[Music] This week on C-SPAN's lectures and history podcast, Lebanon Valley College professor James Brousard teaches a class on the leadup to the American Revolution. He discusses actions taken by the British government, such as the Stamp Act and the stationing of British troops in Boston and how the ensuing political conflict ultimately led to war. And a note to our listeners, lectures in history will be back with all new episodes next week. more in a moment. All right, so today we're going to be talking about the imperial problem that faces Britain after the end of the war in 1763 and of course the coming of the revolution. So if you have any questions, pipe up. Uh if not, I'll be asking you a few. Now, you remember last time or last week anyway, we put a graph up here showing the result you'd probably get if you went around and asked everybody in the colonies at 25-year intervals, do you want to be independent of Britain? And if you remember, the graph shot up kind of like like this over the years. In other words, as the colonies move along from Jamestown to 1776, uh more and more people as time passes decide that they are able to handle this on their own. they don't need to be ruled from Westminster. And eventually, of course, enough of them decide that to uh produce a declaration of independence. So that graph would make the revolution pretty easy to understand, right? It's just like you growing up. You know, when you're two, the last thing you want is your parents to dump you out the door and say, "Okay, now you got to run your own life." By the time you're 12, you can see it might look pretty good. By the time you're 18, here you are. So if this graph is right, then the colonies are just going through the normal process of maturing. And a smart parent of course will keep an eye on things and as the child gets more competent and more confident, ease up on the strings. In that case, separation can come around come about uh reasonably nicely. If the parent doesn't see what's happening and doesn't accommodate the changing uh competence and confidence of the child, then there's likely to be argument and eventually maybe some kind of explosion. So this graph would make the revolution uh pretty easy to explain. It's just a one case of what normally happens with people and with societies. Unfortunately, that's not the way the graph looks at all. The graph looks more like this. Nobody wants to be independent until almost the very winter of 1775 and 76 after the firing at Lexington and Conquered, after Tom Payne's pamphlet, Common Sense comes out uh and spreads around the colonies. This makes the revolution much harder to figure out because the colonists are probably never happier and more um glad to be British in than in any time uh before or after 1776. They just won this great war. The French are gone. The Indians temporarily are quelled. These people are celebrating. They're glad to be part of the most powerful and freest country uh in the western world. So what we have to explain then is not how a society gradually gets more and more interested in breaking away from the apron strings and being independent. What we have to figure out is how did these proud and happy Englishmen in 1763, how did so many of them turn out to be traitors and rebels 10 or 12 years later against a government they would have said a few years before was the best and freest. Now, there are some long-term trends in colonial history that, if you think about it, make independence more possible as the years go by. Doesn't mean people want to be independent, but population, for instance, you start out with a few hundred people in a couple of spots on the coast. By the 1790s, you're looking at uh 250,000 people, maybe about double the population of Lebanon County, stretched out over 1500 miles of coast. By 1776, a couple of million people, a fourth of the population of England herself, more people than you have in some European countries. Now, if you had to do it, you can certainly imagine you could make a go of it as your own nation. And along with growing population comes a growing sense of um what would we call it? Political competence. The local elite, people like uh Ben Franklin, people like uh William Bird, who we talked about a couple of weeks ago, these are the folks who dominate the local elected assemblies. And if you remember, the assemblies are getting more and more powerful and the governors who were appointed from overseas are getting having less and less authority as the years go by. By the time you get to the middle of the 1700s, you've got pretty much local self-government in almost every colony. So, not only is population reaching the level where you can imagine a an independent country would work, you've got a governing class that thanks by George, if they've been running their colony for the last few decades, they ought to be able to run a country. The economy has also, of course, been growing. As population increases, as people push the Indians out and occupy more land, as they exploit the labor of more slaves, the prosperity of the colonies grows. By the time of the revolution, a third of all the ships built in the British Empire built right here on these shores. A fifth or a sixth of all the iron in the whole world is produced in the American colonies. So while you might have u a city like London or a really fancy Duke's mansion and estate in England, if you averaged people out, the white population of the colonies is probably the most populous I mean the most prosperous part of the whole empire. So growing population, growing political competence, improving economy, all of these things mean if you had for some unforeseen reason to go off on your own, you really might be able to do it. But again, it doesn't mean you want to be independent. These people are intensely proud of being British. and they're even trying to at least people at the upper level is trying to imitate uh how the British population of their class lives. So again, it becomes tough to figure why does so many of these people a dozen years later uh take up arms against their own government. Now, there are probably three fairly new developments in the colonies that again don't make independence likely or even desirable, but at least lay the groundwork for something. Great awakening. Remember, for hundred years, people in the colonies from the very beginning have been thinking of themselves as provincials, looking back across the ocean with admiration and with envy at this glittering metropolis over there. Here they are living on the the edge of civilization, staring out at an endless forest. And back home there's London which by itself has more people than all the colonies for many decades. There are great universities other than Harvard. Where are the great universities in the colonies? Where are the Shakespeare plays? Where are the philosophers? And even a guy like William Bird who can feel good because his mansion has 15 or 