{"id":74,"date":"2023-03-06T23:24:06","date_gmt":"2023-03-06T23:24:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/pressbooks.ccconline.org\/ppschis1210\/chapter\/module-2-4\/"},"modified":"2023-04-26T17:52:57","modified_gmt":"2023-04-26T17:52:57","slug":"module-2-4","status":"publish","type":"chapter","link":"https:\/\/pressbooks.ccconline.org\/ppschis1210\/chapter\/module-2-4\/","title":{"raw":"2.4 The Causes of the American Revolution","rendered":"2.4 The Causes of the American Revolution"},"content":{"raw":"Most immediately, the American Revolution resulted directly from attempts to reform the British Empire after the Seven Years\u2019 War. The Seven Years\u2019 War culminated nearly a half century of war between Europe\u2019s imperial powers. It was truly a world war, fought between multiple empires on multiple continents. At its conclusion, the British Empire had never been larger. Britain now controlled the North American continent east of the Mississippi River, including French Canada. It had also consolidated its control over India. But the realities and responsibilities of the postwar empire were daunting. War (let alone victory) on such a scale was costly. Britain doubled the national debt to 13.5 times its annual revenue. Britain faced significant new costs required to secure and defend its far-flung empire, especially the western frontiers of the North American colonies. These factors led Britain in the 1760s to attempt to consolidate control over its North American colonies, which, in turn, led to resistance.<\/span>\r\n\r\nKing George III took the crown in 1760 and brought Tories into his government after three decades of Whig rule. They represented a vision of the empire in which colonies would be subordinate. The Royal Proclamation of 1763 was Britain\u2019s first major postwar imperial action targeting North America. The king forbade settlement west of the Appalachian Mountains in an attempt to limit costly wars with Native Americans.\r\n\r\nBefore the Seven Years War, the rivalry between British America and New France had elemental issues involving cost and differing settlement demographics.\u00a0 The English, then British, had far more settlers entering North America, leading the French to rely on Native Americans as low-cost military auxiliaries to limit the need for more expensive regular French forces on this continent.\u00a0 The British, facing similar fiscal concerns in a newborn empire with a worldwide reach, revived an old idea that became known as the militia \u2013 relying on American settlers as low-cost military auxiliaries to counter the French use of Native Americans.\r\n\r\nThe French were able to rely on native peoples to fight for them as a result of the technological dependency that had formed across New France\u2019s history.\u00a0 Native peoples had accepted the greater convenience of technologies like steel, smelted copper, and textiles, over time losing the skills to make the flint, clay, and animal skin technologies replaced by the European imports.\u00a0 Yet the native peoples could not make steel, smelt copper, or weave the same kind of textiles, and thus had to answer the French call to war as a matter of existential economics.\r\n\r\nYet after the end of the Seven Years War, New France was all but gone.\u00a0 The native peoples had been ignored in the final treaty settlements, and they faced a stark existential disaster when the ill-informed British military leader Amherst misunderstood the practice of \u201cgifts\u201d \u2013 as the French called the technological dependency elements \u2013 and enforced economizing measures ending such trade.\u00a0 Native peoples west of the main settlements of British America rose in a war that came to be known as Pontiac\u2019s Rebellion.\u00a0 The fighting was a cost the British Empire could scarcely endure after the terrible losses, especially financial, of the Seven Years War, and such costs had to be prevented in the future.\r\n\r\nOf course, the costs to the native peoples to restore the trade on which their existence depended were far worse.\u00a0 Deliberate exposure of native peoples to smallpox, one of the contagions that had laid waste to Native American populations in the 16th century and after, was one of many causes of terrible casualties.\u00a0 Devastation of their settlements and homes, along with displacement, hunger, and other diseases, added to the terrible impact.\r\n\r\nDetermined not to face their own costs in a time of high costs, the British Empire established a limit to the western settlement of American colonists.\u00a0 Yet the Americans relied on expansion west to ensure the prosperity and their descendants and new arrivals, and to ensure that the land-owning white males among them would see their sons able to vote and participate politically with new lands \u2013 taken from native peoples.\u00a0 These limits, and the costs they imposed on white Americans far less wealthy than the famous American Founders, would drive protests and demands for access to the territory they had fought for in militia units alongside regular British military forces.\u00a0 When the Revolution eventually began, the manpower needed for the Patriot cause would be driven in large part by the limits to western settlement \u2013 ensuring the later United States government would have strong incentives to continue expanding and expropriating land from Native Americans.\r\n\r\nIn 1764, Parliament passed two more reforms. The Sugar Act sought to combat widespread smuggling of molasses in New England by cutting the duty in half but increasing enforcement. Also, smugglers would be tried by vice-admiralty courts and not juries. Parliament also passed the Currency Act, which restricted colonies from producing paper money. Hard money, such as gold and silver coins, was scarce in the colonies. The lack of currency impeded the colonies\u2019 increasingly sophisticated transatlantic economies, but it was especially damaging in 1764 because a postwar recession had already begun. Between the restrictions of the Proclamation of 1763, the Currency Act, and the Sugar Act\u2019s canceling of trials-by-jury for smugglers, some colonists began to fear a pattern of increased taxation and restricted liberties.<\/span>\r\n
\r\n

