American Revolution

THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION, as an intellectual, social, political, and military event, can be understood as having begun in 1763 and ended with the inauguration of George Washington as the first president under the federal Constitution in 1789. Although it had extensive democratizing effects, those were largely unanticipated and unintended; the Revolution should be understood as essentially conservative in nature.

In the main, the Revolution arose out of the British government's attempts to govern its enormous empire more rationally, and to spread its burdens more equitably, after the Seven Years' War. The British victory in that first world war, with the acquisition of an enormous amount of New World territory from France, came at a substantial price. From the point of view of cash-strapped Britons, one logical response loomed: to tax the colonists more. In addition, the newly won territories would be governed on liberal lines and an effort would be made to head off further difficulties with the American Indians.

Colonists in 13 of Britain's 26 New World colonies resisted and/or resented attempts to implement these new policies. Thus, for example, Pontiac's Rebellion in 1763 led to the establishment of a western boundary to colonial expansion at the peaks of the Appalachian Mountains. Members of elites in all the mainland colonies, who had invested in land titles in areas now closed to them indefinitely, lamented this policy. Beginning with the Sugar Act of 1764, Parliament attempted to tax the colonists.

From the beginning, colonists believed that the new vector of British policy deprived them of two of their most significant rights: the right to be taxed only by their own representatives and the right to trial by jury. In the same year, the Currency Act extended the prohibition on New England legislatures' printing of legal tender notes to all of the North American colonies. Protests against these measures tended to stress Britons' inherited rights, not to stake out some ideal argument for the perfection of society. James Otis's 1764 pamphlet, The Rights of the British Colonies Asserted and Proved, typified colonial answers to the new departure of the British government in insisting that the colonists had brought with them to North America all of the rights of Englishmen. Patrick Henry, in his first term as a burgess, sponsored resolutions making similar claims through the Virginia General Assembly in 1765. These arguments against British policy were conservative in that they attempted to preserve the colonial assemblies' traditional prerogatives.

The potential explosiveness of colonial resistance to British policy received its first illustration in the wake of the Stamp Act, which Parliament adopted March 22, 1765. In that law, Parliament undertook to tax various types of products in the colonies, including legal paper, newsprint, playing cards, dice, and a number of other items and types of documents. Parliament dispatched paper to all of the colonies and named stamp agents throughout its New World empire, but the Stamp Act proved to be a revenue loser. Through physical intimidation by groups such as Samuel Adams's Boston “Sons of Liberty,” the colonists forced stamp agents to resign in most colonies without the distribution of any stamped paper; the act's costs far exceeded the revenue it yielded. In the end, Parliament saw the futility of its measure and repealed it.

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