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Although the colonists were acquiring a national identity,
and calling themselves Americans, they were not a nation. Rather
they thought of themselves as Virginians, Rhode Islanders, Jerseymen,
North or South Carolinians. Each Colony had a separate government,
under the authority of London. Communications between cities
and Colonies was bad. Colony quarrelled with Colony: a 21-year
long dispute over Fort Pitt embittered Virginia and Pennsylvania;
Connecticut claimed parts of the Wyoming Valley along the Susquehanna;
New Hampshire and New York clashed over possesion of the Green
Mountains.
Apart from these disputes, there were differences
between North and South, East and West. Geographical divisions
marked social and economic discords. Conflicts between East and
West resulted in violence, with the inland territories - whose
inhabitants were less educated and rougher than those on the
coastal fringes -- believing they were treated as second class
citizens. These settlers often lacked proper representation in
the colonial assemblies. Easterners, not exposed to attack from
Indians, were reluctant to pay for inland defense.
Differences between North and South became one of
the two great threats to unity in the war against Britain and
in the subsequent peace. The South had a different economic and
social structure to that of the North, as did the East and West.
Aristocractic society was more firmly established in the South.
Rural influences were also stronger in the south. In all these
ways America lacked cohesion. During the American Revolutionary
War, thirteen independent states fought in temporary alliance.
So, against a background of American growth, faulty
British assessments, revival of British interest in the Colonies
after 1763, the deficiencies of the London Parliament, poor communications
and the stress and strains of Colonial expansion, a series of
events took place which flung Britain and America headlong into
war. These events followed a cycle of legislation and reaction.
Parliament would legislate - America would react. This cycle
widened the gap between Britain and the Thirteen Colonies; time
and again the two sides clashed over the right of Parliament
to tax, and the Colonists' right to be represented or consulted
before taxes were levied.
At times the gap might have been bridged, but these
chances became less as time passed, and opportunities were overlooked
until too late. When Britain did something to meet Colonial requests,
as in 1770 (Britain repealed all of its duties except for the
Tea Tax), only half-measures were taken
and only a temporary political respite secured.
Even before the termination of the French
and Indian War, visible indications had appeared of a new
direction in colonial affairs. Beginning in 1759, small-scale
disputes broke out between Britain and the colonies over disallowance
of measures passed by the popular assemblies, over writs of assistance
empowering the royal customs officials to break into homes and
stores, and over judicial tenure in the colonial courts. Subsequent
decisions made in London forbade "for the time being"
western settlement beyond the Appalachian divide (the Proclamation
of 1763), eliminated provincial paper currency as legal tender,
bolstered the customs department, and enlarged the authority
of the vice-admiralty courts in relation to enforcement of the
Navigation Acts.
When these unpopular measures were followed almost
immediately by Parliament's placing taxes on Americans for the
first time in their history, the result was an explosion that
shook the empire to its foundations. George Grenville, chief
minister from 1763 to 1765, did not father the idea of American
taxation; it had been "in the air" for several years.
But it was he who pushed the controversial bills through Parliament
in 1764 and 1765.
The Sugar Act of 1764, actually a downward revision
of an earlier Molasses Act, cut the duty on imported foreign
molasses from sixpence to threepence a gallon; but it was to
be vigorously enforced, and it was now called a revenue measure
rather than a law designed merely to regulate trade.
The next year Grenville secured passage of the so-called
Stamp Act, placing taxes on all legal
documents and on newspapers, almanacs, and other items. Soon
afterward came a third law, the Quartering Act, a form of indirect
taxation that required American assemblies to provide British
troops passing through their colonies with temporary housing
and an assortment of provisions.
"Taxation without representation" was the
central issue in the imperial rupture. It raised a fundamental
question concerning the limits of parliamentary power that was
debated throughout the dozen or so years before the declaration
of American independence. Although Americans complained about
the stream of British acts and regulations after 1759, they now
agreed that the constitutional issue of taxation posed the gravest
threat of all to their freedom as individuals. If it was legal
to take a man's property without his consent, as the philosopher
John Locke wrote in defense of the Glorious Revolution of 1688
in England, then a man could scarcely have any liberty remaining,
since property gave one a stake in society and enabled one to
vote. Americans felt confident that Locke would have approved
when they wrote in almost countless documents and petitions that
Englishmen--in England, in Virginia, or anywhere else--could
be taxed only by their own directly elected representatives.
When Parliament retreated in 1766, reducing the Sugar
Act to the level of a trade duty and repealing the Stamp Act,
it was responding to retaliatory colonial boycotts on British
trade goods, not to the justness of American constitutional pronouncements.
In 1767, Chancellor of the Exchequer Charles Townshend
persuaded a Parliament already antagonistic toward the colonies
to pass the Townshend Acts. These levied
new and different taxes on the American colonists: duties to
be collected at the ports on incoming lead, paper, tea, paint,
and glass. Besides meeting other imperial expenses such as the
upkeep of the army in America, these Townshend duties might go
to pay the salaries of royal governors and other crown officials
who previously had been paid by the colonial assemblies, which
had used this power of the purse to make the king's appointees
somewhat responsive to their wishes. A final Townshend scheme
reorganized the customs service in America, establishing its
headquarters in Boston, where mounting friction between collectors
and townspeople led to the dispatch of
regular troops to the city to keep order in 1768. |
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