Chapter I: Acadian Driftwood.
(Covers the Expulsion)
Chapter II: Pontiac’s War and the Proclamation of 1763.
The conclusion of the Seven Years War, a conflict that played out across the globe, saw Britain come out of the slaughter and carnage as the undisputed victor. In North America, Britain was left with a virtual hegemony on the continent, taking Quebec from France, securing the Ohio River Valley, annexing Florida, and forcing the transfer of Louisiana to Spain. This triumph came at a cost; over 150,000 soldiers were killed, King George II had died (his health having deteriorated due to the strains of the war), and the expanded Empire had found itself immensely indebted.
Almost all of Britain’s newfound postwar troubles originated in North America; there was the issue of the Francophone population in what was once New France, where the largely Catholic population buckled under the weight of British rule. Their Acadian counterparts were less lucky, having been expelled during the war back to France or deported to Britain, the Carolinas, Louisiana, or Quebec. There were native tribes which until this point had enjoyed amicable relations with the French, who had traded with them for fur pelts on far more agreeable terms than the British merchants.
The British in 1758 had been able to strike a separate peace treaty with the Shawnee and Lenape tribes, vowing to prohibit settlement beyond the Appalachian Mountains in exchange for the cancellation of their alliance with the French. By the time of the war’s final conclusion five years later, these two tribes were just a few of the discontented clusters of Native people in Ohio Valley who found themselves aghast at British policies towards them; indeed, General Jeffrey Amherst, the Commander-in-Chief of the British forces in North America, was quite contemptuous towards them. Viewing the native peoples as too savage to pose a credible threat to British dominance, Amherst deployed only 500 troops between a handful of isolated fortifications to secure the region and immediately halted the French practice of winning over the tribal chiefs with generous gifts of guns, cloth, glass, and tobacco. Considering the practice to be bribery, Amherst displayed from the beginning a clear unwillingness to accept the Native tribes as partners in the administration of the region.
The most alarming threat to the natives however was not the (sparse) presence of British troops, but rather, the wave of immigration over the Appalachian Mountains that followed the war. Where the French settlers who came to the Ohio River Valley were content to farm together in small, isolated clusters, the British came en-masse, clearing large amounts of land and establishing new settlements in what is now Ohio. This alarmed a number of tribal leaders, most notably Pontiac. Forming an alliance of tribes angered by British policies and settlement, they first struck Fort Detroit in April of 1763, killing scores of settlers and their families as well as massacring and burning the British garrison there.
By the time word of the massacre at Fort Detroit reached the British authorities, Pontiac’s allies had already raided and destroyed eight smaller forts and blockhouses across the Ohio River Valley. Fort Sandusky and Fort Saint Joseph (the former along Lake Erie in modern day Ohio, the latter in southwest Michigan) soon met similar fates as Fort Detroit. Emboldened by their successes, Pontiac decided to strike deeper into more settled British territory in order to deter further westward migration into the Ohio countryside. Attacking Fort Pitt (near modern day Pittsburgh), a force of primarily Delaware warriors besieged nearly 550 people huddled inside the fort. Fearing an unprecedented slaughter, General Amherst dispatched a relief party under the command of Henry Bouquet, but they were ambushed at the Battle of Bushy Run by a raiding party of native warriors who had split off from the siege to intercept them after scouts reported their advance towards Fort Pitt. After two days of fierce fighting, the British repelled their native attackers and shortly thereafter broke the siege of Fort Pitt.
It was after the siege of Fort Pitt that one of the most controversial incidents of the war occurred; in a series of letters between General Amherst and Bouquet, Amherst authorized a scheme to distribute smallpox infected blankets among the native population in an early example of biological warfare. While historical evidence exists confirming that this plot was carried out, its effectiveness remains up to debate as another smallpox epidemic reportedly blighted the native tribes in the region at the same time.
Regardless, when word of the conflict reached the ears of King George III, the young monarch was horrified and revolted by the carnage. In August 1763, the Board of Trade recalled Amherst as the Commander-in-Chief of Britain’s North American forces, and replaced him with General Thomas Gage. The new Commander took more proactive measures to end the war upon his arrival in late September, he immediately used Britain’s Iroquois allies as a backchannel to Pontiac’s allies in order to organize a peace conference. This eventually took place at Fort Niagara, with over 2,000 native representatives attending. The subsequent treaty signed at Fort Niagara recognized the Iroquois’s territorial sovereignty and promised to limit colonial settlement in the newly conquered Canadian colonies.
Shortly thereafter, the King issued the Proclamation of 1763; the proclamation officially prohibited western settlement west of the Appalachians and defined the Ohio River Valley as “Indian Country.” This largely pacified most of Pontiac’s allies, and the rebellion rapidly died down after the proclamation was issued – though Pontiac himself and an increasingly smaller band of warriors would not surrender until 1765. The proclamation came at a price; it stabilized what is now the Midwest and prevented a full blown eruption of war between Britain and the various native tribes that populated North America, but was greatly resented in the colonies, where available land was decreasing at a time when immigration from Europe was increasing.
