Key terms
- Salutary neglect
- Loose enforcement c. 1720–1763; Edmund Burke's phrase, 1775
Britain's long habit of loosely enforcing its trade laws and letting colonial assemblies run local affairs and tax their own voters.
When Britain ended it after 1763, colonists long used to self-rule resisted both the new taxes and the crackdown on smuggling.
- Proclamation of 1763 (Proclamation Line)
- October 7, 1763
King George III's order barring colonial settlement and private land purchases west of the Appalachians and reserving that land for Native nations.
Settlers and land speculators such as George Washington ignored the line, and the closed West became one more grievance against Britain.
- Sugar Act (Revenue Act of 1764)
- Passed April 5, 1764; in force September 29, 1764
George Grenville's law that halved the duty on foreign molasses to 3 pence a gallon and tightened enforcement. Accused smugglers now faced vice-admiralty courts, which had no jury.
With this law Parliament taxed colonial trade to pay for the army in America, while earlier duties had mainly regulated it.
- Rights of Englishmen
- Core of colonial protest, 1764–1775
The liberties colonists claimed as British subjects, above all the right to pay only taxes their elected representatives approved, along with trial by jury and no peacetime army without their assemblies' consent.
Colonists turned Britain's own constitution against Parliament and claimed every right that Britons at home enjoyed.
- Virtual representation
- British defense of colonial taxation, 1760s
The British argument that Parliament represented the whole empire, colonists included, just as it represented big towns like Manchester that sent no members.
To colonists, only representatives they elected could tax them, and they elected no one to Parliament.
- Stamp Act
- Passed March 22, 1765; in force November 1, 1765; repealed March 18, 1766
Parliament's first direct tax on the colonists, which required revenue stamps on newspapers, wills, licenses, and even playing cards and dice.
Because it fell on printers, lawyers, and merchants, the colonists best able to stir up protest, resistance spread from colony to colony.
- Quartering Act
- First act May 15, 1765; new act June 2, 1774
A law that made the colonies house and supply British troops in barracks, inns, and empty buildings. Neither it nor the 1774 version put soldiers in occupied homes.
New York's assembly refused to supply the troops in full, and Parliament voted in 1767 to suspend it until it gave in.
- Sons of Liberty
- From 1765
Local resistance groups of artisans, laborers, and merchants whose crowds forced stamp distributors to quit and later enforced boycotts of British goods.
By the time the Stamp Act took effect, their protests had made it unenforceable almost everywhere.
- Stamp Act Congress
- October 7–25, 1765, New York
A meeting of delegates from nine colonies in New York. Their Declaration of Rights and Grievances said that only colonial assemblies could tax colonists.
Colonies acted together against Parliament for the first time, yet the delegates still declared their loyalty to the king.
- Nonimportation agreements
- Boycotts in 1765–1766, 1768–1770, and 1774–1775
Pledges by colonial merchants to stop importing British goods, which crowds enforced and households backed by refusing to buy. The main waves followed the Stamp, Townshend, and Coercive Acts.
Lost sales turned British merchants into lobbyists for repeal of the Stamp Act and later the Townshend duties.
- Declaratory Act
- March 18, 1766
The law Parliament passed the same day it repealed the Stamp Act, declaring its full power to bind the colonies "in all cases whatsoever."
Britain gave up the tax but kept the principle, and in 1767 Parliament used that claimed power to tax again.
- Townshend Acts (Townshend duties)
- Passed 1767; in force November 20, 1767; all but tea repealed April 1770
Charles Townshend's duties on imported glass, lead, paint, paper, and tea, whose revenue paid royal governors and judges and freed them from colonial assemblies that had controlled their salaries.
Resistance to the duties revived the boycotts and brought British troops to Boston in 1768.
- Daughters of Liberty
- Name in use by 1766; spinning bees peaked 1768–1770
Patriot women who spun homespun at public spinning bees and gave up British tea and cloth, especially during the boycott of the Townshend duties.
Women decided much of what households bought and wore, and boycotts could not work without them.
- Boston Massacre
- March 5, 1770, King Street, Boston
The shooting in Boston where British soldiers fired into a crowd pelting them with snowballs, ice, and sticks. Five men died, among them Crispus Attucks, a sailor of African and Native descent.
