APUSH Unit 3

After the French and Indian War in 1754 culminated in the Great War for Empire of 1756–1763 transformed the British Empire in North America because

The British ministry could no longer let the colonies manage their own affairs while it minimally oversaw Atlantic trade

the people of england had considered americans as foreigners, but John Dickenson argued that they were not any of the names they were called. That they knew their worth thus

stage set for a struggle between the conceptions of identity — and empire — held by British ministers, on the one hand, and many American colonists on the other

Beginning in 1689, as Britain built a great navy and

subsidized the armies of European allies, military spending soared. Tax revenues did not keep pace, so the government created a large national debt by issuing bonds for millions of pounds

To pay off the large amount of debts

colonies began to get taxed extra

The war also revealed the little __ britian had over the americas

power

The demands of royal governors and British generals were repeatedly refused by colonial assemblies, which outraged British officials. Moreover, colonial merchants had evaded taxes for decades by bribing customs officials. To end that practice, Parliament passed the Revenue Act of 1762, which required

absentee customs officers to take up their posts in the colonies, rather than hiring underpaid assistants to do their work.

The greatest gains from the war had come in North America, where the specter of French encirclement had finally been lifted, and the greatest new postwar expenses

were being incurred in North America as well.

Currency Act of 1764

which banned the American colonies from using paper money as legal tender. Colonial shopkeepers, planters, and farmers had used local currency, which was worth less than British pounds sterling, to pay their debts to British merchants. The Currency Act ensured that merchants would no longer be paid in money printed in the colonies

The Sugar Act revived old American fears that colonists

would not be treated as equals of the English.

The influential Virginia planter Richard Bland emphasized that the American colonists “were not

sent out to be the Slaves but to be the Equals of those that remained behind.”

After decades of salutary neglect, Americans saw

that the new imperial regime would deprive them “of some of their most essential Rights as British subjects,”

“If you chuse to tax us,” he wrote, “give us Members in your Legislature, and let us be one People.” With the exception of William Pitt, British politicians rejected Franklin’s idea as too radical. They argued

that the colonists already had virtual representation in Parliament because some of its members were transatlantic merchants and West Indian sugar planters.

Consequently, the prime minister’s plan provoked a constitutional confrontation on the specific issues of

taxation, jury trials, and military quartering as well as on the general question of representative self-government.

The colonist tactics of challenging Grenville, Parliament, and Charles Townshend was by

organizing protest - formal of informal, violent as well as peaceful, and fashioned a compelling ideology of resistance

After Patrick Henry denounced Grenville’s legislation and attacked King George III for supporting comparing him to Charles I, whose tyranny led him to be overthrown and executed, his remarks frightened the Burgesses that then condemned

the Stamp Act that manifest tendency to destroy american freedom

The stamp act, the congress protested the loss of American “rights and liberties,” especially the right to trial by jury. It also challenged the constitutionality of both the Stamp and Sugar Acts by declaring that only the colonists’ elected representatives could tax them.

Still, moderate-minded delegates wanted compromise, not confrontation. They assured Parliament that Americans “glory in being subjects of the best of Kings” and humbly petitioned for repeal of the Stamp Act. Other influential Americans favored active (but peaceful) resistance, organizing a boycott of British goods.

The Sons of Liberty organized crowd activities in cities and towns throughout the colonies examples of this was

demanding the resignation of stamp-tax collectors, burned collector Andrew Olivers house, looting, and killing people

In New York City, nearly three thousand shopkeepers, artisans, laborers, and seamen marched through the streets breaking windows and crying

“Liberty!” Resistance to the Stamp Act spread far beyond the port cities. In nearly every colony, angry crowds — the “rabble,” their detractors called them — intimidated royal officials. Near Wethersfield, Connecticut, five hundred farmers seized tax collector Jared Ingersoll and forced him to resign his office in “the Cause of the People.”

Roused by the Great Awakening,

evangelical Protestants resented arrogant British military officers and corrupt royal bureaucrats.

Nearly everywhere popular resistance nullified the Stamp Act

included apprentices, day laborers, and unemployed sailors: young men with their own notions of liberty who

English common law

he centuries-old body of legal rules and procedures that protected the lives and property of the monarch’s subjects

Locke contended further that governments originated in social compacts among ordinary people, not in the divine right of kings, and that when they failed to protect these rights, the people had a right to

rebel against them

Montesquieu, who had maintained that a “separation of powers” among government departments prevented arbitrary rule. In Britain, they feared, this

separation had broken down, allowing corrupt government officials to gain too much influence in Parliament

If Parliament could tax the colonies without their consent, he wrote,

“our boasted liberty is but a sound and nothing else.”