20 houses. even he knows perfectly well that the really snazzy people in Britain have mansions of a hundred and more houses and so there's this sense that you're country bumpkins really looking at your betters over in England always trying to be like them always striving to more and more match the English pattern but never of course quite coming close you're definitely most secondass citizens uh in your own minds in the empire. And then here comes the great awakening. This huge surge of evangelical religion sweeping through the colonies. It pretty well faded out by the 1750s. But it's left behind it a whole lot of evangelical Christians who have been told by their faith that Britain is not necessarily the best model for them. What matters in this world is not how educated you are, how cultured you are, how good your family is, how much wine you have in your basement, how well you can read philosophy. What matters in this world is how well are you getting ready for the next world. Not how do you live this life, but how are you going to live the next one? And so the example these people are told to follow, the people they're told to admire aren't so much the local elite or the entire country of England back home. What they're supposed to model themselves on is who is the most godly person. It isn't necessarily going to be the merchant with the fancy house. It isn't necessarily going to be the guy like William Bird with his plantation and his slaves and his wine and his fancy clothes. It could be could be your husband or your wife. Could be the slave out in William Bird's tobacco field. Could be the c carpenter in town. It isn't very likely to be one of those people you used to admire. And the same is true when you look at your place within the empire. You can look across the ocean to Britain and you can see, at least in your mind, here is a group of people who aren't as godly as we are. Here are people who do put the focus on the good things of this life, on the luxuries, on the corruptions that eat away at your morality. And maybe we're not so bad then compared to them. In fact, what the Great Awakening is telling you is you people on this side of the Atlantic should stop being embarrassed and ashamed of who you are and stop being envious of those people over in Britain because you are better than they are in the one thing that matters and that is the question every Christian has to ask of course what must I do to be saved? So imagine how you'd feel, you know, if you'd grown up your whole life and you'd always felt inferior to your older sister and someone comes along and gets you to realize, wait a minute, in the ways that really matter, you're actually better than your sister, it's going to change the way you think about your relationship. So there's one thing. Second thing that's going on, remember, is a lot of the elite in the colonies are reading these wig writers who are telling them history is a constant struggle between power and liberty and liberty regrettably always loses and that liberty is in danger in Britain itself, the freest country in the Western world, because corruption is eating away at the vitals of the country. Offices are sold, votes are bought, government operates not according to uh policy but according to what office can I get, what salary can I make, how can I get some goodies for my relatives and that sort of thing. And that allows the ambitious wouldbe Caesars in any government to use that sort of attitude. What's in it for me to corrupt the House of Commons by saying, "Hey, you support me, get you a good office. You support me, your agent aunt can have a government pension. Your son can get into college. We got a little clergyman post here, you know, for your nephew." And the more and more people who are bought off by the government, the less and less likely the House of Commons is to be a bull work against liberty. So liberty is safest. The wigs are telling these folks in a country with a big broad landholding middle class. Farmers who are independent economically, they don't need anything from government. They don't have to go get a bribe cuz what good would it do them? And of course, where do you find the society with the big broad landholding middle class? right here in America, not in England, which can never have that kind of society because it's just not big enough for every family to have a decent chunk of land. And so if the core of being English is to be free and if liberty is safest in a society with this big landholding middle class, then the colonies are the best part of the empire, the most English part of the empire and the freest part of the empire. So stop thinking of yourselves as a bunch of backward bumpkins. Think of yourselves as more English than people in England even. You're the ones leading the way for the whole empire and perhaps all of Europe and maybe the whole world toward a future where freedom is more and more secure and the wouldbe Caesars have less and less chance to destroy it and to exalt themselves. So here are two ways in which the colonists are being are learning to think not of themselves as inferiors but and not even as equals but as actually the best part of the empire that's going to change how they look at things. And then there's a growing sense of American identity. The whole the whole idea of of what community you think of yourself as belonging to is uh kind of iffy for people to try to figure out. But one enterprising historian decided about 50 years ago or so, let's look at newspapers and let's ask ourselves what do people mean when they use words like we and us and our the words of inclusion. And what do they mean when they use words like they and them and those the words for know the other. Well, up through oh about the 1730s or 40s, mostly when people talk about we, they mean we Pennians or we Britains in the empire. You have your colonial identity, you have your British identity. When you talk about they and them, you mean know those foreigners over in France and Spain, or sometimes those people in the next colony down the road who we don't know about and don't really much care about. But increasingly as you get into the 50s and the 60s, when you look at newspapers and see how people use those pronouns, a lot of times now, when they say we, they mean we Americans, more than just we in our colony, less inclusive than we in the whole empire. Now you've got this intermediate identity, this sense that you have some things in common with people in other colonies on this side of the Atlantic. that you don't share with people in England or Jamaica or other parts of the empire. And now when you talk about well the outsiders, they and them a lot of times now it's not just those foreigners, it's also those people over in England. Now, this doesn't mean, of course, that if you think of yourselves as Americans, you think of yourselves as less British anymore than say someone who says, "I'm a New Englander," is any