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25year intervals, do you want to be independent of britain . And if you remember, the graph like nd of like this over the years. In other words, as the colonies move along from jamestown to this more and more people time decide that he are handle this on their own, they dont need to be ruled from westminister and eventually of course some of them decide to produce a declaration of independence. That graph would make the revolution pretty easy to understand, right . Its just like you growing up. When youre 2, the last thing you want is your parents to thump you out the door and say ok, now you got to run your own life. By the time youre 12, it might look pretty good. By the time youre 18, there you are. So if this grass is right, the colonies are going through the normal process of maturing and the smart parents, of course, will keep an eye on things and as the child gets more confident, ease up on the rings and in that case dedication can come about reasonably nicely. If the parents doesnt see whats happening and doesnt accommodate the changing competence and confidence of the child, then theres likely to be an argument and eventually maybe some kind of explosion. So this graph would make the revolution pretty easy to explain. Its just one case of what normally happens with people and society. Unfortunately, thats 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 1776 after the firing t lexington and concord, after tom paynes common sense comes out and spreads across the colony and makes the revolution harder to figure out because the colonists are probably never happier and more glad to e british than at any time before or after 1776. They just won this great war. The french are gone. The indians temporarily are quelled. These people are celebrating. They are glad to be a part of the most powerful and freest countries 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 turn out to be tradeers traitors and rebels 12 years later against a government who they said a few years before was the best and freest in the world . Now, there are some longterm trend in colonial history that if you think about it make independent more possible as the years go by. It doesnt mean people want to be independent. But population, for instance, you start out with a few hundred people and in a couple spots on the coast, the 1790s, youre looking at 250,000 people, maybe. About double the population of Lebanon County stretched out over 1,500 miles of coast. By 1776, a couple million people. 1 4 of a tour europe itself. More than you have in some european countries. If you had to do it you can imagine you can make a go of it as your own nation and along with growing population comes a growing sense of what would we call it . Political competence. The local elite people like ben franklin and people like william byrd who we talked about a couple weeks ago and they dominate the elected assemblies, and if you remember, theyre getting more and more powerful and the governors overseas are having less and Less Authority as the years go by. By the time you get to the middle of the 1,700s youve got pretty much local selfgovernment in almost every colony. So not only is population reaching the level where you can imagine an independent country would work, youve got a governing class that thinks, by george, if theyd been running their colony the last few decade, we 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 is they exploit the labor of more slaves. The prosperity of the colonies grows. By the time of the revolution, a 1 3 of all the ships built in the British Empire are built on the shores, about 1 5 of all the iron is produced in the american colonies. While you might have a city like london or a really fancy dukes mansion and estate inening lan, if you average people out, the white population of the colony is the most prosperous part of the whole empire. Growing capitol hill competence and improving the economy, all 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 doesnt mean you want to be independent. These people are intensely proud of being british. And theyre even trying people at the upper levels are trying to imitate how the British Population of their class lives. So again, it becomes tough to figure why do many of these people a dozen years later take up arms against their own government. Now, there are probably three fairly new developments in the colonies, that against dont make independence likely or desirable but at least lay the groundwork for something. A great awakening, remember, for a hundred years. People in the ol donnies from the very beginning have been thinking of themselves as provencials, looking back across the ocean at admiration and envy over this glittering metropolis over there. Here they are with it on the edge of civilization staring out at an endless forest and back home theres london which by itself has more people than all the colonies for many decades. Theyre a Great University other than harvard where the Great University is in the colony. Where shakespeare place and the philosophers and a guy like william bird can feel good because his mansion has 15 or 20 houses and even he knows perfectly well that the really snazzy people in britain have mansions of a hundred or more houses. D so theres this sense that youre country bumpkins, looking at your betters over in england, always trying to be striving to ways match the english pattern but never of course coming close. Youre definitely second class citizens in your own minds in the empire and here comes the great awakening, this huge serge of evangelical religions sweeping through the colonies and faded out by the 17 50s but 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 but matters in this world is not how educated you are and how cultured you are and how good your family is and how much wine you have in your basement, how well you can read philosophy. What matters in this world is how ready are you for the next world, not how you live this life but how are you going to live the next one. The example these people are told to follow and admire ent so much the local elite or the entire country of england back home, what theyre supposed to model themselves