American Revolution

The American Revolution transformed thirteen British colonies into fourteen states (including Vermont) and bound them into one republic. It changed the identity of millions of people, and transformed their dominant political idea from unequal subjection to equal citizenship. It began with a parochial dispute about being British. Its debates escalated to fundamental questions of human existence. By creating the United States, the Revolution gained world-historical significance.

The Revolution also created a continent-spanning empire. To the victors every denizen was a subject, though not necessarily a citizen, of the United States. To Indians, nothing of the sort was true. They remained their own peoples. The Revolution helped begin the worldwide assault on slavery. It also let slavery spread across the Cotton Kingdom and gain enough strength that a southern republic nearly emerged out of the American republic's contradictions. Full of such contradictions, the Revolution was among the major modern transforming events.

British Power in the Colonies

At the end of the Seven Years' War in 1763, Great Britain stood triumphant among western European powers. But the war had been expensive, and the colonies had seemed insubordinate and uncooperative, even though colonials gloried in being Britons. Parliament's position, given formal statement in 1765 by Sir William Blackstone, was that it possessed power over all Britons. Vaunted British liberty merely meant that the Crown could not act without Parliament's consent.

After 1763 successive British administrations tried to tax the colonies directly to pay for imperial defense and administration and to assert Parliament's power. The Revenue or "Sugar" Act (1764) taxed all sugar and molasses brought to the mainland colonies. Despite sporadic protests and a great deal of smuggling, it took force. The STAMP ACT (1765) tried to tap colonial business by requiring official stamps on most transactions. Colonial resistance nullified it every where except Georgia, and it was repealed in 1766. The Declaratory Act (1766) announced that Parliament could legislate for the colonies "in all cases whatsoever." In 1767 the TOWNSHEND ACTS taxed imported glass, lead, paint, paper, and tea. Resistance led to the repeal of all except the tea duty in 1770. All of the British taxes were to be paid in scarce coin rather than colonial paper money, which was denied the status of legal tender. Violators would be tried in vice-admiralty courts, where a royal judge would decide all matters.

After 1767 an American Board of Customs Commissioners was based in Boston. Troops were stationed there in 1768 to protect customs officials. In 1773 Parliament combined the tea tax with rescuing the bankrupt East India Company by letting it market tea directly to America. Most towns simply turned the tea ships around before they entered the port limits and had to declare their cargoes. But Boston could not. When intense negotiations about sending it back finally failed on 16 December 1773, "Mohawks" dumped the tea into the Harbor.

The "destruction of the tea" (not called the Boston Tea Party until decades later) changed the British position. The issue no longer was taxes; it was punishing Boston and Massachusetts. Early in 1774 Parliament passed four "Coercive" or "Intolerable" Acts, which closed the port of Boston, altered the Massachusetts government, allowed troops to be billeted on civilians, and permitted trials of British officials to be heard in Nova Scotia or Britain, because they supposedly could not get a fair trial in the original colony. This was despite the acquittal by a Massachusetts court of the soldiers involved in the Boston Massacre. General Thomas Gage, commander in chief in America, became governor of Massachusetts, and British headquarters moved from New York to Boston. Meanwhile the Quebec Act recognized Catholicism and French customs there and gave jurisdiction over the Ohio and Great Lakes country to the government in Montreal.

The Rise of Resistance

Resistance received a strong lead from notable provincials. They had become used to making laws, raising taxes, setting public officials' salaries, and debating high policy. They regarded their assemblies as local equivalents of Parliament. Now Parliament itself threatened their power and pride. Provincial assemblies passed resolutions, established COMMITTEES OF CORRESPONDENCE, and called for days of fasting. The sort of white men who sat in them started to work out the position that we know as "taxation without representation is tyranny." The phrase was coined by the fiery Boston lawyer James Otis, but it was not widely used. The elite's lead was important, but resolutions and pamphlets would not alone have altered even one British policy, let alone start to change the fundamental terms of American life. From the Stamp Act in 1765 to the dumping of the tea, the resistance movement's "punch" came from the port cities, thanks to both ordinary people's grievances and well-organized popular leadership.