less American by thinking that. But it does mean that that for the first time you can imagine that something binds you to the people in the other colonies. Uh that again is different from what binds you to people in the rest of the empire. And you can see a greater sense not just of of American identity, but a greater sense of American unity. You know, the first three wars against the French and the Indians, the government in Britain is just banging its head against the wall to get the colonies to see you face a common threat. You should all be pulling together. Indians are attacking Massachusetts. People in South Carolina say, "What's it to me?" Well, Indians are bothering people in Virginia, people in Rhode Island. It's none of their business. Finally, in this last war, the French and Indian War, finally, the colonies begin to see, yes, maybe we're all in this together. Maybe we share something in common, and that is a common enemy and a common threat. member Ben Franklin, remember, tries to get the colonial leadership together at Albany in 1754 to work out not just a common approach to the Indian problem, but even a colonial government where we'll have one governor appointed for the whole of the colonies, one assembly for the whole of the colonies. Nothing comes of it. But just the fact that it could be thought of and that some of the colonial leaders would come and talk about it and think it's a good idea is something brand new. So, you've got these long-term developments, growing population, growing political competence, a growing economy that while they don't make people want to be independent, does mean that if independence should unfortunately come, we probably can handle it. And then you've got this sense that hey, wait a minute. We are no longer the backward provincials in this empire looking with envy at the great metropolis across the seas. We are not even just the equal but perhaps superior in some ways to those poor folks because here we are more religious, more devout. Here, freedom is safer because we have a huge group of middle class farmers who need nothing from anyone. C-SPAN's lectures and history podcast continues in a moment. Now, back to C-SPAN's lectures and history podcast. Now, with that as background, let's take a look at 1763. Here you are in America. You've just won this big war against the French and the Indians. and you think that you want it. It kind of slips your mind that the British government sent 25,000 regular troops across the Atlantic to capture Montreal and Quebec and drive the French out of Canada and of course a British navy commanded the seas. What you remember is Bradock marching his army pelmel through the forest of Pennsylvania being ambushed and practically destroyed by the Indians and the French saved only by the courage of the colonial troops led by George Washington. So you don't have a terribly good impression of the part that the British military played in winning this war. you think more of it being a colonial victory. And since the victory has been won, the future looks great. Oh, that that dark, brooding presence out there in the forest that is is laying like a shadow over your future is gone now. The French are out of America. They're not coming back as far as you're concerned. The French without the Indians without French help are less able to oppose colonial expansion. The future looks great. All the way to the Mississippi, this is your world now. Well, across the Atlantic in Westminster, things don't look quite that good. I mean, they're glad to have won the war, of course. Who wouldn't be glad to beat the French, your traditional enemy? But the very completeness of the victory means the French are going to be all that more anxious for revenge. So, you can't just say, "Hot dog, we won the war. pieces here. Let's go home. Everybody in Britain who who knows about the the state of the world knows there's going to be another war every generation or so. And you have to be ready to defend what you want. So victory is great, but victory brings its own problems. For one thing, a bigger empire to defend. You've got more land in America to defend. You've got more land in India to defend. and you've got a couple of islands here and there extra to worry about. So, you need to keep the navy and you need to keep the army at higher than the levels you had before the war. That costs money. So, the three big problems facing America that worry British policy makers after they finish drinking the toasts to victory. One is what in the world do we do about these Indians? No, the Native American population has been the enemy for 75 years, and they've looked on you as the enemy. Now, these people have to learn how to live as good, loyal British subjects. That's not going to be very easy, considering that there are a lot of white loyal British subjects who want nothing more than to get more Indian land. So, let's think about this. If you were a a Native American leader in 1763 and your great fear is that the English colonists are going to get more of your land, what are you going to do about it when they start saying, "Hey, we'd like to carve out a nice big chunk of your territory." Yeah. Not going to be happy with it. And if they persist, probably going to fight back and retaliate. Well, and this is exactly, of course, what happens in Pontiac's rebellion. Pontiac leads the Northwest Indians, even before the war with France is over, to besiege almost every single British outpost between Detroit and Pittsburgh because they're worried that without French help, they face a pretty dismal future. The government doesn't want to have to fight Indian war after Indian war in the interior of North America. So, they got to figure out a way to deal with that. The second problem they're looking at is law enforcement. Like almost all the colonial empires, the British try to follow the economic policy of mercantalism, which means basically you need to accumulate wealth in your country because there's going to be another war coming along soon and you need money to fight wars. And the idea of the mercantalists is wealth is basically gold and silver. There's only a limited fixed amount more or less in the world. If your country has more, some other country has less. Countries, nations acquire wealth the same way families do. You bring in more money than you spend or in trade terms, you sell more to other countries than your people buy from other countries. So you have to manage your trade policy in a way that helps prepare the country for the next war, reduces the amount of foreign goods your people buy, and helps spur exports. Well, there's a lot of smuggling going on in the colonies because it's a whole lot better from the merchants's point of view if you can sneak your products in, don't have to pay the import duty on them, sell them at a lower cost to your customer. The government hasn't been able to do much about this because of other things like wars that