The topic of this lecture is revolution, the American Revolution, one of the most important
events in American history, possibly of world history.
So far in this class we have concentrated on the natural hardships faced by the colonists
and most especially by the difficulties that they faced from British mercantilism.
The reality however is that the colonists were remarkably successful, resourceful and prosperous.
The population was growing, people were living longer, they were more likely to own their
own land than anywhere else in the world.
They built houses, they built towns, they built cities, they established trade routes
and they achieved a high standard of living by the mid 1750s. Americans had the third largest merchant fleet in the world and it was a relatively peaceful time living under the protection of the British Empire and they possessed the legal framework in their society that protected their property rights and they had the rights of English citizens which were cherished and the envy of the people of the world.
of the World.
Given that British mercantilist policies were hard to enforce or did not really harm the
colonists that much, it is puzzling to many why Americans ever revolted in the first place.
After all, taxes were low, interference was low, and the protection provided by the British
with the parliament under the control of the Pelhamite Whigs such as the Duke of Newcastle,
Henry Pelham himself and Robert Walpole, the American colonies were governed under a policy
of what is referred to as salutary neglect.
They were largely left alone except when they did something stupid or if they were engaging
in self-destructive activities such as inflation, when one colony started inflating and another
colony would inflate and there would just be more and more competitive inflation of
one colony against the other, the crown would step in or the parliament would step in and
Pass a Law, basically saying you're not allowed to print money anymore.
So under that kind of system where they were being left alone except in cases where they
were doing something that was self-destructive, especially between 1720 and 1750, the colonies
were de facto independent or they were virtually independent.
They were essentially governing themselves.
So given the realities of the situation, we really do need to answer the question, why
did the colonists revolt?
Well first of all, wars and revolutions are political acts, and these political acts are
usually triggered by other political acts.
However, the reasons and the results of these political acts ultimately do have economic
motivations behind them.
Therefore to understand these political acts it is vital to understand the economic motivations
that lie behind them.
So I want to start here first of all looking at the old colonial policy where the colonies
were established at a time when the monarchy in Great Britain was really dominant.
The colonists were English citizens.
They had English rights and they enjoyed the English system of property, law and justice.
And of course that's a very fundamental background for any kind of economic activity and economic
growth to take hold.
You have to have the right to your property, the access to a legal system which provides
Under the old colonial policy, the colonists really shared power with the Crown, and did
much of the governing of the colonies themselves.
The colonists controlled the lower house of government, including legislation involving
the purse strings or things of the nature of taxes and expenditures.
The lower house, and they had different names, but basically similar to our House of Representatives
or the British House of Commons, these are branches of the government that are elected
Directly by the People, Whereas the Crown or the King appointed the Governor of the
Colonies, and of course all the states have governors now, but the King appointed the
Governor and most of the time the appointees were sympathetic to the wishes of the colonists.
The upper house was also appointed by the king or the crown, but they were usually appointed
people who were the colonists themselves.
During this period, government was small.
The British took care of the national defense.
They provided the soldiers and the ships.
Taxes were low.
The Americans were taxed roughly 20 to 25 percent of what English citizens in Great
Britain were taxed.
The British Empire cost a lot of money to run.
Government was much bigger in Britain and the cost of maintaining that empire fell heavily
on the British citizens.
The colonists had a much smaller government and much lower taxes.
The Navigation Acts, which we've discussed, were generally considered reasonable for most
of this period.
The colonists were exempt from restrictions on building ships.
They were exempt from being involved with the trade between the colonies and England.
They were also given special exemptions from the Navigation Acts, such as the right to
export rice directly to Southern Europe.
So that in this case it was, if the colonists had to export rice to Great Britain and then
and have it re-exported to Southern Europe.
Their rice wouldn't have been a competitive product and it wouldn't have sold, but the
colonists got a special exemption so they could ship the rice directly from the colonies
to the wholesale buyers in Southern Europe.
So by that exemption, their rice business was able to thrive, otherwise it would have
been stymied.
The Navigation Acts were not, therefore, a major distortion for the colonial economy.
The colonists didn't have many comparative advantages in manufacturing anyways.
Their comparative advantage was almost entirely in terms of the production of agricultural
The Colonists would have traded with Britain, even if there were no Navigation Acts.
They were English citizens, they had ties to England.
England was very close in terms of Europe to the colonies, so they would have traded
a great deal with England even if there were no Navigation Acts.
And even with all that, if there were a stringent aspect of the Navigation Acts or any real
of British policy, or of simply resorting to manufacturing their own goods rather than
buying from the British.