In March 1765, Parliament passed the Stamp Act. The act required that many documents be printed on paper that had been stamped to show the duty had been paid, including newspapers, pamphlets, diplomas, legal documents, and even playing cards. The Sugar Act of 1764 was an attempt to get merchants to pay an already existing duty, but the Stamp Act created a new, direct (or \u201cinternal\u201d) tax. Parliament had never before directly taxed the colonists. Instead, colonies contributed to the empire through the payment of indirect, \u201cexternal\u201d taxes, such as customs duties. In 1765, Daniel Dulany of Maryland wrote, \u201cA right to impose an internal tax on the colonies, without their consent for the single purpose of revenue, is denied, a right to regulate their trade without their consent is, admitted.\u201d1<\/sup><\/a> Also, unlike the Sugar Act, which primarily affected merchants, the Stamp Act directly affected numerous groups throughout colonial society, including printers, lawyers, college graduates, and even sailors who played cards. This led, in part, to broader, more popular resistance.<\/p>\r\nResistance to the Stamp Act took three forms, distinguished largely by class: legislative resistance by elites, economic resistance by merchants, and popular protest by common colonists. Colonial elites responded by passing resolutions in their assemblies. The most famous of the anti-Stamp Act resolutions were the Virginia Resolves, passed by the House of Burgesses on May 30, 1765, which declared that the colonists were entitled to \u201call the liberties, privileges, franchises, and immunities . . . possessed by the people of Great Britain.\u201d When the Virginia Resolves were printed throughout the colonies, however, they often included a few extra, far more radical resolutions not passed by the Virginia House of Burgesses, the last of which asserted that only \u201cthe general assembly of this colony have any right or power to impose or lay any taxation\u201d and that anyone who argued differently \u201cshall be deemed an enemy to this his majesty\u2019s colony.\u201d2<\/sup><\/a> These additional items spread throughout the colonies and helped radicalize subsequent responses in other colonial assemblies. These responses eventually led to the calling of the Stamp Act Congress in New York City in October 1765. Nine colonies sent delegates, who included Benjamin Franklin, John Dickinson, Thomas Hutchinson, Philip Livingston, and James Otis.3<\/sup><\/a>\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"486\"]\"Men Men and women politicized the domestic sphere by buying and displaying items that conspicuously revealed their position for or against parliamentary actions. This witty teapot, which celebrates the end of taxation on goods like tea itself, makes clear the owner\u2019s perspective on the egregious taxation. Teapot, Stamp Act Repeal\u2019d, 1786, in Peabody Essex Museum.\u202fSalem State University<\/a>.[\/caption]\r\n\r\nThe Stamp Act Congress issued a \u201cDeclaration of Rights and Grievances,\u201d which, like the Virginia Resolves, declared allegiance to the king and \u201call due subordination\u201d to Parliament but also reasserted the idea that colonists were entitled to the same rights as Britons. Those rights included trial by jury, which had been abridged by the Sugar Act, and the right to be taxed only by their own elected representatives. As Daniel Dulany wrote in 1765, \u201cIt is an essential principle of the English constitution, that the subject shall not be taxed without his consent.\u201d4<\/sup><\/a> Benjamin Franklin called it the \u201cprime Maxim of all free Government.\u201d5<\/sup><\/a> Because the colonies did not elect members to Parliament, they believed that they were not represented and could not be taxed by that body. In response, Parliament and the Crown argued that the colonists were \u201cvirtually represented,\u201d just like the residents of those boroughs or counties in England that did not elect members to Parliament. However, the colonists rejected the notion of virtual representation, with one pamphleteer calling it a \u201cmonstrous idea.\u201d6<\/sup><\/a>\r\n\r\nThe second type of resistance to the Stamp Act was economic. While the Stamp Act Congress deliberated, merchants in major port cities were preparing nonimportation agreements, hoping that their refusal to import British goods would lead British merchants to lobby for the repeal of the Stamp Act. In New York City, \u201cupwards of two hundred principal merchants\u201d agreed not to import, sell, or buy \u201cany goods, wares, or merchandises\u201d from Great Britain.7<\/sup><\/a> In Philadelphia, merchants gathered at \u201ca general meeting\u201d to agree that \u201cthey would not Import any Goods from Great-Britain until the Stamp-Act was Repealed.\u201d8<\/sup><\/a> The plan worked. By January 1766, London merchants sent a letter to Parliament arguing that they had been \u201creduced to the necessity of pending ruin\u201d by the Stamp Act and the subsequent boycotts.9<\/sup><\/a>\r\n\r\nThe third, and perhaps, most crucial type of resistance was popular protest. Riots broke out in Boston. Crowds burned the appointed stamp distributor for Massachusetts, Andrew Oliver, in effigy and pulled a building he owned \u201cdown to the Ground in five minutes.\u201d10<\/sup><\/a> Oliver resigned the position the next day. The following week, a crowd also set upon the home of his brother-in-law, Lieutenant Governor Thomas Hutchinson, who had publicly argued for submission to the stamp tax. Before the evening was over, much of Hutchinson\u2019s home and belongings had been destroyed.11<\/sup><\/a>\r\n