on is who the most godly person. It isnt necessarily going to be the merchant with the fancy house. It isnt necessarily going to be the guy like william bird with his plantations and wine and fancy clothes. Its to be your husband or your wife. It could be the slaves out in williamsburg tobacco field or the carpenter in town. It isnt 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 for britain and you can see, at least in hour mind, here is a group of people who arent as godly as we are and they put focus on got things of this life, the luxuries and corruptions, either way, your morality. And maybe were not so bad then compared to them. Thats what the great awakening is telling you is that 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 youre better than they are in the one thing that matters and that is the question every christian has to ask others, what must i do to be saved. Imagine how youd feel if youd grown up your whole life and always felt inferior to your sister and someone comes along and says wait a minute, in the ways that really matter, youre better than your sister. You have to change the way you think about your relationship. So theres one thing. The second thing going on, you remember, is a lot of the elite in the colonies are reading these writers who are telling them history is a constant struggle between tower and liberty and liberty, regrettably alcs loses and if 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, boats are bought, government operates not only according to 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 seizers in any government to use that sort of attitude, whats in it for me to corrupt the house of commons. By saying hey, you support me, get a good office, you support me, your agent aunt can have a government pension and your son can get in college. We got up a clergyman post up for your nephew. 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 bulwark against liberty. The liberty is faithfulest the wigs are telling these folk with a land Holding Middle class. Farmers that are independent economically dont need anything from government and dont have to go get a bride because what good would it do them . And of course, where do you ind the society with the big ones holding it here in america and not england and never can have that society because its 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 faceless in a society with this big land Holding Middle class then the colonies are the best par of the empire, the most english part of the empire and freest art of the empire. So stop thinking of yourselves as a bunch of backwards bumpkins but think of yourself as more than the people in england. Youre leading the way for the whole empire and perhaps all of europe or maybe the whole world to a future where freedom is and the ore secure wouldbe caesars have less chance to destroy it and exhaustion themselves. Here are two ways in which the columnists are being or learning to think not of themselves as inferiors or equals but is actually the best part of the empire. Thats going to change how they look at things. And then theres a growing sense of american identity, of the whole idea of what community you think of yourself as belonging to is kind of iffy for people to try to figure out. But one enterprising historian decided 50 years ago or so, lets look at newspapers and lets 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 they and them and those and the words for the other. Up until about the 1730s or 1740s, mostly when people talk about we they mean we pennsylvaniaians or we britains in the empire. You have your colonial identity and your british identity. When you talk about they and them, you mean those foreigners over in france and spain, or sometimes those people in the next colony down the road who we dont know about and dont really much care about. But increasingly as you get into the 50s and 60s and 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 have this intermediate identity, a sense you have some things in common with people in other colonies on this side of the atlantic that you dont share with people in england or jamaica or other parts of the empire. And now when you talk about the outsiders, they and them, a lot of times now its not just those foreigners, its also those people over in england. Now, this doesnt mean, of course, that if you think of yourselves as americans or less british any more than, say, someone who says im a new englander is any less american by thinking that. But it does mean that for the irst time you can imagine that something binds you to the people in the other colonies, 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 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. The indians are attacking massachusetts, people in south carolina, whats it to me . The indians are bothering people in virginia, people in rhode island, its none of their business. Finally in this last war, the french and indian war, finally the colonies begin to see, yes, maybe were all in this together and maybe we share something in common and that is a common enemy and a common threat. Ben franklin, you remember, tries to get the Colonial Leadership together in albany in 1754 to work out not just a common approach to the indian problem but even a Colonial Government where we had one governor appointed for the whole of the colonies, one assembly for the whole of the colonies and nothing comes of it. But just the fact it could be thought of and that some of the colonial leaders would come and talk about it and think its a good idea, its something brandnew. So youve got these longterm developments, grows population, growing political competence, growing economy, that while they dont make people want to be independent does mean if independence should, unfortunately, come, we probably can handle it. Then you have this sense that hey, wait a minute. Were no longer the backward provencials in this empire working within the great metropolis across the seas, we are not even just equal but perhaps superior in some ways to those poor folk 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. Now, with that as background, lets take a look at 1763. Here you are in america. Youve just won this big war against the french and the indians, and you think that you won it, kind of slips your mind that the British Government sent 25,000 regular troops to capture montreal, quebec and drive the french out of canada and of course a british navy commanded the seas, but what u remember is braddock marching his army through the forest of pennsylvania being ambushed and practically destroyed by the indians and french and saved only by the courage of the colonial troops led by george washington. So you dont 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. That dark brooding presence out there in the forest that hangs like a shadow over your future is gone now. The french are out of america and theyre not coming back as far as youre concerned. 