Chapter 4- the Empire in Transition

Chapter 4
The Empire in Transition

Loosening Ties
-After the Glorious Revolution, the British Parliament established a growing supremacy over the king.
-These parliamentary leaders were less inclined than the seventeenth-century monarchs had been to try to tighten imperial organization.
-The administration of colonial affairs remained decentralized and inefficient; there was considerable overlapping and confusion of authority among the different departments.
-Very few London officials had ever visited American and few knew very much about their conditions. And what little information they did know about America, there was no one there to lobby for Americas interests and encourage interference with colonial affairs.
-Resistance to imperial authority centered in the colonial legislatures; the American assemblies had claimed the right to levy taxes, make appropriations, approve appointments, and pass laws for their respective colonies. They looked upon themselves as little parliaments.
-Despite their frequent resistance to the authority of London, the colonists continued to think of themselves as loyal English subjects.
-The American colonies felt stronger ties to England than they did to each other; New Englanders and Virginians viewed each other as foreigners, while Connecticut merchants despised New York ones.
-Despite their differences, the growth of the colonial population produced an almost continuous line of settlement along the seacoast and led to the gradual construction of roads and the rise of intercolonial trade. Colonial postal services also helped increase communication.
-A conference of colonial leaders was meeting in Albany in 1754 to negotiate a treaty with the Iroquois, as the British government had advised the colonists to do.
-The delegates stayed on to talk about forming a colonial federation for defense against the Indians. Benjamin Franklin proposed, and the delegates tentatively approved, a plan by which Parliament would set up in American “one general government” for all the colonies.
-The Albany Plan was set up so that each colony would retain its present constitution, but would grant to the new general government such powers as the authority to govern all relations with the Indians.
-War with the French and Indians was already beginning when this Albany Plan was presented to the colonial assemblies, and none approved it.
The Struggle for the Continent
-In the late 1750’s and early 1760’s, a great war raged through North American, changing forever the balance of power both on the continent and throughout the world.
-In America, the conflict with the final stage in a long battle among the three principal powers in northeastern North America: the English, the French, and the Iroquois.
-The French and the English had coexisted relatively peacefully in North America for nearly a century.
-But by the 1750’s, religious and commercial tensions began to produce new frictions and conflicts. The crisis began in part because of the expansion of the French presence in America.
-Louis XIV sought greater empire; French explorers had traveled down Mississippi River and looked westward. The French held continental interior.
-Middle ground of interior was occupied by French, British, and Indians. The English offered Indians more and better goods, French offered tolerance and they adjusted behavior to Indian patterns, therefore the French developed closer relationships to the Indians.
-The most powerful native group however, had a rather different relationship with the French. The Iroquois Confederacy- the five Indian nations formed a defensive alliance in the fifteenth century, which ended up being the most powerful tribal presence in the Northeast since the 1640’s.
-Queen Anne’s War generated more substantial conflicts: border fighting with the Spaniards in the South as well as with the French and their Indian allies in the North.
-The Treaty of Utrecht, which brought the conflict to a close in 1713, transferred substantial areas of French territory in North American to the English.
-Two decades later, European rivalries led to still more conflicts in America. Disputes over British trading rights in the Spanish colonies produced a war between England and Spain and led to clashes between the British in Georgia and the Spaniards in Florida.
-For the next five years, tensions between the English and the French increased.
-In 1754, the governor of Virginia sent militia under George Washington to challenge French, assaulted Fort Duquesne. F counter-assault on his Fort Necessity resulted in its surrender
-The French and Indian War lasted nearly nine years, and it proceeded in three distinct phases.
-The first phase of the war lasted from 1754 after Fort Necessity to expansion to Europe in 1756. Colonists were on their own for the most part with some British assistance; navy prevented landing of larger French reinforcements, but failed with the Ohio River attack.
-Beginning in 1757, the English secretary of state, began to transform the war effort in America by bringing it for the first time fully under British control.
-The second phase began in 1756 when French and English opened official hostilities in Seven Years’ War. The Realignment of allies, beginning in 1757 British Secretary of State William Pitt began to bring most important war effort in America under British control: forcibly enlisted colonists seized supplies and forced shelter from colonists without compensation.
-The dramatic fall after the siege of Quebec on September 13, 1759, marked the beginning of the end of the American phase of the war. A year later, the French army formally surrendered to Amherst.
-The British achieved most of Pitt’s aims in the Peace of Paris. Under its terms, the French ceded to Great Britain some of their West Indian islands and most of their colonies in India. They also transferred Canada and all other French territory east of the Mississippi, except New Orleans, to Great Britain.
-The French and Indian War had profound effects on the British Empire and the American colonies. It greatly expanded England’s territorial claims in the New World. At the same time, it greatly enlarged Britain’s debt; financing the vast war had been a major drain on the treasury.
