Practice questions: Philosophical Foundations of the American Revolution

Answer: (B) The Proclamation of Rebellion and the Prohibitory Act

1. The French alliance came in 1778, after independence had been declared, so it did not undo a reconciliation appeal that the king had already refused in 1775.
2. In August 1775, before the petition was delivered, George III proclaimed the colonies in open rebellion and never answered them, and in December the Prohibitory Act cut off their trade, which pushed moderates away from reconciliation.
3. Repeal of the Stamp Act in 1766 led colonists to thank the king, nine years before this petition, so it did not undercut a strategy Congress had not yet adopted.
4. The Articles, drafted in 1776 and ratified in 1781, were a plan of union among the states after the break, not the act that killed the appeal of July 1775.

Answer: (C) Colonists kept loyalty to the king and blamed Parliament and ministers

1. From the Stamp Act Congress onward, colonists denied that Parliament could tax them and did not make seats at Westminster their aim.
2. After 1763 many colonists resented the standing army and the ban on western settlement, so asking for more British troops was not the pattern of these protests.
3. Through 1775, Congress and earlier protests still called the colonies loyal subjects and aimed their grievances at Parliament and the king's ministers, which is why this petition addresses George III rather than Parliament.
4. Colonists rejected taxation without the consent of their own assemblies, and keeping the money in America would not have cured that objection.

Answer: (A) Enlightenment confidence that merit and reason outrank inherited status

1. Enlightenment writers, Locke chief among those the colonists read, grounded government in consent and valued individual talent over rank passed down by birth, which is the case Paine makes against hereditary kings.
2. Predestination is a seventeenth-century doctrine about salvation, and the Great Awakening's lesson was that ordinary people could question religious authority, not that birth should decide who rules.
3. Mercantilism was an imperial theory about trade and revenue, and it does not supply an argument against crowns inherited at birth.
4. Virtual representation was Parliament's defense of taxing colonists who elected no members, and it is a claim about the House of Commons rather than about hereditary monarchy.

Answer: (D) attacked the king and the institution of monarchy

1. The rights of Englishmen were the ground of the Stamp Act protests in 1765 and of the First Continental Congress in 1774, and Paine moved past them to natural rights held by people who were not English.
2. Boycotts were the tactic of the Stamp Act crisis, the Townshend protests, and the Continental Association, and Common Sense demanded independence rather than another suspension of trade.
3. Writers such as Dickinson had accepted Parliament's regulation of imperial trade while denying it the power to tax for revenue, which is an earlier and narrower quarrel than Paine's.
4. Earlier protests blamed Parliament and the king's ministers and still professed loyalty to George III, whereas Common Sense in January 1776 attacked the king and monarchy itself and called a government of their own a natural right.

Answer: (B) Opposition to independence among colonists remained strong in 1776

1. Fighting began at Lexington and Concord in April 1775, and that July Congress was still asking the king for peace, so independence was not the settled colonial position before the war.
2. Inglis, an Anglican minister in New York, published this Loyalist reply to Common Sense in 1776, and about one colonist in five, including most Anglican clergy, stayed with the king.
3. Most Anglican clergy and royal officials remained loyal to the king, so they were not the leaders of the push for independence.
4. Paine attacked monarchy, but Inglis and other Loyalists argued that a limited monarchy protected liberty, so colonists had not agreed that kingship itself was illegitimate.

Answer: (C) persuade readers that support for independence was already widespread

1. The figure is a claim about copies of Common Sense in a newspaper fight with the Loyalist writer Cato, not a reply to a charge that Paine was making money from the war.
2. He published the number in the Pennsylvania Journal while answering a critic, and it was not an accounting delivered to Congress.
3. In that April 1776 exchange Paine used a huge circulation figure to make independence look like a cause that had already spread, and Common Sense did move quickly and turned many colonists toward independence, though no surviving ledger confirms 120,000 copies.
4. A tax on pamphlets would have repeated the parliamentary taxation colonists had fought since the Stamp Act, and Paine was arguing for a break with Britain rather than for a new tax.

Answer: (D) Loyalists who wanted to remain under a limited monarchy

1. The Sons of Liberty led protests against taxes such as the Stamp Act, which put them on the opposite side of a defense of British rule.
2. Committees of correspondence spread the colonial protests of the early 1770s, coordinating resistance rather than loyalty to the Crown.
3. Readers who accepted Common Sense were being urged to break with the king, and Inglis wrote this pamphlet to refute that argument.
4. Loyalists stayed with the king, and Inglis's defense of limited monarchy as favorable to liberty is the position that camp took in 1776.

