The Roots of the Amercian
Revolution
The Early Years…
• When George III came to the throne in 1760
scarcely anyone in England or America foresaw
independence for thirteen of the British colonies
in North America.
• Colonists were proud of their affiliation with
Great Britain and satisfied with the prosperity
they enjoyed as part of Britain's commercial
empire.
• Only in retrospect do the irritations that arose in
the course of Britain's management of its vast
empire appear to point toward revolution.
Continued…
• From the 17th century on, colonists had to deal
with royal officials sent to protect the Crowns
interests in North America.
• The policies themselves were not at issue, since
for the most part they harmonized well enough
with the colonists' interests. The colonists
worried more about that the money would end
up in the pockets of the officials rather than the
royal treasury.
• The colonists' success in establishing the rights
of their legislative assemblies, gave a measure of
confidence that their liberty was secure.
What Was London Thinking?
• Imperial officials in London, though always
uneasy about the assertiveness of the colonial
legislatures, had no concerted plan for reform at
the end of the French and Indian War in 1763.
• The events that led to revolution in 1776 did not
grow out of a British resolve to bring the loosely
governed empire under control at last.
• They were looking in another direction entirely
when in 1765 the colonies exploded in rage at
parliamentary taxation.
Continued…
• The Crown's ministers were simply seeking a way to finance the
king's military policy.
• During the French and Indian War the British government had
taken financial responsibility for the defense of the colonies as well
as provided military leadership and many of the troops.
• Rather than demobilizing at the end of the war, George III with his
minister William Pitt's backing chose to keep the army at near
wartime strength of eighty-five regiments to be ready in the event of
renewed hostilities with France.
• The problem was how to pay for them. England was financially
exhausted after the lengthy and costly war that had nearly doubled
the national debt, and the country could not bear additional taxes.
• The solution was to station large portions of the army in Ireland and
America and require local support for the troops in each location.
The Sugar Act, the Stamp Act, and the Townshend Duties were
intended to help finance the £359,000 needed annually to sustain the
troops in America.
Sugar Act of 1764
• The American Revenue Act of 1764, or Sugar Act, confused the
Americans. It was in the first place not a new tax but an alteration of
an old customs duty.
• To prevent trade with the French West Indies, Parliament in 1733
had passed a prohibitive tariff on sugar, molasses, and other goods
imported from those islands.
• The colonists lived with these annoying customs duties by evading
them through smuggling.
• They could scarcely object in principle to duties they had long
acknowledged as legitimate.
• In the second place, the Sugar Act reduced the duty, from 6d. on a
gallon of molasses, for example, to 3d.
• The difference was, of course, that mechanisms were put in place to
collect the duty and American shippers faced having actually to pay
it.
• There were objections heard to the Sugar Act on grounds that it was
intended for revenue, not regulation, and so was illegitimate, but
the ambiguities were sufficiently great to blunt American
opposition.
The Stamp Act
• The Stamp Act presented no such ambiguities.
• It was a tax laid directly on the people for the express
purpose of raising revenue.
• To collect the tax the British ministry embossed stamps
of varying values in sheets of paper and sold the paper
to the colonists for use as legal documents, newspapers,
and pamphlets.
• No document written on unstamped paper had legal
standing, and so the colonists were compelled to buy the
stamps and pay the tax.
• In Britain stamp taxes were considered inoffensive and
easy to collect, but if Whitehall officials expected the
colonists to agree for that reason, they soon realized that
wasn’t going to happen.
Continued…
• The colonists at virtually every level of society,
including many who later became Loyalists, rose
in protest.
• The colonial legislatures and a specially called
Stamp Act Congress submitted complaining
petitions to Parliament.
• The people feared that the "Stamp Men" were
benefiting from the tax.
• The charges brought in newspapers and
pamphlets against these men reflected the old
suspicion about British colonial officials.
America’s Argument to Parliament
• They claimed as British subjects the right to tax
themselves, and since the colonists could not be
represented in Parliament, the taxes had to originate in
their colonial assemblies.
• The British believed that Parliament was sovereign over
all the empire; everyone in it had to yield to its authority.
• The colonists did not elect members to Parliament, but
Parliament nonetheless represented the colonists as it
did other groups—large cities in England among them—
that did not have the right to elect members.
• But the colonists could not acknowledge this notion of
being "virtually" represented.
• The trouble was Parliament was not affected by the taxes
laid on the colonists. In fact, if those taxes ceased they
could stand to increase taxes at home.