\r\n\r\nPopular violence and intimidation spread quickly throughout the colonies. In New York City, posted notices read:\r\n
PRO PATRIA,<\/i>\r\n\r\nThe first Man that either<\/i>\r\n\r\ndistributes or makes use of Stampt\r\n\r\nPaper, let him take care of<\/i>\r\n\r\nhis House, Person, & Effects.<\/i>\r\n\r\nVox Populi;<\/i>\r\n\r\nWe dare.\u201d<\/i>12<\/sup><\/a><\/blockquote>\r\n<\/div>\r\nBy November 16, all of the original twelve stamp distributors had resigned, and by 1766, groups calling themselves the Sons of Liberty were formed in most colonies to direct and organize further resistance. These tactics had the dual effect of sending a message to Parliament and discouraging colonists from accepting appointments as stamp collectors. With no one to distribute the stamps, the act became unenforceable.<\/span>\r\n\r\n \r\n\r\n[caption id=\"\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"464\"]\"This Violent protests by groups like the Sons of Liberty created quite a stir both in the colonies and in England itself. While extreme acts like the tarring and feathering of Boston\u2019s Commissioner of Customs in 1774 propagated more protest against symbols of Parliament\u2019s tyranny throughout the colonies, violent demonstrations were regarded as acts of terrorism by British officials. This print of the 1774 event was from the British perspective, picturing the Sons as brutal instigators with almost demonic smiles on their faces as they enacted this excruciating punishment on the Custom Commissioner. Philip Dawe (attributed), \u201cThe Bostonians Paying the Excise-man, or Tarring and Feathering,\u201d Wikimedia<\/a>.[\/caption]\r\n\r\nPressure on Parliament grew until, in February 1766, it repealed the Stamp Act. But to save face and to try to avoid this kind of problem in the future, Parliament also passed the Declaratory Act, asserting that Parliament had the \u201cfull power and authority to make laws . . . to bind the colonies and people of America . . . in all cases whatsoever.\u201d However, colonists were too busy celebrating the repeal of the Stamp Act to take much notice of the Declaratory Act. In New York City, the inhabitants raised a huge lead statue of King George III in honor of the Stamp Act\u2019s repeal. It could be argued that there was no moment at which colonists felt more proud to be members of the free British Empire than 1766. But Britain still needed revenue from the colonies.13<\/sup><\/a>\r\n\r\nThe colonies had resisted the implementation of direct taxes, but the Declaratory Act reserved Parliament\u2019s right to impose them. And, in the colonists\u2019 dispatches to Parliament and in numerous pamphlets, they had explicitly acknowledged the right of Parliament to regulate colonial trade. So Britain\u2019s next attempt to draw revenues from the colonies, the Townshend Acts, were passed in June 1767, creating new customs duties on common items, like lead, glass, paint, and tea, instead of direct taxes. The acts also created and strengthened formal mechanisms to enforce compliance, including a new American Board of Customs Commissioners and more vice-admiralty courts to try smugglers. Revenues from customs seizures would be used to pay customs officers and other royal officials, including the governors, thereby incentivizing them to convict offenders. These acts increased the presence of the British government in the colonies and circumscribed the authority of the colonial assemblies, since paying the governor\u2019s salary had long given the assemblies significant power over them. Unsurprisingly, colonists, once again, resisted.\r\n\r\nEven though these were duties, many colonial resistance authors still referred to them as \u201ctaxes,\u201d because they were designed primarily to extract revenues from the colonies not to regulate trade. John Dickinson, in his \u201cLetters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania,\u201d wrote, \u201cThat we may legally be bound to pay any general duties on these commodities, relative to the regulation of trade, is granted; but we being obliged by her laws to take them from Great Britain, any special duties imposed on their exportation to us only, with intention to raise a revenue from us only, are as much taxes upon us, as those imposed by the Stamp Act.\u201d Hence, many authors asked: once the colonists assented to a tax in any form<\/em>, what would stop the British from imposing ever more and greater taxes on the colonists?14<\/sup><\/a>\r\n\r\nNew forms of resistance emerged in which elite, middling, and working-class colonists participated together. Merchants reinstituted nonimportation agreements, and common colonists agreed not to consume these same products. Lists were circulated with signatories promising not to buy any British goods. These lists were often published in newspapers, bestowing recognition on those who had signed and led to pressure on those who had not.\r\n\r\nWomen, too, became involved to an unprecedented degree in resistance to the Townshend Acts. They circulated subscription lists and gathered signatures. The first political commentaries in newspapers written by women appeared.15<\/sup><\/a> Also, without new imports of British clothes, colonists took to wearing simple, homespun clothing. Spinning clubs were formed, in which local women would gather at one of their homes and spin cloth for homespun clothing for their families and even for the community.16<\/sup><\/a>\r\n\r\nHomespun clothing quickly became a marker of one\u2019s virtue and patriotism, and women were an important part of this cultural shift. At the same time, British goods and luxuries previously desired now became symbols of tyranny. Nonimportation and, especially, nonconsumption agreements changed colonists\u2019 cultural relationship with the mother country. Committees of Inspection monitored merchants and residents to make sure that no one broke the agreements. Offenders could expect to be shamed by having their names and offenses published in the newspaper and in broadsides.\r\n\r\nNonimportation and nonconsumption helped forge colonial unity. Colonies formed Committees of Correspondence to keep each other informed of the resistance efforts throughout the colonies. Newspapers reprinted exploits of resistance, giving colonists a sense that they were part of a broader political community. The best example of this new \u201ccontinental conversation\u201d came in the wake of the Boston Massacre. Britain sent regiments to Boston in 1768 to help enforce the new acts and quell the resistance. On the evening of March 5, 1770, a crowd gathered outside the Custom House and began hurling insults, snowballs, and perhaps more at the young sentry. When a small number of soldiers came to the sentry\u2019s aid, the crowd grew increasingly hostile until the soldiers fired. After the smoke cleared, five Bostonians were dead, including one of the ringleaders, Crispus Attucks, a former slave turned free dockworker. The soldiers were tried in Boston and won acquittal, thanks, in part, to their defense attorney, John Adams. News of the Boston Massacre spread quickly through the new resistance communication networks, aided by a famous engraving initially circulated by Paul Revere, which depicted bloodthirsty British soldiers with grins on their faces firing into a peaceful crowd. The engraving was quickly circulated and reprinted throughout the colonies, generating sympathy for Boston and anger with Britain.\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"510\"]\"Illustration This iconic image of the Boston Massacre by Paul Revere sparked fury in both Americans and the British by portraying the redcoats as brutal slaughterers and the onlookers as helpless victims. The events of March 5, 1770 did not actually play out as Revere pictured them, yet his intention was not simply to recount the affair. Revere created an effective propaganda piece that lent credence to those demanding that the British authoritarian rule be stopped. Paul Revere (engraver), \u201cThe bloody massacre perpetrated in King Street Boston on March 5th 1770 by a party of the 29th Regt.,\u201d 1770. Library of Congress<\/a>.[\/caption]\r\n\r\nResistance again led to repeal. In March 1770, Parliament repealed all of the new duties except the one on tea, which, like the Declaratory Act, was left, in part, to save face and assert that Parliament still retained the right to tax the colonies. The character of colonial resistance had changed between 1765 and 1770. During the Stamp Act resistance, elites wrote resolves and held congresses while violent, popular mobs burned effigies and tore down houses, with minimal coordination between colonies. But methods of resistance against the Townshend Acts became more inclusive and more coordinated. Colonists previously excluded from meaningful political participation now gathered signatures, and colonists of all ranks participated in the resistance by not buying British goods and monitoring and enforcing the boycotts.\r\n\r\nBritain\u2019s failed attempts at imperial reform in the 1760s created an increasingly vigilant and resistant colonial population and, most importantly, an enlarged political sphere\u2014both on the colonial and continental levels\u2014far beyond anything anyone could have imagined a few years earlier. A new sense of shared grievances began to join the colonists in a shared American political identity.\r\n