Answer: (A) Kings held power by divine right and by birth

1. Locke's social contract, which Jefferson used, held that people are by nature free and equal and that power comes from the consent of the governed, which denies both the divine right of kings and rule inherited by birth.
2. Colonial assemblies had long taxed their own communities, and a right to replace a destructive government does not dispute that local practice.
3. Mercantilist regulation of trade for the empire's benefit is an economic policy, and the draft's principle is about where political authority comes from.
4. Toleration among Protestant churches was a religious dispute in the colonies, and the right to alter a government answers a claim about political power rather than about church law.

Answer: (D) Slaveholders issued a rights claim and left slavery in place

1. Quaker antislavery petitions pressed Pennsylvania and other meetings, and they did not lead Virginia's convention to add a phrase that narrowed who counted as being in society.
2. In June 1776 the Virginia convention was replacing royal government, Britain was not writing its rights article, and the phrase concerns membership in society rather than a parliamentary voting rule.
3. Virginia adopted no plan of gradual abolition after the war, and the phrase was used to limit the promise rather than to schedule emancipation.
4. The convention added "when they enter into a state of society" to Mason's rights article, and slaveholders used it to argue that enslaved people stood outside the promise, even as Jefferson wrote of equal creation while Robert Hemings, a teenager he enslaved, served him in Philadelphia.

Answer: (C) The Articles of Confederation and the 1778 alliance with France

1. The Proclamation of 1763 and the Quebec Act of 1774 came before this speech and were among the grievances of the imperial crisis, so they did not answer his call for a union and a foreign treaty.
2. The Judiciary Act of 1789 and the Bill of Rights, ratified in 1791, belong to the federal Constitution, not to the confederation or the wartime alliance he said should come first.
3. Dickinson, whose committee drafted the Articles in 1776, wanted a confederation and a foreign treaty before independence; Congress adopted the Articles in 1777, the states ratified them in 1781, and France allied with the United States in 1778, supplying that union and that ally after the declaration rather than before it.
4. Jay's Treaty in 1794 settled some disputes with Britain, and the Whiskey Rebellion that year was a protest against a federal excise, so neither was the confederation or the French alliance.

Answer: (B) Leaders who shared grievances still split over declaring independence

1. The First Continental Congress in 1774 still called the colonies loyal British subjects and blamed Parliament rather than the king, so independence was not a decision it had already made.
2. Dickinson, who had written the Olive Branch Petition, spoke on July 1 against declaring immediately and stayed away on July 2, when twelve colonies approved Lee's resolution and New York abstained pending instructions from home.
3. By July 1776 the question on the floor was independence, and Dickinson himself had long denied Parliament's right to tax the colonies.
4. Lee's resolution, not a bill to end slavery, was the vote of July 2, and the slave-trade passage was a separate argument inside Jefferson's draft.

Answer: (A) Native alliances with Britain after the 1763 limit on western settlement

1. Since 1763 Britain had tried to keep settlers west of the Appalachians, off Native land, and many Native nations sided with Britain for that reason, which the Declaration's frontier charge obscures.
2. Native nations in 1776 were not adopting American-style republican constitutions, and written instruments such as the Cherokee constitution of 1827 belong to a later generation.
3. Congress in 1776 did not guarantee Native title east of the Mississippi, and settler pressure ran toward the western land Britain had tried to close.
4. France had lost mainland North America in 1763 and did not return in 1776 to rebuild that empire; its treaty with the United States came in 1778 and did not restore French rule on the frontier.

Answer: (D) Delegates cut a slavery charge to keep the states together

1. Southern delegates voted for independence and left the preamble's natural-rights language in place, objecting to the slave-trade charge rather than to the idea of natural rights.
2. Britain cast no veto over an American emancipation statute in 1776, and the deleted lines were an accusation against the king, not a law freeing anyone.
3. Northern delegates did not make immediate emancipation the price of the Declaration; Jefferson later remembered them as uneasy because their merchants had carried enslaved people.
4. Congress cut the whole passage, which accused the king over the slave trade and was not a plan to free anyone, and Jefferson recalled in 1821 that the cut pleased South Carolina and Georgia, which wanted the trade continued, and spared northern carriers, sacrificing the charge to hold the coalition of states.

Answer: (C) Northern laws for gradual emancipation and Black freedom petitions

1. Cotton spread across the Deep South after the cotton gin of 1793 and slavery grew there, which ran against Haynes's claim rather than following from it.
2. The campaign for a stronger central government in the 1780s grew out of the weakness of the Articles and unrest such as Shays' Rebellion, not out of an argument for the liberty of Africans.
3. Haynes turned the Declaration's liberty claim toward Africans, Prince Hall and other Black petitioners asked Massachusetts for freedom in that language in 1777, and northern states then passed gradual emancipation laws, beginning with Pennsylvania in 1780.
4. Manifest Destiny is a name for expansionist belief in the 1840s, the wrong generation, and it was not an effect of Haynes's case for African liberty.