TRICKERY
• Then suddenly in 1766 the controversy seemingly dissolved. In the
House of Commons William Pitt, the hero of the French and Indian
War, made an eloquent if somewhat inconsistent plea for the
colonies' right to tax themselves while affirming Parliament's
supremacy in all other legislative matters.
• Pitt's speech carried the day and the Stamp Act was repealed.
• On the same day, however, Parliament passed a Declaratory Act
that reasserted the right of Parliament to legislate "in all cases
whatsoever."
• In their rejoicing the colonists paid no heed to the merely verbal
assertions.
• In the long struggle with royal governors, they had become
accustomed to such compromises; they knew they had won this one.
• A few months later the duty on molasses was reduced to 1d. The
colonists calculated that smuggling cost them about 1 1/2d. per
gallon, so they willingly paid the lesser fee. The new duty brought
substantial revenues to the Crown and all parties were content.
The Boston Massacre
• There was a tragic incident in 1770 when troops
fired on a civilian crowd that was harassing
them.
• Some called it the Boston Massacre, but more
levelheaded citizens recognized the deaths were
an accident.
• John Adams, a leader of the resistance to the
British measures, defended the soldiers in court.
• For the most part it seemed that good sense had
prevailed and a compromise had been reached
in the dispute with Parliament.
Townshend Acts
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Unfortunately, however, Britain still needed funds to sustain its American regiments.
In 1767 the chancellor of the exchequer, Charles Townshend, proposed a new revenue
measure that tried to make the most of American compliance with trade regulation such as
the Sugar Act.
Since the Americans objected to internal taxes like the stamp duties, Townshend proposed
import duties on glass, lead, paints, paper, and tea similar to those on sugar and molasses.
To his dismay, the Americans would have none of it. John Dickinson, in his Letters from a
Farmer in Pennsylvania, warned Americans that the Townshend Duties were every bit as
much a revenue measure as the Stamp Act and should be repudiated.
Citizens agreed. Merchants agreed to not import British goods- not just those subject to taxes
but a broad range of other goods, even at a considerable cost to themselves.
By 1769 only New Hampshire merchants had failed to enter a non-importation pact.
When American imports fell by nearly a third, the ministry in London took notice. The new
head of government, Lord North, led the way, and in 1770 the Townshend Duties were
repealed.
This time they only kept the duty on tea.
Americans objected but could not sustain the painful non-importation agreements. As the
news of repeal spread, the merchants resumed trade with Britain except for the importation
of tea.
Tea
• The East India Company had fallen on hard times, and Parliament,
in an attempt to bail out the lumbering giant, granted it privileges
with grave implications for America.
• The company's inventory of imported tea had built up in British
warehouses. In 1773 Parliament decided that when tea was reexported to the colonies, the import duties paid when it was first
brought into England would be remitted, enabling the company to
retail the tea at a reduced price.
• The company still had to pay the old Townshend Duty of 3d. a
pound when the tea arrived in America, but there would be enough
of a price differential to give the company a substantial marketing
advantage even against smuggled Dutch tea.
• Furthermore the company was allowed to sell through its own
American agents rather than through middlemen, further reducing
the price.
The Boston Tea Party!
• It is a little difficult to understand the American reaction to the Tea
Act. No new duty had been imposed. Americans were no more
obligated to buy the tea than before the act was passed.
• But at all four major ports where tea shipments arrived—Boston,
New York, Philadelphia, and Charleston—people resisted.
• They interpreted the act as an attempt to bribe Americans into
buying tea and paying the duty, thus opening the door to still
more oppressive taxation.
• In three ports the tea shipments were halted or sent back; in Boston
Governor Thomas Hutchinson seemed resolved to land the tea at
whatever cost.
• To stop him, townspeople on December 16, 1773, dumped 342
chests of tea into the harbor. The Tea Act had brought the resistance
movement back to life.
The Hangover
• The Boston Tea Party was the beginning of the end. All
of England was outraged. In willfully destroying
valuable private property the Americans had gone too
far.
• Parliament responded in March 1774 by closing the port
of Boston to all trade and in May passed the Coercive
Acts intended to restrict Massachusetts government.
• The governor was authorized to appoint members of the
Governor's Council rather than letting the lower house
nominate them; he similarly was empowered to appoint
judicial officials without the necessity of council
approval; and town meetings were forbidden except to
elect selectmen.
Continental Congress
• The ministry had hoped to isolate Massachusetts with these measures and
show by example the fate that awaited other colonies that carried resistance
too far.
• Instead the colonies interpreted Massachusetts's fate as the doom that
awaited them all if they failed to resist.