Notes<\/h4>\r\n
    \r\n \t
  1. Daniel Dulany, Considerations on the Propriety of Imposing Taxes in the British Colonies, for the Purpose of Raising a Revenue, by Act of Parliament<\/em>. The Second Edition (Annapolis, MD: Jonas Green, 1765), 34. For a 1766 London reprint, see https:\/\/archive.org\/details\/cihm_20394, accessed April 24, 2018. \"image\"<\/a><\/li>\r\n \t
  2. Newport Mercury<\/em>, June 24, 1765. This version was also reprinted in newspapers in New York, Boston, Philadelphia, and Maryland. \"image\"<\/a><\/li>\r\n \t
  3. Proceedings of the Congress at New-York<\/em> (Annapolis, MD: Jonas Green, 1766). \"image\"<\/a><\/li>\r\n \t
  4. Dulany, Considerations on the Propriety of imposing Taxes in the British Colonies<\/em>, 8. \"image\"<\/a><\/li>\r\n \t
  5. \u201cThe Colonist\u2019s Advocate: III, 11 January 1770,\u201d Founders Online, National Archives<\/em>, http:\/\/founders.archives.gov\/documents\/Franklin\/01-17-02-0009, last modified June 29, 2017. \"image\"<\/a><\/li>\r\n \t
  6. George Canning, A Letter to the Right Honourable Wills Earl of Hillsborough, on the Connection Between Great Britain and Her American Colonies<\/em> (London: T. Becket, 1768), 9. \"image\"<\/a><\/li>\r\n \t
  7. \u201cNew York, October 31, 1765,\u201d New-York Gazette<\/em>, or Weekly Mercury<\/em>, November 7, 1765. \"image\"<\/a><\/li>\r\n \t
  8. \u201cResolution of Non-Importation made by the Citizens of Philadelphia,\u201d October 25, 1765, mss., Historical Society of Pennsylvania<\/em>, http:\/\/digitalhistory.hsp.org\/pafrm\/doc\/resolution-non-importation-made-citizens-philadelphia-october-25-1765. For the published notice of the resolution, see \u201cPhiladelphia, November 7, 1765,\u201d broadside, \u201cPennsylvania Stamp Act and Non-Importation Resolutions Collection,\u201d American Philosophical Society, Philadelphia, PA. \"image\"<\/a><\/li>\r\n \t
  9. \u201cThe Petition of the London Merchants to the House of Commons,\u201d in Prologue to Revolution: Sources and Documents on the Stamp Act Crisis, 1764\u20131766<\/em>, ed. Edmund S. Morgan (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1959), 130\u2013131. \"image\"<\/a><\/li>\r\n \t
  10. Governor Francis Bernard to Lord Halifax, August 15, 1765, in ibid., 107. \"image\"<\/a><\/li>\r\n \t
  11. For Hutchinson\u2019s own account of the events, see Thomas Hutchinson to Richard Jackson, August 30, 1765, in The Correspondence of Thomas Hutchinson<\/em>, Volume 1: 1740\u20131766, ed. John W. Tyler (Boston: Colonial Society of Massachusetts, 2014), 291\u2013294. \"image\"<\/a><\/li>\r\n \t
  12. Documents Relative to the Colonial History of the State of New-York, procured in Holland, England, and France<\/em>, 13 vols., ed. Edmund O\u2019Callaghan (Albany, NY: Weed, Parsons, 1856), vol. 7, 770, https:\/\/pbs.twimg.com\/media\/Btm5M84IMAA4MCY.png:large, accessed April 24, 2018. \"image\"<\/a><\/li>\r\n \t
  13. \u201cThe Declaratory Act,\u201d The Avalon Project: Documents in Law, History, and Diplomacy<\/em>, http:\/\/avalon.law.yale.edu\/18th_century\/declaratory_act_1766.asp, accessed April 24, 2018. \"image\"<\/a><\/li>\r\n \t
  14. \u201cLetters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania, to the Inhabitants of the British Colonies. Letter II,\u201d Pennsylvania Gazette<\/em>, December 10, 1767. \"image\"<\/a><\/li>\r\n \t
  15. \u201cAddress to the Ladies,\u201d Boston Post-Boy<\/em>, November 16, 1767; Boston Evening-Post<\/em>, February 12, 1770. Many female contributions to political commentary took the form of poems and drama, as in the poetry of Hannah Griffitts and satirical plays by Mercy Otis Warren. \"image\"<\/a><\/li>\r\n \t
  16. Carol Berkin, Revolutionary Mothers: Women in the Struggle for America\u2019s Independence<\/em> (New York: Knopf, 2005), 17\u201318. \"image\"<\/a><\/li>\r\n<\/ol>\r\n<\/div>","rendered":"

