| The Road to Revolution (1763-1774) |
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Sections:- The Proclamation Line of 1763
- The Paxton Boys
- The Philosophy of Rebellion: British Taxation and American Reaction
- The Boston Massacre or The King Street Riot?
- Internal vs. External Taxes, Townshend Acts, and the Boston Tea Party
- Life and the Boycott
- Demography of the Revolution
- The Final Act Before Revolution: The Intolerable Acts
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| Historical Context
With the end of the French and Indian War, French power in North America was essentially broken. England came into control of the Great Lakes region and its Native American inhabitants. With the French threat removed from the frontier, the American colonists wanted to expand into these new lands.
Attached Documents
On 7 October 1763, English King George III issued a proclamation organizing English rule in the new territory. While this proclamation contained many provisions, the most significant halted colonial expansion beyond the Appalachian Mountains in order to protect Native Americans from encroachment. This became known as the Proclamation Line of 1763.
Questions to Consider
1) Why does King George III believe that he needs to protect the Native Americans from the colonists? Why would the English have a different opinion than the colonists?
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| Historical Context
The Paxton Boys were primarily Scotch and Irish immigrants farming in western Pennsylvania. They were very dissatisfied with colonial government, believing that it was too dominated by the commercial interests in the major cities and too lenient with the Native American population.
Attached Documents
In December 1763, the Paxton Boys took out their frustrations on a peaceful Conestoga Indian village in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. An unknown number of villagers were killed. The surviving Native Americans fled for Philadelphia and were pursued by an estimated 600-1,500 of the Paxton Boys. The Paxton Boys were calmed by Benjamin Franklin near Philadelphia and gave up the pursuit, but they did present the colonial government with a list of grievances.
Questions to Consider
1) In section two of the Paxton Boys Remonstrance, why were the they so concerned that trials for the Lancaster massacre be conducted in the local courts rather than other counties? What hints does Franklin's writing offer? |
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| Historical Context
"The question was never the immediate amount of taxation that the British were asking of the colonists. The question was whether the British had the right to do it at all. We're talking about people [the American colonists] with enormous sensitivity to the dangers of power. If you conceded the right to Parliament to tax and if there was no check on it, no limit, it could go on indefinitely. You could be bled white. The power to tax was the power to destroy."
—Pauline Maier
The immediate issue in the colonial tensions with England was taxes, but the underlying issue was the structure of the imperial government. The English constitution allowed English citizens the right to vote for the Parliament which was, at this point, the real power in the British government. The right of the ballot, however, did not extend to the colonists. As the colonists were, by and large, English immigrants, they did not understand why their rights as Englishmen would have been terminated upon coming to the American colonies.
British debts from the French and Indian War threw the empire into economic crisis. England was increasingly forced to look to the American colonies as a source of tax revenue. As the colonists were not represented in Parliament they viewed these taxes as a violation of their rights as Englishmen. British Prime Minister George Grenville countered this argument by saying that all members of Parliament represented all British citizens equally. This “Virtual Representation,” as it became known, was punctured by essayist Daniel Dulany.
Attached Documents
In 1765, the imposition of the Stamp Act, a tax on all printed materials, threw the American colonies into crisis. Riots erupted in most major cities, particularly New York and Boston. On 14 August 1765, rioters destroyed the home of Massachusetts colonial governor Thomas Hutchinson. By the time the Stamp Act was to take effect, all of the Stamp Act Commissioners were forced to flee the colonies. On 7 October 1765, colonial delegates met in New York at The Stamp Act Congress to articulate their grievances with England.
English aristocrat William Pitt, a member of Parliament for whom Pittsburg was named, made an impassioned plea in the House of Lords arguing the rightness of the American complaints.
Questions to Consider
1. Do the thoughts in the Stamp Act Congress resolution and Dulany’s considerations relate to those in the Declaration of Independence? Can these be seen as a first step to the philosophy of the Revolution?
2. Pitt said "America is almost in open rebellion." Do you think that this was the case in 1765 or was this a bit of political hyperbole?
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| Historical Context
Since the Stamp Act Riots in 1765, Boston had been a site of almost constant turmoil. In 1768, British soldiers had to be stationed in the city to restore calm. While it is unclear what exactly happened, on 5 March 1770 the British soldiers had a confrontation with the Boston residents. During the melee, British soldiers fired into the crowd killing five and wounding six.
Attached Documents
Massachusetts Royal Governor Thomas Hutchinson ordered the eight soldiers and their commander, Captain Thomas Preston, charged with murder. Many thought, Preston included, that they would be hanged. After a spirited defense by future founder John Adams however, Preston and six soldiers were acquitted. Two soldiers were convicted of the reduced charge of manslaughter and were sentenced to be branded and listed as criminals.
