The French, the Indians, and the Americans

In 1763, a worldwide imperial conflict called the Seven Years' War ended in resounding victory for the British Empire, which smashed its European rivals to emerge from the conflict as one of the largest and most powerful empires in world history.

North America had been just one of many fronts in the global Seven Years' War, which American colonists usually called the French and Indian War, in honor of their enemies in the conflict. In the end, the French and their Native American allies fell to British and colonial forces, leaving England officially in control of the whole part of North America east of the Mississippi River and north of Florida.

Of course, the several hundred thousand Native Americans who inhabited the continent wouldn't have seen it that way. But for Englishmen everywhere, the war's end was a time of triumph and liberty. Englishmen enjoyed more rights and freedoms than the subjects of any other world empire at the time. The colonists reveled in the victory they'd helped the mother country to achieve

Colonists in 1763 would have thought the very idea of independence unthinkable, and probably downright mad.

Who could have foreseen that within just two years, angry mobs of Americans would attack the private residences of colonial officials?

Or that within five years, colonial leaders would call for a boycott of British goods?

Or that within seven years, five colonists would lie dead on Boston Common, shot down by British troops?

While Britain may have been especially powerful after the French and Indian War, they were also quite broke.

Imperial wars waged on multiple continents over a period of several years were very expensive endeavors. At war's end, the British sought to recoup some of their costs from the Americans, who'd certainly benefited from the protection of British soldiers and the expansion of the realm westward.

So, England issued the Proclamation of 1763, prohibiting colonists from settling west of the Appalachian Mountains, in order to avoid potentially costly and protracted frontier wars between settlers and Native Americans. This, of course, angered white settlers who'd already pushed into the backcountry of Kentucky and Tennessee, as well as the elite Eastern planters who'd already speculated in the purchase of extensive land claims beyond the Appalachians.

American ire only increased when England went on to pass a series of taxes, designed to enlist the colonies in helping to pay off their share of the war costs.



For 100 years, England had passed laws to regulate colonial trade in the interest of a mercantilist policy designed to ensure that imperial commerce benefited the mother country. These laws supposedly bound American colonists to trade only with English merchants and ship their products only in English vessels, even if the Americans could find better prices through foreign traders.

But until 1763, the imperial government in London had allowed those laws to go largely unenforced, and the colonists had since become accustomed to a sense of self-determination during this period of so-called "salutary neglect."

In short, the British failed to appreciate just what a century of salutary neglect had done. While lawmakers in London believed they were simply enforcing their old laws and applying new ones for the good of the entire empire—including its American subjects—the colonists interpreted the new Parliamentary acts after 1763 very differently.

Colonists felt that these acts were violations of their liberty, unacceptable infringements of their rights as free Englishmen. When British officials tried to take such freedoms away, Americans not only protested, but they began to think and speak of those freedoms as their essential rights.

The Sugar Act

British taxes and regulations on colonial commerce weren't entirely unknown before 1763, but most had gone unenforced due to a combination of Britain's salutary neglect and Americans' ingenuity in bribing, smuggling, or otherwise skirting the rules.

Therefore, when Parliament passed the Sugar Act, it hardly considered such a tax as new or unorthodox. The Molasses Act of 1733 had sought to regulate the same items. It levied high duties of six pence per gallon on molasses, in an effort to shut down the trade between the French Caribbean (where sugar plantations produced the molasses) and New England (where molasses was a principal ingredient for distilleries manufacturing rum).

The 1764 act actually cut those taxes in half, to three pence per gallon. But in contrast to the 1733 act, it also included new safeguards to ensure that it would actually be enforced.

For merchants, this effectively meant a change from no tax to a three pence tax. The act also provided for stronger admiralty courts, where merchants accused of smuggling could be tried without a jury. See, colonial juries were notoriously sympathetic to their fellow Americans.