    Most immediately, the American Revolution resulted directly from attempts to reform the British Empire after the Seven Years\u2019 War. The Seven Years\u2019 War culminated nearly a half century of war between Europe\u2019s imperial powers. It was truly a world war, fought between multiple empires on multiple continents. At its conclusion, the British Empire had never been larger. Britain now controlled the North American continent east of the Mississippi River, including French Canada. It had also consolidated its control over India. But the realities and responsibilities of the postwar empire were daunting. War (let alone victory) on such a scale was costly. Britain doubled the national debt to 13.5 times its annual revenue. Britain faced significant new costs required to secure and defend its far-flung empire, especially the western frontiers of the North American colonies. These factors led Britain in the 1760s to attempt to consolidate control over its North American colonies, which, in turn, led to resistance.<\/span><\/p>\n

    King George III took the crown in 1760 and brought Tories into his government after three decades of Whig rule. They represented a vision of the empire in which colonies would be subordinate. The Royal Proclamation of 1763 was Britain\u2019s first major postwar imperial action targeting North America. The king forbade settlement west of the Appalachian Mountains in an attempt to limit costly wars with Native Americans.<\/p>\n

    Before the Seven Years War, the rivalry between British America and New France had elemental issues involving cost and differing settlement demographics.\u00a0 The English, then British, had far more settlers entering North America, leading the French to rely on Native Americans as low-cost military auxiliaries to limit the need for more expensive regular French forces on this continent.\u00a0 The British, facing similar fiscal concerns in a newborn empire with a worldwide reach, revived an old idea that became known as the militia \u2013 relying on American settlers as low-cost military auxiliaries to counter the French use of Native Americans.<\/p>\n

    The French were able to rely on native peoples to fight for them as a result of the technological dependency that had formed across New France\u2019s history.\u00a0 Native peoples had accepted the greater convenience of technologies like steel, smelted copper, and textiles, over time losing the skills to make the flint, clay, and animal skin technologies replaced by the European imports.\u00a0 Yet the native peoples could not make steel, smelt copper, or weave the same kind of textiles, and thus had to answer the French call to war as a matter of existential economics.<\/p>\n

    Yet after the end of the Seven Years War, New France was all but gone.\u00a0 The native peoples had been ignored in the final treaty settlements, and they faced a stark existential disaster when the ill-informed British military leader Amherst misunderstood the practice of \u201cgifts\u201d \u2013 as the French called the technological dependency elements \u2013 and enforced economizing measures ending such trade.\u00a0 Native peoples west of the main settlements of British America rose in a war that came to be known as Pontiac\u2019s Rebellion.\u00a0 The fighting was a cost the British Empire could scarcely endure after the terrible losses, especially financial, of the Seven Years War, and such costs had to be prevented in the future.<\/p>\n

    Of course, the costs to the native peoples to restore the trade on which their existence depended were far worse.\u00a0 Deliberate exposure of native peoples to smallpox, one of the contagions that had laid waste to Native American populations in the 16th century and after, was one of many causes of terrible casualties.\u00a0 Devastation of their settlements and homes, along with displacement, hunger, and other diseases, added to the terrible impact.<\/p>\n

    Determined not to face their own costs in a time of high costs, the British Empire established a limit to the western settlement of American colonists.\u00a0 Yet the Americans relied on expansion west to ensure the prosperity and their descendants and new arrivals, and to ensure that the land-owning white males among them would see their sons able to vote and participate politically with new lands \u2013 taken from native peoples.\u00a0 These limits, and the costs they imposed on white Americans far less wealthy than the famous American Founders, would drive protests and demands for access to the territory they had fought for in militia units alongside regular British military forces.\u00a0 When the Revolution eventually began, the manpower needed for the Patriot cause would be driven in large part by the limits to western settlement \u2013 ensuring the later United States government would have strong incentives to continue expanding and expropriating land from Native Americans.<\/p>\n

    In 1764, Parliament passed two more reforms. The Sugar Act sought to combat widespread smuggling of molasses in New England by cutting the duty in half but increasing enforcement. Also, smugglers would be tried by vice-admiralty courts and not juries. Parliament also passed the Currency Act, which restricted colonies from producing paper money. Hard money, such as gold and silver coins, was scarce in the colonies. The lack of currency impeded the colonies\u2019 increasingly sophisticated transatlantic economies, but it was especially damaging in 1764 because a postwar recession had already begun. Between the restrictions of the Proclamation of 1763, the Currency Act, and the Sugar Act\u2019s canceling of trials-by-jury for smugglers, some colonists began to fear a pattern of increased taxation and restricted liberties.<\/span><\/p>\n

    \n

    In March 1765, Parliament passed the Stamp Act. The act required that many documents be printed on paper that had been stamped to show the duty had been paid, including newspapers, pamphlets, diplomas, legal documents, and even playing cards. The Sugar Act of 1764 was an attempt to get merchants to pay an already existing duty, but the Stamp Act created a new, direct (or \u201cinternal\u201d) tax. Parliament had never before directly taxed the colonists. Instead, colonies contributed to the empire through the payment of indirect, \u201cexternal\u201d taxes, such as customs duties. In 1765, Daniel Dulany of Maryland wrote, \u201cA right to impose an internal tax on the colonies, without their consent for the single purpose of revenue, is denied, a right to regulate their trade without their consent is, admitted.\u201d1<\/sup><\/a> Also, unlike the Sugar Act, which primarily affected merchants, the Stamp Act directly affected numerous groups throughout colonial society, including printers, lawyers, college graduates, and even sailors who played cards. This led, in part, to broader, more popular resistance.<\/p>\n