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 westminister, things dont look quite that good. I mean, theyre glad to have won the war, of course, who wouldnt 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 cant just say hot dog, we won the war, peace is here, lets go home. Everybody in britain who knows about the fate of the world knows theres 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 another problem, a bigger empire to defend for one thing. You have more land in america to defend. Youve got more land in india to defend. And youve got a couple 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 policymakers after they finish drinking the toast to the victory, one is what in the world do we do about these indians . The native American Population has been the enemy for 75 years and looked on you as the enemy. Now these people have to learn to live as good, loyal british subjects and wont be easy considering theres a lot of white loyal bringish subjects who want nothing more than to get more endian lan. More indian land. So lets think about this. If you were 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, wed like to carve out a nice big chunk of your territory . Yeah. Not going to be happy with it. And if they persist . Probably will fight back. And this is exactly of course what happens in pontiacs rebellion. Pontiac leads the northwest indians even before the war with france is over to the to besiege almost every single british outpost between detroit and pittsburgh because theyre worried without french help, they face a pretty dismal future. The government doesnt want to have to fight indian war after indian war in the interior of north america but theyve got to figure out a way to deal with that. The second problem theyre looking at is law enforcement. Like almost all colonial empires, the british try to follow Economic Policy of mercantilism which means basically you need to accumulate wealth in your country because there is going to be another war coming along soon and they need money to fight wars. And the idea of the mercantilist is wealth is basically gold and silver. Theres only a limited fixed amount more or less in the world and 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 for export. Well, theres a lot of smuggling going on in the colonies because its a whole lot better from the merchants point of view if you can sneak your products in, dont have to pay the import duty on them, sell them at a lower cost to your customer. Government hasnt 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. Youve got to put a stop to that. No government can allow that to happen. Thats problem two. Problem three is you need money. Its going to cost money to defend north america. Where is it going to come from . The american colonies are the most prosperous countries of the empire and play the pay the least taxes. The average tax per person in the British Isles is about 25 times as much as the average in he colonies. If you raise more money to defend the colonies, it seems logical to ask those in the colonies to pitch in than look at the overtaxed at home. That is what the countries have to wrestle with in order to be able to take advantage of the fruits of victory. So indian problem pops up first because of pontiacs rebellion, how are you dealing with that if your problem is that the indians dont like having their land overrun by a bunch of white colonists, then the only way youre 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. Ok. [inaudible] right. And we hope that will prevent onflict. 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 theres not a lot of grumbling or griping about the proclamation of 1763 in the beginning. People in the colonies dont 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 dont want to have to be paying taxes to go fight indians who are only fighting because those greedy folks on the frontier want to take away their land. And its not supposed to be a permanent barrier. The idea the government has as population builds up in some spot on the frontier, youll go out and negotiate with the indians, carve out another chunk of land and pay them for it and open it up. So sentiment will continue and expansion will go on but be slower and more orderly and they hope more peaceful. Later on, however, as people start developing these paranoid fears that theres 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 well be easier to control. But in the beginning the proclamation doesnt cause a lot of stir. Its a little bit different when we get to enforcing the law. The problem existed because theres not enough revenue cutters and 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. The governments cant let that happen. If you have an unpopular law, youve got to repeal it or enforce it. You cant let a whole generation of people grow up scoffing at the law. So whats the government do . They basically put more police on the street. 