push themselves to the forefront of policy. But now that the war is over, now is the chance maybe to crack down on smuggling and get the trade of the colonies moving more in tune with the good of the country. It got so bad that during this last war with France, there are colonial merchants actually selling goods to the French while the French are out shooting their fellow British countrymen. You got to put a stop to that. No government can allow that to happen. So that's problem two. And problem three is you need money. It's going to cost money to defend North America. Where's it going to come from? The American colonies are the most prosperous part of the empire, and they pay the least taxes. The average tax per person in the British Isles is about 25 times as much as the average in the colonies. So if you're going to raise more money to help defend the colonies, it seems logical to try to ask the undertaxed people in the colonies to help chip in than to lay more burdens on the overt taxed people at home. So those are three problems the government's got to wrestle with in order to be able to take advantage of the fruits of victory. So Indian problem pops up first because of Pracak's rebellion. How are you going to deal with that? If your problem is that the Indians don't like having their land overrun by a bunch of white colonists, then the only way you're going to calm the Indians down is protect them against that danger. So the Proclamation of 1763 says what? Proclamation 1763. Come on. Come on. You people know this. Okay. Says that the colonists can't settle west of the Appalachian into Indian territory, right? And we hope that'll prevent conflict. Now, the idea of course comes pretty well up against the colonist idea that hey, everything west of the Mississippi is now open for us. But surprisingly perhaps, there not a lot of grumbling and griping about the proclamation of 1763 in the beginning. Oh, people in the colonies don't want to have Indian wars either, if they can help it. Especially the people along the coast where most of the ruling elite live. They don't want to have to be paying taxes to go fight Indians who are only fighting because those greedy folks out on the frontier want to take away their land. And it's not supposed to be a permanent barrier. The idea the government has is as population builds up in some spot along the frontier, you'll go out and negotiate with the Indians, carve out another chunk of land, pay them for it, and open it up. So settlement will continue. Expansion will go on. it'll just be slower and more orderly and they hope more peaceful. Later on, however, as people start developing these paranoid fears that there's some conspiracy against government in Britain, then people start looking back at the proclamation and saying, "Hey, maybe this Indian thing was just a front. Maybe the whole point is they want to keep us crowded up between the mountains and the sea so we'll be easier to control. But in the beginning, the proclamation doesn't cause a whole lot of stir. It's a little bit different when you get to enforcing the law. The problem existed because they're not enough revenue cutters. There not enough customs collectors to catch every little inlet along the coast where people might smuggle stuff in. And when you do catch them, what happens? They get tried by a jury of their friends, relatives, and customers. And the local jury, as often as not, laughs at the law, acquits the criminal, or finds them some measly little amount that makes a joke of law enforcement. Governments can't let that happen. No. If you have an unpopular law, you've either got to repeal it or you've got to enforce it. You can't let a whole generation of people grow up scoffing at the law. So, what's the government do? They basically put more police on the streets, more customs officials, more revenue cutters, making it easier to catch the smugglers when they try to bring stuff in. And when you do get them, instead of having them sit down in front of a jury of their buddies, we'll ship them off to Nova Scotia to be tried by a judge who isn't going to be swayed by any local friendships and justice can finally be done. Now, you'd expect, right, that a good citizen who looks around and says, "Boy, crime is getting out of hand." Would be overjoyed when the government decides to crack down on the criminals. And it comes as rather a shock when that's not the attitude at all that comes out of the colonies. Remember the wigs had been telling these people that the way you lose your freedom in today's world is not by Julius Caesar marching an army down and capturing London and installing himself as a dictator but by the new Caesar just hiding in some little room somewhere in Westminster and hauling the members of parliament in one at a time and basically saying hey what will it take to get you to go from a watchguard of public liberty liberty into somebody who will let me do what I want. Here's your payoff. Well, the more government offices there are, the more patronage the government has. Every new official in the customs service is another salary for somebody. You want your uncle, your brother, your son, or even yourself, you know, to have that nice salary. Well, then if you're a member of parliament, you better do what the government wants. And so instead of people saying, "Hey, thank gosh we're finally getting more officials to enforce the law and keep crime down," they start complaining that look at this. They're creating more patronage jobs to use as bribes to get the House of Commons to look the other way while whatever conspiracy there is against our liberties proceeds step by step. And then you got guys like uh John Hancock, one of the biggest smugglers in the colonies. People who get caught and are hauled up not before a jury, but before a judge, they're not going to get much sympathy if they go around whining that, hey, the the government is not letting me break the law and stuff my pockets full of money anymore. But if they go around saying, "Hey, the government has taken away my right of a jury trial, one of the most fundamental liberties of the free Englishmen, and if they can do it to me, they can do it to you." Then people are going to pay a lot of attention. And so you've turned yourself from a criminal into a victim, a victim of the evil government that is little by little trying to turn everybody from freeborn English subjects into slaves. So just trying to enforce the law and keep colonial trade going in ways that help the country instead of hurt it creates a lot of outrage. But the worst of it all, of course, is trying to deal with the revenue problem. If you're going to get money and you have part of your population paying practically nothing, the wealthiest part and another part paying gigantically more. If you're the government, who would you go tax, Jody? Who do you go after? You got to make the people who are overt taxed pay more. You got to make the people