“We are taxed without our own consent,” Dickinson wrote in one of his Letters. “We are therefore —

SLAVES.”

benjamin Franklin in Philadelphia and James Otis in Massachusetts, also began to condemn the institution of chattel slavery itself as a violation of

natural rights

African Americans made the connection as well. In Massachusetts, enslaved laborers submitted at least four petitions to the legislature asking that slavery be abolished. As one petition noted, enslaved people “have

in common with other men, a natural right to be free, and without molestation, to enjoy such property, as they may acquire by their industry.”

After seeing the results and impact of the stamp act they dismissed it but passed the

Declaratory Act of 1766 which explicitly reaffirmed Parliament’s “full power and authority to make laws and statutes … to bind the colonies and people of America … in all cases whatsoever.”

Townshend Acts of 1767

had both fiscal and political goals. The Revenue Act imposed duties on colonial imports of tea, glass, lead, paper, and painters’ colors that were expected to raise about £40,000 a year. Though Townshend did allocate some of this revenue for American military expenses, he earmarked most of it to pay the salaries of royal governors, judges, and other imperial officials, who had always previously been paid by colonial assemblies. In hopes they stayed loyal and listened to the king without a second thought

Repeal of the Townshend duties in 1770 restored harmony to the British

Empire, but strong feelings and mutual distrust lay just below the surface.

In 1773, those emotions erupted, destroying any hope of compromise. Within two years, the Americans and the British clashed in armed conflict. Despite widespread resistance among loyal colonists,

Patriot legislators created provisional governments and military forces, the two essentials for independence.

When British officials threatened to seize the Americans responsible for the burning of the customs vessel Gaspée and prosecute them in Britain,

the Virginia House of Burgesses and several other assemblies set up their own committees of correspondence. These standing committees allowed Patriots to communicate with leaders in other colonies when new threats to liberty occurred.

the Quebec Act, which allowed the practice of Roman Catholicism in Quebec

Because the act extended Quebec’s boundary south all the way to the Ohio River, it also angered influential land speculators in Virginia and Pennsylvania and ordinary settlers by the thousands

The delegates who met in Philadelphia in September 1774 had different agendas. Southern representatives,

fearing a British plot “to overturn the constitution and introduce a system of arbitrary government,” advocated a new economic boycott. Independence-minded representatives from New England demanded political union and defensive military preparations. Many delegates from the Middle Atlantic colonies favored compromise

each colony would retain its assembly to legislate on local matters, and a new continent-wide body would handle general American affairs. The king would appoint a president-general to preside over a legislative council selected by the colonial assemblies. Galloway’s plan failed by a single vote; a bare majority thought it was too conciliatory

Instead, the delegates demanded the repeal of the Coercive Acts and stipulated that British control be limited to matters of trade. They also approved a program of economic retaliation: Americans would stop importing British goods in December 1774. If Parliament did not repeal the Coercive Acts by September 1775, the Congress vowed to cut off virtually all colonial exports to Britain, Ireland, and the British West Indies. Ten years of constitutional conflict had culminated in a threat of all-out commercial warfare.

The boycotts of 1765 and 1768 raised the political consciousness of rural Americans. When the First Continental Congress established the Continental Association in 1774 to enforce a third boycott of British goods

it quickly set up a rural network of committees to do its work.

There were many reasons to resist the Patriot movement. Skeptics believed that Patriot leaders wer

subverting British rule only to advance their own selfish interests. Peter Oliver wrote of Samuel Adams, for example, “He was so thorough a Machiavilian, that he divested himself of every worthy Principle, & would stick at no Crime to accomplish his Ends.”

Some “Gentlemen of influence” worried that resistance to

Britain would undermine all political institutions and “introduce Anarchy and disorder and render life and property here precarious.”

Many loyal or neutral colonists hoped, above all,

Many loyal or neutral colonists hoped, above all,

In Massachusetts, the attempt to isolate and punish Boston and the surrounding countryside backfired as

Patriots resisted military coercion. Violence resulted in both places, and with it the collapse of imperial control.

a Middlesex County Congress had urged Patriots to close the existing royal courts and to transfer their political allegiance to

the popularly elected House of Representatives. Subsequently, armed crowds harassed Loyalists and ensured Patriot rule in most of New England.

Patriot forces easily defeated the British at Montreal; but in

December 1775, they failed to capture Quebec City and withdrew

As military conflicts escalated, Americans were divided in their opinions of King George III

Many blamed him for supporting oppressive legislation and ordering armed retaliation, but other influential colonists held out the hope that he might mediate their conflict with Parliament

In June 1776, Richard Henry Lee presented Virginia’s resolution to the Continental Congress: “That these United Colonies are, and of right ought to be, free and independent states.”