Adams’ defense rested heavily on the inconsistencies between the various accounts of the event. Included are the summation of Adams, the accounts of Preston, from his deposition, and of the patriot newspaper The Boston Gazette. Also included is Paul Revere’s famous engraving of the event. Note that in the Revere engraving, he changed the "Customs House" sign to Butcher's Hall.
Questions to Consider
1. How does Paul Revere's engraving square with the witness testimony? Note where the British officer (Preston) is standing. Does that seem likely?
2. Which account of the event seems more accurate? Can either be entirely trusted? Based in the testimony, do you think this was “The Boston Massacre” or “The King Street Riot?” Would you have voted to convict the British soldiers?
3. The first man killed in the event was Crispus Attacus, an African American, yet no African Americans appear in Revere's engraving. Why do you think that is?
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| Historical Context
Throughout the tax controversies between the colonies and England, the American colonists rested on a distinction between “internal” and “external” taxes. The colonists argued that the British, as masters of the empire, had every right to construct external, or indirect taxes, in the form of trade regulation but, as the colonists did not have representation in Parliament, England did not have the right to impose internal, or direct taxes, upon the colonists.
After the tax protests that marked the middle years of the decade, the British decided to accept this distinction. In 1767, Parliament passed the Townshend Duties which shifted the structure of English taxation on the colonies to the form of import and export duties. At this point, the colonists were no longer satisfied with this distinction and reacted with the same sorts of violence that marked the passage of the Stamp Act. Colonists began a boycott of all non-essential English goods. In his "Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania," John Dickinson explains why the colonists considered these taxes to still be unconstitutional because they are not really trade regulations but actually revenue bills and, therefore, direct taxes.
In 1770, British Prime Minister Lord North acquiesced to colonial protests and revoked all of the Townshend Duties except for the one on tea. The duty on tea was retained because it was the most lucrative of the Townshend Duties and and support for the British East India Tea Company. Also, North did not want to appear to give in to the colonists entirely.
In 1773, Parliament passed the Tea Act which sought to further ease the financial problems of the East India Company which held eighteen million pounds of unsold tea. The Tea Act gave the East India Company permission to sell this tea at a discounted rate in the American colonies. While the availability of discounted tea may seem a strange reason for protest, American colonists still maintained the boycott on English goods since the Townshend duties, and they viewed the discounted tea as an attempt to circumvent the boycott.
In December 1773, American colonists prevented the landing of ships loaded with tea in Boston Harbor. After two weeks of fruitless negotiations with Governor Thomas Hutchinson, on 16 December a group of colonists disguised as Mohawk Indians boarded the English ships in the harbor and, over the course of three hours, dumped 342 cases of tea into Boston Harbor.
Attached Documents
The first image portrays colonists tarring and feathering a British tax agent.
The second image is a representation of the Boston Tea Party.
Questions to Consider
1. Do you think the colonists were being entirely fair to the British? What do you think the British could have done to rectify the situation?
2. Why didn't the British stop the colonists from dumping the tea into the harbor?
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Following the Townshend Acts, Colonists boycotted British luxury goods. This poem, which appeared in the Virginia Gazette in 1767, encouraged women to manage the home without British imports and to think and act politically.
Questions to Consider
1. Could a boycott of this size be maintained in the 18th Century without the participation of women?
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Attached Documents
Benjamin Franklin was one of America’s first great demographers. In this 1751 essay, Franklin points to the higher American birthrate and argues that soon there will be more Englishmen in America than in England. Parliament had forbidden any significant American industry through the Navigation Acts. Franklin believed that this would result in the American colonies becoming an agricultural power dependent on Europe for manufactured goods.
Questions to Consider
1. Franklin says that this increase in American population will create a vast market for English manufactured goods. What other implications can be drawn? What does this say in the context of Parliamentary representation? Could the American colonies outgrow their subordinate relationship with England?
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| Historical Context
Following the Boston Tea Party, the British began to recognize that a state of rebellion existed in the American colonies. In the spring of 1774, Parliament passed five pieces of legislation designed to punish the patriots and quell the growing colonial unrest. These became known collectively as “The Intolerable Acts.”
Attached Documents
The first bill, passed on 31 March 1774, was the Boston Port Act which closed the port and crippled the city’s shipping based economy.
On 20 May, The Massachusetts Government Act abolished the colony’s colonial government and The Administration of Justice Act exempted British officials from colonial courts.
Parliament passed The Quartering Act on 2 June, requiring colonists to pay for the support and to house the British troops sent to the colonies to restore calm.
On 22 June, Parliament allowed Quebec, recently taken in the French and Indian War, to keep its French model of government and justice and retain its Catholic faith in the Protestant Empire.
Reaction to the Intolerable Acts caused the colonists to send delegates to Philadelphia for the First Continental Congress.
Questions to Consider
1. Do you think that the war could have been prevented at this point? What could the colonists and England do to prevent war? Was it inevitable?
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