Transcript Colonial assemblies had significant authority

THE EMPIRE IN TRANSITION
Chapter 4
LOOSENING TIES
Americans at the mid‐18th century were proud to
be British and enjoyed many advantages of
membership in the British Empire including trade,
protection, political stability, and the fact that the
government left the colonies alone.
 During the 1760s and 1770s, changes in both
international and domestic political circumstances
led to a new imperial relationship that sharpened
differences between England and its American
colonies.
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A TRADITION OF NEGLECT
Although the Crown converted many colonies to
royal status during the first half of the 18th
century and more strict Navigation Laws were
passed, no serious enforcement efforts and the
colonies exercised substantial autonomy.
 After the Glorious Revolution Parliament
exercised increasing authority over the king and
tighter imperial organization was not a priority.
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POWERFUL COLONIAL LEGISLATURES
Royal officials in America were often corrupt and
dependent upon the colonial assemblies for their
expenses.
 Colonial assemblies had significant authority—
claiming the right to tax, spend, appoint officials,
and legislate — and came to see themselves as
sovereign in their respective colonies.
 Colonists considered themselves loyal British
subjects and felt closer ties to England than to the
other colonies.
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ALBANY PLAN OF UNION
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Despite inter‐colonial trade and communication
that bound the colonies together, they still
refused to approve the Albany Plan of Union in
1754 when confronted with a common foe (the
French in the Ohio River Valley)
AN UNEASY BALANCE OF POWER
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The century‐old struggle between England and France
for Atlantic supremacy in trade and naval power spared
four colonial wars:
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King William’s War
Queen Anne’s War
King George’s War
Ended with England’s 1763 victory in the Seven Years’ War
Known in the American colonies as the French and
Indian War, this struggle affected three powers, the
English, the French, and the Iroquois.
English dominance in North America brought into focus
tensions in the imperial relationship.
NEW SOURCES OF CONFLICT
Throughout the 18th century the French
attempted to establish their dominance in the
Ohio Valley.
 The French were better at forming relations
with Indians than were the English
 One exception was the Iroquois Confederacy,
which traded with the English and Dutch as
well as the French and was adept at playing the
Europeans against each other.
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THE IROQUOIS CONFEDERACY
After King George’s War the Iroquois granted
trading concessions to the English, which
prompted the French to construct a series of
forts in the Ohio Valley.
 The English countered, and the Virginia militia
led by George Washington attacked Fort
Duquesne.
 Washington was defeated, and the French and
Indian War commenced.
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THE GREAT WAR FOR THE EMPIRE
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From 1754 to 1756 the colonists fought without much
assistance from Britain.
Receiving little help from Iroquois allies, British General
Edward Braddock was defeated at a second attack of Fort
Duquesne.
When the war expanded to Europe, Prime Minister William
Pitt, realizing the consequences of a French victory in North
America, took control of the war and supported the colonial
effort with British troops.
Pitt used forced enlistments, impressments, and
confiscation of goods without payment to secure a British
victory. These actions engendered colonial resistance.
PITT TAKES CHARGE
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In 1758, Pitt sent many more soldiers to
America resulting in a series of major British
victories followed most significantly the fall Of
Quebec and Montreal.
TREATY OF PARIS
The war ended in 1763 with the Peace of Paris
 All French territory in North America was ceded to
England. However, as a result of the war, Britain’s
national debt grew dramatically , and the British
were embittered by the Americans’ resistance to
its policies, military ineptitude, meager financial
support of the war effort, and war time
profiteering.
 This led to a move for colonial reorganization with
increased imperial authority
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CONSEQUENCES OF THE WAR
The French and Indian War had a profound
effect on the colonies.
 They had united against a common foe and
resisted British interference in local affairs.
 The American militia, fighting alongside British
regular, noted stark contrasts with their English
countrymen.
 Indians earned British enmity, and Iroquois
Confederacy began to unravel.
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THE NEW IMPERIALISM
With peace in 1763 Britain faced an enormous
debt and new responsibilities with its expanded
empire.
 A new British government adopted the strategy of
more governmental involvement in colonial affairs.