The ultimate effect was to create anxiety among colonists whose economic livelihoods were substantially threatened by the new—well, newly enforced—taxes and regulations: these were primarily the inhabitants of port towns along the coast.

In 1765, Parliament followed up the Sugar Act with the Stamp Act, a direct British tax on a wide variety of printed materials: everything from playing cards to court documents, land deeds, books, newspapers, and even dice.

Because each of those documents had to contain the official government stamp, colonists had to pay the tax whenever they wanted to purchase any of the printed items. In one sense, the Stamp Act was merely Parliament's attempt to strengthen and enforce the long-ignored Navigation Acts, which had been passed a century earlier to ensure that valuable American exports—like tobacco—would have to travel through English ports.

But in another sense, the Stamp Act marked a departure from all imperial regulations that preceded it, as it was the first time the British sought to gain revenues by taxing colonial commerce directly (an "internal tax") instead of regulating trade (an "external tax"). Some of these revenues were supposed to go toward the cost of stationing British troops in North America, to ensure security and stability.



So, American colonists responded to the Stamp Act with outrage.

They quickly became alarmed at the prospect of a permanent standing army in their midst. Local elites were offended by Parliament's challenge to their own authority. And a large cross-section of Americans who read books or newspapers, played cards or dice, or purchased any of the printed items specified in the Stamp Act, were angered not only by the financial burden incurred but by the principle of the matter: Parliament had directly taxed the colonists without their consent or the consent of their representatives.

Colonists thought of themselves as equals in the British Empire, not subordinates, and they couched their protests in language that invoked the rights of all Englishmen. If they allowed this precedent to stand, the reasoning went, then Parliament could forever run roughshod over them and their rights.

British officials, on the other hand, thought of the colonists as a population subject to Parliamentary authority, and believed that the London government couldn't capitulate without surrendering that authority.



Colonial resistance became violent over the summer of 1765, when a shoemaker named Ebenezer Mackintosh led an angry mob on a building owned by Andrew Oliver, a merchant appointed to enforce the Stamp Act who was also a relative of Massachusetts Lieutenant Governor Thomas Hutchinson. Hutchinson privately opposed the act, but publicly fulfilled his role as a symbol of British authority by helping to disperse the crowd. A few days later, Mackintosh led his fellow Bostonians over to Hutchinson's own house, where they broke down the front door and looted everything in sight, leaving little intact but the bare walls.

Hutchinson and his family, who were eating dinner when the mob approached, just barely got away in time. Mackintosh was subsequently arrested, but then released, thanks to the intervention of prominent craftsmen and merchants—a group known as "the Loyal Nine"—who led the Stamp Act opposition, but hadn't anticipated it would escalate so rapidly.



But not all resistance was violent or threatening. In Virginia, the talented orator Patrick Henry persuaded his colleagues in the House of Burgesses to pass five resolutions that asserted the colonists' rights as Englishmen, including their right to consent to taxation. The more conservative members of the House rescinded the fifth resolve the next day, feeling it went too far by declaring that any entity attempting to assume the power of taxation—other than the General Assembly of Virginia—"has a manifest tendency to destroy British as well as American Freedom."

Though most colonists didn't have the time or luxury to read sophisticated Enlightenment treatises on political philosophy or theories on the rights of man, they understood, viscerally, the actions of Parliament—and subsequently of the king—as a threat to their liberty. That was enough.

In the century of salutary neglect that led up to the end of the French and Indian War, Americans had developed an understanding of their rights and their place in the British empire, and they weren't willing to submit to a different interpretation of who had the ability to tax them.

Through a series of precipitous actions and reactions on both sides of the Atlantic, that initial difference of opinion spiraled into a challenge to monarchical rule itself by 1776. When Parliament offered the colonies a return to the status quo ante bellum on March 16th, 1778—that is, they offered to grant all American demands short of independence—it was too late.

By that time, the American Congress, and most of the American people, were dead set on gaining self-determination.