New York to assume complete financial responsibility for its defense against Indian attacks. If the assembly refused, some members of Parliament threatened that an extra port duty would be imposed on New York imports and exports to raise the needed funds. II. Townshend decided to create the Restraining Act of 1767, which suspended the New York assembly until it submitted to the Quartering Act. Faced with the loss of self-government, New Yorkers appropriated the required funds. III. The Restraining Act was of great significance because it threatened the existence of representative government in the colonies. A. The British Privy Council had always supervised the assemblies, but Townshends Restraining Act went much further by defining American governmental institutions as completely dependent on Parliamentary favor. America Again Resists I. The Townshend Duties revived the constitutional debate over taxation. A. During the Stamp Act crisis of 1765 some Americans had suggested that external duties on trade were acceptable but that direct or internal taxes were not.

A Second Boycott I. John Dickinson argued that the real issue was not whether the tax was internal or external but the intention of the legislation. Many refused to accept the Townshend taxes on colonial imports because the measures were not designed to regulate trade but to bring revenue to the imperial government, and thus amounted to taxation without consent. II. Patriots in Boston launched a new boycott of British goods, and New York traders followed shortly after. But public opinion was divided. Philadelphia merchants, sailors, and dockworkers, who were more heavily involved in direct trade with Britain, refused to join the nonimportation movement. III. Public support for the boycott gradually spread to smaller port cities and into the countryside. A. In Puritan New England, ministers and public officials supported nonimportation by condemning luxury and the use of foreign superfluities and promoted the domestic manufacture of necessities. B. The boycott prompted crowd actions that united thousands of Americans in a common political movement. But in many seaports, merchants deeply resented the crowds attacks on their reputations and property. Fearing mob rule, they condemned nonimportation and stood by the royal governors. IV. Despite this split between radical Patriots and future Loyalists, the boycott gathered momentum. A. In March 1769 most Philadelphia merchants responded to public pressure and joined the nonimportation movement. The Daughters of Liberty I. American women, especially religious women, added their support to the nonimportation movement through the production of homespun textiles. A. The boycotts against Britain prompted a more sustained involvement by women than had been seen in past movements. II. The contest over the Townshend Duties elicited support from a much broader group of women, including religious women in New England, who organized dozens of spinning matches, bees, and demonstrations as the homes of their ministers. A. Some of these gatherings were openly patriotic, but many more pious women combined support for nonimportation with the fulfillment of social obligations and charitable work by gathering to spin flax and wool, which they donated to their ministers. B. Just as the tradition of crowd actions influenced mens response to the imperial crisis, so womens concerns with the wellbeing of their communities guided their efforts. III. Ultimately, the efforts of patriotic young women and religious women prompted thousands of other women to redouble their efforts at the spinning wheel and loom. Newspapers celebrated these patriotic heroines, whose production of cloth made America less dependent on British textile imports than in previous years. A. While this surge in domestic production did not compensate for the loss of British imports, it inspired support for nonimportation in hundreds of communities. Britain Responds I. British patience was exhausted. To strengthen the Hand of Government in Massachusetts and assist the Commissioners of the Customs, who had been forced by a mob to take refuge on the Liberty, a British naval vessel, Hillsborough dispatched four regiments of troops in Boston.

A. Hillsboroughs goal was to prepare for an armed showdown with the radical Boston Patriots. By the end of
1768 a thousand British regulators were encamped in Boston, and military coercion was a very real prospect. B. General Gage accused public leader in Massachusetts of treasonable and desperate resolves and advised the ministry to quash this spirit with a blow. Parliament responded by threatening to appoint a special commission to hear evidence of treason, and King George supported Hillsboroughs plan to repeal the Townshend Duties in all colonies except Massachusetts. C. Once the rebellious New Englanders were isolated, the British army would bring them to their knees. The stakes had risen. In 1765 American resistance to taxation had provoked Parliamentary debate. In 1768 it produced a plan for military coercion. The Second Compromise I. At this critical moment the British ministrys resolve faltered, primarily because of domestic problems. The American trade boycott also began to hurt the British economy. A. In 1769 the boycott had a significant impact. By continuing to export tobacco, rice, fish, and other goods to Britain while refusing to buy its manufactured goods, Americans accumulated a trade surplus. To revive their flagging fortunes, British merchants and manufacturers petitioned Parliament for repeal of the Townshend Duties. B. By late 1769 merchants petitions had persuaded some ministers that the Townshend Duties were a mistake, and the king had withdrawn his support for Hillboroughs plan for military coercion. The Crisis Resolved I. Early in 1770 Lord North became prime minister and decided to arrange a new compromise with the colonists. Arguing that it was foolish for Britain to taw its own exports to America, North persuaded Parliament to repeal the duties on glass, paper, and paint. But he retained the tax on tea as a symbol of Parliaments supremacy. A. In a spirit of good will, merchants in New York and Philadelphia renewed the importation of British manufactured goods, rejecting pleas from zealous Boston Patriots to continue the boycott until North acknowledged their constitutional rights by repealing the tax on tea. B. Most ordinary Americans accepted the symbolic levy and simply avoided paying the tax by drinking smuggled Dutch tea, which was cheaper. II. Even new outbreaks of violence in New York and Boston did not rupture the compromise. During the boycott in New York artisans and workers had taunted British troops. In retaliation the soldiers tore down a Liberty pole, setting off a week of street fighting known as the Golden Hill riots. A. In Boston friction arose between the townspeople and British soldiers on a much broader range of issues. Leading Patriots contested the constitutional legitimacy of the occupation of the town by a standing army. B. Seeking to uphold the honor of Boston while condemning British policy, Patriot leaders played a double game. John Adams defended the soldiers in a Boston court and won their acquittal. Simultaneously, James Bowdoin accused the British of deliberately planning the killing by imposing a standing army in town. His pamphlet circulated widely in the colonies and, by depicting the event not as an accident but as the Boston Massacre inflamed public opinion. Sovereignty Debated