Paul Revere's engraving, which showed soldiers firing on command into a peaceful crowd, spread the Patriot version across the colonies.
- Committees of Correspondence
- Boston, November 2, 1772; intercolonial from March 12, 1773
Letter networks that shared news of British actions and planned resistance. Samuel Adams started Boston's committee, and in 1773 Virginia's assembly began linking the colonies.
Protest had faded between crises, but a standing network kept towns and colonies planning together.
- Tea Act
- May 10, 1773
Parliament's law to rescue the East India Company by letting it sell tea through its own colonial agents. The Company's tea now undersold smuggled Dutch tea but still carried the Townshend duty.
Colonists resisted a law that lowered prices, because buying the cheaper tea meant accepting Parliament's right to tax.
- Boston Tea Party
- December 16, 1773
A protest in which Bostonians, mostly artisans and laborers in Mohawk disguises, dumped 342 chests of tea into the harbor after Governor Hutchinson refused to let the ships leave without unloading it.
Even some colonists condemned the destruction of private property, and Lord North's government set out to make an example of Boston.
- Coercive Acts (Intolerable Acts)
- Passed March 31–June 2, 1774; Boston port closed June 1, 1774
Four laws that punished Massachusetts for the Tea Party by closing Boston Harbor, cutting self-government, letting accused royal officials stand trial elsewhere, and widening the quartering of troops.
Other colonies shipped Boston food and money, and twelve colonies sent delegates to the First Continental Congress.
- Quebec Act
- June 22, 1774
A law to govern conquered French Canada that protected Catholic worship, kept French civil law, set up no elected assembly, and stretched Quebec's border south to the Ohio River.
Colonists counted it among the Intolerable Acts, since it threatened their western land claims, their self-government, and their Protestant faith.
- First Continental Congress
- September 5–October 26, 1774, Philadelphia
The assembly of delegates from twelve colonies, all but Georgia, that met in Philadelphia to answer the Coercive Acts. It declared colonists' rights and created the Continental Association to boycott British goods.
Many delegates still wanted compromise, and Congress shelved Galloway's plan for a union under the Crown by six colonies to five.
Big questions
Evaluate the extent to which the Seven Years' War marked a turning point in American relations with Great Britain.
The war marked a sharp turn because it nearly doubled Britain's debt. To pay for about 10,000 troops left in America, Britain ended salutary neglect and taxed colonists with the Sugar Act and the Stamp Act. Colonists still felt British, yet they now challenged Parliament's right to tax them.
Why did British colonists object to the Stamp Act, and what did "no taxation without representation" reject?
Colonists objected because Parliament taxed them without their consent, a violation of the rights of Englishmen. The Stamp Act Congress declared that only colonial assemblies could tax colonists, since no colonist sat in the House of Commons. The slogan "no taxation without representation" rejected virtual representation, Britain's claim that Parliament spoke for the whole empire.
Briefly explain one similarity or difference in how two groups in North America responded to a British policy from 1763 to 1783.
Artisans and laborers in the Sons of Liberty and women in the Daughters of Liberty both resisted Parliament's taxes by refusing British goods. The Sons used crowds to force stamp distributors out and to enforce nonimportation agreements, while the Daughters spun homespun so families could do without British cloth.
Identify one factor that increased tensions between Britain and its colonies from 1763 to 1776, and explain how it led to revolution.
The Tea Act turned a quiet dispute into a crisis, since anyone who bought its cheap tea also paid Parliament's tax. Bostonians dumped the tea, Parliament punished Massachusetts with the Coercive Acts, and the colonies answered together in the First Continental Congress. Within months, militia and British regulars were fighting at Lexington and Concord.
Common mistakes
MistakeBy 1774 colonists all wanted independence from Britain.
In factInto 1775 most Patriots demanded their rights as British subjects, and Congress sent the king the Olive Branch Petition that July.
MistakeColonists' slogan "no taxation without representation" attacked salutary neglect.
In factThe slogan rejected virtual representation, and colonists wanted a return to the salutary neglect of the years before 1763.
MistakeThe Declaratory Act declared the colonists' rights.
In factParliament passed the Declaratory Act in 1766 to claim full power over the colonies, while the Stamp Act Congress wrote the Declaration of Rights and Grievances.