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, well ship them off to nova scotia to be tried by a judge who isnt going to be swayed by any local friendship and justice can finally be done. Now, youd 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 criminal, and it comes as rather a shock when thats 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 todays 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 in westminister 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 watch guard of public liberty into somebody who will let me do what i want . Heres 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 to have that nice salary . Well, then, if youre a member of parliament, you better do what the government wants. And . Of people saying thank gosh were finally getting more officials to enforce the law and keep crime down, they start complaining that look at this, theyre 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 youve got guys like 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, theyre not going to get much sympathy if they go around whining that a, the government is not allowing me to break the law and stuff my pockets full of money anymore. But if they go around saying hey, the government is taking away my right of a jury trial, one of the most fundamental liberties of the free englishman, and if they can do it to me, they can do it to you, then people are going to ay a lot of attention. So youve turned yourself from a criminal into a victim, a victim of the evil government that is little by little trying to turn everybody from free borne english subjects into slambs. 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 youre going to get money and you have part of your population paying practically nothing, the wealthiest part, and another part paying gigantically more, if youre the government, who would you go tax . Ho would you go after . Youre making the people overtaxed more pay more or those not paying much a little. Those that are paying much. And even if you didnt think that was the morally right thing to do, can you imagine how the British Government telling the british people, hey, we decided to let the colonists go on being freeloaders and tax you more. Thats 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 youre raising the land tax on the land holders in britain and theyre 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 in 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 people in those colonies at least pay a part of the cost of their own defense. So how are 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 attacks on most forms of legal activity. Youve got to put a tax stamp on wills, for instance, you file with the court. You go plead in court, youve got to put a tax stamp on the pleadings you submit to the judge. You want to take your ship out with the cargo, youve got to put a tax stamp on the papers. 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 of people in the colonies and only affects basically lawyers and merchants and publishers and a couple other groups of people. Secondly, its a really puny tax and averages about one schilling a person per year. Hardly anything compared to what people pay in england. And third and maybe best of all, its hard to evade and easy to detect evasion. You dont have to send a Tax Collector swarming out over the landscape the way you would if you had a land tax. All you have to do is look at the pamphlet, does it have the tax stamp on it or not . Look at the will theyre trying to file in court, does it have the stomp on it or not . 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 colony and the 95 of the people sitting out on their farms growing food for their families would never see a tax stamp in their lives. Oh, well maybe if theyre 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, hey, thanks for not taxing us so much and still paying most of the cost of defending us, not even indifferent. Nah, we dont like taxes but its just a little and who cares . Instead, it produces outrage, anger and fear. Because, again, one of the fundamental undoubted rights of englishmen is not to be taxed by your own representative. The king cant take your money unless your representatives say so. So who represents the colonists in america . Well, as far as everybody in england is concerned, the house of commons is their representative just like it represents everyone in the empire. But a house of commons makes really no sense as a representative body if you think of it as full of a bunch of politicians who are going up there to look out for the interests of their little slice of the country because franchises for electing members of the commons were passed out back in the late middle ages and there are big cities like birmingham and manchester andening lan land that have no people elected to the house of commons because they were just ville inches hundreds of years ago and there are a few other places that used to be towns of people them that have nobody living in them anymore. William penn, where hes from, it has no living people so it makes no sense at all, right to say, here are towns who have no one representing them, and here are cemeteries who have a couple of people every two years to go up two people every year or so go up there and represent dead bodies. The house of commons makes sense only if you think that its not a collection of politicians, who are looking out for local interests. Its a collection of statesmen. Everybody there, whoever they are elected from, is supposed to be taking big, broad, outlook and thinking of whats good for the whole empire. So if the house of commons is supposed to represent the interest of people in birmingham, people of birmingham i cant complain when they have to pay a tax even though they dont elect anybody because everybody in the house of commons is watching out for them. Now and everybody in the house you will of commons is watching out for pennsylvania. I now, the british call this now, the british call this virtual representation. You may not elect anybody directly, what you are 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 cant buy a cheese burger in Virtual Reality. 