"Ordinary people" is a broad term. In the port towns it covered seafarers, laborers, apprentices, journeymen artisans, master craftsmen, tavern keepers, and even small merchants. In the right circumstances it could cover slaves, though describing a crowd as comprising "sailors, Negroes, and boys" was a standard way to disown it. Crowd action was a normal part of eighteenth-century urban life. Some crowds amounted to a whole community defending itself when the militia, the sheriff's posse, or the volunteer fire company could not. Even gentlemen might be involved, perhaps disguised in costume or a workingman's long trousers.

Crowd action also could have a class content. Seafarers, rather than all "town-born," frustrated an attempt in 1747 to impress them off the Boston streets into the Royal Navy. Crowds could be rough, but they also could be sophisticated. Boston workingmen paraded with effigies each autumn on "Pope's Day" (5 November), which celebrated the unmasking of the seventeenth-century Gun-powder Plot to bomb Parliament. They were keeping alive their sense that to be British meant more than doing whatever Parliament said. It was to be Protestant and free, and on that day the crowd of Protestant freemen ruled Boston's streets.

For the most part these uprisings were traditional, aimed at restoring how things ought to be, but during the Stamp Act crisis of 1765–1766 a transformation began. An intercolonial network of Sons of Liberty emerged, combining militancy with political direction. For the most part they were men in the middle, not real plebeians but not gentry either. In Boston Samuel Adams was Harvard educated but very much a popular politician. Adams could (and often did) argue with the governor, but he also could talk to people like shoemaker Ebenezer Macintosh, who led one of the Pope's Day crowds. Macintosh brought out the crowds on 14 August 1765, in order to "convince" stamp distributor Andrew Oliver that he should resign before the Stamp Act even took force. Boston's depressed economy helps explain the crowd's intense anger.

Newport, New York City, and other places followed Boston's lead. Virginia's House of Burgesses passed powerful (if ambiguous) resolutions. These inspired more resolutions from other assemblies and from a congress of nine colonies that assembled in New York. Mary land pamphleteer Daniel Dulany demolished the British argument that the colonies were "virtually" represented in Parliament. Henceforth the British assertion would be simply that Parliament could do what it chose. Separate but coordinated nonimportation campaigns in the ports frustrated the Townshend Acts between 1768 and 1770, not completely but enough to bring repeal of all but the tax on tea.

Parallel to the tax problem, the issue of British soldiers became an irritant. Only New York had a longstanding garrison, and it was small until the Seven Years' War. When peace returned, the garrison remained so large that two separate barrack areas were needed to house the troops. Their off-duty competition for scarce jobs made them immensely unpopular, which also applied to the four-regiment garrison posted to Boston in 1768. Street brawls between soldiers seeking work and civilians broke out in New York in January 1770, and five Bostonians died when soldiers on guard duty at the customs house opened fire on a snowball-throwing crowd in Boston in March. Work was an issue there also, but Boston's bloodshed began when a customs informer fired into a hostile crowd, killing eleven-year-old Christopher Seider. Calm returned after the "Boston Massacre," but in 1772 Rhode Islanders captured and burned the revenue cutter Gaspée when it ran aground.

Resistance Becomes Revolution

The same year Boston named a committee to rouse awareness in backcountry towns. Initially the committee met with suspicion, but after the passage of the Coercive Acts country people reorganized their militias, closed the royal courts, and shut down the new government outside occupied Boston. This was the moment when ordinary country people first became directly involved. By shutting down the government rather than just resisting one law or policy, it also was the moment when resistance began turning into revolution. Committees of correspondence began to form outside Massachusetts, partly to exchange information and partly to rally support. The First Continental Congress met in Philadelphia at summer's end. It worked out the position that all colonials would support Massachusetts by direct aid and by boycotting British commerce, and it called for committees of association to guarantee compliance. During the autumn tense New Englanders gathered supplies, conducted militia drills, and set up lines of quick communication.

They showed their temper by rallying quickly after a rumor of fighting at Boston spread through eastern New England in October. They showed their organization and their full readiness on 19 April 1775, when real fighting broke out at the towns of Lexington and Concord after a British expedition tried to seize supplies and capture leaders. Massachusetts men drove the troops back with heavy losses, gathered into an impromptu army, and besieged Boston, which the British army controlled. In June they inflicted massive injuries on another British force at Breed's (Bunker) Hill. Massachusetts had been in revolution since the closure of the courts the previous summer. Now it was at war.

