As
the dust settled and the cost of the war was reckoned with, a new perception
formed in the motherland of the American Colonies. Britain’s King George III
had a big problem after the French and Indian War. His government needed money.
The War had been very costly. One solution was popular in his country: “Let’s
make the colonies give us more money.”[1]
The
general attitude of the King and the British Parliament was that their efforts
in the French and Indian War had successfully protected the colonies from death
and destruction and had even allowed them to expand their reaches, and
therefore the colonists were indebted to England for the help they had
rendered.
The
British government sent additional troops after the war to protect the new
settlements, but also to keep the colonists from moving to far inland. The
British government was concerned that if the colonists settled too far into the
interior of the continent they might be less likely to export and import goods
with Great Britain, because they would acquire new trading partners.
In
1764 the British Parliament under the leadership of Prime minister George
Grenville passed the Sugar act which had an impact on the molasses which was
used to make rum, the American’s largest export. This angered the industry.
The
next year in 1765 Parliament passed the Stamp Act which was a tax on the
Colony’s legal documents, newspapers and business documents. This new tax
angered a large portion of the population who felt as though they had nothing
to say about the whole situation.
The
colonies had distinguished between the power to tax and the power to make laws.
The latter they said, belonged to the Parliament for the whole empire, but the
power to tax was the exclusive power of the local representative assembly in
each part of the empire.[2]
The American Colonies enforced this mentality by breaking off as much trade
with Britain as possible.
This
economic cramp placed the British government into a posture that eventually
caused Parliament to repeal the Stamp act in March 1766. This combination of
tax threats may have ended in the favor of the Colonies, but the need for money
to support British governmental endeavors on the North American continent was
not eliminated.
The
tensions would continue to swell slowly over the next several years. Protests
and riots would occasionally be displayed by the American patriots who were
frustrated with the British politics that weighed in on their lifestyles. On
the spring day of March 5, 1770 British soldiers in Boston leveled their arms
at a crowd of citizens that they perceived to be a threat. Five Americans were
mortally wounded. The event would earn the title we now know as the Boston
Massacre.
Three
years later in December of 1773 a band of colonial patriots poorly disguised as
Native American Indians boarded British ships that had landed at Boston, and
dumped a large cargo of tea into the harbor’s water. It was as an act of
rebellion against the taxes levied on them for that tea. These types of
incidents, some more notable than others constantly eroded the relationship
between King George III and his thirteen American colonies.
By
the early part of the 1770s there was an ever growing segment of the colonial
population that had decided that if they were going to have to pay taxes to
England they were going to have a say in it. This would not only mean that they
would be represented in Parliament by their own people, but also that their acceptance
in certain social circles by the British aristocracy would be guaranteed.
For
those who truly understood the demographics and the geography involved in such
political and social desires, it was not hard to understand how separation and
independence as a result of the formation of a new nation was just a stone’s
throw away. The real questions left to be answered were; “How best should this
process take place?” and “Do we have the ability to endure until the end of
such a process?”
The
decade of the 1700s would mark World history with one major event. That event
would give a chance for the ancient ideals of a republican government with
democratic purposes and values to be tested once again by a little over two
million people living in a somewhat unchartered geographical territory. It
would showcase the forced division of a nation’s people by one of its own
groups. This event and process would give rise to a lifestyle of self rule and
freedom that was not yet being formally practiced by any nation known to the
world at that time. The American Revolution would be an unparalleled event in
World history that would give birth to the most powerful and technologically
aggressive culture on the planet.
[1] Isaacs, Sally
Senzell America in the Time of George Washington (Chicago, Illinois.
Reed Educational & Professional Publishing. 1998) p.10
[2] Morgan, Edmund
S. The
Stamp Act Crisis – Prologue to Revolution (Charlotte, North Carolina UNC
Press, 1995) p.283