• In September 1774 the First Continental Congress met in Philadelphia to
protest the Coercive Acts and to organize a new non-importation
movement.
• In Massachusetts itself the new governor, Gen. Thomas Gage, decided not
to keep the assembly in session, knowing it would do nothing but protest
Britain's actions.
• But in a truly revolutionary act, the assembly refused to disband and
continued to meet as a Provincial Congress to take measures against the
exercise of arbitrary power.
• The Congress's main purpose was to declare the colony's rights and to
enforce the non-importation agreement, but it soon assumed the form of a
shadow government.
• Tax revenues were diverted from the official treasury to the Congress.
Fearing reprisals, it urged the town militias to make themselves ready
and provided for the collection of arms.
And So it Begins…
• Governor Gage, a mild man who hoped to calm the
aroused colonists, saw a revolutionary government
forming before his eyes.
• When he heard that a cache of arms had been stored at
Concord twenty-one miles from Boston, he felt obligated
to send troops to destroy it.
• On the evening of April 18th the troops embarked from
Boston Common to cross the Charles River to
Cambridge.
• At Lexington in the early morning hours they
encountered a small, confused band of militiamen and
shots were fired.
• A few miles farther at Concord, militia from the
surrounding towns put up more resistance.
• Seeing they were outnumbered, the British began their
retreat under heavy fire. The Revolution had begun.
• http://www.earlyamerica.com/shot_heard.htm
Social Changes
Why Revolt?
• The revolutionary movement began as a
defense of the status quo.
• All the colonists asked for in their first
protests was the continuance of their
traditional right as English subjects to
consent to their own taxes.
• Had Britain pulled back at nearly any
point before 1775, the resistance would
have died away.
Why do it?
• As the government became increasingly
oppressive, the colonists had to ask why they
obeyed at all.
• Jefferson summed up a decade of thought in the
Declaration of Independence when he wrote
about "equality" and "inalienable rights." When a
government fails in its duty to protect those
rights, the people may organize a new
government.
• It was a simple line of thought, but unlike the
initial protest against parliamentary taxation, the
thinking was radical.
What is Equality??
• The most prominent eighteenth-century meaning of
equality was stated by John Locke: it meant no one had
by nature the right to rule another human being without
that person's consent.
• Creatures of the same species, Locke said, "should also
be equal one amongst another without Subordination or
Subjection." People might differ in wealth, education, or
manners, but no one had the right to govern another
because of these advantages.
• There was to be no separate rank above freeman with
special privileges in the state.
• After the Revolution, for the first time, the word
aristocrat became a term of political opposition.
Effect of this thought
• The most significant effect from this thought of equality is that it
made slavery untenable.
• Following the Revolution, antislavery societies were formed in
virtually all the northern states from Massachusetts to Virginia,
abetting a movement already strong among the Quakers.
• By legislation or judicial decision slaves were manumitted in most
states from Pennsylvania north before 1800.
• In 1787 Congress prohibited slavery in the Northwest Territory.
• The southern delegates had insisted that the federal Constitution
forbid interference with the slave trade for twenty years, and in
1808, when the prohibition expired, Congress stopped the
importation of slaves.
• But there progress halted. Slavery remained an institution in the
states from Maryland south and spread into new states in the
Southwest. The revolutionary idea had run up against the vested
interests of planters whose economy and way of life were founded
on slavery.
Effects on the Church
• One other institution came under attack in the name of
revolutionary equality—the church.
• Americans did not bear a grudge against the established church as
the French or the English did, mainly because the American
religious establishments exercised so few privileges and so
generously tolerated dissenters.
• As children of the Enlightenment, the American revolutionaries
believed that the will to resist tyranny originated in the mind.
People claimed their rights because they understood what they
were.
• The Anglican church in Virginia was anything but an overpowering
intellectual influence in the state, yet Jefferson counted among his
greatest achievements passage in 1786 of the Bill for Establishing
Religious Freedom.
• The New England states were slower to disestablish their
Congregational churches (Connecticut in 1818 and Massachusetts in
1833), but the principle enunciated in the First Amendment that
Congress should make no law respecting an establishment of
religion eventually prevailed.
Warfare
The Beginning…
• The encounters at Lexington and Concord were followed by the
capture of Fort Ticonderoga (1775) and Crown Point (1775) in New
York by Benedict Arnold and Ethan Allen and the Green Mountain
Boys.
• The Second Continental Congress met in May and appointed
George Washington commander in chief of the colonial forces.