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, you can only be represented by someone you elect from among you in your geographic area. Why should somebody elected from somewhere else represent you . It makes no sense. If you live in Lebanon County, you cant depend on the guy from Lancaster County representing your interests, you cant punish him if he does wrong. You cant reward him with reelection if he does right. He would be a fool to represent your interest. The only thing that matters to him is whether the people in Lancaster County what the people in Lancaster County want. If you cant be represented by somebody in the next county you certainly cant think youre represented by somebody 3,000 miles away, somebody who has never seen you and you have never seen him. So everybody agrees that the englishman is entitled to be taxed only by his own representatives. What they dont seem to agree on, who are his representatives . If you think the house of commons represents the whole empire, including pennsylvania, they can certainly tax pennsylvania. Thats the view of people back home. If you think the Pennsylvania Assembly is the only representative body for pennsylvania, then the house of commons cant possibly constitutionally tax people in pennsylvania. And everybody in england should be able to see that. Well, there is the big problem, right . Now, let me ask you this. Lets suppose youre a member of the Pennsylvania Assembly. Lets suppose the government agrees, hey, look, if the king wants your money, hes got to come ask the Pennsylvania Assembly for it. So the government says to you, mr. Pennsylvania assemblyman, lets say youre that assemblyman. The government says to you, we need some money, will you please tax your constituents and send us the money . What is your attitude likely to be . So you would be willing to go back and tell your constituents next election, the reason you are paying this extra tax is i had to send some of your money overseas. Do you think your voters would like that or what they kick you out . They probably wouldnt and that is what folks in england thinks the attitude in america is likely to be. If you have to ask the local and you think you are going to get defeated at the next election, you are not going to get any. Fundamentalat the vital interest of people in the colonies, it is their view that we should enjoy all the rights of englishmen. Is nobodyse rights can take our money but our. Lected representatives we cannot concede that point because once we elect a government that oversteps the bounds of the constitution, . Here does it stop loss of liberty. We cannot have the country raise money from the wealthiest parts and have the rest of us pay for that, we are not going to put up with that. If you are in the british. Overnment since they get all the benefits of being in it. Tough, because compromise and sometimes work. For compromise to work, you cant have one side or the other give up this vital interest. How do you compromise . You guys pay more, that does not go over too well. How do you fight the stamp act if you are a colonist . Well, for one thing, you get a mob up and go to the people who are appointed to distribute the tax stamps and say, hey, would you rather resign your office or get beaten up, and most of them would rather resign their offices. So pretty soon, there is an anybody in any colony who is willing to risk his life actually selling the tax stamps. And just so the government doesnt 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 of these coastal cities, the colonial elites decide to meet together in new york at the Stamp Act Congress until the British Government exactly what the story is. Number one, we are english, just as much as you. Rights people in england do. You cannot tax us except through our representatives, number four is you are trying to do it anyway and number five as we are not going to let you. Just to drive the point home, well have a boycott of reddish goods. The american colonies are among the biggest most profitable markets for british merchants and manufacturers, not of course if no one buys their stuff. After a while, the merchants and manufacturers of britain go down to westminster to westminster, telling the government get rid of this stupid tax, you are costing us money and since nobody is willing, stupid or brave enough to distribute the tax stamps, you are not raising any money from it, anyway. Parliament does repeal the stamp act. Great celebration in the colonies. Hey these guys finally understand our Constitutional Rights. Toasts are drunk to the patriot king who stands above party of politics and looks out for the good of the people. They are so busy celebrating, the colonists dont realize that at the very same time that congress repeat parliament repealed the stamp act, they passed me to territory act that said parliament has a right to bind the colonies in all cases whatsoever including taxation. So the government did not really accept the argument made in america. All they said was look, we contact you anytime we want, we just dont happen to feel like it right now. That is not much of a victory. Things down, but you still have the problem of money. Can you ask the people of britain to pay extra to defend america when americans are not willing to defend america . And you promised or comes in charles townsend, comes up , with a new idea. The townsend act. The government gets the 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 parliaments right to regulate trade so lets forget the stamp stuff. We will have a tax on things the colonists import. Paper, led, glass, tea, and we will collect it at the ports. Nobody has to be bothered and thats that. Big surprise, more outrage anger and fear. More mobs, another boycott of british goods, more angry protests going back across the ocean. Dont you get it, in a you ract from us is a tax dont you get it . Any money you extract from us is a tax. You cant do it whatever you call it however you try to hide it. More boycotts, or lost money. Merchants and manufacturers go to parliament and say stop this nonsense and once more, the government backs off and repeals all the townsend taxes except the one on tea. More big celebrations, people breathing a sigh of relief. Finally maybe we made our point that we are not paying taxes. The next few years, a number of things happened to reawaken the spheres of conspiracy against liberty these fears of conspiracy against the ready. Against liberty. If its not the tax issue, it is something else. The government sends troops over to boston in 1768. One of the great fears englishmen have is fear of a Standing Army. When there is a war going on, you need an army to fight the enemy. When there is no war, you dont need an army. No cotton that a country can say that, you got potential enemies on every border. The