-All these factors combined to persuade many English leaders that a major reorganization of the empire, giving London increased authority over the colonies, would be necessary in the aftermath of the war.
The New Imperialism
-The experience of the French and Indian War suggested that such increased involvement from London would not be easy to achieve. Not only had the colonists proved so resistant to British control that Pitt had been forced to relax his policies in 1758, but the colonial assemblies had continued to respond to British needs slowly and grudgingly.
-Territorial annexations of 1763 doubled size of British Empire in North America. There were several conflicts over whether west should be settled or not, and colonial governments competed for jurisdiction, while other wanted English to control or make new colonies.
-At the same time, the government in London was running out of options in effort to find a way to deal with its staggering war debt. Landlords and merchants in England itself were objecting strenuously to increases in what they already considered excessively high taxes.
-England could not rely on any cooperation from the colonial governments. Only a system of taxation administered by London, the leaders of the empire believed, could effectively meet England’s needs.
-With the departure of the French, settlers and traders from the English colonies had begun immediately to move over the mountains and into the upper Ohio Valley.
-To prevent an escalation of fighting that might threaten western trade, the government issued a ruling- the Proclamation of 1763- forbidding settlers to advance beyond the line of the Appalachian Mountains.
-The Proclamation of 1763 was appealing to the British from several reasons. It would allow London, rather than the provincial governments and their land-hungry constituents, to control the westward movement of the white population.
-In the end however, the Proclamation of 1763 failed to meet even the modest expectations of the Native Americans. It had some effect in limiting colonial land speculation in the West in controlling the fur trade, but on the crucial point of the line of settlement it was almost completely ineffective.
-Regular British troops, would not be stationed permanently in America; and under the Mutiny Act of 1765 the colonists were required to assist in provisioning and maintaining the army.
-White settlers continued to swarm across the boundary and to claim lands farther and farther into the Ohio Valley. The British authorities tried repeatedly to establish limits to the expansion but continually failed to prevent the white colonists from pushing the line of settlement farther west.
-The Sugar Act of 1764, designed in part to eliminate the illegal sugar trade between the continental colonies and the French and Spanish West Indies, strengthened enforcement of the duty on sugar.
-The Currency Act of 1764 required the colonial assemblies to stop issuing paper money and to retire on schedule all the paper money in circulation.
-The Stamp Act of 1765 imposed a tax on most printed documents in the colonies: newspapers, almanacs, pamphlets, deeds, wills, licenses.
-The new imperial program was an effort to reapply to the colonies the old principles of mercantilism.
-Many colonists may have resented the new imperial regulations, but at first they found it difficult to resist them effectively. Continuously, Americans continued to harbor grievances against one another against the authorities in London.
-In 1763, the Paxton Boys descended on Philadelphia with demands for relief from colonial taxes and for money to help them defend themselves against Indians.
- A small-scale civil war broke out as a result of the so-called Regulator movement in North Carolina. The Regulators were part of the Carolina upcountry who organized in opposition to the high taxes that local sheriffs collected. The western countries were badly underrepresented in the colonial assembly.
-After 1763 common grievances began to counterbalance internal divisions and merchants opposed commercial and manufacturing restraint, backcountry resented closing land speculation and fur trading, indebted planters feared new taxes, professionals depended on other colonists, small farmers feared taxes ad abolition of paper money. Restriction came at beginning of economic depression, policies affected cities greatest where resistance first arose. Boston suffering worst economic problems
-Great political consequences, Anglo-Americans accustomed to self-government thru provincial assemblies and right to appropriate money for colonial govt. Circumvention of assemblies by taxing public directly and paying royal officials unconditionally challenged basis of colonial power.
Stirrings of Revolt
-The Stamp Act of 1765 affected all Americans. Economic burdens were light but colonists disturbed by precedent set- past taxes to regulate commerce and not raise money, stamps obvious attempt to tax without the assemblies’ approval.
-Few colonists did more than grumble- until Patrick Henry 1765 in VA House of Burgesses spoke against British authority. Introduced resolutions known as Virginia Resolves declaring Americans possessed same rights as English, the right to be taxed only by their own representatives.
-In several colonial cities, crowds began taking the law in their own hands. During the summer of 1765, serious riots broke out up and down the coast, the largest of them in Boston.
-Men belonging to the newly organized Sons of Liberty terrorized stamp agents and burned the stamps. The agents, themselves Americans resigned; and the sale of stamps in the continental colonies ceased.
-Among Townshend’s first challenges was dealing with the continuing American grievances against Parliament, now most notably the Mutiny Act of 1765, which required colonists to provide quarters and supplies for the British troops in American.
-The British considered this a reasonable requirement; the troops were stationed in North America to protect the colonists from Indian or French attack and to defend the frontiers.