So if British mercantilist policy was too stringent, they would just simply ignore it.
Okay, now as we get further into the colonial period and closer to the revolution, we encounter
after a new colonial policy, which is where England is less under the control of the monarch
or the king or the crown and more under the control of democracy or the parliament.
The king controlled England when the colonies were founded, but there was a transfer of
power from the crown to the parliament around 1690.
Of course, as I said, the English people were heavily taxed.
They were gaining opposition to the cost of this empire building by Great Britain.
And so there was a lot of infighting and ultimately a transfer of power from the Crown to Parliament.
The parliament had, instead of the king's ministers, the parliament had a privy council
which was charged with reviewing all legislation passed in the colonies and this privy council
would of course delay the legislation from going into effect because they had to review
it and they could extend that delay if they wanted to and they could even veto laws that
In the old colonial policy, the king answered to all English subjects.
The king viewed all people living under his realm to be his subjects, so he was interested
in all of their interests.
But the Parliament only answered to the voters in England itself.
We didn't have any representatives in Parliament, so Parliament's focus was more on the English
people themselves rather than the colonists.
And now Parliament was in charge of passing laws on the colonies, and they had a bureaucratic
structure to monitor and enforce their will.
government under certain administrations wanted very strict enforcement of its will and its
officials often resorted to very punitive actions precisely at the wrong place and time.
And this change in the monitoring structure of the colonies caused the atmosphere to change
Change from one of freedom in the colony to one of bitterness.
There's a building process in this change in atmosphere and there's a series of events.
It's a rolling series of British actions, American reactions.
What I'm going to do is to fold up all of these events and this legislation into what's
categorizes the three crises leading up to the American Revolution.
The first crises centers around the French and Indian War, or what was called the Seven
Years War in Europe.
In this war, where the British were able to defeat the French and Indian combination in
the West, and where Britain gained control of the area west of the Appalachians, they
They gained control of Canada and also of Florida, a major expansion of the British
Empire.
But this was seen by the British as an act of protecting the colonies.
But the colonists, who were often soldiers and people who helped the British during the
in the war, saw it as them helping the British protect the Empire.
So it was a victory but both the British government and the American colonists saw it as sort
of as their victory and they wanted some kind of payoff and the Americans wanted the payoff
of Being Able to Move into the Western Lands as New Settlements of Fertile Land Areas to Settle
The British wanted to lower the cost of their defense.
The military cost of the empire was large, growing, and the British citizens were bitter about all that.
and so in order to limit the cost of defense the British wanted to limit
settlers from going into the land west of the Appalachian Mountains so they had
a proclamation line of 1763 along the Appalachian Mountains which would prevent
settlement west of the mountains the Ohio River Valley for example and by
by preventing new settlements that meant that they wouldn't have to build forts and station
troops to the west.
So that would reduce their cost.
And they also wanted to increase revenues by taxing the colonists.
And so they're really stepping in here.
In 1764, they passed the Sugar Act, which taxed non-British sugar from the West Indies.
So if Americans wanted to buy French sugar and import it into the colonies in order to
make rum and also for use of sugar itself, they would have to pay a higher tax and they
were getting a good deal from the French in terms of buying sugar from the French sugar
colonies which were more efficient than the British at this time.
And so by adding the tax, it meant that Americans were going to pay a higher price of sugar,
which of course we still do today.
The Sugar Act also added to the list of goods Americans could not trade overseas and it
increased the burdens of tariffs.
In 1765, the parliament passed the Stamp Act, the famous Stamp Act.
This was a revenue tax that required a stamp be placed on all paper documents.
So if you wanted a will or a contract drawn up, you would have to buy a particular stamp
and have it affixed to that document or otherwise you could supposedly get in trouble.
But you also had to have stamps on newspapers and on playing cards, virtually any kind of
paper document you had to have a stamp and you had to pay for the stamp with gold or
for Silver Coins and that money was sent back to Great Britain.
This infuriated the colonists like the Sugar Act. Benjamin Franklin said that this was
an invalid tax because it was an internal tax. Both English citizens and American colonists
Americans and American columnists viewed internal taxes as illegitimate.
That the Crown, especially from England, would place an internal tax and internal taxes would
be on the buying and selling of goods or a tax on labor, like the income tax, they viewed
that as an illegitimate tax and the only kind of taxes that the government was able
to raise was an external tax where the government put a tax on imports or exports so the government
was protecting the border so they were allowed to tax at the border in order to provide for
that defense but internal taxes were basically off limits unless it was a special situation
For more money needed to be raised for emergency purposes, you could impose temporary internal
taxes.