 This response is characterized by historians as the
end of salutary neglect, that the British inattention
to colonial matters before 1763 had benefited
both England and her colonies.
 This new policy reflected a shift in philosophy from
commercial to territorial imperialism.
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COMMERCIAL VS. TERRITORIAL
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Officials began to value the land itself, apart from the
commerce it produced, and the new lands made governing
more complex.
The staggering debt combined with already high British taxes
pointed to a policy of taxing the colonies.
The new king George III wanted to be an involved monarch
but had intellectual and psychological limitations.
He replaced stable Whig governments, beginning with a
ministry headed by George Grenville.
Grenville believed the colonies should obey the law and pay
their share of the cost of governing and maintaining the
empire.
PROCLAMATION OF 1763
An Indian attempt to stem the tide of colonial
migration westward, Pontiac’s Rebellion,
pointed to the urgency of western issues.
 Grenville issued The Proclamation of 1763 to
limit conflicts with Indians and control trade,
migration, and land speculation.
 The Proclamation failed to meet these goals
and the line was continually moved west at the
Indian’s expense.
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SUGAR, CURRENCY, & STAMPS
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Grenville soon followed with other acts to assert
imperial authority by:
stationing troops and ships in the colonies called the
Quartering Act
 collecting duties
 reorganizing the duties on sugar and molasses called
the Sugar Act
 establishing vice‐admiralty courts in America
 stopping the use of paper currency called the Currency
Act
 taxing documents called the Stamp Act
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THE COLONIAL RESPONSE
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This program collected much more revenue but created
common grievances, antagonized nearly all interest
groups in the colonies, and promoted increasing
economic anxiety already fueled by a postwar
depression, particularly in the cities.
Grenville’s program violated the colonial belief in
self‐government and the authority of the provincial
assemblies to control public finance.
Tension between coastal and eastern settlers, the
Paxton Boys, and the North Carolina Regulator
Movement diverted colonial attention away from the new
British policies until the Stamp Act Crisis.
STIRRINGS OF REVOLT
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The Stamp Act of 1765 focused colonial antagonism
towards, and unification against, new British policies.
Americans had accepted English taxes for the purpose of
regulating trade, not to raise revenue.
The Virginia House of Burgesses adopted the Virginia
Resolves introduced by Patrick Henry, proclaiming Americans
had the same rights as Englishmen and only their
representative assemblies could tax them.
That fall, the delegates from nine colonies met in New York
at the Stamp Act Congress and petitioned the King and
Parliament.
They argued that they were loyal British citizens, but they
could not be taxed by Parliament.
PARLIAMENT BACKS OFF
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In Massachusetts, organized resistance to the Stamp
Act came from the Sons of Liberty, which encouraged
mob action and sacked Lt. Governor Thomas
Hutchinson’s house.
Parliament repealed the Stamp Act in 1766, more
because of pressure from London merchants losing
profits from the colonial boycotts rather than from
colonial pressure or violence.
However, Parliament simultaneously passed the
Declaratory Act, upholding Parliament’s authority to
pass laws affecting the colonies “in all cases
whatsoever”.
THE TOWNSHEND PROGRAM
Charles Townshend assumed leadership of the
English government and dealt with colonial
noncompliance of the Quartering Act by
suspending the New York Assembly.
 To raise revenue he accepted the colonial
distinction between internal and external taxes.
 Parliament then levied a new set of taxes,
 The Townshend Duties, which taxed lead, paint,
paper, glass and tea. These actions stirred the
colonies to action.
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COLONIAL BOYCOTTS
The Massachusetts Circular Letter was sent by its
assembly to the other colonies urging them to
resist all taxes.
 When Townshend established a Board of Customs
Commissioners in America, the colonies
established a non‐importation agreement and
promoted American production. Homespun
became fashionable.
 All the duties except the tax on tea were repealed
in 1770.
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THE BOSTON MASSACRE
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To protect the Board of Customs Commissioners from
harassment, troops were sent to Boston. This action
created significant tension, in part because the British
troops were vying with Bostonians for menial jobs.
In March 1770, a mob harassed troops with snowballs
and rocks and the troops fired on the crowd an event
known as the Boston Massacre.
