The signing of the Treaty of Paris, often called the Peace of Paris, formally ended the French and Indian War and marked the beginning of an era of British dominance outside Europe. Britain gained control of France’s claims in mainland North America east of the Mississippi. Although Britain doubled its colonies, its economy was nearly bankrupted by the cost of the war.

The Proclamation of 1763 “preserved to the said Indians” the lands west of the Appalachian Mountains, forbade white settlement, and restricted commerce with the American Indians. Power over westward expansion was now in the hands of British officials.

To maintain the army and repay war debts, Parliament imposed new duties on colonial trade. The Sugar Act taxed imported wines, coffee, textiles, and indigo and expanded the customs service. The Royal Navy patrolled the coast to search for smugglers, who were tried in special courts without a jury.

James Otis, in The Rights of the British Colonies Asserted and Proved, carried his objection to a specific tax on sugar to a generalized argument in favor of natural rights and the consent of the governed. Otis, whose sister Mercy Otis Warren was also an American propagandist, is credited with coining the phrase “No taxation without representation.”

The Currency Act prohibited colonial governments from issuing paper money and required that all taxes and debts to British merchants be paid in British currency.

Parliament passed the Stamp Act to help pay for British troops stationed in the colonies during the French and Indian War. The act required the colonists to pay a tax, represented by a stamp, on various forms of papers, documents, and playing cards.

Fall, 1765 – Stamp Act Response

• Stamp Act required printed materials use embossed stamped paper on which a tax had been paid considered way to recoup costs of defending colonies in late War. Fiercely resisted as an unlawful tax – no taxation w/o rep – no reps in parliament.

• Response  – “Braintree Instructions,” authored by John Adams as Braintree’s instructions to its representative in the General Court (Sept. 1765), and circulated around the countryside, which articulated the colony’s grievances. 

• Other towns eventually adopted similar “resolves.” (Note time lag) usually as an instruction to the town’s representative to protest/resist the act in the General Court. Look for “resolves”
• Stamp Act repealed March 1766 – may see references to great rejoicing, victory.

Patrick Henry was accused of treason for denouncing the Stamp Act in the Virginia House of Burgesses. Legend has it that Henry declared, “If this be treason, make the most of it!”

Reaction to the Stamp Act ranged from boycotts of British goods to riots and attacks on tax collectors. In this letter, Archibald Hinshelwood, merchant and rising politician from Nova Scotia, describes his impressions of the Stamp Act and of the resulting colonial unrest.

Chancellor of the Exchequer Charles Townshend imposed new duties on imports of glass, lead, paint, paper, and tea in the colonies. Revenue paid the salaries of governors and judges, preventing colonial legislatures from exercising the power of the purse over those officials.

1767-8 Townsend Acts and Responses – Things Heat Up

• Parliament passed a series of acts placing duties on imported paper, paint, lead, glass, and tea. 

• Samuel Adams authored a “Circular Letter” from Boston to Mass. towns and to the other colonies. It laid out grievances and sought input from other assemblies.

• Look for responses supporting the “Boston Letter” or resolves to encourage local manufacturing (to replace dutied items)

June-July 1768 British Response to Massachusetts Circular Letter – ultimatum to Mass. General Court: rescind letter or be dissolved. Ninety-two representatives (later to be honored as “the 92”) refused to rescind, and the assembly was forcibly dissolved. Huge backlash against bridging colonial right of assembly.

In his series entitled Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania, John Dickinson called on colonists to resist the Townshend Duties. The letters, which were published in many colonial newspapers, helped turn opinion against the Townshend Acts.

After Britain imposed the Townshend Duties in July of 1767, the colonists became even more restive. In 1768 two regiments of British troops arrived in Boston to quell the nascent rebellion.

1768 – Arrival of British Troops. Boston responded to the dissolution of the provincial assembly and Boston’s occupation by British troops by calling for “a convention of towns” to meet in order to devise a “speedy redress” of their grievances. Look for articles discussion whether to attend convention and voting on whom to send as representative.