But other than that, people didn't like this idea.
Well, the British didn't like Franklin's argument either.
But there was also the famous no taxation without representation argument that the colonists
raised.
After all, Americans were being taxed and they had no say so in it.
The history of the colonies had been that American colonies themselves and the lower
house of the colonial government would impose the taxes.
They would vote on it and the representatives of the people would vote on those taxes.
So there was a long standing tradition in England and in the colonies that if you were
going to be taxed you would have representation and the colonists were clearly not represented
in the Stamp Act or the Sugar Act. They were being taxed by somebody else's representatives.
This Stamp Act really irked professions like lawyers, editors, writers and printers because
all of their production basically was being taxed. Most importantly, these are the type
of People, lawyers, editors, writers, printers, who were very important in organizing a group
and a movement organizing in opposition to the tax.
So in response to that, Americans boycotted English goods so that they formed official
boycotts, very successful in most of the colonies, not all, but the fact that Americans weren't
The Colonists made their own houses and they made their own food and they grew their own
food.
When it came to bread and beer and rum and meat, vegetables, they were producing all
of their own stuff.
They could put off the buying of English goods, but the English merchants weren't too happy
about that.
So parliament ultimately backed down and reduced or eliminated the negative aspects of both
The Second Crisis Follows Directly on the Heels of the First World War
The First Crisis, and it consists of things like the Quartering Act of 1765, and you'll
all note that this is very much related to the Third Amendment to the Constitution, the
Third Bill of Rights, which prevents the quartering of soldiers in private homes.
We think to ourselves, what's up with that?
When does that ever occur?
It occurred back just prior to the American Revolution where Britain required the colonies
to pay for the upkeep of all the soldiers stationed in the colony.
So they had to pay for the food, clothing and shelter of British soldiers and this often
meant that British soldiers were allowed to stay in inns and saloons, public buildings
and even private houses.
And so this is something that the colonies were upset about.
More troops began being stationed in the colonies, both because of the opposition and because
the law basically said, you know, if you ship some soldiers over to the American colonies,
you don't have to pay for them.
So, you know, you see a natural tendency for the British to want to send more soldiers
because of the the opposition that Americans had been to their policy as
well as the fact that we are forcing them to pay for the cost and also the
Townsend duties which in 1767 raised the taxes on imports and a wide variety of
goods and they also greatly increased enforcement with more bureaucrats an
An Army of Bureaucrats, New Courts with Bigger Budgets to Officiate Over Lawbreakers, and
also allowing the issue of search warrants, of course another topic that's fairly timely,
but easier access to search warrants so that British officials could search private homes,
Private Businesses, warehouses for the possibility of illegally imported goods or goods that
hadn't been taxed. Americans rebelled here with both boycotts and mob violence. For example,
They would kidnap a British official or a customs agent of the British government and
lock them up in some building and a ship would come into harbor, the goods would be offloaded,
they would be sent either to a warehouse or to the interior of the country and once the
ship was safely out of sight, the customs official would be released.
This was something the British didn't appreciate.
More soldiers were brought in to protect the agents.
The soldiers were, of course, harassed.
They were not welcome.
Ultimately, this led to the Boston Massacre in 1770, where a group of soldiers who were
marching through Boston were being heckled and rotten tomatoes were being thrown at them
and so on and so forth.
and the British soldiers opened fire on this unarmed mob of town citizens and several of
them were shot, many of them were injured and a couple of them actually died during
this massacre and of course as a result of all of this opposition of the new boycotts
against British Goods, the harassing of the soldiers, the harassing of the customs officials,
the British again backed down because English merchants had to sell it to the American market
or go bankrupt.
So once again, the Americans were successful with not open revolution but of these voluntary
Boycotts of British Goods and the heckling of the soldiers and so on and so forth to
basically get parliament to back down.
And we'll bring this lecture to a close, but you can see we're building to this process
where parliament is acting more and more belligerent to the colonies.
We're trying to figure out a way to start exploiting these colonies.
Under the old parliaments and the crown, the colonies were able to survive through this
process of salutary neglect and other ways of evading the negative effects of British
mercantilism.
But after 1750, as we get into the 1760s, you see that parliament is trying to somehow
exploit the colonies for additional revenues.
And we'll pick it up with a third crisis in the Boston Tea Party in the next lecture.