-They did not so much to quartering the troops or providing them with supplies; they had been doing that voluntarily ever since the French and Indian War. They resented that these contributions were now mandatory, and they considered it another form of taxation without representation.
-To enforce the law and to try again to raise revenues in the colonies, the Townshend Act steered two measures through the Parliament in 1767.
-The first disbanded the New York assembly until the colonists agreed to obey the Mutiny Act. While the second levied new taxes on goods imported to the colonies from England- lead, paint, paper, and tea.
-The Boston merchants- accustomed, like all colonial merchants, to loose enforcement of the Navigation Acts and doubly aggrieved now that the new commission was diverting the lucrative smuggling trade elsewhere-were indignant, and they took the lead in organizing another boycott.
-In 1767, Charles Townshend died suddenly, and the new prime minister, Lord North repealed all of the Townshend Duties except the tax on tea in March of 1770.
-Before the news of the repeal reached Massachusetts, colonial resentment raised to a new level of intensity. The colonists’ harassment of the new customs commissioners in Boston had grown so intense that the British government had placed four regiments of regular troops inside the city.
-On March 5, 1770, a few days after a particularly intense skirmish between workers at a ship rigging factory and British soldiers was knocked down; and in the midst of it all, several British soldiers fired into the crowd, killing five people. This event became known as the Boston Massacre.
-The leading figure in fomenting public outrage over the Boston Massacre was Samuel Adams, the most effective radical in the colonies. He spoke frequently at Boston town meetings; and as one unpopular English policy followed another- the Townshend Duties, the placement of customs commissioners in Boston, the stationing of British troops in the city.
- A new concept that government was necessary to protect individuals from evils of people, but government made up of people and therefore safeguards needed against abuses of power, people disturbed that king and ministers too powerful to be checked.
-One basic principle, Americans believed, was the right of people to be taxed only with their own consent- a belief that gradually took shape in the widely repeated slogan “no taxation without representation”.
-In an effort to save the company, the government passed the Tea Act of 1773, which gave the company the right to export its merchandise directly to the colonies without paying any of the navigation taxes that were imposed on the colonial merchants.
-The act angered many colonists for several reasons. First, it enraged influential colonial merchants, who feared being replaced and bankrupted by a powerful monopoly. More importantly, the Tea Act revived American passions about the issue of taxation without representation.
-In late 1773 with popular support of leaders planned to prevent East India Company from landing its cargoes in colonial ports, Charleston stopped shipment. December 16, 1773 Bostonians dressed as Mohawks boarded ships, poured tea chests into harbor, this was known as the Boston Tea Party.
-When the Bostonians refused to pay for the property they had destroyed, George III and Lord North decided on a policy of coercion. Parliament closed the port of Boston, drastically reduced colonial self-government, permitted royal officers to be tried in other colonies, and provided for the quartering of troops in the colonists’ barns and empty houses. These were the Intolerable Acts.
Cooperation and War
-Passage of authority from royal government to colonists began on local level where history of autonomy strong. Example- 1768 Samuel Adams called convention of delegates from towns to sit in place of dissolved General Court. Sons of Liberty became source of power, enforced boycotts
-Committees of correspondence began 1772 in Massachusetts and Virginia made first intercolonial committee which enabled cooperation between colonies. Virginia of 1774 governor dissolved assembly, rump session issued call for Continental Congress
-First Continental Congress met Sept 1774 in Philadelphia (no delegates from Georgia), and made 5 major decisions. First was to rejected plan for colonial union under British authority. Endorsed statement of grievances, called four repeal of oppressive legislation. Recommended colonists make military preparations for defense of British attack against Boston. Then nonimporation, nonexportation, nonconsumption agreement to stop all trade with Britain, formed “Colonial Association” to enforce agreements. Lastly, agreed to meet in spring, indicating making CC a continuing organization
-CC reaffirmed autonomous status within empire, declared economic war. In Eland Lord Chatham (William Pitt) urged withdrawal of American troops, Edmund Burke for repeal of Coercive Acts. 1775 Lord North passed Conciliatory Propositions- no direct Parliament tax, but colonists would tax themselves at Parliament demand. It didn’t reach America until after first shot fired.
-Farmers and townspeople of MA had been gathering arms and training “minutemen”. In Boston General Thomas Gage know of preparations, received orders from England to arrest rebel leaders Sam Adams and John Hancock in Lexington vicinity. Heard of minutemen stock in nearby Concord and decided to act on April 18, 1775.
-William Dawes and Paul revere road from Boston to warn of impending British attack. At Lexington town common shots fired and minutemen fell. On the march back from hidden farmers harassed British army. Rebels circulated their account of events, rallied thousands of colonists in north + south to rebel cause. Some saw just another example of tension.