When war broke out General and Governor Gage was under orders from London to act, even though he knew his troops were too few for the task. Each side knew the other's plans, and townsmen were ready for the alarm that Paul Revere spread as the troops prepared to move. Whoever fired first, the colonial militia gave the redcoats a terrible drubbing, besieged Boston, and gave British regulars another drubbing before they yielded Breed's (Bunker) Hill in June. Shortly after that, George Washington, who had appeared at the Second Continental Congress in uniform, arrived to take command. A stalemate followed until artillery captured from Fort Ticonderoga on Lake Champlain could be placed on Dorchester Heights. That made Boston untenable, and the British withdrew in March 1776.

Outside New England the news of fighting changed the mood from disquiet and support to angry solidarity. COMMITTEES OF SAFETY took form and began to drain power away from regular governments. The elite New Yorker Gouverneur Morris described one meeting to elect a committee as "the mob" beginning "to think and to reason." He likened the plebeians to "poor reptiles" and predicted that "'ere noon they will bite." When the news arrived from Lexington, a real mob broke open the city arsenal and seized the weapons stored there. Small farmers outside New England began to ponder their own interests. Slaves in Virginia quietly approached the royal governor and offered their services. They knew at least vaguely about Somerset's Case (1772), which seemed to outlaw slavery within Britain. As early as 1768 Ohio country Indians had been exploring the idea of unity. Now they and most others began considering which side to choose.

The Debate over Independence

Throughout the quarter-century from 1764, when the first protests against the Sugar Act appeared, until the end of the great debate about ratifying the federal Constitution in 1789, American writers argued. Until 1774 their debate was about the problem of being British while not dwelling in Britain. London set the terms of the argument even though writers like Daniel Dulany (Maryland) and John Dickinson (Delaware and Pennsylvania) wrote with great power and usually won their points.

Thomas Jefferson's A Summary View of the Rights of British America (1774) broke free of that agenda. He, Thomas Paine, John Adams (Thoughts on Government, 1776) and others were declaring intellectual independence and beginning to address the problems that Americans would face as a separate people. The first result would be justifying independence in 1776. The second would be state-level arguments about how to be republican. The third would be the creation of the republic over a dozen intensely conflict-ridden but very creative years.

Paine's COMMON SENSE (1776) made the argument for independence and republicanism, calling for the simplest of political institutions to replace the old order. Not everybody was ready, and some people were moving to the king's side. Others dreaded Paine's call for extreme political simplicity, particularly Adams, whose Thoughts on Government made the call for institutional complexity and balance. That debate would continue until 1788. Adams also suggested that any new constitution would need some sort of popular ratification. New York artisans and farmers in western Massachusetts were making the same point. More immediately, doubters and moderates had to be convinced, particularly in New York and in Pennsylvania, whose old government continued to meet in the same building as Congress until May 1776.

Congress moved toward independence gradually between April and July, opening the ports to non-British trade, calling for remaining royal government to end, and finally naming the five-man committee that drafted its Declaration to the world. It also named committees to begin the business of foreign affairs, particularly with France, which already was giving clandestine aid, and to draft ARTICLES OF CONFEDERATION binding the separate states. Until that document was finally approved in 1781, there was no real basis for the United States to exist. Yet during those years Congress organized an army, supported a war, presided over the beginnings of a national economy, and won an alliance with France and financial aid from the Netherlands.

The DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE has three parts: an eloquent statement about human rights, a long bill of indictment against "the present king of Britain," and the formal statement of separation. Of these the most important at the time was the attack on King George. The Declaration did not attack monarchy in principle. That would have been foolish, given the need for French aid. What Jefferson wrote was not what Congress finally declared. To the Virginian's chagrin, his collective editor cut much of his impassioned rhetoric toward the document's end, including his attempt to blame slavery on King George, which Jefferson himself saw as the final and most powerful charge. Historically the charge was ridiculous; Virginians had wanted their slaves. But slavery was emerging as a moral and political problem that cut across all other lines of dispute, including that of loyal Briton and revolutionary American. When British writer Samuel Johnson asked in 1776 how it was "that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty from the drivers of Negroes," his revulsion was just as strong as Jefferson's.

jpeeler

2013-02-13

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