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Chapter II - Seeds of Rebellion
Seeds of Rebellion 1760 - 1765
Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness were ideals which many citizens of the thirteen colonies fought and died for between the years of 1763 and 1790. Underlying these noble concepts, however, the drive for economic power most strongly motivated colonial rebellion against the encroachments of an increasingly aggressive British empire. Varied interest groups, including planters, merchants, farmers and artisans, banded together, challenged British authority, successfully fought a war for independence, and established the American republic. By 1790 a defeated England had relinquished control the Southern planters and New England merchants who exercised their newly won economic power throughout the colonies.
What circumstances made the colonists revolt at this particular time? Perhaps conditions in England following the French and Indian War led to events which would affect colonists from frontier settlements in the foothills of the Appalachians to the coastal towns of Boston, Philadelphia, New York and Charleston - events which would forever alter the increasingly tense relationship between the empire and its colonies.
King George III, enthroned in 1760, was an ambitious and conscientious ruler determined to restore some of the powers of the vast British empire. Even though most colonists thought of themselves as loyal and patriotic British subjects at the end of the French and Indian War, King George III and members of Parliament considered the rugged settlers to be little more than unruly children, a "heterogenous collection of contentious and uncooperative provincials" who needed the discipline and control of a firm father's hand. The British government first attempted to exercise this control with the Proclamation Line of 1763 which made the headwaters of rivers flowing into the Appalachian Mountains the temporary western boundary for settlement. Supposedly, this boundary would prevent clashes between Indians and the colonists who were forbidden to settle Indian lands until they were granted by treaty. However, many bold colonists presumptuously established settlements west of the proclamation line, ignoring this unenforceable regulation.
Assuming that the simple proclamation of a boundary line had resolved the nagging matter of land squabbles between Indians and colonists, the British turned their attention to a larger and more immediate problem - the huge debt incurred during the French and Indian War which nearly doubled England's national debt from 73 million pounds to 137 million pounds. Since the colonists were virtually untaxed, English land owners bore the heavy burden of taxation. Now it seemed only fair that the colonists should share the excessive taxes required to administer and defend the distant colonies. As a result, England's newly appointed Prime Minister, George Grenville, put into effect an imperial policy designed to reform the irresponsible colonies. He established a permanent military force in the colonies, transferred the regulation of precarious Indian relations from colonial governments to imperial officials and denied colonies the right to issue their own paper money. Also taking effect during this period, the 1764 Sugar Act doubled the amount of tax colonists had to pay for imported molasses. To control the colonists' outrage at the prospect of having to pay twice as much, the act also established the complex political and military structure which would be necessary to enforce collection of duties.
Although eight alarmed colonial legislatures petitioned Parliament to repeal the Sugar Act, neither Grenville nor members of Parliament had any reservations about Great Britain's right to levy taxes on the colonies. Grenville firmly believed that government derived legitimacy from the consent of the people; however, his definition of consent was directly opposite that of the colonists. Americans believed that they should be represented only by men whom they or their "property-holding neighbors" had actually elected. Grenville, however, insisted that because Parliament represented all English subjects wherever they resided, the colonists were adequately represented, and their consent could simply be assumed.
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