pay nothing pay a little. Make the people who aren't paying much? Makes sense, right? After them. And even if you didn't think that was the morally right thing to do, can you imagine, you know, the British government telling the British people, "Hey, we decided to let the colonists go on being freeloaders and tax you more." That's not going to go over very well with the constituents. And while the government is obviously to some considerable degree insulated from public opinion, if you're raising the land tax on the landholders in Britain and they're the people that vote for the House of Commons, you could be in some danger, especially since there are of course opponents to the government that are always looking for ways, just as political opponents always are, of making the current government look evil and bad and corrupt and getting voters to turn away from them. So if you have to raise more money to defend the colonies in the new world, it only makes sense to have the people in those colonies at least pay a part of the cost of their own defense. So how you going to do it? Well, the stamp tax is the answer. This looks like a pretty good deal to the government because what it is is basically a tax on most forms of legal activity. You got to put a tax stamp on wills, for instance, that you file with the court. You go plead in court, you got to put a tax stamp on the pleadings you submit to the judge. Uh you want to take your ship out with a cargo, you got to put a tax stamp on the papers. Uh and things like pamphlets. You want to publish a pamphlet on how to catch fish, you got to put a tax stamp on it. Newspapers, same thing. So, it only affects a very small number of the couple of million people in the colonies. It only affects basically lawyers and merchants and publishers and a couple other groups of people. Secondly, it's a really puny tax. It averages out about one shilling a person per year. Hardly anything compared to what people pay in England. And third, and maybe best of all, it's hard to evade, and it's easy to detect evasion. Oh, you don't have to send uh tax collectors swarming out over the landscape the way you would if you had a land tax. All you need to do is look at the pamphlet. Hey, does it have the tax stamp on it or not? Look at the will that trying they're trying to file in court. It's got the stamp on it or not. It's easy to figure out if people are paying or not paying. So every way you look at it, it seems to be about the simplest, easiest way you could tax the colonies. And the 95% of the people who are sitting out on their farms growing food for their families would never see a tax stamp in their lives. Oh well, maybe if they're wealthy enough to have a will, they have to stick one on there. People in England are astounded and surprised and totally frustrated when the stamp tax produces not gratitude for, hey, thanks for not taxing us so much and for still paying most of the cost of defending us and not even indifference. Ah, you know, we don't like taxes, but it's just a widow one. Who cares? Instead, it produces outrage, anger, and fear. Because again, one of the fundamental undoubted rights of Englishmen is not to be taxed, but by your own representatives. The king can't take your money unless your representatives say so. So, who represents the colonist in America? Well, as far as everybody in England is concerned, the House of Commons as their representative, just like it represents everyone in the empire. Now, the House of Commons makes really no sense as a representative body if you think of it as full of uh a bunch of politicians who are going up there to look out for the interest of their little slice of the country because franchises for electing uh members of the Commons were passed out back in the late Middle Ages. And there are big cities like Birmingham and Manchester in England that have no people elected to the House of Commons because they were just villages hundreds of years ago. And there are a few other places that used to be towns with people in them that have nobody living there anymore. Old Sarum, for instance, where William Pit, the great defender of America in the House of Commons is elected from, has no living people. So it makes really no sense at all, right, to say here are towns that have no one representing them, and here are cemeteries that have a couple of people every two years to go up every two people every year or so to go up there and represent dead bodies. The House of Commons makes sense only if you think that it's not a collection of politicians who are looking out for local interests. It's a collection of statesmen. Everybody there wherever they are elected from is supposed to be taking the big broad outlook and thinking of what's good for the whole empire. So if the House of Commons is supposed to represent the interests of people in Birmingham, people in Birmingham can't complain when they have to pay a tax even though they don't elect anybody because everybody in the House of Commons is watching out for them. And everybody in the House of Commons is watching out for Pennsylvania. Now the British call this virtual representation. You may not elect anybody directly, but you're virtually represented by everybody. Now, we know today, you know, the difference between virtual reality and real reality, and it gets pretty close sometimes, but you can't buy a cheeseburger in virtual reality. C-SPAN's lectures and history podcast continues in a moment. Now, back to C-SPAN's lectures and history podcast. And so the colonies have a very different way of looking at representation. From the very beginning of the Virginia House of Burgesses in 1619, the colonial idea has been you can only be represented by someone you elect from among you in your geographic area. I mean, why should somebody elected from somewhere else represent you? It makes no sense. Now, if you live in Lebanon County, you can't depend on the guy from Lancaster County representing your interests. You can't punish him if he does wrong. You can't reward him with reelection if he does right. He'd be a fool to represent your interests. The only thing that matters to him is what the people in Lancaster County want. So, if you can't be represented by some person in the next county, you sure as heck don't think you're represented by somebody 3,000 miles away who you've never seen and has never seen you. So, everybody agrees that the Englishman is entitled to be taxed only by his own representatives. But what they don't seem to agree on is who are his representatives? If you think the House of Commons represents the whole empire, including Pennsylvania, it can certainly tax Pennsylvania. That's the view of people back home. If you think the Pennsylvania Assembly is the only representative body for Pennsylvania, then the House of Commons cannot possibly constitutionally tax people in Pennsylvania. And everybody in England should be able to see that. Well, there's the