Hist 110
American Civilization I
Instructor: Dr. Donald R. Shaffer
Upper Iowa University
Lecture 5
Imperial Reform: Background
 The origins of the American Revolution
mostly prompted by changes in British
policies toward its colonies prompted by
the French and Indian War
The British paid for the war primarily
through borrowing, leaving a £133 million
national debt that cost 60 percent of
British tax revenue just to service the
interest payments
 It would cost even more to pay for troops
to be permanently stationed to protect
British North America

 With the population of the British Isles
paying five times as much taxes as the
American colonists, it seemed to British
fair that the Americans pay a share of the
war debt and higher future defense costs
 This change in British taxation signaled
an end to salutary neglect and de facto
American autonomy since 1688
Proclamation Line of 1763
which prohibited colonial
settlement west of the
Appalachian crest caused
Anglo-American tension
Lecture 5
George Grenville’s Reforms


George Grenville became Prime
Minister in 1763 and his reforms
angered the American colonists
Currency Act of 1764


Banned colonies from printing paper
money, forcing Americans to use scarce
British sterling
Sugar Act of 1764


George Grenville
Lowered the tax on foreign molasses by 3
pence per gallon turning a tax meant to
regulate trade into a revenue tax
Stamp Act of 1765


Meant to fund stationing British troops
in America
Levied taxes by placing stamps on all
court documents, land titles, contracts,
newspapers and other printed articles—
even playing cards
Designs for British tax stamps
in the colonies
Lecture 5
Resistance to the Stamp Act
 American opposition to the Stamp Act
was immediate and zealous
 Stamp Act Congress
Nine colonies sent representatives to New
York City in October 1765
 Issued resolutions emphasizing that
Americans could only be taxed by their
own legislatures, not Parliament

 Direct Action

Mobs in Boston and New York violently
protested the Stamp Act, which caused
unease of the colonial elites and efforts to
control subsequent popular protest
 Boycotts of British goods and popular
resistance which made the Stamp Act
impossible to enforce led to its repeal
 Declaratory Act (1766): repealed the
Stamp Act while reaffirming
Parliament’s authority to tax Americans
Different
ways of
protesting
the Stamp
Act
Lecture 5
Radical Whig Ideology
 American resistance to British taxes in
part a product of 18th-century English
political culture

Hence, American protest about the
Stamp Act was not just about the
Americans not wanting to pay more taxes
 Radical Whigs: political movement that
feared any form of concentrated power
as a threat to individual liberty
The Radical Whigs were always on the
lookout for conspiracies against liberty by
power hungry men
 This tended to make them uneasy about
monarchy
 Radical Whig authors and the movement
more generally passed on this fear of
conspiracies against liberty to the
American colonists
 Hence, many American colonists tended
to see the power grab of British imperial
reform in the 1760s as a conspiracy against
their liberties

The Ambitious Man on a Horse
Radical Whig fear of concentrated
power had its origins in Stuart
ambitions in the 17th century
Lecture 5
Townshend Acts
 William Pitt became Prime Minister in
1767, but was ill so day-to-day control of
his government devolved to Charles
Townshend, Chancellor of the
Exchequer

Townshend pushed a new scheme to tax
the Americans
 Townshend Acts
Revenue Act of 1767: levied indirect taxes
on certain goods from Great Britain
 Indirect taxes: levied during manufacture
or transport rather than at time of final
sale (“direct taxes”)
 Taxes on glass, paint, paper, tea, etc.

 Tax revenue would pay salaries of
colonial officials in America
 Americans feared the loss of leverage
over officials, but the Revenue Act
renewed their fears of a conspiracy
against liberty
Charles Townshend
Lecture 5
Resistance to the Townshend Acts
 Additional pieces of Townshend
legislation created a Board of Customs
Commissioners and Vice Admiralty
courts in North America to tighten up
enforcement of the Navigation Acts
Quartering Act also demanded the
colonial assemblies provide certain
facilities and supplies for British troops
 Parliament suspended the New York
assembly when it failed to cooperate
 This action and the abuses by customs
officials stirred up American fears of a
British conspiracy against their liberties