Although most Americans still remained loyal to the empire, 5 years of conflict over taxes and constitutional principles had significantly altered their sentiments. A. In 1765 American public leaders had accepted Parliaments authority; the Stamp Act Resolves had opposed only certain legislation. By 1770 the most outspoken PatriotsBenjamin Franklin, Patrick Henry, and Samuel Adamshad repudiated Parliamentary supremacy, emphasizing instead the authority of the American assemblies. B. Beginning from this premise, Franklin looked for a way to redefine the imperial relationship so that the colonies would have political equality within the empire. II. The British had twice tried to impose taxes on the colonies, and American Patriots had twice forced them to retreat. If Parliament or king insisted on exercising Britains claim to sovereign power, at least some Americans were prepared to resist by force. Fearful of civil war, the ministry was hesitant to take the final step. The Road to Rebellion I. The repeal of the Townshend Duties in 1770 restored harmony to the British Empire. For the next 3 years most disputes were resolved peacefully. The Compromise Overturned I. The repeal of the Townshend Duties did not satisfy radical Patriots, who now wanted American independence. A. In 1772, Samuel Adams persuaded the Boston town meeting to establish a Committee of Correspondence to state the rights of colonists. The practice quickly spread. Other colonies copied the practice when the British government set up a royal commission to investigate the burning of the Gaspee, a British customs vessel. B. The commissions powers, particularly its authority to send Americans to Britain for trial, first aroused the Virginia House of Burgesses, which created a Committee of Correspondence to communicate with other colonies. The Tea Act I. Parliaments passage of the Tea Act in 1773 initiated the chain of events that led directly to war. Lord North had designed the act to provide financial relief for the British East India Company, a royally charted firm that was in debt due to mismanagement and military expeditions to extend British rule in India. A. The Tea Act provided the company with a governmental loan and eliminated the customs duties on the companys tea as it passed through Britain to be sent to America. This provision allowed the East India Company to sell tea at a lower price than other British merchants, giving it a virtual monopoly over the American market. II. Lord North failed to understand how unpopular the Tea Act would be in America. Radical Patriots accused the ministry of using low prices to bribe Americans to give up their principled opposition to Parliamentary taxation. A. North saw the tax as an essential wedge that would eventually allow the imposition of other levies. He insensitivity to the fragile state of the colonial relationship cost the empire dearly, for it revived American resistance. B. The East India Company decided to distribute the tea directly to shopkeepers in major American cities, a tactic that would eliminate most American merchants from the trade.

I.

III. The Committees of Correspondence took the lead in organizing resistance to the Tea Act. The Sons of Liberty prevented
East India Company ships from landing new supplies, forcing the ships captains to return the tea to Britain or store it. The Boston Tea Party I. For decades Massachusetts had resisted British authority, and in the 1760s it had assumed leadership of the anti-imperial movement. James Otis and John Adams had raised the first constitutional objections to legislation enforcing imperial reform, Boston mobs were the first to oppose the Stamp Act, and Boston merchants such as John Hancock had led colonial opposition to the Townshend Duties. II. Patriots raided the Dartmouth and threw 45 tons to tea into the harbor. The Coercive Acts I. The British Privy Council was outraged by the Tea Party. Early in 1774 Parliament rejected a proposal to repeal the duty on American tea and instead enacted 4 Coercive Acts to force Massachusetts into submission. A. The Port Bill closed Boston Harbor until the East India Company received payment for the tea. B. The Government Act annulled the Massachusetts charter and prohibited most local town meetings. C. The new Quartering Act required the colony to build barracks or accommodate British soldiers in private houses. D. To protect royal officials from Massachusetts juries, the Justice Act allowed the transfer of trials of capital crimes to other colonies or Britain. II. In response, Patriot leaders throughout the mainland condemned these lawswhich they called the Intolerable Actsand rallied support for Massachusetts. The Committees of Correspondence had created a firm sense of unity. III. In 1774 Parliament passed the Quebec Act, which heightened the Americans sense of common danger. The law extended the boundaries of Quebec into the Ohio River Valley, threatening to restrict the western boundaries of Virginia. It also gave legal recognition to Roman Catholicism. A. Although the ministry had not intended the Quebec Act as a coercive measure, many colonial leaders saw it as another demonstration of Parliaments power to intervene in American domestic affairs. The Response of the First Continental Congress I. To respond to the new British measures, American leaders called for a new all-colony assembly, the Continental Congress. A. The stakes of the first Continental Congress were high, and understandably the delegates were divided. The southern leaders, fearing a British plot to overturn the constitution, favored a new economic boycott. The New England colonies advocated political union and defensive military preparations. Delegates from the middle colonies wanted to seek political compromise with Britain. B. Led by Joseph Galloway, they outlined a scheme for a new imperial system that resembled the Albany Plan of Union of 1754. America would have a legislative council selected by the colonial assemblies and a presidentgeneral appointed by the king. The new council would have veto power over Parliamentary legislation that affected America. II. The congress passed a Declaration of Rights and Grievances that condemned the Coercive Acts and demanded their repeal. It also repudiated the Declaratory Act of 1766, which had proclaimed Parliaments supremacy over the colonies, and demanded that Britain restrict its supervision of American affairs to matters of external trade. It began a program of

