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1. American Revolution Background
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| D. British North America →→ 1. American Revolution Background → 2. American Revolution Battles → 3. Coming of the Loyalists → 4. Rise of Montreal → 5. Province of Upper Canada → 6. War of 1812 → 7. Northern and Western Exploration →→ E. Conflict and Change |
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Background
The American Revolution forged a new nation, the United States of America, out of the original Thirteen Colonies. But it also had a major impact on British North America. The citizens of BNA found a powerful new nation on their doorstep, founded on liberal, republican notions, one that championed the sanctity of the individual, and opposed the older monarchical rule of Britain.
There were other results arising from the American Revolution. The Revolutionary War, fought between the U.S. and Britain between 1776 and 1783, set a model for other countries, most notably, France, which was to have its own bloody revolution a decade later. The Revolution made refugees of a whole class of people, the United Empire Loyalists, fifty thousand strong, who could no longer live in the newly formed United States and so chose to make a new home north of the border. And finally, British North Americans, while rejecting the Revolution, could not escape its effects. Many future decisions on the part of individuals living north of the border were as a result of having living beside such a powerful neighbour to the south.
Causes of the Revolution
Several economic causes lay behind the Revolution. The Seven Years' War of 1757-64 had expelled the French from Northern America, but it had also left the British treasury dry. So at the very time that the Thirteen Colonists were expanding and gaining a sense of their own independence, Britain was beginning to tighten the noose around them to help pay nagging war debts, and the cost of colonial defence.. Parliament at Westminster passed a whole series of new colonial taxes, and rigorously enforced those taxes, at precisely the same time that the America resentment of those taxes was intensifying.
The British policy of mercantilism was also at fault. Colonial commerce and trade were tightly regulated to benefit big firms like the East India and Hudson's Bay companies, and prevent any colonial competition with British manufacturers. Beginning as early as 1651, through various Navigation Acts, the British began to impose its mercantilist policy on the Thirteen Colonies. All trade had to be conducted on British vessels only, and those ships had to be captained by a British subject. All colonial shipping had first to dock in a British port, and only then could it be trans-shipped elsewhere. Various other acts, such as the Woolen Act (1689), which prohibited the export of any and all raw wool or cloth and the Hat Act (1732) which put a stop to the colonial export of beaver hats, imposed a heavy British hand over the commerce of the Thirteen Colonies and British North America.
While colonists chafed under these policies, many felt there were benefits associated with their relations with Britain. The mother country provided defense. The mercantilist policy, while limiting colonial economic freedom to a certain extent, did bring some degree of prosperity. And as most colonists knew, smuggling of goods like sugar from the West Indies, was rampant, and the British could do little to stop it.
However, Britain's serious economic woes signaled that change was at hand. The British argued that the colonists themselves should help defray the cost of their own defense. Stationing British troops and garrisoning forts cost money, money which the British did not have. So the answer appeared obvious - at least to the British - make the colonists pay.
The opening signal in the tax battle was the Molasses Act of 1764. The British did cut in half the duty to be paid on molasses, indigo, and other products from the West Indies. But at the same time they let it be known that they intended to enforce this Act fully, and take major violators to Admiralty Court in Britain, instead of the more lenient colonial courtrooms.
Royal Proclamation of 1763
Other factors besides economics and taxation were at work at the same time. The Royal Proclamation of 1763 worsened relations between the Thirteen Colonies and Britain. The British had just fought Pontiac's War with the aboriginals the year before and wanted to avoid another outbreak of hostilities in the interior. So in 1763, they drew the Proclamation Line along the Appalachian Mountains and declared that no colonist could go west of the line.
The British intent was two-fold. On the one hand, they were aiming to keep the peace by creating a huge aboriginal reservation in the interior. With white settlers and traders prohibited from the territory, the risk of conflict was greatly diminished. A more subtle aim was to drive the expanding Thirteen colonists northward and hopefully swamp the recently defeated French-Canadian, Roman Catholic population of Quebec. (The colonists could not go south as the Spanish held Florida, while the Proclamation Line prevented westward expansion.)
Above all, the Royal Proclamation infuriated many frontier settlers and land developers, who wanted access to the rich Ohio Valley. (One of these land developers was a young Virginia major, George Washington.) The colonists increasingly felt themselves boxed into a narrow strip along the seacoast, with an expanding population that needed new lands to settle.