big problem, right? Now, let me ask you this. Let's suppose you're a member of the Pennsylvania Assembly. And let's suppose the government agrees, hey, look, if the king wants your money, he's got to come ask the Pennsylvania Assembly for it. So, the government says to you, Mr. Pennsylvania assemblyman, let's say you're that assemblyman. government says to you, "Hey, we need some money. Uh, will you please tax your constituents and send us some money?" What's your attitude likely to be? So, you'd be willing to go back and tell your constituents next election, hey, the reason you're paying this extra tax is that I had to send some of your money overseas. Do you think your voters would like that and reward you or would they kick you out? They probably wouldn't like that. They probably wouldn't. And that's what folks in England think the attitude in America is likely to be if you have to ask the local assemblies and all these colonies, please send us money. And the assemblyman says, hey, wait, if I do that, I'm going to get defeated at the next election. You're never going to get any. So if you look at the the fundamental vital interests of people in the colonies, it is in their view that we should enjoy all the rights of Englishmen. We're no less English for being over here. And one of those rights is nobody can take our money but our elected representatives and they are right here in Philadelphia or Charleston or wherever your colonial capital might be. We can't concede that point because if once we let the government overstep the bounds of the constitution, where does it stop? It stops at another Caesar. Loss of liberty. We can't take that first step. The people in England of course look at it very differently. If we can't have the government raise money from the most prosperous part of the country and the rest of us have to pay extra because of it, we're not going to put up with that. How can the government let this happen? And so if you're in the British government, you know, whatever fast footwork and compromises you might conduct in the meantime, in the long run, one way or another, you're probably going to have to be able to get the people in America to pay some at least of the cost of running their country since they get all the benefits of being in it. Well, that's tough because compromise, you know, can sometimes work. But for compromise to work, you can't have one side or the other give up its vital interest. So, here's a case where, you know, how how do you compromise this? Uh there are some proposals for, hey, let's let the colonists elect members to the House of Commons. Then they'd be in it, then we could tax them. The response in the colonies is, "Ah, forget it. That would never work." You know, England's 3,000 miles away. That's uh 5 to 8 weeks. Uh we don't know what's going on over there. We can't construct our representatives about what to do, etc., etc. No. But it looks to a lot of people in England, like the colonists are saying, "Look, we don't care what excuse we come up with. We just don't want to pay any taxes. Period. You guys pay more." That doesn't go over too well. So, how do you fight the Stamp Act if you're a colonist? Well, for one thing, you get a mob up and go to the people who were appointed to distribute the tax stamps and say, "Hey, would you rather resign your office or get be beaten up?" And most of them would rather resign their offices. So, pretty soon there isn't anybody in any colony who is willing to risk his life actually selling the tax stamps. And just so the government doesn't misunderstand what the colonists are trying to say and kind of as a way to regain leadership from the mobs that are hanging around in all these coastal cities, the colonial elites decide to meet together in New York at the Stamp Act Congress and tell the British government exactly what the story is. Number one, we are English just as much as you. Number two, that means we have all the rights people in England do. Number three, one of those is you can't tax us except through our representatives. Number four is you're trying to do it anyway. And number five is we're not going to let you. And just to drive the point home, we'll have a boycott of British goods. Now, the American colonies are among the biggest, most profitable markets for British merchants and manufacturers. Not, of course, if nobody buys their stuff. So, after a while, the merchants and manufacturers of Britain go swarming down to Westminster telling the government, "Hey, get rid of this stupid tax. You're costing us money." And besides, since nobody is willing is stupid or brave enough to actually distribute the the tax stamps, you're not raising any money from it anyway. And so Parliament does repeal the Stamp Act. Great celebration of course in the colonies. Hey, these guys finally understand our constitutional rights. Toasts are drunk to William Pit and the other defenders of American rights in Parliament. And to George III, the patriot king who stands above party and above politics and looks out for the good of his people. And they're so busy celebrating. Uh the colonists don't sufficiently realize some of them that at the very same time that Congress repealed the Stamp Act that Parliament repealed the Stamp Act, they passed the Declaratory Act that said Parliament has a right to bind the colonies in all cases whatsoever, including of course taxation. So the government didn't really accept the argument made in America. All they said was, "Look, we could tax you anytime we want. We just don't happen to feel like it right now." That's not much of a victory, but it calms things down. But you still have the problem of money. Can you ask the people in Britain to pay extra to defend America when Americans aren't willing to defend America? So, a new prime minister comes in, Charles Townsen, comes up with a new idea, the Townsen Acts. the the government gets a mistaken impression that the objection to the Stamp Act really was that it was an internal tax as opposed to a duty on imports where people have never really objected to Parliament's right to regulate trade. So, let's forget the stamp stuff. We'll have attacks on things the colonists import. Paper, lead, glass, tea, and we'll collect it at the ports. Nobody else has to be bothered. That's that big surprise. More outrage, more anger, and more fear. More mobs, another boycott of British goods, more angry protests going back across the ocean. Look, don't you guys get it? Any money you extract from us is a tax. You can't do it. Whatever you call it, however you try to hide it, you can't do it. It's unconstitutional. And just to remind you of that, we're not buying your goods again. By the way, more boycots, more lost money. The merchants and manufacturers go down to Parliament again and say, "Stop this nonsense." And once more the government backs off and repeals all of the towns and taxes except the one on tea. More big celebrations in the colonies. People