    Resistance to the Stamp Act took three forms, distinguished largely by class: legislative resistance by elites, economic resistance by merchants, and popular protest by common colonists. Colonial elites responded by passing resolutions in their assemblies. The most famous of the anti-Stamp Act resolutions were the Virginia Resolves, passed by the House of Burgesses on May 30, 1765, which declared that the colonists were entitled to \u201call the liberties, privileges, franchises, and immunities . . . possessed by the people of Great Britain.\u201d When the Virginia Resolves were printed throughout the colonies, however, they often included a few extra, far more radical resolutions not passed by the Virginia House of Burgesses, the last of which asserted that only \u201cthe general assembly of this colony have any right or power to impose or lay any taxation\u201d and that anyone who argued differently \u201cshall be deemed an enemy to this his majesty\u2019s colony.\u201d2<\/sup><\/a> These additional items spread throughout the colonies and helped radicalize subsequent responses in other colonial assemblies. These responses eventually led to the calling of the Stamp Act Congress in New York City in October 1765. Nine colonies sent delegates, who included Benjamin Franklin, John Dickinson, Thomas Hutchinson, Philip Livingston, and James Otis.3<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n

    \"Men
    Men and women politicized the domestic sphere by buying and displaying items that conspicuously revealed their position for or against parliamentary actions. This witty teapot, which celebrates the end of taxation on goods like tea itself, makes clear the owner\u2019s perspective on the egregious taxation. Teapot, Stamp Act Repeal\u2019d, 1786, in Peabody Essex Museum.\u202fSalem State University<\/a>.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

    The Stamp Act Congress issued a \u201cDeclaration of Rights and Grievances,\u201d which, like the Virginia Resolves, declared allegiance to the king and \u201call due subordination\u201d to Parliament but also reasserted the idea that colonists were entitled to the same rights as Britons. Those rights included trial by jury, which had been abridged by the Sugar Act, and the right to be taxed only by their own elected representatives. As Daniel Dulany wrote in 1765, \u201cIt is an essential principle of the English constitution, that the subject shall not be taxed without his consent.\u201d4<\/sup><\/a> Benjamin Franklin called it the \u201cprime Maxim of all free Government.\u201d5<\/sup><\/a> Because the colonies did not elect members to Parliament, they believed that they were not represented and could not be taxed by that body. In response, Parliament and the Crown argued that the colonists were \u201cvirtually represented,\u201d just like the residents of those boroughs or counties in England that did not elect members to Parliament. However, the colonists rejected the notion of virtual representation, with one pamphleteer calling it a \u201cmonstrous idea.\u201d6<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n

    The second type of resistance to the Stamp Act was economic. While the Stamp Act Congress deliberated, merchants in major port cities were preparing nonimportation agreements, hoping that their refusal to import British goods would lead British merchants to lobby for the repeal of the Stamp Act. In New York City, \u201cupwards of two hundred principal merchants\u201d agreed not to import, sell, or buy \u201cany goods, wares, or merchandises\u201d from Great Britain.7<\/sup><\/a> In Philadelphia, merchants gathered at \u201ca general meeting\u201d to agree that \u201cthey would not Import any Goods from Great-Britain until the Stamp-Act was Repealed.\u201d8<\/sup><\/a> The plan worked. By January 1766, London merchants sent a letter to Parliament arguing that they had been \u201creduced to the necessity of pending ruin\u201d by the Stamp Act and the subsequent boycotts.9<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n

    The third, and perhaps, most crucial type of resistance was popular protest. Riots broke out in Boston. Crowds burned the appointed stamp distributor for Massachusetts, Andrew Oliver, in effigy and pulled a building he owned \u201cdown to the Ground in five minutes.\u201d10<\/sup><\/a> Oliver resigned the position the next day. The following week, a crowd also set upon the home of his brother-in-law, Lieutenant Governor Thomas Hutchinson, who had publicly argued for submission to the stamp tax. Before the evening was over, much of Hutchinson\u2019s home and belongings had been destroyed.11<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n

    \n

    Popular violence and intimidation spread quickly throughout the colonies. In New York City, posted notices read:<\/p>\n

    PRO PATRIA,<\/i><\/p>\n

    The first Man that either<\/i><\/p>\n

    distributes or makes use of Stampt<\/p>\n

    Paper, let him take care of<\/i><\/p>\n

    his House, Person, & Effects.<\/i><\/p>\n

    Vox Populi;<\/i><\/p>\n

    We dare.\u201d<\/i>12<\/sup><\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n

    By November 16, all of the original twelve stamp distributors had resigned, and by 1766, groups calling themselves the Sons of Liberty were formed in most colonies to direct and organize further resistance. These tactics had the dual effect of sending a message to Parliament and discouraging colonists from accepting appointments as stamp collectors. With no one to distribute the stamps, the act became unenforceable.<\/span><\/p>\n

     <\/p>\n

    \"This
    Violent protests by groups like the Sons of Liberty created quite a stir both in the colonies and in England itself. While extreme acts like the tarring and feathering of Boston\u2019s Commissioner of Customs in 1774 propagated more protest against symbols of Parliament\u2019s tyranny throughout the colonies, violent demonstrations were regarded as acts of terrorism by British officials. This print of the 1774 event was from the British perspective, picturing the Sons as brutal instigators with almost demonic smiles on their faces as they enacted this excruciating punishment on the Custom Commissioner. Philip Dawe (attributed), \u201cThe Bostonians Paying the Excise-man, or Tarring and Feathering,\u201d Wikimedia<\/a>.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

    Pressure on Parliament grew until, in February 1766, it repealed the Stamp Act. But to save face and to try to avoid this kind of problem in the future, Parliament also passed the Declaratory Act, asserting that Parliament had the \u201cfull power and authority to make laws . . . to bind the colonies and people of America . . . in all cases whatsoever.\u201d However, colonists were too busy celebrating the repeal of the Stamp Act to take much notice of the Declaratory Act. In New York City, the inhabitants raised a huge lead statue of King George III in honor of the Stamp Act\u2019s repeal. It could be argued that there was no moment at which colonists felt more proud to be members of the free British Empire than 1766. But Britain still needed revenue from the colonies.13<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n