An American Consciousness
Finally, a new sense of national consciousness was beginning to develop among the colonists on the Eastern seaboard. In part, it was based - and would grow in time - on a feeling of anti-Britishness. The colonists were coming to see themselves not only different from their British cousins, but superior. They were untainted by European conventions and customs. They were freer and more independent. They had the beckoning frontier at their back door. They were not subservient subjects.
The defining moment in the breakout of the American Revolution came in 1764, when the British Parliament passed the Stamp Act. This was the first direct tax imposed on the colonists. The tax was blatantly obvious - and detested - every time a colonist paid for a stamp that had to appear on letters, documents, contracts, and papers. And it hit hardest with the most influential and literate within colonial society, the ones that could - and would - do something about it. These colonists certainly did not want British troops in their midst, enforcing taxation. It was rubbing salt in the wound to demand that they pay for them.
The Revolution began as a tax protest. Tax collectors were attacked, some were tarred and feathered, public property was destroyed, and the shout of "No Taxation Without Representation" became the rallying cry of the protesters. Since they were not represented in the British Parliament in Westminster, the colonists argued, then they should not be taxed.
In 1765, representatives from nine colonies met in New York to draw up a petition against the Stamp Act. The British backed down in the face of such united opposition and repealed the Act. However, the trouble came to the surface a year later, when in 1766, the British imposed duties on previously untaxed items. The colonists began a new round of protests, including a new strategy of boycotting British goods.
The Boston Massacre
The so-called "Boston Massacre" of May 5, 1770, while scarcely a true massacre, only served to arouse already inflamed colonial passions. It happened when British regulars of the 29th Regiment, taunted by a crowd of colonists, failed to hear Captain Preston's orders not to shoot, and opened fire on the crowd, killing five people, including Crispus Attackus, the first black to die in this first skirmish of the American revolution; two British soldiers were later convicted of manslaughter for their part in the Boston Massacre.
Arguably one of the sparks that ignited the American Revolution, this event owed more to its telling than the event itself. Termed a “massacre” by Samuel Adams, the death of 5 “patriots” was built up as an example of the tyranny of King George III.
For over two years 700 British troops had occupied Boston. They were sent to protect the tax collectors and maintain order in a city thought to contain a significant number of political hotheads.
On the evening of March 5, 1770, a series of seemingly small actions resulted in a confrontation between a group of British troops and a crowd of agitated Bostonians. A small mob of rabble threw stones and snowballs at a sentry outside of the Boston customhouse. Things got tenser when reinforcements were called in. Twenty more soldiers, bayonets fixed, arrived to back up their colleague. After about 30 minutes one soldier was hit by a club and fell. He rose and presented his musket toward the crowd. In the confusion of the moment, he fired into the crowd and a general firing by the soldiers ensued.
Five died and another 6 were wounded. The crowd dispersed and the Captain in charge along with some of the soldiers were arrested and tried for murder. Even in the colonies the justice system called the soldiers to account. At trial, a Boston lawyer, John Adams, put up an able defence and all save two of the soldiers were acquitted. The two convicted soldiers were each branded on the hand and released.
Paul Revere quickly produced an engraving illustrating the “massacre” raising this event to a high level of significance. A few years later this event would add to others as reasons for all out war.
The Boston Tea Party
The Revolution began to look more certain by 1773. By that point, many American colonists called themselves patriots and were united in their opposition to British policies. A sense of pan-Americanism was starting to become evident. A number of leaders, such as John and Samuel Adams among others, emerged. Then events in 1773 took a sharp turn towards open rebellion.
Across the Atlantic in London, the East India Company was in financial difficulties. In order to assist the company, the British government decided to give it an exclusive monopoly to sell their tea into the American Colonies without having to pay the British export tax. This meant the Company could charge higher prices. This was too much for the colonists. Now they had to be the dumping ground for tea that was more expensive, and worse tasting as well.
On the evening of December 16th, 1774, three East India merchant ships waited to be unloaded at Griffin's Wharf in Boston. Sam Adam's revolutionaries had prevented the boats from being unloaded, but Governor Thomas Hutchinson had kept them in port waiting. Adams and a group of up to sixty revolutionaries disguised as Mohawks stormed Griffin's Wharf, boarded the tea ships and threw the entire cargo overboard.