1768 & 1769 – Non-Consumption Agreements – Samuel Adams called for a complete economic boycott of all British goods. Some towns ignored this, some mildly called to “Increase frugality and home manufactures,” others wholeheartedly embraced the boycott. Boston voted to promote local industry and home products and to curtail imports of the enumerated goods.

The British authorities hoped to prevent further conflicts between white settlers and American Indians by forbidding the continued migration of settlers and by paying the Indians for lands they had already occupied. After giving up their land, the Six Nations of the Iroquois Confederacy dispersed, with some staying in western New York and others traveling north to Canada and west to Wisconsin.

By the beginning of 1770, there were 4,000 British soldiers in Boston, a city with 15,000 inhabitants, and tensions were running high. On the evening of March 5, crowds of day laborers, apprentices, and merchant sailors pelted British soldiers with snowballs and rocks. A shot rang out, and then several soldiers fired their weapons. When it was over, five civilians lay dead, including Crispus Attucks, an African American merchant sailor who had escaped from slavery more than twenty years earlier.

Entitled “To the Right Honourable William, Earl of Dartmouth,” Wheatley’s famous poem reflects the colonists’ hopes that Dartmouth, the new secretary of state for the colonies, would be less tyrannical than his predecessor. Wheatley declares that her love of freedom comes from being a slave, comparing the colonies’ relationship with England to a slave’s relationship with a slave holder.

And can I then but pray
Others may never feel tyrannic sway

Late 1772/early 1773 – Boston Pamphlet – Sam Adams again attempted to rouse public resistance by publishing an account of a Boston Town Meeting in which the citizens

•  laid out their rights,

• chronicled the ways in which those rights had been violated

• and called on other towns to form Committees of Communication to network

To save the East India Company from bankruptcy, Parliament authorized the company to sell a tea surplus directly to the public without payment of duty. This effectively gave a monopoly to the East India Company. The move sparked protests ranging from boycotts by women to the famed Boston Tea Party of December 16, 1773.

Parliament enacted the Port Act as a reprisal for the Boston Tea Party. The first of the “Intolerable Acts,” the Port Act closed Boston harbor to all shipping until payment for the destroyed tea was made. In May, two additional Intolerable Acts forbade public meetings in Massachusetts unless sanctioned by the royal governor and transferred any trial of a British official accused of a capital offense to England or another colony.

Passed by the Parliament of Great Britain effectively abrogating the 1691 charter of the Province of Massachusetts Bay giving its royally-appointed governor wide-ranging powers. The colonists said that it altered, by parliamentary fiat, the basic structure of colonial government, vehemently opposed it, and would not let it operate. The act was a major step on the way to the start of the American Revolution in 1775.

Took place in Concord. The delegates resolved to say that the recent acts of the British Parliament are tyrannical and go against any notion of jurisprudence. The delegates reiterated their loyalty to the Crown, however they maintained their duty to protect their rights that had been granted through the Massachusetts Charter.

Meets in Concord after Royal Governor Thomas Gage dissolves the provincial assembly.  With John Hancock as its president, this extralegal body became the de facto government of Massachusetts outside of Boston.  It assumed all powers to rule the province, collect taxes, buy supplies, and raise a militia. Hancock sent Paul Revere to the First Continental Congress with the news that Massachusetts had established the first autonomous government of the Thirteen Colonies.

The First Continental Congress, called in response to the Intolerable Acts, met in Philadelphia. All thirteen colonies except Georgia were represented. They composed a “Declaration of Rights and Grievances,” which detailed “grievous acts and measures” imposed by the Crown to which “Americans cannot submit.”

By 1774 – 1775, you should be seeing notes in your town meeting records about

• Establishing, equipping, training local militia and minute companies

• Gathering/storing arms, ammunition, and medical supplies

• Voting to send representatives to the extra-legal Provincial assemblies

• Participating in actions to close courts

• Establishing Committees of Correspondence & of Safety (local, extra-legal govt.)