    The colonies had resisted the implementation of direct taxes, but the Declaratory Act reserved Parliament\u2019s right to impose them. And, in the colonists\u2019 dispatches to Parliament and in numerous pamphlets, they had explicitly acknowledged the right of Parliament to regulate colonial trade. So Britain\u2019s next attempt to draw revenues from the colonies, the Townshend Acts, were passed in June 1767, creating new customs duties on common items, like lead, glass, paint, and tea, instead of direct taxes. The acts also created and strengthened formal mechanisms to enforce compliance, including a new American Board of Customs Commissioners and more vice-admiralty courts to try smugglers. Revenues from customs seizures would be used to pay customs officers and other royal officials, including the governors, thereby incentivizing them to convict offenders. These acts increased the presence of the British government in the colonies and circumscribed the authority of the colonial assemblies, since paying the governor\u2019s salary had long given the assemblies significant power over them. Unsurprisingly, colonists, once again, resisted.<\/p>\n

    Even though these were duties, many colonial resistance authors still referred to them as \u201ctaxes,\u201d because they were designed primarily to extract revenues from the colonies not to regulate trade. John Dickinson, in his \u201cLetters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania,\u201d wrote, \u201cThat we may legally be bound to pay any general duties on these commodities, relative to the regulation of trade, is granted; but we being obliged by her laws to take them from Great Britain, any special duties imposed on their exportation to us only, with intention to raise a revenue from us only, are as much taxes upon us, as those imposed by the Stamp Act.\u201d Hence, many authors asked: once the colonists assented to a tax in any form<\/em>, what would stop the British from imposing ever more and greater taxes on the colonists?14<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n

    New forms of resistance emerged in which elite, middling, and working-class colonists participated together. Merchants reinstituted nonimportation agreements, and common colonists agreed not to consume these same products. Lists were circulated with signatories promising not to buy any British goods. These lists were often published in newspapers, bestowing recognition on those who had signed and led to pressure on those who had not.<\/p>\n

    Women, too, became involved to an unprecedented degree in resistance to the Townshend Acts. They circulated subscription lists and gathered signatures. The first political commentaries in newspapers written by women appeared.15<\/sup><\/a> Also, without new imports of British clothes, colonists took to wearing simple, homespun clothing. Spinning clubs were formed, in which local women would gather at one of their homes and spin cloth for homespun clothing for their families and even for the community.16<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n

    Homespun clothing quickly became a marker of one\u2019s virtue and patriotism, and women were an important part of this cultural shift. At the same time, British goods and luxuries previously desired now became symbols of tyranny. Nonimportation and, especially, nonconsumption agreements changed colonists\u2019 cultural relationship with the mother country. Committees of Inspection monitored merchants and residents to make sure that no one broke the agreements. Offenders could expect to be shamed by having their names and offenses published in the newspaper and in broadsides.<\/p>\n

    Nonimportation and nonconsumption helped forge colonial unity. Colonies formed Committees of Correspondence to keep each other informed of the resistance efforts throughout the colonies. Newspapers reprinted exploits of resistance, giving colonists a sense that they were part of a broader political community. The best example of this new \u201ccontinental conversation\u201d came in the wake of the Boston Massacre. Britain sent regiments to Boston in 1768 to help enforce the new acts and quell the resistance. On the evening of March 5, 1770, a crowd gathered outside the Custom House and began hurling insults, snowballs, and perhaps more at the young sentry. When a small number of soldiers came to the sentry\u2019s aid, the crowd grew increasingly hostile until the soldiers fired. After the smoke cleared, five Bostonians were dead, including one of the ringleaders, Crispus Attucks, a former slave turned free dockworker. The soldiers were tried in Boston and won acquittal, thanks, in part, to their defense attorney, John Adams. News of the Boston Massacre spread quickly through the new resistance communication networks, aided by a famous engraving initially circulated by Paul Revere, which depicted bloodthirsty British soldiers with grins on their faces firing into a peaceful crowd. The engraving was quickly circulated and reprinted throughout the colonies, generating sympathy for Boston and anger with Britain.<\/p>\n

    \"Illustration
    This iconic image of the Boston Massacre by Paul Revere sparked fury in both Americans and the British by portraying the redcoats as brutal slaughterers and the onlookers as helpless victims. The events of March 5, 1770 did not actually play out as Revere pictured them, yet his intention was not simply to recount the affair. Revere created an effective propaganda piece that lent credence to those demanding that the British authoritarian rule be stopped. Paul Revere (engraver), \u201cThe bloody massacre perpetrated in King Street Boston on March 5th 1770 by a party of the 29th Regt.,\u201d 1770. Library of Congress<\/a>.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

    Resistance again led to repeal. In March 1770, Parliament repealed all of the new duties except the one on tea, which, like the Declaratory Act, was left, in part, to save face and assert that Parliament still retained the right to tax the colonies. The character of colonial resistance had changed between 1765 and 1770. During the Stamp Act resistance, elites wrote resolves and held congresses while violent, popular mobs burned effigies and tore down houses, with minimal coordination between colonies. But methods of resistance against the Townshend Acts became more inclusive and more coordinated. Colonists previously excluded from meaningful political participation now gathered signatures, and colonists of all ranks participated in the resistance by not buying British goods and monitoring and enforcing the boycotts.<\/p>\n

    Britain\u2019s failed attempts at imperial reform in the 1760s created an increasingly vigilant and resistant colonial population and, most importantly, an enlarged political sphere\u2014both on the colonial and continental levels\u2014far beyond anything anyone could have imagined a few years earlier. A new sense of shared grievances began to join the colonists in a shared American political identity.<\/p>\n