reve breathe a big sigh of relief. Maybe we've finally made our point that we aren't paying taxes. Now, the next few years, a number of things happen to reawaken these fears of conspiracy against liberty. If it's not the tax issue, it's something else. For example, the government sends troops over to Boston in 1768. One of the great fears Englishmen have is fear of a standing army. No, when there's war going on, you need an army to fight the enemy. When there's no war, you don't need an army. Now, no continental country could say that. Of course, you got potential enemies on every border. The government would be complete idiots if they didn't keep an army up in peace time to prevent somebody invading them. But Britain, of course, is a bunch of islands. As long as the British Navy is there, you're going to have plenty of notice before you have to get ready to fight. You don't need an army. So, if you see your government beginning to build up an army when there's no enemy around, you have to start asking yourself, well, who are they planning to use it against? If it's not the enemy, is it us? Why would the government need an army? Unless it's planning to do something really horrible to its own people and it wants to put down the inevitable protests. and Englishmen have seen armies in peace time be used for precisely that purpose under the Steuart Kings and even Cromwell, the great defender of parliamentary rights, who after he lpped the king's head off made himself dictator and ran an even tighter ship than the Stearts did. So, here are troops in Boston. Huh? Why are they to defend us from the Indians? The Indians are out in the frontier. defend us from the French. The French are gone. Why are there government troops sitting in Boston? You really have to start asking that question. So again, remember the Wigs, the Wig writers have been telling people over and over again, how do you lose your liberty? You lose it to your own government. You lose it to some ambitious politician or group of politicians who decide to gradually start snipping away at it. you are far more likely to fall prey to your own government than to a foreign enemy. And so if you have this sort of generalized suspicion of government and you see things happen like, hey, they're trying to tax us without our consent. Hey, they're trying to take away our right of a jury trial here. Hey, they've got troops here and there's no war going on. It does make some people start to wonder. And then the Boston Massacre, of course, only brings the the the fear of a standing army to an even greater peak. Here they are shooting down our own people. But there's more even going on than that. Now, the Church of England is the established church back home. It is the state church in most of the southern colonies and parts of New York. And the Anglicans in America have a problem. To be a clergyman, you have to be anointed, consecrated by at least one bishop. All the bishops are back in Britain. So if you are a Pennian and you want to be a minister in the Church of England, you got to go all the way back across the ocean, an expensive and dangerous trip for the laying on of hands. or your clergymen have to be Englishmen and Scotsmen sent over here. Be a lot easier to have an Anglican bishop right here in the colonies. And so a lot of the Anglicans in America start asking for one. Now you'd think who cares, right? If you're a Presbyterian or a congregationalist or in anything, why do you care how easy it is for the Anglicans to get clergymen? But remember, the Church of England is part of the government. The bishops sit in the House of Lords. They're basically politicians, not religious people. In your mind, every new Anglican minister is another piece of patronage to be used to corrupt the people who should be defending public liberty, but instead are up at Westminster looking out for what they can get for themselves. So, you want to expand the power of the Church of England in America. This looks suspicious. Why would you want to do this now? So even things like that can be turned into fearsome things. And then you've got the question of judicial independence. Now in England, judges are in there for life. The whole point is to make them independent of government. They don't have to look over their shoulder all the time and ask how's my decision going to look to the guys in authority. The problem you have in the colonies is there are not very many educated, competent lawyers. So, the government isn't willing to put some half-assed lawyer in a judge's office for life. You might have to have him be a judge now because you have no choice, but in another 10 or 20 years when you have more educated lawyers, you want to be able to get rid of this person and put a decent judge in. So let's don't have lifetime tenure for judges in the colonies. Well, if you look at it from the standpoint of we want the best qualified judges, that makes some sense, right? But if you look at it the way a paranoid conspiracy-minded person would, you'd ask yourself, why is it that they don't want the judges to be independent? Why do they want the judges to be subject to removal by government at any time? obviously because they're planning to do bad things and don't want the judges to stand in their way. So here's another part of the conspiracy. So if you have already been taught by these wig writers to suspect your government anyway and then you see your government doing things that as far as you're concerned any sensible person would see was either unconstitutional or dangerous, taxing you when they don't represent you. Not letting you have a trial by jury, keeping you from expanding westward to get further away from their control. Making the judges subject to removal anytime they want to get rid of an obstreporous judge. Putting troops in the colonies when there's nobody to fight but you. Helping the Church of England get bigger and more powerful here when everybody knows it's just another quai governmental body. you're gonna start worrying. And although all of this stuff looks really stupid from the view in England, it doesn't look stupid to you. And so you get more and more suspicious people and the more they express their suspicion and people learn about it in England, the more people in England have to scratch their heads. What the heck are these people talking about? the conspiracy. There's no conspiracy against liberty in Westminster. No taxes. Why shouldn't they have to pay taxes? Everybody else does. No bishop in America, who would care about that, etc., etc., etc. So, if you're an Englishman and you're reading all this stuff, this total phony baloney these people are coming up with as excuses not to have to obey the law or pay their taxes, you know, you start to wonder maybe there is a conspiracy. All right, but it's not here in London. It's over in America. There's a few of these malcontents like Sam Adams and a few people like that who are doing their