Transcript
Dawn
April 19, 1775
Lexington, Massachusetts. April 19, 1775. On the village green: about seventy-seven militiamen. Farmers, tradesmen, cousins.
Up the road: the vanguard of seven hundred British regulars, coming for the gunpowder at Concord.
Maj. John Pitcairn Disperse, you rebels! Lay down your arms!
Captain Parker orders his men to disperse. Some start to.
Nobody knows who fired it. Both sides swore it was the other. Redcoats and militia alike are British subjects. So how did Britons end up shooting at Britons?
Twelve years earlier… 1763
The answer starts twelve years earlier — with a war Britain won… and a bill it couldn't pay.
The Most Expensive Victory
1763
Seventeen sixty-three. Britain has just won the Seven Years' War, fought from Pittsburgh to the Philippines.
In the Treaty of Paris, France surrenders Canada and everything east of the Mississippi. Nobody asks the people who live there.
The winner: King George the Third. Age twenty-five. Congratulations, Your Majesty. Here's the bill.
The price of victory: Britain's national debt nearly doubled.
Enter George Grenville, head of the Treasury, who read account books like novels.
George Grenville Ten thousand soldiers, guarding America. Surely America can help pay for them.
For decades, London had winked at colonial smuggling. Historians call it salutary neglect. Grenville did not wink.
The people nobody asked answered. With Britain squeezing their trade and eyeing their land, the Odawa leader Pontiac called for war.
Pontiac As to those who come to trouble your lands—drive them out, make war upon them.
That summer, warriors from a dozen nations seized eight British forts. At Fort Pitt, the garrison gave Delaware envoys blankets from its smallpox hospital.
London's answer: a line down the Appalachians. No settlement west of it.
To Native nations, a fragile shield, promised only 'for the present.' To colonists who'd fought to open the West, a betrayal.
Thousands of settlers crossed it anyway. Even George Washington privately called it temporary. London's fix number one pleased no one. Fix number two would be about money: the colonists'.
Stamp of Disapproval
1764–1766
Britain had a debt. And an idea.
Prime Minister George Grenville loved a ledger. His showed American customs costing more to collect than they raised.
His Sugar Act of 1764 halved the molasses tax — then actually collected it. Accused smugglers faced admiralty courts: a Crown judge, and no jury.
Then the Stamp Act of 1765 taxed nearly every printed page: newspapers, wills, licenses, college diplomas.
And, in case anyone tried to relax: playing cards, one shilling a pack. Dice, ten shillings a pair.
To be fair: by one estimate, the average Briton paid twenty-six shillings a year in taxes; the average Massachusetts taxpayer, one.
The colonists objected on principle: no taxation without representation. London replied: virtual representation. Parliament speaks for everyone, voter or not. Colonists preferred the actual kind.
In Virginia, Patrick Henry put it plainly.
Patrick Henry The taxation of the people by themselves, or by persons chosen by themselves to represent them … is the distinguishing characteristick of British freedom.
In Boston, the future Sons of Liberty hanged stamp distributor Andrew Oliver in effigy. Shoemaker Ebenezer MacIntosh led a crowd that wrecked his office. Next day, Oliver quit.
Twelve days later, a crowd gutted Lieutenant Governor Thomas Hutchinson’s mansion. He had privately opposed the Stamp Act.
In October, nine colonies met as the Stamp Act Congress: only their own assemblies could tax them. Merchants in New York, Philadelphia and Boston stopped ordering British goods.
London merchants begged for repeal. The Commons summoned a witness: Benjamin Franklin.
Member of Parliament What was the temper of America towards Great-Britain before the year 1763?
Benjamin Franklin The best in the world.
Member of Parliament And what is their temper now?
Benjamin Franklin O, very much altered.
“They will not find a rebellion; they may indeed make one.”
And if Britain sent troops?
Benjamin Franklin They will not find a rebellion; they may indeed make one.
March 18, 1766: repeal! London cartoonists buried the Stamp Act. Boston hung the Liberty Tree with lanterns. Few read the fine print.
Same day: the Declaratory Act. Parliament could bind the colonies in all cases whatsoever. Britain dropped the tax. It kept the principle.
Glass, Lead, Paint, Paper, Tea… and Troops
1767–1770
Parliament's next fix came from Charles Townshend. Colonists hate internal taxes? Fine. Tax their imports.