    Notes<\/h4>\n
      \n
    1. Daniel Dulany, Considerations on the Propriety of Imposing Taxes in the British Colonies, for the Purpose of Raising a Revenue, by Act of Parliament<\/em>. The Second Edition (Annapolis, MD: Jonas Green, 1765), 34. For a 1766 London reprint, see https:\/\/archive.org\/details\/cihm_20394, accessed April 24, 2018. \"image\"<\/a><\/li>\n
    2. Newport Mercury<\/em>, June 24, 1765. This version was also reprinted in newspapers in New York, Boston, Philadelphia, and Maryland. \"image\"<\/a><\/li>\n
    3. Proceedings of the Congress at New-York<\/em> (Annapolis, MD: Jonas Green, 1766). \"image\"<\/a><\/li>\n
    4. Dulany, Considerations on the Propriety of imposing Taxes in the British Colonies<\/em>, 8. \"image\"<\/a><\/li>\n
    5. \u201cThe Colonist\u2019s Advocate: III, 11 January 1770,\u201d Founders Online, National Archives<\/em>, http:\/\/founders.archives.gov\/documents\/Franklin\/01-17-02-0009, last modified June 29, 2017. \"image\"<\/a><\/li>\n
    6. George Canning, A Letter to the Right Honourable Wills Earl of Hillsborough, on the Connection Between Great Britain and Her American Colonies<\/em> (London: T. Becket, 1768), 9. \"image\"<\/a><\/li>\n
    7. \u201cNew York, October 31, 1765,\u201d New-York Gazette<\/em>, or Weekly Mercury<\/em>, November 7, 1765. \"image\"<\/a><\/li>\n
    8. \u201cResolution of Non-Importation made by the Citizens of Philadelphia,\u201d October 25, 1765, mss., Historical Society of Pennsylvania<\/em>, http:\/\/digitalhistory.hsp.org\/pafrm\/doc\/resolution-non-importation-made-citizens-philadelphia-october-25-1765. For the published notice of the resolution, see \u201cPhiladelphia, November 7, 1765,\u201d broadside, \u201cPennsylvania Stamp Act and Non-Importation Resolutions Collection,\u201d American Philosophical Society, Philadelphia, PA. \"image\"<\/a><\/li>\n
    9. \u201cThe Petition of the London Merchants to the House of Commons,\u201d in Prologue to Revolution: Sources and Documents on the Stamp Act Crisis, 1764\u20131766<\/em>, ed. Edmund S. Morgan (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1959), 130\u2013131. \"image\"<\/a><\/li>\n
    10. Governor Francis Bernard to Lord Halifax, August 15, 1765, in ibid., 107. \"image\"<\/a><\/li>\n
    11. For Hutchinson\u2019s own account of the events, see Thomas Hutchinson to Richard Jackson, August 30, 1765, in The Correspondence of Thomas Hutchinson<\/em>, Volume 1: 1740\u20131766, ed. John W. Tyler (Boston: Colonial Society of Massachusetts, 2014), 291\u2013294. \"image\"<\/a><\/li>\n
    12. Documents Relative to the Colonial History of the State of New-York, procured in Holland, England, and France<\/em>, 13 vols., ed. Edmund O\u2019Callaghan (Albany, NY: Weed, Parsons, 1856), vol. 7, 770, https:\/\/pbs.twimg.com\/media\/Btm5M84IMAA4MCY.png:large, accessed April 24, 2018. \"image\"<\/a><\/li>\n
    13. \u201cThe Declaratory Act,\u201d The Avalon Project: Documents in Law, History, and Diplomacy<\/em>, http:\/\/avalon.law.yale.edu\/18th_century\/declaratory_act_1766.asp, accessed April 24, 2018. \"image\"<\/a><\/li>\n
    14. \u201cLetters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania, to the Inhabitants of the British Colonies. Letter II,\u201d Pennsylvania Gazette<\/em>, December 10, 1767. \"image\"<\/a><\/li>\n
    15. \u201cAddress to the Ladies,\u201d Boston Post-Boy<\/em>, November 16, 1767; Boston Evening-Post<\/em>, February 12, 1770. Many female contributions to political commentary took the form of poems and drama, as in the poetry of Hannah Griffitts and satirical plays by Mercy Otis Warren. \"image\"<\/a><\/li>\n
    16. Carol Berkin, Revolutionary Mothers: Women in the Struggle for America\u2019s Independence<\/em> (New York: Knopf, 2005), 17\u201318. \"image\"<\/a><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"author":101,"menu_order":4,"template":"","meta":{"pb_show_title":"on","pb_short_title":"","pb_subtitle":"","pb_authors":[],"pb_section_license":""},"chapter-type":[],"contributor":[],"license":[],"class_list":["post-74","chapter","type-chapter","status-publish","hentry"],"part":226,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pressbooks.ccconline.org\/ppschis1210\/wp-json\/pressbooks\/v2\/chapters\/74","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pressbooks.ccconline.org\/ppschis1210\/wp-json\/pressbooks\/v2\/chapters"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pressbooks.ccconline.org\/ppschis1210\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/chapter"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pressbooks.ccconline.org\/ppschis1210\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/101"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/pressbooks.ccconline.org\/ppschis1210\/wp-json\/pressbooks\/v2\/chapters\/74\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":639,"href":"https:\/\/pressbooks.ccconline.org\/ppschis1210\/wp-json\/pressbooks\/v2\/chapters\/74\/revisions\/639"}],"part":[{"href":"https:\/\/pressbooks.ccconline.org\/ppschis1210\/wp-json\/pressbooks\/v2\/parts\/226"}],"metadata":[{"href":"https:\/\/pressbooks.ccconline.org\/ppschis1210\/wp-json\/pressbooks\/v2\/chapters\/74\/metadata\/"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pressbooks.ccconline.org\/ppschis1210\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=74"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"chapter-type","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pressbooks.ccconline.org\/ppschis1210\/wp-json\/pressbooks\/v2\/chapter-type?post=74"},{"taxonomy":"contributor","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pressbooks.ccconline.org\/ppschis1210\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/contributor?post=74"},{"taxonomy":"license","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pressbooks.ccconline.org\/ppschis1210\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/license?post=74"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}