Colonial Unrest Lecture Notes
The Navigation Acts:
In colonizing North American, England followed no “master plan.” The Southern colonies were founded mostly by profit-motivated companies or individuals. The New England colonies, in contrast, were begun mainly for religious purposes. Idealism was the inspiration for two of the most interesting colonial experiments – Pennsylvania and Georgia. William Penn, the devout Quaker who founded Pennsylvania in 1682, hoped to build a colony where people would be “as free and happy as they could be.” To that end, he promised those who came to his colony that “you shall be governed by laws of your own making.” Georgia was created by another idealist, James Oglethorpe, for equally humanitarian reasons. Deeply moved by the plight of men and women who were locked away in appalling English prisons for crimes no worse than being in debt, Oglethorpe proposed founding Georgia as a refuge for the poor. “England will grow rich,” he promised backers of his plan, “by sending her poor abroad.”
During the early years of settlement, England largely ignored the colonies. When Charles II became king of England in 1660, however, he insisted that “distance of place” should not remove the colonies from England power. During his rule, England enacted a series of laws called the Navigation Acts to control colonial trade.
Under the Navigation Acts, the colonists were allowed to export their primary crops and raw materials only to England or to other English colonies. The colonists were also required to import all their manufactured goods from England alone. All goods flowing into or out of the colonies had to be carried in English or colonial ships. The purpose of these laws was to create a self-sufficient empire with England as the manufacturing center and the colonies serving as producers of raw materials and as markets for English manufactured goods.
For a time the colonies were comfortable with this organization of England’s empire. The system of trade set up by the Navigation Acts worked reasonably well for the Southern Colonies. Southern planters shipped their tobacco, rice, and indigo directly from their riverside plantations to England for sale. The Middle Colonies also thrived under this system, which was known as surplus farming or planting ‘cash crops’. This fertile area produced a surplus of grain that was shipped to English sugar planters in the West Indies to feed their slaves. This system also served the interest of English merchants and factory owners. Almost all of the American colonists’ belongings came from England – their clothing, dishes, furniture, tools, etc.
The New England colonies did not fit well into the trade system created by the Navigation Acts. The thin soils of this region produced no crops for export (known as subsistence farming). Fortunately for New Englanders, the trade laws were seldom enforced with much vigor. The wealth of New England was based on fishing, shipbuilding, and trade, much of it illegal. Smuggling goods to and from countries other than England became a respected profession among the descendants of Puritans.
Politics and Government in the American Colonies:
When colonists left England to settle in America, they took with them their beliefs about the rights of an English citizen. These rights, which has been won in a long series of battles between the English people and their monarchs, included the right to be tried by a jury when accused of a crime, the right to petition the government, and the right to live under laws approved by England’s legislature, the lawmaking body known as Parliament. The founders of colonies quickly discovered that they had to guarantee these same rights in America if they wanted to attract colonists. As Captain John Smith, who led the tiny settlement of Jamestown through its hardest times, explained to Virginia’s founders, “No man will go from [England] to have less freedom [in America].
In 1618 the Virginia colonists were granted their full rights as English citizens, including the right to elect their own legislative assembly. This assembly, the House of Burgesses, was the first elected law-making body in the Americas. The House of Burgesses dealt with issues ranging from how much should be planted or how much should be charged for their tobacco, to what to do about the growing friction between Virginia’s colonists and Native Americans.
Self-government also quickly took root in New England. Across New England people gathered at village meeting houses each month to deal with such questions as: What should villagers pay in taxes to support a school? Should pigs be allowed to roam freely about the village or penned up? Who should the new schoolmaster be? Anyone could speak at one of these town meetings before the men of the village voted on the issue. In their assemblies and town meetings, the colonists were practicing democracy, or government by the people. Colonists found they could run their everyday affairs quite well little help from a distant monarch or government officials.
By 1750 each of the 13 British colonies had its own elected assembly. The assembly shared power with a governor, usually an official appointed by the Crown (the British monarch and his or her government). A few of these appointees were qualified to run colony. Most, however, were well-connected but incompetent political hacks. American complained bitterly about the military has-beens, unbalanced youths, broken-down rakes, and bankrupt debtors who were sent across the Atlantic to govern the colonies.
In theory, the governor had considerable power, including the power to veto laws passed by the assembly. When he issued a royal instruction in the name of the King, the assembly was supposed to obey. If the assembly did not, the governor had the power to get rid of the assembly. Over the years, however, colonial assemblies found they could use their power over the purse to control most governors. One method was to refuse to pay the salary of a difficult official. “Let us keep the dogs poor,” reasoned one New Jersey assemblyman, “and we’ll make them do what we please.” Most governors gave into this sort of fiscal blackmail, but not all. One stubborn governor of North Carolina ran that colony for 11 years without being paid. Another approach was for the assembly to refuse to fund a governor’s favorite project, unless he approved the assembly’s laws. The colonists were so accustomed to running their own affairs that by 1750 they looked on royal instructions as little more than guidelines set down by the King for a governor.
The French and Indian War:
In the struggle for North America, the rivalry between Britain and France was particularly intense. By the 1750s the center of the colonial conflict was the lush and fertile Ohio River Valley. Both France and Britain claimed this region and viewed it as essential to their colonial expansion. When the governor of Virginia heard in 1753 that French troops were building forts in the Ohio Valley, he sent a young surveyor named George Washington west across the Appalachians to warn the French that they were trespassing on land owned by Great Britain. Washington delivered the message, but the French were not about to leave the region.