Glass, lead, paint, paper, tea. The revenue would pay royal governors and judges, freeing them from colonial assemblies.
Enforcement came with writs of assistance: general warrants letting customs officers search almost anywhere.
Enter “a Farmer in Pennsylvania” — really John Dickinson, a rich Philadelphia lawyer. Regulate trade? Fine. Tax for revenue? Never.
John Dickinson ROUSE yourselves, and behold the ruin hanging over your heads.
A Massachusetts Circular Letter urged the colonies to resist together. From Boston to Charleston, merchants stopped buying British.
Women made the boycott work: the Daughters of Liberty spun homespun at public spinning bees. Every skein was a vote, cast by people who weren't allowed to cast one.
It worked. In 1769, British exports to the colonies fell by more than a third. London's merchants wanted repeal.
Meanwhile, London sent Boston soldiers. On October 1, 1768, redcoats marched up Long Wharf, drums beating. For seventeen months, the town simmered.
March 5, 1770. A sentry struck a boy who'd insulted an officer. Church bells rang, and hundreds flooded King Street.
Captain Thomas Preston brought seven soldiers. The crowd hurled snowballs, ice and insults, and dared them to fire.
They fired. Eleven men were hit. Five died.
Crispus Attucks, a sailor of African and Native descent who had likely escaped slavery, died in the snow. Samuel Maverick was seventeen.
Within weeks, Paul Revere was selling this: soldiers firing on command into a peaceful crowd. Preston's version:
Capt. Thomas Preston …come on you rascals, you bloody backs, you lobster scoundrels, fire if you dare
Use HIPP. Historical situation: an occupied town, trials looming. Intended audience: an angry public, versus officials in London. Purpose: to inflame, versus to exonerate. Point of view: a Son of Liberty, versus a man facing the gallows. Neither is a photograph. Both are evidence.
Their lawyer? John Adams, a Patriot who believed even redcoats deserved a fair trial.
John Adams Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations… they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence.
That very day, in London, Lord North proposed repealing the Townshend duties. All but one. The tax on tea stayed — for the principle, again. Hold that thought.
A Nice Cup of Tea
1772–1773
Townshend's taxes were gone—except the one on tea. For two years, Boston almost behaved.
Almost. In 1772, Rhode Islanders torched the Gaspee, a British customs schooner. London threatened trials in England. Nobody talked. Everybody noticed.
Samuel Adams—hopeless at business, brilliant at politics—fought back by mail.
Samuel Adams Among the natural rights of the Colonists are these: First, a right to life; Secondly, to liberty; Thirdly, to property.
Sound familiar? That's John Locke, hand-delivered.
Committees of Correspondence linked town to town, then, from 1773, colony to colony. Resistance now had a nervous system.
In London, the East India Company sat on seventeen million pounds of unsold tea. Lord North's fix: the Tea Act.
The twist? It made tea cheaper—even taxed, cheaper than smuggled Dutch tea. Cheap tea was bait: drink it, and you accepted Parliament's right to tax you.
Then the tea ships arrived. So did the handbills: Friends! Brethren! Countrymen! That worst of Plagues, the detested tea…
Governor Hutchinson—whose sons were the tea's agents—wouldn't let the ships leave untaxed. December 16th. Old South, packed to the rafters. At dusk, his answer: no.
Within the hour, a hundred-odd apprentices, artisans and laborers, faces sooted, crudely disguised as Mohawks, boarded the tea ships.
Three hours. Three hundred forty-two chests, hacked open and dumped.
Then they swept the decks and replaced a padlock they'd broken. The politest crime in Boston history.
By morning, tea was washing ashore in drifts; men rowed out to beat it under.
John Adams This is the most magnificent Movement of all. There is a Dignity, a Majesty, a Sublimity, in this last Effort of the Patriots, that I greatly admire.
Even Franklin said Boston should pay for the tea. Parliament agreed—and sent the bill.
Intolerable
1774–1775
London's answer to the Tea Party: Parliament's biggest fix yet.
Not a tax this time — a punishment. In Britain, they were the Coercive Acts. Colonists called them Intolerable.
One: the Port Act. Boston Harbor closed until the town paid for the tea.