best to stir up these totally phony fears to turn people against the government. so that they can perhaps wind up as bosses of an independent America. We can't let this happen without trying to do something about it. So every time there protests in the colonies, the government slaps them back. The people in England get madder and that just makes some of these people in the colonies matter and it goes from one step to another. And then of course the Boston Tea Party arrives. Here are a bunch of people swarming onto the docks, destroying thousands of pounds worth of tea owned by the East India Company. Clearly an illegal act. Lots of people in the colonies who believe in the law are offended by this. Now, usually, of course, if you go destroy somebody's property, one or two things is going to happen, right? the person whose property you destroyed is going to sue you in court and make you pay for it. Or the government is gonna grab you and put you in jail for the crime. But the government doesn't do that in the case of the Tea Party. Oh, for one thing, it'd be awfully hard to figure out who these people were who did this. But what the government does instead is say, "We're going to punish the whole city of Boston until the Bostononians agree to reimburse the East India Company for all that tea." So they shut the port of Boston down. No ships can come in, no ships can go out. You're going to starve the city out. You're going to cost the merchants and the dock workers and the sailors money. And eventually the economic pain is going to be sufficient that they will have to back down and pay for the tea. and you're going to punish the colony of Massachusetts because they need to be taught a lesson, too. Well, this creates again outrage and fear. This is not the way you deal with a a criminal act. You don't go punish a whole population because somebody robbed a bank. Why is the government doing this? It must be that they're just trying to think of another excuse to put the screws on the colonies and make us cave into their demands. If we do that, we don't deserve the name of Englishmen. and then maybe almost worse, totally unconnected with uh the Boston Tea Party, but at the same time as passing the uh acts against um Boston and Massachusetts, Parliament passes the Quebec Act, an effort to try to um get the French Catholics in Canada more uh resigned to being run by England. We're going to let the Canadians have the same kind of government they had before. An appointed governor and judges, no elected assembly. They've never had one. They're not used to it. And to make the Catholics feel comfortable, we're going to have the Catholic Church still be the official church of Canada. We won't try to force Protestantism down their throat, so they'll be a little more content. Well, the outrage in the lower colonies is tremendous. Everybody understands if you don't have an elected representative body as part of your government, you have no protection against arbitrary government. Why are they not giving the Canadians an elected assembly? Is it because they intend to take away ours sooner or later? Maybe. And considering that Protestants see the Catholic Church as the one great enemy of human freedom in the modern world, the fact that your Protestant government is saying, "Hey, the Catholic Church can dominate the life of Canada." This is a little suspicious, too. Why would they be doing that? And perhaps worst of all, they have extended the borders of Canada down to the Ohio River. So, it includes most of the modern uh Midwest. A good chunk of what the colonists had been assuming was their future expansion is now going to be dominated by a Catholic controlled colony with no elected representative. Pretty suspicious. So all of this stuff comes together to produce the growing sense of outrage that leads to things like the first continental congress and leads the British government to respond with even sterner measures. So this is how you go in 10 or 12 years from a country full of happy proud Englishmen to a whole bunch of traders and rebels. Not that of course everybody buys into these conspiracies, but enough do to produce the end result. Now if you look back on it, you know, a lot of this stuff could probably be compromised, right? You could maybe have made the proclamation of 1763 not quite so severe. You could maybe have said, "Okay, look, relax about jury trials. Everybody gets them except these smugglers who keep being let off by juries. We're not after you." You could have not maybe put the troops in Boston. You could have said to the Anglican church, "Hey, you guys, it's too much trouble to have a bishop over there. We'll just keep doing what we have been doing there." You could compromise away almost all these disputes except one. How do you get around the fact that the colonists are insisting we won't pay any taxes unless our local assemblies approve them because otherwise it's unconstitutional and the people in England saying we're not going to let you get away with paying no taxes so we have to pay more because every good citizen has to be willing to take on the responsibilities of citizenship as well as enjoy the advantages. We can't let you guys get away with escaping your responsibilities. Neither side can afford to back down because the colonists think their vital interest is wrapped up in defending their constitutional rights. And this is perhaps one of the biggest, that the government can't take your money unless your representatives say it's okay. to give in on that opens you up to more and more unconstitutional actions and you're heading down the slippery slope toward dictatorship. But the government can't give up either saying we're going to let the wealthiest part of the empire pay nothing and everybody else has to pay more. No government could do that. So once the argument about taxation and representation gets set in stone so that neither side can back down without giving up their vital interest, that's where it it seems really difficult to figure out how a compromise could ever be possible. Either the colonists have to submit to unconstitutional actions by their government, throwing their liberties into danger as they see it, or the government have to submit to letting a big chunk of their country get away without living up to the responsibilities of the good citizen. And neither is possible. So once the issue gets set that way, it's really hard to see how it ends in any other place uh except the spot in conquered that Emerson wrote about by the rude bridge that arched the flood. Their flag to the April's breeze unfurled here once the embattled farmers stood and fired the shot heard around the world. So that's all for today. Next time we will get into the actual revolution itself. Well, not next time because you have an exam next time. Thanks for listening to this week's lectures in history podcast. To find more of our history programming, visit our website at cyphenspan.org.