government would be idiots if they did not keep an army of in peacetime. But britain is a bunch of islands. As long as the navy is there, you will have plenty of notice before you have to get ready to fight. You dont need an army, so if you see your government leading to build up an army when there is no enemy around, you have to ask yourself who are they planning to use it against. If it is not the enemy, is it us . Why would the government need an army of us is planning to do something horrible to its own people and it wants to put down the inevitable protests. Englishmen have seen armies in peacetime use for precisely that purpose under the stuart kings and even cromwell, the great defender of parliamentary rights who made himself dictator and ran an even tighter ship than the stewards did. So here are troops in boston. Why . Are they to defend us from the indians . The indians are in the frontier. The french are gone. Why are there Government Troops sitting in boston . You have to start asking that question. Remember the whigs. The wig writers have been telling people over and over, how do you lose her liberty . You lose it to your government, you lose it to some ambitious politician or a group of politicians who decide to start gradually start snipping away at it. You are far more likely to fall prey to your own government then to a foreign enemy. Than to a foreign enemy. If you have this generalized suspicion of government and you see things happen like they are trying to tax us without our consent, they are trying to take away our right to a jury trial and they have troops here, it does make some people start to wonder. And then the boston massacre of course, only brings the fear of a Standing Army to an even greater peak. Here they are, shooting our own people. But there is more going on than that. The church of england is the established church back home. In moste state church of us 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 or consecrated by at least one bishop. All the bishops are back in britain. So if you are pennsylvanian, and you want to be a minister in the church of england, you got to go all the way across the ocean, and expensive and dangerous trip for the laying on of hands. Or your clergymen have to be englishmen and scotts men sent over here. It would be a lot easier to have an anglican bishop right here in the colonies, so a lot of the anglicans in america start asking for one. Now you would think who cares right . If you are a presbyterian all right conversationalist or anything, why do you care . How easy it is for the anglicans to get clergyman . But remember, the church of england is part of the government. The bishops sit in the house of lords. They are basically politicians. Every new anglican minister is another piece of patronage used to corrupt people in who should be done people who should be defending public liberty but are instead of in westminster looking 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 fear some things. Fearsome things. Then youve got the question of judicial independence. In england, judges are in there for life. The whole point is to make them independent of government, they dont have to look over their shoulder all the time and ask how is my decision going to look to the guys in authority. The problem you have in the colonies is you dont have many educated competent lawyers. The government is not willing to put some halfass lawyer in a Judges 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. Lets dont 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 sense right . But if you look at it the way a paranoid conspiracy minded person would, you would ask yourself why is it that they dont 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 are planning to do bad things and dont what the judges to stand in their way. Here is another part of the conspiracy for you. If you have already been taught by these wig writers to suspect her government anyway, and then you see your government doing things that as far as you are concerned, any sensible person would see was either unconstitutional or dangerous, taxing you when they dont 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 at any time they want to get rid of an obstructionist judge, putting troops in the colonies when there was nobody to fight but you, helping the church of england get bigger and more powerful and Everybody Knows it is just another quasigovernmental body, you are going to start worrying. Stuff looks of this really stupid from the view in england, it doesnt look stupid to you, 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 are these people talking about, conspiracy . There is no conspiracy against liberty in westminster. Why shouldnt they have to pay taxes . Everybody else does. No bishop in america . Who would care about that . If you are in englishmen and you are reading all of this stuff, this total phony baloney these people are coming up with as excuses not to have to obey the law or pay taxes, you start to wonder, they did there is a conspiracy but its not in london, its in america. There are a few malcontents like sam adams who are doing their best to stir up these potentially these totally phony fears to turn people against the government so they can perhaps lineup as bosses of an independent america. We cant let this happen without trying to do something about it. Every time there is a protest in the government, the cop in the colonies, the government slaps them back. The people in england get matter get madder and that just make some of the people in the colonies madder and it just goes from one step to another. 