Such open defiance might have jeopardized the patriot cause. However, the British reaction to it ensured that such would not be the case. For the British, this wanton destruction of property and disregard of law was could not be ignored. They responded with the passage of four acts meant to punish the colonists. In America they became known as the Intolerable Acts - signifying the colonial reaction, while the British steadfastly referred to them as the Coercive Acts. They closed the port of Boston until the tea was paid for as well as proclaimed the right of the British, through the Quartering Act, to have their soldiers lodge at any colonial homestead they wanted.
By themselves, the Intolerable Acts were hard for the colonists to accept. However, there was more. In another instance of poor timing, the British passed another act in the same session of Parliament that fueled colonial resentment even more. The Quebec Act of 1774 had nothing directly to do with the Thirteen Colonies, but by the quirk of timing, the Americans came to regard it as the fifth Intolerable Act. Wanting to keep the loyalty of the French Canadians - and thereby not lose BOTH its North American possessions - the British granted a number of rights to the recently conquered population to the north. They expanded the boundaries of Quebec - at the expense of the Thirteen Colonies - and also gave special protection to the Roman Catholic church within Quebec - an indignity to the largely Protestant Americans.
Taxation Without Representation
Revolutions need a grievance. The American colonists had theirs in their claim that they were being the rights of Englishmen. Foremost among those was not to be taxed without their consent. Revolutions require leaders. Again the Americans had theirs in figures such as Patrick Henry, John Hancock, William Randolph, Thomas Jefferson, and the Adams brothers. But revolutions also require an ideology. The Americans discovered theirs in principally two sources. The first was a pamphlet entitled Common Sense, written by a transplanted Englishman named Thomas Paine. He argued, for the first time, that logic and reason dictated the separation of the Thirteen Colonies from Britain. Compromise was not possible, neither was reconciliation. The only option was outright separation and the declaration of independence. The 46-page tract, released in January 1776, was as passionate as it was stirring. More than 100 000 Americans read it in less than a year and gained many more converts to the cause.
Declaration of Independence
While many in the colonies favoured open rebellion, a sizable faction still counseled caution. In fact, there may have been an opportunity to avert an actual revolution. Many still held out hope for reconciliation. Representatives of twelve of the colonies met in Philadelphia in 1774 but the meeting was hijacked by the radical element that drafted a strongly worded Declaration of Rights. In a last-ditch effort at resolution, even after shots had been exchanged, the Olive Branch Petition was sent to King George III. But he refused to be moved from his hard-line position.
First Shots Fired
Massachusetts Governor Thomas Gage decided to strike out against the rebel leaders at Lexington and Concord. At 10 pm, he sent Captain Francis Smith with a column of 900 soldiers across the Charles River toward Lexington to seize patriot arms and ammunition stored in Concord and to arrest Samuel Adams and John Hancock.
But rebel silversmith Paul Revere started off ahead of them with William Dawes and Samuel Prescott to warn Sam Adams and John Hancock and the colonial militiamen that British troops were advancing - "The British are coming!"
The first British troops arrived at dawn in Lexington to find 70 local "minutemen", or patriot volunteers, waiting for them on the village commons. Capt. John Parker ordered his men not to fire unless fired upon, but fighting began there and at the bridge north of Concord.
The British destroyed gun carriages, barrels of flour thought to contain gunpowder, and a liberty pole at Concord, before retreating to Boston. They suffered 73 killed, 174 wounded, compared to only 8 dead, 20 wounded for the Minutemen sharpshooters.
The fighting had started. "The shot heard round the world" was the way poet Ralph Waldo Emerson eloquently described the beginning of hostilities, in his Concord Hymn.
The American Revolutionary War would go on for seven long years, bring in the French on the side of the Americans, and deeply dividing those on American soil. It would only be concluded with the defeat of British general Cornwallis at the Battle of Yorktown, leading to the signing of the Treaty of Paris in 1783.
| Background - Gallery | Stories & Texts | Web Links | Milestones | Student Activities | Student Projects |
| D. British North America →→ 1. American Revolution Background → 2. American Revolution Battles → 3. Coming of the Loyalists → 4. Rise of Montreal → 5. Province of Upper Canada → 6. War of 1812 → 7. Northern and Western Exploration →→ E. Conflict and Change |
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