economic retaliation, beginning with nonimportation and non-consumption agreements that would take effect in December 1774. III. Even at this late date a few British leaders continued to hope for compromise. However, these efforts were doomed to failure. The ministry was unyielding. They branded the Continental Congress an illegal assembly. A. Lord North set strict terms: Americans must pay for their own defense and administration and acknowledge Parliaments authority to tax them. He imposed a naval blockade on American trade with other nations and ordered General Gage to suppress dissent in Massachusetts. The Rising of the Countryside I. Although the Patriot movement began in the seaport cities, its success would depend on the support of rural population. Before 1750 most farmers had little interest in imperial issues. Their primarily allegiance was to their families and communities. A. However, the loss of life during the Seven Years War and taxes imposed by the Quartering Act began to drive some over the edge. The Expansion of the Patriot Movement I. The political doctrines of the urban Patriots gradually infiltrated the countryside. The merchant-led boycott of 1765 attracted some rural supporters, and by 1768 Daughters of Liberty in hundreds of small towns were weaving cloth to aide in the second boycott. A. When the Continental Congress declared a new nonimportation movement in 1774, it had little difficulty in setting up a network of local Committees of Safety and Inspection to support it. B. Appealing to rural thriftiness, the Congress condemned the wearing of expensive imported clothes. Patriots also appealed to the yeoman tradition of agricultural independence, which was everywhere under attack. By the 1770s, many northern yeomen felt personally threatened by British imperial policy. II. Despite their higher standard of living, southern slaveholders had similar fears. Many Chesapeake had fallen deeply into debt to British merchants. Accustomed to being masters on plantations, planters resented their financial dependence on British merchants and feared the prospect of political dependence raised by the Coercive Acts. They feared that the ministry would take over the House of Burgesses, depriving the gentry of the political power it had so long enjoyed. The Loyalists I. While many white planters and merchants supported the Patriot cause, other prominent Americans had worried for years that resistance to Britain would destroy respect for all political institutions and would end in mob rule. These fears increased when the Sons of Liberty turned to violence. A. Most Loyalists were royal officials, merchants with military contracts, clergy who were members of the Church of England, and lawyers. They began to denounce the Patriot goal of independence. Landlords and merchants used the threat of economic retaliation to persuade indebted tenants and workers to oppose Patriot policies. II. Thousands of ordinary colonists also refused to support the Patriot resistance movement for a variety of reasons. Class antagonism was one factor. A. In regions where many wealthy landlords became Patriots, tenant farmers often favored the maintenance of imperial authority. Similar social divisions prompted about of the backcountry regulators in North Carolina

and many smallholding farmers on the eastern shore of the Chesapeake Bay in Maryland to oppose the policies advocated by the Patriot gentry. B. Ethnic and religious conflicts in the mid-Atlantic colonies also prompted colonists to support the king. III. In most areas the Loyalists failed to organize potential supporters and were unable to affect the course of events. At this point Americans who favored resistance to British rule commanded the allegiance of the majority of white Americans. Exploiting their advantage in public opinion, the Patriots prepared for full-scale rebellion. The Failure of Compromise I. A month before the first Continental Congress, 150 delegates gathered in Concord, MA, for a Middlesex County Congress. This illegal convention had advised Patriots to close the royal courts of justice and transfer their political allegiance to the House of Representatives. II. General Thomas Gage tried to maintain imperial power. In September 1774 he ordered British troops to march out of Boston and seize Patriot armories and storehouses at Charlestown and Cambridge. His expedition created more support for the Patriot cause. A. In response, 20,000 colonial militiamen mobilized to safeguard military supply depots in Concord and Worcester. B. The Concord town meeting voted to raise a defensive forcethe Minutemen. III. Gage waited for orders from Britain. In the meantime, the MA House met on its own. It issued regulations for the collection of taxes, strengthened the militia, and assumed the responsibilities of government. A. On the night of April 18, 1775, Gage dispatched 700 soldiers to capture colonial leaders and supplies at Concord. Fighting broke out. B. At Concord the British took heavy losses.