The proclamation, however, wasn’t the only issue on the minds of the colonists.
Chapter III: Taxation without Representation.
The Seven Years War and the Pontiac rebellion were costly affairs for Great Britain, where the burden of defending their greatly expanded North American territories put further strain on the Empire’s finances. To counteract this, the Board of Trade in London decided to take action. First came the Sugar Act of 1764, in which Parliament actually lowered the tax on sugar while beginning to enforce existing laws for the first time with the ultimate goal of collecting revenue also while placating the public. The enforcement of the tax could not come at a worse time for the colonies, where a recession had begun as the colonial economy had been virtually weaponized against France and failed to adjust quickly to the prewar conditions that were expected following the Treaty of Paris. Colonial leaders lamented their lack of representation in the parliament, and the papers printed the rallying cry of “No Taxation without Representation” from Halifax to Charleston.
The Proclamation of 1763 also proved to be unpopular. Though settlers would ignore this decree, they would come to find that they were outside of the King’s protection upon arriving in the western wilderness, and the English subjects resented this fact as attacks by Native tribes increased despite the conclusion of Pontiac’s rebellion. Yet available land in the colonies was increasingly fleeting, necessitating the westward movement of peoples in defiance of the proclamation. Native attacks on the settlers continued here and there, though the initial wave of primarily Scots-Irish settlers largely clung to the region surrounding Appalachia, a young Daniel Boone being the most prominent amongst them.
Next came the Currency Acts of 1764, which effectively prohibited the colonies from issuing paper money and instead mandated that the Pound Sterling be used as the exclusive currency of the colonies. This caused a severe capital shortage that brought economic growth to a complete standstill. Colonial agents such as Benjamin Franklin argued in London against the Currency Act to no avail, where their protestations fell on deaf ears. The currency shortages in the colonies made it nearly impossible for the colonial governments to house and support the presence of nearly 8,000 British redcoats. This would prove to complicate General Thomas Gage’s efforts to defend the region, and would pave the way for the unpopular Quartering Act of 1765.
Perhaps the most egregious of all the parliamentary measures taken to regulate the colonies in the minds of the citizenry, the Quartering Act went far beyond the demands of even General Gage in order to address the housing shortage. Though some colonies managed to raise the funds necessary to construct barracks to house the British troops, a crisis emerged in New York when available space to house the troops for the winter could not be appropriated. On the orders of General Gage, troops were quartered in private homes. Those who resisted or refused were arrested and jailed. The actions staved off the possibility of British troops freezing to death, but it came at a heavy cost as relations between the colonies and London reached their low ebb.
Despite the discontent in the colonies, London remained ignorant (and willfully so) about the growing chasm between the New and Old Worlds. Worse yet, the punitive actions already taken by the Mother Country had done little to reinvigorate the economy or compel it to adapt to peacetime circumstances. The government of Lord Bute, the Prime Minister and mentor to King George III, was insistent on keeping up a presence of up to 10,000 soldiers to defend the colonies from further aggression. This would require expenditures of upwards to £255,000 pounds per year, or $30 million in present day US dollars. The reasoning was not purely based around the assessment of foreign threats (and indeed, with France having been vanquished in North America, there was very little in the way of threats at all); there was indeed a political component, as demobilizing the British army in North America would put 1,500 officers out of work – many of whom were well connected to parliament. The national debt on the whole had also nearly quadrupled during the course of the war, with the British government owning £130,000,000 pounds to creditors.
This required London to take more action, resulting in the Stamp Act of 1765 being passed by Parliament around the same time as the Quartering Act. Lord Bute’s inability to come up with a solution for the Empire’s financial woes resulted in the failure of his government, and Lord Grenville soon replaced him as the Prime Minister. Bute’s successor would prove to be considerably more aggressive in his pursuit of finding a solution, resulting in the Stamp Act being pushed through parliament over the loud objections of the colonies. The legislation mandated that a tax on paper be implemented, with all paper sold in the colonies being required to be marked with a certain stamp to confirm that the tax had been paid. Lawyers and journalists were required to pay an even higher tax, with the intention of restricting the growth of the colony’s professional class in order to keep North America economically subservient to Britain.