 Americans renewed their boycotts
against the British and anti-British
violence, particularly in Boston

The British were forced to send royal
troops into Boston to protect royal
officials
Lord
North
Lecture 5
Lord North Takes Power
 Becoming Prime Minister in 1770, Lord
North engineered the repeal of the
Townshend Acts, but kept the tax on tea
as a symbol of Parliament’s power to tax
the Americans
 Renewed incidents of violence did not
immediately undo North’s peace gesture

A week of riots occurred in New York City
after British troops tore down the
Patriot’s Liberty Pole
 Boston Massacre (March 1770)
Cause: resentment toward British troops
stationed in Boston, many of whom were
Irish Catholics and competed with
working-class Bostonians for casual
employment in their off-duty hours
 Crowds provoked the soldiers into firing
by pelting them with rocks and snowballs
 Five Bostonians killed
 John Adams successfully defended the
soldiers at their murder trial arguing self
defense

How is John Revere’s famous
engraving at odds with
the facts of the
Boston Massacre?
Lecture 5
Renewed Tensions

Two years of uneasy peace followed the
Boston Massacre


The uneasy peace came to an end in
June 1772, when Rhode Islanders burned
the HMS Gaspee, an unpopular British
anti-smuggling ship that ran aground


The tea tax stayed in place and Patriots
boycotted British tea
British crown authorities alarmed
Americans by wanting to try the
perpetrators of Gaspee burning in
Admiralty courts in Britain
Committees of Correspondence


The Gaspee affair prompted the
formation of local committees across the
colonies to monitor British activities and
alert of committees through letters of
any matter of concern
Patriot leaders, however, found it
difficult to gain the interest of much of
the American population who tended to
focus more on local concerns
Burning of the HMS Gaspee
June 1772
Lecture 5
Boston Tea Party and Aftermath
 Tea Act (May 1773): legislation aimed to
encourage Americans to consume taxed
British tea by giving the British East
India Company special privileges in
importing tea into America
 Boston Tea Party (December 1773):
Boston Patriots responded by dumping
342 chests of British tea into the harbor
 The British responded to the Tea Party
by closing Boston Harbor until the tea
was paid for and by passing a series of
laws that became known in the colonies
as the “Intolerable Acts”

The Intolerable Acts convinced many
Americans, who heretofore discounted
Boston’s Patriots as hotheads, that British
really were conspiring against the liberty
of the American colonists
Sons of Liberty throwing tea
chests overboard during the
Boston Tea Party
Lecture 5
Outbreak of Revolutionary War
 After the passage of the Intolerable Acts
most Americans essentially refused to
follow British authorities instead shifting
their allegiance to proto-state
governments known as “Continental
Associations”
The Continental Associations
coordinated their actions through the
Continental Congress, which as in the
past initially tried pressuring the British
through an import boycott
 Lord North responded by ordering a
naval blockade to block American trade
and authorized the British forces in
America to suppress dissent in
Massachusetts

 Lexington and Concord (April 1775):
British and Patriot forces clashed as
British tried to seize American military
supplies
 Bunker Hill (June 1775): British loses
heavy in battle to dislodge American
forces from hills overlooking Boston
 British could not break Patriot siege of
Boston and evacuated the city in March
1776
British forces suffered over
1,000 casualties to achieve a
Pyrrhic victory in the
Battle of Bunker Hill
Lecture 5
Independence
 Olive Branch Petition (July 1775)
The Continental Congress tried to restore
peace by petitioning George III to
intercede with Parliament on their behalf
 With the news of heavy losses from
Bunker Hill, the king dismissed the
American attempt at conciliation

 Thomas Paine’s Common Sense
Pamphlet published in January 1776 by
English radical Whig, Thomas Paine
 A recent arrival in America, he argued the
only way for Americans to keep their
liberties was to separate themselves
monarchical Britain
 Pamphlet widely read in the colonies and
critical in severing remaining shreds of
American loyalty to the British Empire

 Declaration of Independence

Continental Congress declared American
independence in July 1776 relying on John
Locke’s natural rights arguments
Thomas Paine