American Revolution
Outcome 1
HTAV Student Lectures – 26 March 2012
Nick Frigo – Santa Maria College
April 1764 - Sugar Act
• Factual Evidence
Imposed duties on foreign sugar and
and enforced customs duties.
• Primary Source Evidence
“but duties as high as are laid by this Act, cannot by any means . . . Be
collected, being vastly greater than the trade itself can possibly bear . .
. “ – Stephen Hopkins, Governor of Rhode Island.
• Secondary Source Evidence
“The Sugar Act (Grenville’s American revenue Act) was parliaments
first law for the specific purpose of raising money in the colonies”
• Reason – British Action – Colonial Reaction – British Response . . .
March 1765 -Stamp Act
Factual Evidence
Meant a tax on: legal
documents, business contracts,
licenses, land deeds,
newspapers, journal and playing
cards.
• Primary Source Evidence
How can it be reconciled that the “colonies, who are without one
representative in the House of Commons, should be taxed by the British
Parliament.” – James Otis, “The Rights of the British Colonists asserted
and Proved”, July 1764
• Secondary Source Evidence
“Through this Act, the British were taxing the colonial population to pay
for the French war, in which colonists had suffered to expand the British
Empire.” – Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the US., p. 61.
** Reason – British Action – Colonial Reaction – British Response . . .
The Stamp Act Congress
• Gordon Wood claimed that while the formation of Stamp Act
Congress was an “unprecedented display of colonial unity . . .
With its opening acknowledgement of ‘all due subordination
to that August Body the Parliament of Great Britain’, could not
fully express American hostility.” – Gordon Wood, The
American Revolution.
• The Stamp Act Congress declarations defined the American
position at the outset of the controversy, and despite
subsequent confusion and stumbling, the colonists never
abandoned this essential point.
• The Declarations of the Stamp Act Congress, 1765
Repeal of the Stamp Act
• News of the repeal took 2 months to reach
America. When it did, John Adams recalled, it
“hushed into silence almost every popular
Clamour, and composed every Wave of Popular
Disorder into a smooth and peaceful Calm”.
• “If ‘internal’ taxes, like the stamp tax were
objectionable to Americans, the authority of
Parliament to levy ‘external’ taxes – duties on
imported goods – was not.” – Howard Zinn.
• The repeal of the Stamp Act did nothing for the
Empire’s budget so . . .
Declaratory Act
• Following the repeal of the Stamp Act, the
Rockingham Ministry consented to the adoption
of the Declaratory Act, “baldly stating that
Parliament retained the power to legislate for the
colonies ‘in all cases whatsoever’.” - Jack Rakove,
Revolutionaries.
• British parliament did not want to look like they
were giving in to the colonists.
• Parliament yielded to colonist protests, but WAS
NOT prepared to exempt colonists from the
highest power of the British Empire.
The Townshend Duties – Revenue Acts
• Factual Evidence
Taxed items that had to be imported:
paint, tea, glass, paper - Colonists
responded by attempted to lessen the use
of such items (boycott).
• Primary Source Evidence
Contemporary Letter: “Another Act of
Parliament which appears to me to be
unconstitutional and as destructive to
liberty of these colonies.” – Letters from a
Farmer
• Secondary Source Evidence
• Reason – British Action – Colonial
Reaction – British Response . . .
Townshend Acts
• Townshend “clearly conceived his scheme as a
way of habituating Americans to the payment
of new taxes. He also hoped to exploit
Franklin’s distinction between internal and
external taxes, the former objectionable on
constitutional grounds, the latter presumably
acceptable under Parliament’s general
authority over trade.” – Jack Rakove,
Revolutionaries.
John Dickinson, Letters from a farmer
in Pennsylvania
• For Dickinson “a ‘tax was a
tax’. Whatever its form,
Parliament had no right to
levy on the colonies . . .
‘Parliament … possesses a
legal authority to regulate
the trade of Great Britain,
and all her colonies’, but it
had no right to tax the
colonies in any way”. –
Edward Countryman, The
American Revolution.
Further colonial responses…
• Dickinson’s ideas were not fully matched by the
colonist’s action . . .
• In 1765 the Stamp Act Congress had helped
establish a framework for intercontinental unity.
• In reality, the push for boycotts came from
individual colonial assemblies . . .
• “Shops selling British goods were smeared with
the mixture of mud and faeces called
‘Hillsborough paint’ to mock the British minister
for colonial affairs.” – Jack Rakove,
Revolutionaries.
The Boston Massacre
• On 5 March “a crowd gathered
in King Street to confront troops
who were guarding the customs
house. Someone began to throw
snowballs, and the soldiers
panicked. Someone else – his
name has never been
established – shouted the order
to fire, and a minute later five
Bostonians lay dying. Many
more were wounded.” – Edward
Countryman, The American
Revolution.
“The ‘Boston Massacre’, especially as it was depicted
in Paul Revere’s exaggerated engraving, aroused
American passions and inspired some of the most
sensational rhetoric heard in the Revolutionary era.” –
Gordon S. Wood, The American Revolution.
1770
• The historian, political philosopher
and author Edmund Burke wrote the
following in 1770:
• “The Americans . . . Have made a
discovery, or think they have made
one, that we mean to oppress them.
We have made a discovery, or think
we have made one, that they intend
to rise in rebellion against us . . . we
know not how to advance, they know
not how to retreat . . . Some party
must give way.”
Boston Tea Party . . . What historians
had to say . . .
• “The Tea Party led to the Coercive Acts by
Parliament, virtually establishing martial law
in Massachusetts, dissolving the colonial
government, closing the port in Boston and
sending in troops. Still, town meetings and
mass meetings rose in opposition.” – Howard
Zinn, A People’s History of the United States, p.
67.
Boston Tea Party and its legacy . . .
What historians had to say . . .
• “The Boston Tea Party galvanized support for
the movement toward independence not only
in the colonies, but among liberal elements in
Britain as well.” – Alan Axelrod, The Real
History of the American Revolution, p. 68.
• “The Coercive Acts were the last straw. They
convinced Americans once and for all that
Parliament had no more right to make laws for
them than to tax them.” – Gordon Wood,
American Revolution, p. 37.
What Colonials had to say about the
Boston Tea Party
• John Adams – “This is the most magnificent
movement of all . . . This destruction of the
tea is so bold, so daring, so firm, so intrepid,
and inflexible, and it must have so important
consequences, and so lasting, that I can’t but
consider it an epoch in history.” – cited in
Gordon Wood, American Revolution, pp 36-7.