A year later Washington returned to the Ohio Valley with a force of 150 Virginia militiamen. His orders were to build a fort where the Allegheny and Monongahela Rivers meet to form the Ohio River. The French, however, had arrived first and built Fort Duquense on this strategic site, later to become the city of Pittsburgh. Not far from the fort, the Virginians met and defeated a small force of French soldiers. Washington and his soldiers were soon surrounded by 600 French troops. In desperation, the Virginians threw together a log stockade aptly named Fort Necessity. For 10 hours they traded gunfire with the French in a driving rain. By nighttime, with his powder wet and 100 of his men dead or wounded, Washington was forced to surrender. The young Virginian had lost more than a battle at Fort Necessity. For months the Native Americans of the Ohio Valley had been watching the growing conflict between the French and the English, unsure of which side to support. Now the choice was clear. They would ally themselves with the winning side, the French.
The bullets that whistled through the Ohio River Valley in 1754 were the first shots of a conflict the Americans called the French and Indian War, named after their two adversaries. From America, the fighting spread to Europe and then to the West Indies, Africa, and Asia. The fighting was most intense in Europe, where competing powers fought and bled each other into exhaustion.
The French and Indian War began badly for Britain, with huge losses in the first stages of the war. (Thanks in part to the bright red uniforms of the British army). In 1759, however, the tide began to turn in Britain’s favor, especially with the fall of Quebec. The war would continue for another three years, before the war officially ended with the signing of the Treaty of Paris. In this treaty, France agreed to give up its claim both to Canada and to the Mississippi River Valley, a region the French called Louisiana. Britain took over Canada as well as the part of Louisiana that lay east of the Mississippi River. France gave Spain all of Louisiana west of the Mississippi.
The Proclamation of 1763:
Great Britain emerged from the war as the most powerful nation in the world. Its empire spanned the globe, inspiring the saying that the “sun never set on the British Empire.” With this enlarged empire came new problems. One was how to keep peace with the Native Americans of the Ohio Valley. Most of the Native Americans of this region had fought with the French and still remained loyal to their defeated allies. They also harbored resentment against British fur traders who, the Native Americans claimed, had corrupted their people with rum and cheated them out of their furs. Most of all, they feared that the trickle of British colonists coming over the mountains into their lands would soon become a flood.
In 1763 an Ottawa chief named Pontiac organized an attack on the British fort of Detroit. At the same time, Delawares, Shawnees, and Senecas captured most of the other British outposts in the Ohio Valley. The Native Americans also attacked backcountry settlements in Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Virginia, killing about 2000 colonists. One British general was so angered by Pontiac’s conspiracy that he suggest spreading smallpox among the warring tribes by giving them disease-infected blankets. This idea was rejected for fear of infecting British troops as well. The uprising was finally put down by a mixed force of British and colonial troops.
The unrest in Ohio Valley forced Britain to consider the future of the region. In 1763 the government issued a proclamation that set the Ohio Valley aside as an Indian reservation. To keep settlers out of this reserved land, the proclamation drew a line along the crest of the Appalachians beyond which colonists could not pass.
The Proclamation of 1763 infuriated colonists of every sort. Land-hungry settlers who were preparing to trek west across the mountains were dismayed by this new restriction. Land speculators who had invested in western land claims now feared their investments were worthless. Colonists who had supported the war effort in order to get rid of the French and open up new territory to British expansion felt betrayed. After helping to win the war, they were now being denied the fruits of their victory.
In order to enforce the Proclamation of 1763 and to keep peace between the colonists and Native Americans, the British government planned to station a permanent army of 10,000 soldiers in America. The only problem with this plan, from a British point of view, was how to pay for the cost of keeping such a large force in America. The French and Indian War had drained the British treasury. Britain emerged from the war with a huge debt of 140,000,000 pounds, about half of it incurred defending the American colonies. To repay this debt, King George III had already raised taxes in Britain so high that taxpayers were rioting in protest.
To British officials it seemed only sensible that the American colonists be asked to pay at least part of the cost of their own defense. These officials knew, however, that asking the colonial assemblies to vote funds for this purpose was next to useless. During the war, the colonial assemblies had been notoriously reluctant to vote money for war supplies or to raise troops. As the British commander-in-chief in America noted, “it is the constant study of every province here to throw every expense on the Crown and bear no part of the expense of this war themselves.”
Only when the British government promised to reimburse the colonies for their war expenditures did the colonial assemblies loosen their purse strings. Now that the war was over, British officials were certain that the colonial assemblies would be even less willing to vote money for their general defense. Some other way of getting money out of the colonies would have to be found.
The colonists were very uncomfortable with the plan to keep a standing army of British troops in America. They pointed out that no such army had been maintained in America while the French occupied Canada and Louisiana. Why then, they asked, was such a force needed now? Parents worried that their children would pick up spendthrift ways and fashionable vices from the rakes and wastrels who were supposed to fill the British army. Some Americans believed Britain wanted troops in the colonies not for defense, but rather to cram unpopular acts of Parliament down the colonists’ throats. One Marylander predicted that the soldiers would be “employed in the national service of cropping ears and slitting the nostrils” of colonists who disobeyed royal instructions. But most of all, the colonists objects to the plan to keep a large British force in America because they expected they would be forced to pay for the troops’ support.
As discontent grew in the colonies, the stage was set for yet another struggle for control of Britain’s North American empire. This time the conflict would not be with a rival nation such as France or Spain, but with the colonists themselves. These initial feelings of unrest were the first step towards what would become the most famous revolution in world history.