The Stamp Act proved to be almost as unpopular as the Quartering Act, and there was immediate resistance to it in the colonies. The newspapers decried “taxation without representation” and the new influx of tax collectors to the colonies were met with open hostility. Shortly before the Stamp Act had been passed, Pennsylvania’s chief colonial agent in London, Benjamin Franklin, led a delegation of American leaders to meet privately with Grenville to air their concerns. The meeting was unsuccessful for Franklin and his delegation, and Grenville moved forward to ensure that tax was levied. When the King witnessed the growing discontent in the colonies due to this measure in conjunction with his already strong dislike of Grenville, he decided that he too would seek out the counsel of Franklin. And so, in June of 1765, Benjamin Franklin – clad in a humble frock coat – was called to Saint James Palace for an audience with King George III.
It was here that a novel idea found its way to the King; perhaps, argued Franklin before the monarch, the King could appoint a member of his immediate family to oversee the administration of the colonies. The plan, which was born out of a modified version of his early proposal, the Albany Plan of Union, would serve to both strengthen ties between the new and old worlds while simultaneously preserving the fragile and threatened autonomy of the colonies. It took only a few more meetings for Franklin to finally persuade King George to issue the Proclamation of 1765, which was issued in September of 1765 to great excitement in the colonies.
Chapter IV: The Proclamation of 1765 and the Townshend Acts.
The Proclamation of 1765 was issued on September 10th, 1765 by King George III, stunning parliament and bewildering his Prime Minister, who privately threatened to resign in the wake of the monarch’s unilateral action. The decree announced the appointment of the King’s younger brother, the 26 year old Prince Edward Augustus, Duke of York and Albany, to the position of Proprietor of the Continental Crown Lands. This would give the Duke executive control of the colonies, subservient only to the will of King George himself. The proclamation also called for “a grand council” to be convened to serve as an advisory body to the Duke, though no explicit powers were granted to this legislative artery.
In the colonies, there was some relief – with the tradition of the constitutional monarchy now firmly rooted in Great Britain, it was hoped that the “Grand Council” would dominate the politics of the region in the same manner as the Parliament of Britain did. While the more radical elements of the colonial resistance continued to demand representation in parliament, the proclamation largely succeeded overall in satisfying the colonial malcontents.
A notable opponent of the Proclamation was the Duke himself, who was revolted at the prospect of leaving his life in London behind for the New World. Forced by circumstance to keep his objections private, he desperately lobbied the King to reconsider the appointment. But the King’s mind was made up; “there is no other substitute for thine own brethren” wrote the King to the Duke shortly after the appointment shortly before he departed for his new post in the New World. Leaving London in early October, the month long voyage to Philadelphia battered the Duke, who fell ill upon the journey and had not yet completely recovered by the time of his arrival.
His grand entrance to Philadelphia, in which the Governor, the Mayor, and a plethora of important and distinguished dignitaries greeted him in person, was followed by a lavish parade that drew the attention of thousands as curious onlookers watched British royalty at last step foot in their land after a century and a half of immigration and colonization. Awaiting the Duke were quarters fit for a humble King – though the Duke, already accustomed to the austere court of his brother in London, largely found his lodgings on Market Street to be satisfactory for the time being. The three story brick mansion had been built by wealthy widow Mary Lawrence Masters, originally as a gift to her daughter, and was sold almost immediately upon the Duke’s appointment for a hefty sum to the colonial government of Pennsylvania.
By Christmastime, discontent had reasserted itself. The Duke’s arrival did little to change the unpopular taxation policies, and while a number of colonial legislatures had passed resolutions calling for the convening of the proposed “Grand Council,” the Duke took no action to move forward with the plan. In Boston, Philadelphia, and New York, colonial leaders formed Committees of Correspondence to discuss and debate proposed means of resistance to the taxes. Smuggling had become rampant, with the likes of John Hancock and other merchants sneaking in large shipments of sugar and paper, though the illegality of this and the severe punishments discouraged colonial leaders from embracing this particular form of resistance. Instead, it was decided that a boycott would be arranged of British sugar and paper, which commenced shortly after the New Year across the colonies. It would prove to be a highly effective action, as the pinch was quickly felt in London, where the economic slowdown following the Seven Years War continued.
In July of the preceding year, Lord Grenville had been dismissed as Prime Minister due to his weak support in Parliament and acrimonious relationship with the King. Replaced by the Marquis of Rockingham, who was in general more reform minded and open to the colonist’s plight, the fall of Grenville’s government marked a seminal moment of change and reignited the optimism of the growing patriot movement in the New World. Rockingham worked quickly to smooth over the growing unpopularity of Parliament in the New World. The Declaratory Acts were adopted by parliament in the aftermath of Rockingham’s ascension to office, which repealed the Stamp Act, reduced the sugar tax, but most importantly, also formally ascertained Parliament’s jurisdiction over the American colonies. The reaction to this in the colonies was decidedly mixed; the most radical elements grew even more radical while the more moderate elements of the populace, which constituted a majority, found the new government in London to be docile and more representative and inclusive than governments past.