Five colonists were killed including a black sailor,
Crispus Attucks. Bostonian Samuel Adams led a
Committee of Correspondence to propagandize
Bostonian grievances.
SONS OF LIBERTY
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This sparked a resistance network (committee
of correspondence) throughout the colonies led
by Samuel Adams & John Hancock.
THE PHILOSOPHY OF REVOLT
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While Puritan theology was a source of revolutionary
ideology, Whig ideology from England, which argued that
men were inherently evil and government existed to
protect individuals, was also a source of Americans’
revolutionary thinking.
Americans believed that government too was prone to
abuses of power.
A balanced government with power distributed as it was
in England was the ideal and would avoid corruption and
tyranny.
Whigs feared the king and his ministry was becoming a
single center of power and corruption.
VIRTUAL VS. ACTUAL REPRESENTATION
Americans also believed that people could be
taxed only by their consent as expressed through
their direct representatives
 They did not accept the idea of virtual
representation—that Parliament legislated for the
nation as a whole—but believed in actual
representation, legislation by a body of their peers
directly accountable to them.
 In theory, Americans accepted Parliament’s
sovereignty in some areas, but they also believed
that their colonial assemblies had authority.
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THE TEA EXCITEMENT
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After the Boston Massacre an uneasy calm settled on
the colonies.
Corrupt customs officials continued to antagonize
merchants and in 1772 Rhode Islanders burned the
British revenue cutter Gaspee.
In 1773, with the British East India Company on the
verge of bankruptcy, Parliament passed the Tea Act,
which allowed the company to sell tea directly to the
colonies without paying the tea duty; this would bypass
American merchants and establish a tea monopoly.
The colonial response was another boycott that united
the colonies.
THE BOSTON TEA PARTY
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Women played a major role by avoiding English goods
and producing domestic substitutes
They participated in riots and formed the Daughters of
Liberty, which often chided its male counterpart, the
Sons of Liberty, as not being radical enough.
Many ports prohibited the unloading of tea, but in
Boston in 1773, townsmen dressed as Indians dumped
the tea in the harbor
This radical event known as the Boston Tea Party set off
a series of retaliatory events both in England and in
America.
TEA PARTY
COERCIVE ACTS
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Boston refused to pay, and Parliament passed
a series of laws known as the Coercive Acts in
England and as the Intolerable Acts in the
colonies:
 Closed
the port of Boston
 Limited Massachusetts’ power of self government
 Required the quartering of troops in private houses
 Permitted royal officials to be tried in England
CONSEQUENCES
Soon after, the Quebec Act gave the province of
Quebec a self‐governing structure and freedom
to practice Catholicism.
 Combined, these acts spelled tyranny to the
Americans. The colonies unified in their
resistance to these actions by passing resolves
and extended the colonial boycott.
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COOPERATION & WAR
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Traditions of local autonomy were strong, and new extralegal
bodies emerged as royal authority in the colonies crumbled
in the face of these new laws.
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The Sons of Liberty directed vigilante action
The Committee of Correspondence formed inter-colonial groups
and most importantly, the First Continental Congress met in
Philadelphia in 1774.
The congress endorsed grievances, approved the Suffolk
Resolves that recommended military preparation to defend
against the British, approved a Continental Association to enforce
a total boycott of British goods, and agreed to meet the following
spring
These actions ratified the autonomous status of the colonies
within the empire.
LEXINGTON & CONCORD
England’s response, the Conciliatory Propositions,
was too late.
 Having imposed martial law in Massachusetts,
General Thomas Gage, Britain’s commander in
Boston, sent troops to Lexington and Concord in
April of 1775.
 They were to arrest Samuel Adams and John
Hancock and seize a cache of gunpowder
 Alerted by Paul Revere and William Dawes,
minutemen resisted and eight were killed.
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“THE SHOT HEARD ROUND THE WORLD”
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The British troops burned what little powder they found
They were attacked by minutemen as they returned to
Boston
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Nearly two dozen British soldiers were killed in the ambush
The colonial version of the events at Lexington and Concord
rallied Americans to the patriot cause and brought into
clearer focus the view that had been emerging since the end
of the French and Indian War that there were significant
ideological and political differences between Americans and
their English countrymen.