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. Course, if you go destroy somebodys property, one or two things is going to happen right . The person whose property destroyed is going to sue you in it,t and make you pay for or the government is going to grab you and put you in jail for the crime. But the government doesnt do that in the case of the tea party. For one thing, it would be hard to figure out who these people were who did this, but what the government does instead is say we are going to punish the whole city of boston until the bostonians agree to reimburse the route the east India Company for all of that tea. They shut the port of boston down. You are going to starve the city out, you are going to cost the merchants and the dockworkers and the sailors money and eventually the economic pain will be sufficient that they will have to back down and pay for the tea. You are going to punish the colony in massachusetts because they need to be taught a lesson, too . This creates outrage and fear. This is not the way you deal with a criminal act. You dont punish a whole population because somebody robbed a bank. Why is the government doing this . It must be that they are just trying to think of another excuse to put the screws on the colonies and make us cave in to their demands. If we do that, we dont deserve the name of englishmen. Almost worse, totally unconnected with the Boston Tea Party but at the same time as boston the act against and massachusetts, Parliament Passes the quebec act, to try get the french catholics in to beingre resigned run by england. Were going to let the canadians have the same kind of government they had before. An appointed governor and judges, no elected assembly, they have never had one. To make the catholics feel comfortable, we are going to have the Catholic Church still be the official church of canada. We wont try to force part of protestantism down their throat so they will be more content. The outrage in the lower colonies is tremendous. Everybody understands if you dont have an elected representative body as part of your government, you have no protection against arbitrary government. Why are they not giving the canadians elected assembly . Is it because they intend to take away hours sooner or later . Take away ours sooner or later . The partisans see the Catholic Church as the one great enemy of human freedom. The fact that your promising government is saying the Catholic Church can dominate the life of canada, this is suspicious. Why would they be doing that . Perhaps worst of all, they have extended the borders of canada down to the ohio river so that in includes so that it includes most of the modern 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 representatives. Pretty suspicious. 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 measurements. This is how you go from a country full of happy proud englishmen to a bunch of traders and rebels. Not that everybody buys into these conspiracies, but enough do to produce the end result. On it, a lot of this stuff could be compromised. You could have made the proclamation of 1763 not quite so severe. You could maybe have said relax about jury trials, everybody gets it except the smugglers. We are not after you. You could have maybe not put the troops in boston. You couldve said to the anglican church, you guys, it is too much trouble to have a bishop over there, we would just keep doing what we have been doing. You could compromise away all of these disputes except one. How do you get around the fact that the colonists are insisting we wont pay any taxes unless our local assemblies approve them . Otherwise, it is unconstitutional and the people in england saying we are not going to let you get away with paying no taxes so that we have to pay more because every good citizen has to be willing to take on the responsibilities and chip in. We cannot let you guys get away with escaping your responsibility. 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 cannot take your money unless you are unless your representatives say it is ok. To give in on that will open you up to more and more unconstitutional actions and you are heading down a slippery slope toward dictatorship. The government cannot give up either, saying we will let the wealthiest part of the empire pay nothing and every body else has to pay more. No government can do that. About taxationnt and representation gets set in stone, so that neither side can back down without giving up their vital interests, that is where it seems really difficult to figure out how a compromise could ever be possible. It are colonies have to submit to unconstitutional actions by their government, throwing the liberties into danger as they see it was a government has to submit to letting a picture of their country getaway a big chunk of their country get away without paying their fair share. Once the issue gets set that way, it is hard to see how it ends in any other play except the spot in concord that emerson wrote about. Their flag to the april breeze unfurled. Shop heard round the world the shot heard round the world. Next time, we will get into the actual revolution. While not next time, because you have an exam next time. You are watching American History tv, all weekend every weekend on cspan3. To join the conversation, like us on facebook at cspan history. Tonight, on afterwords. Reflecting on a 2017 march and what is ahead for the movement, in the book together we rise, behind the scenes of the protest heard around the world. What do you say to them . To what do you say to them say to their sisters who may not have marched but otherwise share their culture and their beliefs . I say that it may not feel like this but we fight for them to and we believe in their potential to do the right thing and i know that they continue to distort disappoint oftentimes, including disappoint in their white sisters, the 47 who dont vote. When i ask people to do and i do this myself, i am not loyal to any Political Party and i have been known as a big credit of the big critic of the democratic party. Dont assume what this movement is about. The reason i say that is what got into a big controversy about proabortion, prolife, can a prolife woman the a part of this move in this movement and i said we are not a proabortion movement. We are a prochoice movement. We believe a woman should have the agency to choose whatever is right for her and her family and her body. Watch tonight on cspan two. Am in newport, we are learning more about the area. Next, we learned about the life of learn about the life of ida lewis. Lewis was the most famous woman lighthouse keeper in the united states, but more importantly, she was the most important lighthouse keeper in the united states. She was barely five foot to five foot two

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