Faced with certain defeat, staunch Loyalists and anti-independence moderates withdrew from the Congress, leaving committed Patriots to take the fateful step. On July 4, 1776, the Congress approved the Declaration of Independence

To demonstrate Britain’s military superiority, Prime Minister Lord North ordered General William Howe to capture

New York City. His strategy was to seize control of the Hudson River and thereby isolate the radical Patriots in New England from the colonies to the south

On Christmas night 1776,

Washington crossed the Delaware River and staged a successful surprise attack on Trenton, New Jersey, where he forced the surrender of 1,000 German soldiers

The victory at the Battle of Saratoga was the turning point of the war. The Patriots

captured more than 5,000 British troops and ensured the diplomatic success of American representatives in Paris, who won a military alliance with France.

Fears reached their peak during the winter of 1777. While Howe’s army lived comfortably in Philadelphia, Washington’s army

retreated 20 miles to Valley Forge, where 12,000 soldiers and hundreds of camp followers suffered horribly. “The army … now begins to grow sickly,” a surgeon confided to his diary. By spring, more than 200 officers had resigned, 1,000 hungry soldiers had deserted, and another 3,000 had died from malnutrition and disease. That winter at Valley Forge took as many American lives as had two years of fighting.

In this dark hour, Baron Friedrich Wilhelm von Steuben raised the readiness of the American army. A former Prussian military officer, von Steuben was one of a handful of republican-minded foreign aristocrats who joined the American cause

Thanks to von Steuben, the smaller army that emerged from Valley Forge in the spring of 1778 was a much tougher and better-disciplined force

From Boston, John Adams denounced the unicameral legislature as “so democratical that it must produce confusion and every evil work.” Along with other conservative Patriots, Adams wanted to restrict office holding to “men of learning, leisure and easy circumstances” and warned of oppression

under majority rule: “If you give [ordinary citizens] the command or preponderance in the … legislature, they will vote all property out of the hands of you aristocrats.”

To counter the appeal of the Pennsylvania constitution, Adams published Thoughts on Government (1776). In that treatise, he adapted the British Whig theory of mixed government (a sharing of power among the monarch, the House of Lords, and the Commons) to a republican society. To disperse authority and preserve liberty, he insisted on separate institutions:

legislatures would make laws, the executive would administer them, and the judiciary would enforce them.

The political legacy of the Revolution was complex.

Only in Pennsylvania and Vermont were radical Patriots able to create truly democratic institutions

Yet in all the new states, representative legislatures had acquired more

power, and average citizens now had greater power at the polls and greater influence in the halls of government.

Abigail Adams demanded equal legal rights for married women

who under common law could not own property, enter into contracts, or initiate lawsuits

That situation changed in the 1790s, when the attorney general of Massachusetts declared that girls had an equal right to schooling under the state constitution. By 1850,

the literacy rates of women and men in the northeastern states were equal, and educated women again challenged their subordinate legal and political status.

For southern slaveholders, the Revolution was fought to protect property rights, and any sentiment favoring the emancipation of enslaved people met with violent objections. When Virginia Methodists called for general emancipation in 1785,

slaveholders used Revolutionary principles to defend their right to human property.

That idea informed the Articles of Confederation, which were approved by the Continental Congress in November 1777. The Articles provided for a loose union in

which “each state retains its sovereignty, freedom, and independence.” As an association of equals, each state had one vote regardless of its size, population, or wealth. Important laws needed the approval of nine of the thirteen states, and changes in the Articles required unanimous consent

Though the Confederation had significant powers on paper — it could declare war, make treaties with foreign nations, adjudicate disputes between the states, borrow and print money, and requisition funds from the states “for the common defense or general welfare” — it had major weaknesses as well.

t had neither a chief executive nor a judiciary. Though it could make treaties, it could not enforce their provisions, since the states remained sovereign. Most important, it lacked the power to tax either the states or the people.

Between 1784 and 1787, it issued three important ordinances organizing the “Old Northwest.” The Ordinance of 1784, written by Thomas Jefferson, established the principle that territories could become states as their populations grew. The Land Ordinance of 1785 mandated

a rectangular-grid system of surveying and specified a minimum price of $1 an acre. It also required that half of the townships be sold in single blocks of 23,040 acres each, which only large-scale speculators could afford, and the rest in parcels of 640 acres each, which restricted their sale to well-to-do farmers

Finally, the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 created the territories that would eventually become the states of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota

The ordinance prohibited slavery and earmarked funds from land sales for the support of schools. It also specified that Congress would appoint a governor and judges to administer each new territory until the population reached 5,000 free adult men, at which point the citizens could elect a territorial legislature. When the population reached 60,000, the legislature could devise a republican constitution and apply to join the Confederation.

Although Shays’s Rebellion failed

it showed that many middling Patriot families felt that American oppressors had replaced British tyrants

n the new two-level political federation created by the Constitution

the national government would exercise limited, delegated powers, and the existing state governments would retain authority over all other matters.