Answer: (B) Women supplied the Patriot army but received no new political rights

1. The state constitutions of the 1770s left coverture in place, so a married woman's property still folded into her husband's, and withholding the vote did not make the property claim true.
2. Women and girls in Litchfield turned lead from the king's statue into 42,088 musket cartridges for Patriot forces, which was supply work for the war, and it brought them neither the vote nor office.
3. Loyalists remained in New England and elsewhere through the war, and cartridge making in one Connecticut town did not end their resistance.
4. Congress did not conscript women into a national munitions service; the Litchfield labor was local work around a scarce supply of lead.

Answer: (B) turned from reconciliation to separation based on rights

1. The Declaration does not mention Parliament, and protests from the Stamp Act through 1774 had already blamed Parliament, so 1776 was not the first time that charge appeared.
2. In July 1775 Congress still addressed George III as faithful subjects and asked him to restore peace, and on July 4, 1776, it grounded government in natural rights and consent and declared the colonies independent.
3. The Declaration rejects divine right, locating just powers in the consent of the governed and allowing a people to alter a government that destroys their rights.
4. Congress in 1776 did not ask for seats in Parliament; it declared the political connection dissolved and rested the case on rights that did not depend on English birth.

Answer: (A) Harder resistance from Southern slaveholders who feared armed escapes

1. In November 1775 Virginia's royal governor promised freedom to enslaved men who left rebel owners and joined his forces, hundreds reached his lines, and the offer hardened Southern planters against Britain.
2. Congress passed no emancipation law in 1776, and the slave-trade accusation it cut from the Declaration was not a statute freeing anyone.
3. Parliament repealed the Stamp Act in 1766, after colonial boycotts, nine years before Dunmore's proclamation and for a different reason.
4. Dunmore's offer ran to enslaved people and indentured servants held by rebels in Virginia, not to a cession of land by Native nations, whose alignment with Britain had to do with the defense of western land.

Answer: (C) Great Awakening doubt of authority, and Enlightenment natural rights

1. Predestination concerns salvation, and divine right defends kings, whereas Paine uses scripture to attack monarchy.
2. Mercantilism and virtual representation were British defenses of trade laws and of taxation without colonial members of Parliament, not the sources of this attack on kings.
3. The Great Awakening of the 1730s and 1740s taught people to question religious authority, and Paine turned the Bible against kings, while the claim of a natural right to their own government comes from the Enlightenment argument, associated with Locke, that rights belong to people as people.
4. Deism, which Jefferson leaned toward, pictures a Creator who set nature running and rarely intervenes, but these lines rely on scripture, and Paine claims natural rights rather than the rights of Englishmen.

Answer: (D) People shut out of power used the ideals against that exclusion

1. Northern emancipation came later and was gradual; Pennsylvania's 1780 law freed no one already enslaved, and independence in the summer of 1776 did not end slavery in the North.
2. Haynes denied that liberty stopped at English ancestry, placing Africans under the same right he said Englishmen claimed.
3. At Seneca Falls in 1848, activists rewrote the Declaration to say that all men and women are created equal, which uses natural-rights language rather than dropping it.
4. Haynes, a Black minuteman, turned the Declaration's liberty claim toward Africans around 1776, Prince Hall's petition asked Massachusetts for freedom in that language in 1777, and Seneca Falls later extended the same words, so the ideals became arguments against exclusions the governments of 1776 left standing.

Answer: (A) It is an 1821 recollection by the author of the draft

1. Jefferson wrote this account in 1821, forty-five years after he watched Congress edit the draft, and he had a stake in how his own text was remembered, so it has to be checked against the 1776 draft and the records of that summer.
2. He was present: from July 2 to July 4 he sat in Congress while the delegates revised his draft line by line.
3. South Carolina and Georgia wanted the African trade to continue, which is why he said the clause was cut to please them, and they had not banned it.
4. The autobiography is a memoir of 1821, not a speech of July 4, 1776, the day Congress adopted the Declaration.

Answer: (B) Whether liberty needed an end to kingship or a limited monarchy

1. Parliament repealed the Stamp Act in 1766, and the argument between Paine and Inglis in 1776 was about independence and the form of government, not about repeating that repeal.
2. Paine held that kingship could not be justified and that Americans should form their own government, while Inglis answered, for the Loyalists, that limited monarchy was the form most favorable to liberty.
3. Neither writer was asking for colonial members of Parliament: Paine wanted a separate government, and Inglis wanted the connection to the Crown kept.
4. Inglis was an Anglican minister and most Anglican clergy were Loyalists, but these passages argue about monarchy and liberty, not about establishing the Church of England.