• Sending tax revenues to provincial collector Henry Gardner of Stow vs. royal agent

• Sending goods to relieve Boston’s distress

• Voting to erect a Liberty Pole

Harassing those suspected of Tory sympathies, requiring them to sign loyalty pledges

In late 1774 Congress halted the slave trade as part of anti-British protests. Historian James O. Horton notes that “the Revolution puts in sharp relief the difference between America’s ideals and rhetoric and America’s practice.”

  View the pay warrant for Sharp Liberty, an African American soldier who served in the Connecticut Line of the Continental Army.

The American Revolution began with the “shot heard ’round the world.” At the battles of Lexington and Concord, seventy-three British troops were killed and two hundred were wounded or missing in action. The patriot losses were forty-nine dead and forty-six wounded or missing.

On July 5, 1775, one year before they would declare independence, the Second Continental Congress sent the Olive Branch Petition to England. The king refused to even look at it, and instead issued the Proclamation for Suppressing Rebellion and Sedition, declaring the colonies to be in “open and avowed rebellion.”

King George III addressed Parliament to declare that Great Britain would not give independence to the colonies: “The object is too important . . . to give up so many colonies which she has planted with great industry, nursed with great tenderness, encouraged with many commerical advantages, and protected and defended at much expence of blood and treasure.”

In a letter to a fellow Continental Congress delegate, Adams described the basic structure of what would become the American government, including the separation of powers: “A Legislative, an Executive and a judicial Power, comprehend the whole of what is meant and understood by Government.” The ideas presented in this letter had a profound influence on the state constitutions of Virginia, New York, Massachusetts, and ultimately, the federal Constitution.

On July 2, 1776, Congress declared independence from Great Britain and two days later adopted the Declaration of Independence. Copies of the Declaration were then sent out to the new “Free and Independent States” to print and distribute.

  Watch David Armitage on “The International Influence of the Declaration of Independence.”

The Second Continental Congress named a committee to draft the Articles of Confederation to define the relationship between the thirteen new states. The members worked from June 1776 until November 1777, when they sent a draft to the states for ratification. On December 16, 1777, Virginia became the first state to ratify the Articles of Confederation. Maryland was the last, holding out until March 1, 1781.

Women played many roles in the Revolution on both sides of the conflict. They boycotted tea, saved money and goods for the troops, and harbored fugitives. In a letter to her husband in 1777, Lucy Knox describes local unrest, including the arrest of Bostonians suspected of being Tories and the involvement of the local mob in Revolutionary politics. She also reports on the high cost of goods, noting that “the price of every thing is so exorbitant indeed it is difficult to get the necessarys of life here.”

The American army claimed a major victory at Saratoga, New York, when Continental forces trapped British general John Burgoyne’s army in October 1777. But just months later, Washington made camp for the winter at Valley Forge where his army suffered incredible hardship through the winter, facing disease, cold, hunger, and lack of supplies. In this circular letter Washington pleads for aid from the states: “We had in Camp, on the 23rd Inst by a Field Return then taken, not less than 2898 men unfit for duty, by reason of their being barefoot and otherwise naked.

The last major battle of the American Revolution pitted American and French forces against Cornwallis at Yorktown, Virginia. The war was essentially won, but it would take two years before peace negotiations were completed and the peace treaty was signed.

Continental officers who had long been waiting to receive pensions and back pay from Congress threatened to revolt against a “country that tramples on your rights.” Washington convinced military leaders to remain loyal.

  Learn more about Washington and the Newburgh Conspiracy

The Treaty of Paris was signed by representatives of Great Britain and the United States. “For the British this was a profoundly traumatic event . . . they will never again achieve this kind of hegemony. . . . The Americans are now going to have to make their own way.” —Andrew Robertson

At the end of the war, George Washington returned his sword to Congress and said he wanted nothing more than to return to his farm. Upon hearing about this unprecedented refusal of power and profit by a victorious general, King George III remarked, “If that’s true, he will be the greatest man in the world.”

The official end of the Revolutionary War takes place when Congress ratifies the Treaty of Paris.