• John Dickinson drafted the Olive Branch Petition, sent to King
George III, requesting that he seek a peaceful solution to the conflict
• The king refused to receive the document and declared the colonists
out of his allegiance and protection.
• The British won a costly victory in Boston at the Battle of Bunker
Hill (Breed's Hill) (1775)
– suffering heavy casualties and winning the battle only after colonists
ran out of ammunition.
• Henry Knox oversaw the transportation of heavy artillery from Fort
Ticonderoga across Massachusetts to Dorchester Heights, south of
Boston, where the cannons could command the city below.
• Brig. Gen. William Howe realized he could not hold the city, so he
evacuated his troops to Canada on March 17.
• In January 1776 Thomas Paine wrote his pamphlet Common Sense,
jolting Americans to rally behind the cause of independence.
• On July 2, 1776, a declaration proposed in June by Richard Henry
Lee was presented to Congress, calling for independence.
• Congress adopted the Declaration of Independence, drafted by
Thomas Jefferson, on July 4, 1776.
• By late 1776 General Howe had taken New York City and driven
Washington and his small forces from Long Island and Manhattan
and into New Jersey.
• Washington, taking a desperate chance, crossed the Delaware River
and attacked the Hessians at Trenton, New Jersey, on Christmas
Day, surprising and defeating them.
• This victory, along with another at Princeton, gave the Patriots new
hope. At the end of the year, Paine's pamphlet The Crisis (1776)
inspired the Patriots to continue their fight.
• In the summer of 1777 Howe launched a campaign to seize Philadelphia.
• He captured the city, but the Continental Congress quickly moved to York.
• A British army moved south from Montreal to join British forces moving
east from Lake Ontario and north from New York City.
• The armies were to meet in Albany, splitting New York in two, securing the
Hudson Valley, and isolating New England from the rest of the colonies.
• Instead of moving north, Howe decided to take Philadelphia.
• Gen. John Burgoyne, moving south, sent a raiding party to gather supplies
but was defeated by Patriot forces at the Battle of Bennington, Vermont.
• When Burgoyne's troops met a more powerful American army under
Horatio Gates and Benedict Arnold at the Battle of Saratoga, the British
were decisively defeated.
• The American victory at Saratoga convinced the French that the Americans
could win the war; agreeing to ally with the colonists, France entered the
war against England.
• Driven from Philadelphia by Howe, Washington wintered at Valley Forge
(1777-78) where the German drillmaster Baron Friedrich von Steuben
whipped the American soldiers into a well-disciplined force
The Final Battles
• The British changed their strategy in 1778 and moved into the
South, expecting heavy Loyalist support.
• They captured Savannah, Georgia, and Charleston, South Carolina.
• The Americans, however, were victorious at King's Mountain, North
Carolina, in 1780. In 1781 Gen. Nathanael Greene and Gen. Daniel
Morgan took charge of the American armies in the South.
• Gen. Charles Cornwallis and the British forces retreated to
Yorktown, Virginia.
• French forces arrived at Rhode Island under Gen. Jean Rochambeau
and the French fleet arrived under Adm. François DeGrasse,
blockading the entrance to Chesapeake Bay.
• The armies of Washington, the Marquis de Lafayette, and
Rochambeau marched south and began their siege of Yorktown on
September 28, 1781. On October 17, Cornwallis surrendered.
• With the American victory at Yorktown, the British lost their desire
to continue the war.
• In March 1782 the House of Commons voted to abandon the effort.
Lord North's government fell, and the new ministry under Lord
Rockingham opened negotiations with the American peace
commissioners
The Results
• The United States sent Benjamin Franklin, John
Jay and John Adams to negotiate the terms of the
peace.
• By the Treaty of Paris September 3, 1783, Great
Britain recognized the United States as an
independent nation.
• The Great Lakes and Canadian border became
the northern U.S. boundary, the Mississippi
River the western boundary, and Spanish Florida
the southern boundary.
• The treaty also gave Americans fishing rights off
the Grand Banks of Newfoundland.
• An estimated 4,000 to 5,000 Americans died
during the conflict, and British deaths totaled
about 10,000.
Why did America Win?
• Despite their superior numbers, the British operated in a
hostile environment that repeatedly defeated all efforts
to put down rebellion.
• As much as anything that fact accounts for their defeat.
• It is true that as the war dragged on Americans were
slow to enlist, reluctant to pay for still more provisions,
and heartily tired of the conflict.
• In the final analysis it was the refusal of the civilian
population to give up and the determination of
hundreds of ill-trained, poorly supplied militia
companies to harass the enemy that weighed most
heavily in the defeat of the British forces in America