What Caused the American Revolution? Explaining Key Events

1. What Caused the American Revolution?Explaining Key Events

2. The ideological interpretation: BIG IDEAS DRAWN FROM BRITISH RADICAL WHIGS: • Power Threatens Liberty • Liberty: Ability to exercise natural rights in limits set by law • Power: Compulsion “absolute power corrupts, absolutely” • The People MUST be Vigilant Against Corruption and Tyranny • People MUST consent to taxation; be suspicious of the powerful

3. Interpreting the Stamp Act: • British war debt: 137 million pounds, w/ annual budget of 8 million • George Grenville’s solution

4. Interpreting the Stamp Act: • Through the lens of colonial ideology • Joseph Warren: “If the only real motive of the minister was to raise money from the colonies, that method should undoubtedly have been adopted which was least grievous to the people.” • John Adams : it stripped the colonists “in a great measure of the means of knowledge, by loading the press, the colleges, and even the almanac and newspaper with restraints and duties.”

5. Interpreting Reaction to the Stamp Act: Ideology • Resolutions by local Assemblies • Sons of liberty harass stamp collectors; nullify act • Stamp Act Congress: • Resolutions reiterate idea of “no taxation without representation” • Non-importation agreement coordinated

6. Interpreting Reaction to the Stamp Act: Ideology • Interpretive thrust: • A constitutional crisis • Chain of influence from top down

7. Interpreting Reaction to the Stamp Act: An Alternative • The Loyal Nine in Boston • Approach Ebenezer McIntosh and Henry Smith to lead north and South End gangs

8. Interpreting Reaction to the Stamp Act: An Alternative Boston Pope’s Day Effigies

9. Interpreting Reaction to the Stamp Act: An Alternative • Riots; attacks on homes of Andrew Oliver and Thomas Hutchinson • “It was now a war of plunder; of general leveling and taking away the distinction of rich and poor.” • Boston Town Meeting: “utter detestation” of the riots

10. Reaction to the Boston Massacre, 1770

11. Reaction to the Boston Massacre • John Adams and Josiah Quincy defend Capt. Thomas Preston acting in self defense • John Adams’ defense:“a motley rabble of saucy boys, negroes and mulattos, Irish teagues and outlandish jack tarrs[sailors]. “

12. Crisis reemerges, 1767 • TOWNSHEND DUTIES • Import duties on key goods colonists import: House paint leads, glass, tea (Regulating trade an accepted Crown function over colonies – yet this designed to generate revenue) JOHN WILKES ELECTED TO PARLIAMENT, 1768

13. Colonial reaction to Duties • Sam Adams’ Circular Letter – • United colonial front, and non-importation • Crown: repudiate, or have assemblies dissolved • Massachusetts refuses, and Assembly dissolved • Standing army sent to maintain order in Boston

14. “The Bostonians Paying the EXCISE MAN, or “Tarring and Feathering,” British cartoon, 1774(content: tarring and feathering of Customs Commissioner John Malcolm, with Boston Tea Party in background)

15. Détente Ends, 1773 • Tea Act: • 1772 British East India company on verge of bankruptcy, threatening imperial economy • Allows one time, duty-free tax sale directly to consumers

16. Coincides with publication of Hutchinson-Whateley correspondence: • I never think of the measures necessary for the peace and good order of the colonies without pain. There must be an abridgement of what are called English liberties. . . I doubt whether it is possible to project a system of government in which a colony 3000 miles distant from the parent state should enjoy all of the liberty of the parent state. I wish the good of the colony when I wish to see some further restraint of liberty rather than that the connection with the parent state should be broken; for I am sure that such a breach must prove to the ruin of the colony.

17. Final Crisis . . . • Destruction of Tea, Boston, December 1773 • Coercive Acts, 1774 Boston Port Act MA regulatory Act Justice Act Quartering Act (Quebec Act)

18. Final Crisis . . . • Colonial reaction: • Hamilton: “the system of slavery fabricated against America . . . is the offspring of mature deliberation. “ There was “a settled, fixed plan for enslaving the colonies, or bringing them under arbitrary government, and indeed the nation too.” • Jefferson: “though single acts of tyranny may be ascribed to the accidental opinion of a day . . . a series of oppressions, begun at a distinguished period and pursued unalterably through every change of ministers, too plainly prove a deliberate and systematical plan of reducing us to slavery.”

20. Final Crisis . . . Committees of Correspondence propose boycott agreement Coordination via First Continental Congress, September, 1774 Compact to enforce boycott, called “Continental Association,” via local committees (middle-class) Pledge to support Boston in case of attack

21. Conspiracy theories . . Was there a conspiracy to destroy American liberties? British perception: 1768, “House of Lords resolved “wicked and designing men” were “evidently manifesting a design to set up a new and unconstitutional authority independent of the Crown of England.” Recalled under Grenville, ““every expression of discontent was imputed to a desire in those colonies to dissolve all connection with Britain; every tumult was inflamed[in their minds] to rebellion.”

22. Conspiracy theories . . . • Explains punitive response to destruction of tea • Even radical whigs offer little opposition King’s Response to Continental Congress: “the New England governments are in a state of rebellion, blows must decide whether they are to be subject to this country or independent.”