Two: the Crown took over Massachusetts's government, and General Thomas Gage, the army's commander, became governor. Three: the “Murder Act” — accused royal officials could be tried in Britain. Four: redcoats quartered in colonists' empty buildings.
The Quebec Act pushed Catholic, assembly-free Quebec to the Ohio River. London meant it for Canada. The colonies took it personally.
That September, twelve colonies sent delegates to Philadelphia: the First Continental Congress.
Still loyal to the King, they demanded their rights as Englishmen and backed the defiant Suffolk Resolves. Then came the teeth: the Continental Association, a boycott enforced by committees in every town.
Boston was meant to suffer alone. Instead, the colonies fed it: Connecticut sheep, Carolina rice, grain and money.
Fifty-one women in Edenton, North Carolina, pledged to boycott too. A London print mocked them. It missed the point: boycotts were won at the tea table — and there, women decided.
Massachusetts drilled minutemen, and both sides raced for the gunpowder.
King George III Blows must decide whether they are to be subject to this country or independent.
Patrick Henry I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!
Reconstructed by a biographer, decades later. And the man demanding liberty held people in slavery.
Twenty-seven days later, it came to blows.
One If by Land
April 18–19, 1775
April 18th, 1775. General Gage has a secret. Boston has noticed.
Gen. Thomas Gage You will March... with the utmost expedition and Secrecy to Concord.
Target: the colonists' gunpowder.
The secret lasted about an afternoon. That night, two riders went out: Dawes by land, Revere by water.
One if by land, and two if by sea. It was two: a signal to Charlestown, in case Revere got caught.
Paul Revere I set off upon a very good Horse; it was then about 11 o'Clock, and very pleasant.
A Lexington guard told him to keep the noise down.
Paul Revere Noise! You'll have noise enough before long. The Regulars are coming out!
Not "the British." They were all British.
Dawes caught up, then Dr. Samuel Prescott, riding home from his fiancée's. A British patrol pounced. Prescott jumped his horse over a wall and reached Concord.
Revere was captured, then turned loose without his horse. Too late: bells, alarm guns and dozens of riders were waking the countryside.
At dawn, Revere was hauling Hancock's trunk across Lexington Green as the Regulars arrived.
Capt. John Parker I immediately ordered our Militia to disperse, and not to fire.
Then, a shot. Each side blamed the other. The Regulars answered with volleys and bayonets.
Jonas Parker · Robert Munroe · Samuel Hadley · Jonathan Harrington Jr. · Isaac Muzzey · Caleb Harrington · John Brown · Asahel Porter
Eight men died at Lexington. Ten were wounded. Among the wounded was Prince Estabrook, an enslaved man, shot defending a liberty he was denied.
In Concord, the Regulars burned what supplies they could find. Above the North Bridge, militia saw the smoke and feared the town was burning.
The militia advanced. The Regulars fired; two Acton men fell.
Militiaman Fire, fellow soldiers, for God's sake, fire!
Here once the embattled farmers stood, And fired the shot heard round the world. It lasted three minutes. But militia had fired on the King's army, on orders.
Then eighteen miles back to Boston, under fire from every stone wall, barn and tree.
By dark: 73 Regulars killed, 174 wounded. Forty-nine colonists killed.
A whole countryside had mobilized in a single day. By nightfall, militia ringed Boston. The fuse had burned all the way down.
What Just Happened?
1763–1776
Twelve years. Twenty seconds.
A war won on credit. A line on the map. A tax on dice. Repeal — with fine print. Glass, lead, paint, paper, tea… and troops.
Five dead in the snow. Tea in the harbor. A port padlocked. Eight dead at Lexington.
Every fix meant to tame the colonies taught them to act together.
The twist? They still weren't fighting for independence. July 5th: an olive branch for the King. July 6th: a Declaration of the Causes and Necessity of Taking Up Arms.
The King wouldn't even receive it. Then Thomas Paine asked: why have a king at all?
But whose liberty?
Phillis Wheatley For in every human Breast, God has implanted a Principle, which we call Love of Freedom; it is impatient of Oppression, and pants for Deliverance.
Enslaved Bostonians petitioned for the freedom Patriots demanded from Parliament. For many Native nations, Patriot liberty meant losing their land.
Twelve years to light a revolution. Centuries to decide whose liberty it meant.