Yet Rockingham’s government proved to be short-lived; dissent in the cabinet drove him from office in July of 1766, to be replaced by William Pitt the Elder, the Earl of Chatham. Pitt, who had served as the paramount leader of Britain during the Seven Years War despite not holding the title of Prime Minister, was sympathetic to the American’s plight like his predecessor. Charles Townsend, the Chancellor to Pitt and a former member of the Board of Trade, became the primary architect of British economic policy as a result of this shift of power. Recognizing the unpopularity of legislation such as the Sugar Act, the new Chancellor sought to avoid direct taxation in favor of indirect taxation. To make up for Britain’s revenue woes, the Revenue Act of 1767 was adopted by parliament. This implemented taxation on imports to the colonies on goods such as paper, paint, lead, glass, and tea, all goods that had to be imported from Britain. The act also closed the colonial market to foreign imports of these products, giving Britain’s fledgling industrial sector a monopoly over America’s markets. Though the taxes were lower than those imposed by the Sugar Act, colonial leaders bulked; “a tax is a tax” declared Samuel Adams, while John Dickinson elegantly wrote in a series of essays entitled “Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania” that the tax should be resisted and warned against complacency in light of the lower taxes.
Afterwards, Townsend and Pitt ushered the Commissioners of Customs Act of 1767 through the House of Commons. This act’s intent was to create a bureaucratic entity entitled the American Board of Customs Commissioners, which was based in Boston. Though London had hoped the Board would be effective in collecting taxes and halting criminal activity such as smuggling, it was rife with patronage and corruption and was widely distrusted in the colonies as an institution. Worse yet was Townsend’s transparent misappropriation of the revenue generated by the Revenue Act of 1767; though he had sold the plan to the Prime Minister as a means to pay off Britain’s war debt, it only generated £40,000 a year and most of this money was spent on the salaries of British military officers, officials, and judges in the colonies to ensure their loyalty to London.
When the Board of Custom’s Commissioners proved to be incompetent at reducing smuggling, Townsend sought to bind the colonies hands by circumstance. At the same time, the British East India Company began to flounder and was in desperate need of some form of financial rescue that the British government simply couldn’t afford. To resolve this crisis, the Chancellor pushed the Tea Act through the House, which granted the East India Company the exclusive right to export tea to the colonies. Though most Americans did not mind the bailout of the East India Company due to the quality of their product (tea produced in Bengal was widely thought to be superior in taste to the tea produced in Brazil), it also was a clear attempt to legitimize and enshrine the Townsend Acts into law. As a result, patriot groups like the Sons of Liberty argued in favor of buying lower quality smuggled tea due to the perceived illegitimacy of the East India Company’s monopoly.
As 1768 turned to 1769, with the Seven Years War now nearly seven years in the past, America teetered on the edge of anarchy as colonists flocked towards the Sons of Liberty. Their resistance efforts became increasingly violent as they went after revenue agents and tax collectors, often tarring and feathering them in process. In the spring of 1770, a protest in Boston turned particularly troublesome after a few of the most radical voices inspired them to march on Governor Thomas Hutchison’s palatial residence, where a riot ensued. The mansion was ransacked and the Governor and his family barely escaped with their lives. British troops were deployed to Boston in the aftermath of this incident as tensions approached their boiling point.
Chapter V: The Boston Massacre and the First Continental Congress.
The deployment of British regulars to Boston was the peak of the North American troubles; their presence in the city required the construction of expensive barracks at Castle William, and in the interim, they were reduced to exercising their right to compel residents to quarter their troops in their homes. British soldiers were regularly harassed or verbally abused in the streets, and children were keen on hurling snowballs at the hated “occupiers” (as the patriot press had taken to calling them). Tensions brewed over the summer of 1770, finally reaching their boiling point on March 5th.
A light snow fell over Boston as a crowd of soldiers stood guard at the Customs House when a small gaggle of patriots arrived and began their usual routine of taunts; having none of it, a soldier struck one of the men over the head with the butt of his musket, attracting an even larger, more boisterous crowd. The angered patriots began pelting the men with rocks and snowballs, and they responded in an event that remains murky in the eyes of history by opening fire on the mob, killing five people and injuring a dozen more. The event, immortalized as the Boston Massacre, marked a turning point in American history. The soldiers involved were eventually tried for manslaughter, with lawyer John Adams – himself a witness to the slaughter – taking up the unpopular position as their legal counsel.
When word reached Philadelphia, the Duke of York and Albany was horrified; having spent the last five years in leisurely boredom, the custodian of the Continental Crown Lands for the first time decided to exercise his rights, and issued a decree at last assembling “the Grand Council” that was loosely authorized by King George III with the Proclamation of 1765. With no clear instructions laid out in the Proclamation, the Duke thus requested each colonial legislature send a delegation to Philadelphia to attend a gathering that would become the First Continental Congress.
