TOWARD THE WAR FOR AMERICAN

INDEPENDENCE

THE CHAPTER IN PERSPECTIVE

Rivalry for the control of North America came to a head after 1754. Already, the struggle waged among the English, the French, and the Indians had brought on three wars during the first half of the eighteenth century. That struggle now culminated in a fourth and final conflict, the Seven Years’ War (1754-1763). But Britain’s total victory in that fight and the end of French power in North America did not bring lasting peace. Native Americans kept up the baffle to protect their territory and political sovereignty west of the Appalachians. At the same time, Britain’s determination to consolidate its American empire revived the ambivalence of many colonials toward the parent country. Parliament hoped to bind the colonies to the British empire with the new laws and regulations it passed. Yet this legislation served only to alienate Americans already wary of the inequality of English society and the corruption of English politics. Popular opposition to Britain’s new measures led ultimately to rebellion and independence.

OVERVIEW

The chapter opens with an event that marked both a beginning and an ending. The Seven Years’ War resolved the contest for supremacy in North America between the English, the French, and the Indians. Yet it also set the stage for the coming of American independence.

The Seven Years’ War

The conflict, triggered when the French drove George Washington from Fort Necessity in 1754, quickly became global. Until 1758, the French and their Indian allies in North America seemed likely to sweep to victory. Then William Pitt took personal control over the war for Britain and the tide of battle turned. By 1759 British and colonial forces had claimed most of Canada. The Treaty of Paris in 1763 officially ended the French presence on the continent of North America.

The Seven Years’ War was pivotal, because once the French were removed from the frontiers of British America, George III and his ministers could renew their efforts to centralize and consolidate the empire. Of course, the Stuart monarchs had attempted to centralize colonial government in the 1680s, with the Dominion of New England (Chapter 3). What was different about the efforts begun in 1763 was Parliament’s crucial role and its determination to assert its authority directly in America.

The British victory in the Seven Years’ War left Americans overflowing with millennial optimism about the future of the empire They had great expectations of the role that they would play in it. But many leading Britons came away from the conflict disaffected with colonies, charging that Americans had withheld support and even traded with the enemy. Some anticipated that Americans would exploit their new military security by making a bid for independence. British policymakers had no intention of granting the colonies greater influence within the empire.

The Imperial Crisis

Britain did intend to impose tighter controls on American trade and territory and pay for the expense by raising revenue in the colonies. The new measures of the early 1 760s--the Proclamation of 1763, the Sugar Act, the Stamp Act, the Currency Act, the Quartering Act, and the stationing of British troops in the colonies--were all designed to advance the cause of centralization.

The timing of these new measures was disastrous. They deflated American expectations of a more equal stains in the empire and coincided with a postwar downturn in the colonial economy. Perhaps more important, the new measures abridged what Americans understood to be their constitutional and political liberties--the right to consent to taxation, the right to trial by jury, the freedom from standing armies. As a result, Americans displayed an unprecedented unity in opposing the innovations in imperial policy, turning to petitions crowd actions, and boycotts as resistance tactics.

Although Parliament bowed to pressure from British merchants and repealed the Stamp Act, it reasserted its authority to tax were. Americans by passing the Townshend Acts in 1767. Americans renewed and institutionalized their resistance, enforcing boycotts with committees of inspection, and affirmed their unity in responses to the Massachusetts Circular Letter. The stationing of British troops in Boston only increased hostility to imperial authority, erupting, into violence with the Boston Massacre.

With the repeal of all of the Townshend duties except for the tax on tea in 1770, American resistance subsided until the Gaspée incident in 1772. The formation of the committees of correspondence, inspired by Samuel Adams, fostered intercolonial consensus and spread the scope of the resistance inland. When Britain responded to the Boston Tea Party with the Coercive Acts in 1774, many Americans, primed by resistance propaganda, concluded that all British actions in the last decade were part of a deliberate plot to enslave Americans by depriving them of property and liberty. The understanding of history that Americans had learned from the English Opposition, that power inevitably conspires to .encroach on liberty, colonials now applied to the crisis within the empire.

The stage was set for concerted intercolonial action, and the First Continental Congress convened at Philadelphia in September 1774. Delegates walked a middle course, resisting radical demands for immediate mobilization for war and conservative appeals for accommodation. Congress denied Parliament any authority in the colonies except the power to regulate trade, but acknowledged the colonies’ allegiance to George III. Delegates also drew up the Continental Association, an agreement to cease all trade with Britain until the Coercive Acts were repealed.

Toward the Revolution

But the collapse of royal authority in Massachusetts was moving the colonies toward a showdown with Britain. To make a show of force, General Thomas Gage dispatched troops from Boston in April of 1775 to seize arms being stored at Concord. A baffle between British soldiers and the Massachusetts militia resulted. In January of 1776, Thomas Paine’s Common Sense announced that the imperial crisis had passed from “argument to arms.” Paine’s pamphlet undermined the emotional tie to England by attacking George III, and persuaded many Americans of the necessity of independence.

Excerpted from the Instructor's Guide to A Nation of Nations