ABSTRACT
Thomas Paine’s 1776 pamphlet Common Sense, which called for independence and denounced the monarchy as absurd, would not have found any audience in the thirteen British colonies in North America in 1776. After all, they had been on the winning side in the Seven Years War, which destroyed French power in North America forever, and their ruling elites expected to benefit from expanding trade and land speculation opportunities within the British Empire. They also thought that the ‘benign neglect’ that the colonies had grown accustomed to in the 18th Century would continue as before and they would largely be allowed to govern and tax themselves through their provincial assemblies as in the past. Only when King George III and Parliament began to alter these arrangements and impose higher taxes and stricter regulations on the colonies did their Whig and ‘patriot’ leaders like George Washington, John Adams and Benjamin Franklin seriously begin to consider the possibilities of armed revolt and independence.
These new taxes, laws and regulations were not the only cause for rebellion in the American colonies at the time, since small farmers and settlers had grievances against landlords, proprietors and coastal elites almost everywhere, and added a very democratic element to the revolution when it finally came. There was also a severe depression in the colonies after the end of the war in 1763 and considerable poverty and unemployment in the larger towns like Boston, New York and Philadelphia, which led to more strident popular protests against higher taxes or competition from British soldiers, who were also looking for extra work in their off-duty time. Southern planters were heavily in debt to English and Scottish merchants and this added to their resentments, but it was the protests against the Stamp Act, Townshend Acts and the Tea Act, particularly in Boston, which received this most attention at the time. After the Boston Tea Party of 1773, when Massachusetts was finally point under martial and law and the legislature closed down, all the other colonies rallied to its defense and the Revolution began. George III and his ministers did not help matters, since his was a monarch of very limited intelligence and abilities, very rigid in character, a poor judge of people and “intolerant of others whose views did not agree with his” (Middlekauff 2005). He was widely distrusted in Parliament as well as the colonies because of his plans to expand his own administrative powers, and during all the crises with the colonies in the 1760s Britain actually lacked a stable governing coalition. Many merchants in the North American were beginning to agree with the new ideas of free trade and opposition to mercantilism, the Navigation Acts and monopolies like the British East India Company, and also that they might be able to prosper more outside of the British Empire. Along with other colonial leaders, they had also been very comfortable with the system that allowed the colonies to be almost “completely self-governing” before 1763, and disliked and distrusted the ‘innovations’ coming out of London after the war (Middlekauff 2005).
Certainly not everyone in the colonies agreed with the more aggressive response to the new British taxes and regulations, and when the revolution finally came, about one-third of the white population remained loyal to Britain. In general, these people were not extreme conservatives, but thought that the colonies should assist Britain with repaying all the war debts, and feared that all the popular protests and revolts would “degenerate into anarchy or despotism” (Wilson, 1981, p. 18) They also argued that the Americans could not hope to win a war against the strongest power on earth at that time, at least without foreign allies, and that in any event it was not unreasonable to pay higher taxes to pay for the army and navy. Even when tens of thousands of them later fled or were forced into exile, many of them turned to be as much a thorn in the side to the British and has the majority who stayed behind and supported independence, and at least 20% would later petition to have their citizenship restored so they could return to the United States (Mackinnon, 1986, p. 71).
So even among this group of Americans, who sacrificed everything to remain loyal to the king, there were obviously some very strongly-held ideas about the ‘natural rights’ of individuals, including the right to self-government through elected assemblies. At that time, to be sure, only white males with property could vote, but the franchise was far more widely held in North America than in England at the time, and when the king and Parliament really seemed to threaten these traditional rights, they did face a general uprising in the colonies. Britain had backed down over the Stamp Act and Townshend taxes on imports, but both the king and parliament drew the line after the Boston Tea Party. More than any other single piece of legislation in 1763-75, the Intolerable Acts of 1774 truly did turn popular protest into armed rebellion. For the North American colonists, they seemed to show that George III had finally taken off the mask and as determined to rule over them as an autocrat or military despot, and this they would not tolerate.
REFERENCES
MacKinnon, N. (1986). The Unfriendly Soil: The Loyalist Experience in Nova Scotia, 1785-1791. McGill-Queen’s University Press.
Middlekauff, R. (2005). The Glorious Cause: The American Revolution, 1763-1789. Oxford University Press.
Wilson, B. G. (1981). As She Began: An Illustrated Introduction to Loyalist Ontario. Dundurn Press.
