America Past; Do6; Prelude to Revolution

[Beep, Beep, Beep, Beep, Beep, Beep, Beep, Beep] [Background noise] [Music] Let us consider the history. Let us look to the end.

Let us weigh and consider before we advance. To those measures which would bring on the most trying and terrible struggle this country ever saw. Those words were written by Josiah Quincy. Quincy was a law partner of John Adams. And he's an example of a man who went from being a moderate to being a radical on the question of the American Revolution. At first he was moderate in that he was willing to simply talk about his grievances. Later he becomes a radical in that he's willing to go out and fight about it. And you're not going to have a revolution take place until you get a fair number of people who feel that way. They've got to put that talking aside. And be willing to take up arms for their cause. Well that doesn't happen overnight. And what I want to do is look at some of the laws, some of the events that changed people's minds

so if there were enough radicals to wage a revolution by 1775. Remember the United States looks like this after the French and Indian War. Everything west of the Mississippi River belonged to Spain. Everything east to England. England is in a position, she thought, to settle back and enjoy the territory that she's gained from France. Within eight years, she's going to be involved in losing it. To her own colonists. What happened? Well, you have to go back about a hundred years to start on that. Over a period of a century, there'd been a series of laws passed which as a group are called the navigation acts. Why the term Navigation Acts. Because they regulated navigation and trade. They simply were a series of laws designed to regulate trade within the British Empire. And that of course included the colonies. What'd they say?

Well. They said that trade had to be conducted in English ships. To the English that seemed logical. Why use French ships or Spanish ships? Let's use English ships. Give English shipbuilders a livelihood. That included colonists incidentally. Remember colonists are Englishmen. From a sense the colonists benefited from that regulation. Three-fourths of the crews had to be English. There again that seem logical. No problem there. We won't employ foreigners on these ships, if Englishmen need work. Let's have English sailors, give Englishman and colonists jobs as proven on ships. Other parts of the laws are a little more obnoxious. There were certain items that colonists were not allowed to manufacture. They could buy them only from England. The English point of view of course was that we started the colonies for our benefit. That's why you're over there. So

England wanted to trade with the colonies, make money from them, sell them things. We're not going to have the colonies making beaver hats. We'll make them in England and sell them to the colonists. Even though the fur was trapped over here in the first place. Certain goods could be sold only to England, even if you could get better price someplace else. Now that irritated the colonists. If I can sell my tobacco to France for more than I can get for it in England, I ought to be able to do that. The English said no. That did not fit with their mercantilist theory. Real solid thoughts. But, we will give you a monopoly on it. Nobody in the British Empire was allowed to produce tobacco except American colonies. So we're guaranteeing you a market. We're guaranteeing you the protection of the British Navy. Now what are you complaining about? What colonists would reply what are we complaining about, we're complaining about not being able to sell it

someplace else for more money. Some goods you could sell to other countries. But they had to go to England first, where you would pay a tax on them and then ship them to the other country. The colonists objected, of course, to that. The colonies tended to get around these laws by smuggling. That was fairly easy to do. Some of our greatest patriots and richest merchants were smugglers at heart. They engaged on that on the side. And a lot of harbors in United States it was easy to slip into a New England harbor and avoid the tax collector. Once you went out on the high seas, tell them you're going to England then go someplace else. See if they catch you. Maybe they will, maybe they won't. It was a pretty good chance ?. If they did, they did catch you smuggling though, they have a special court in which they tried you. It's called an admiralty court. Admiralty court

because it was conducted by captains of ships, usually on the high seas. Now Englishmen, remember, were accustomed to having trial by jury that went back long way. Admiralty courts did not have a jury trial. So the columnists are very irritated when the English take that away. And they take the smuggler and they put him on board a ship and they say we're going to try you here. Why do they do that? Because colonial juries never convicted anybody. The English The ? saying we'll be glad to try you in Boston. But who's on the jury? A bunch of Bostonian smugglers and columnists who don't convict each other. If you'd ever play it right, we'd let you have your jury trial. So we're gonna try you on board ships. The colonists are irritated over that. Politically just as they were economically by some of these laws. The laws were around for about 100 years and there was no great uproar about them. Why?

Well, they weren't enforced. There was nothing really too bad about an obnoxious law if it isn't enforced. It's when somebody starts trying to make you follow the thing that you get irritated. Why weren't they en- forced? Because Great Britain had other fish to fry that's why. They had the glorious revolution over there. They're replacing their king. They have internal problems. They're worried about wars with France. They kind of treated the colonies with what was called salutary neglect. We'll just neglect you, benignly, won't worry about. But while it happened, if they suddenly decide, should decide to enforce these laws. For 100 years you've been used to having things your own way. What if suddenly you come up and say we're going to crack down on you now? Would that be a little bit like letting a kid do as he pleases until he's 16, and then

suddenly say hey I'm going to take control of this guy he's out of hand. We're going to clamp down on him. Would that work? Well, it didn't work for the colonists. The problem gets worse in 1763. What happened in that year? Well the French and Indian war ended. So? What's the connection? England was in debt. Very greatly in debt. Her debt had tripled. In a war that was fought primarily over here. A war fought, in the English mind, to protect the colonists. Shouldn't they pay for that war? Isn't that fair? Course the colonists they didn't see it that way at all. We fought that war to save your empire. We, the colonists, did the fighting to save you people over Britain's empire for you. And yet you expect us to pay for it. You ought to be grateful to us.

Same problem. The English and colonial simply looking at it differently. Also in 1763 an event takes place out in the West. It seems disconnected. But yet is going to lead directly to the revolution. And that was an event called Pontiac's rebellion. The very year that the French and Indian War ended an Indian rebellion broke out in the Ohio River Valley. The area between the Ohio River and the Great Lakes. It was led by the very capable Indian chief, Pontiac, therefore it's usually called Pontiac's rebellion. There are about 20,000 Indians in that region and he was able to get those tribes to unite temporarily, at least, against the western expansion of the English. That's kind of unusual. One of the major problems that the Indian had was

uniting against the Europeans. They could not stop fighting each other long enough to do that. But Pontiac, with his leadership abilities, was able to get them to cooperate. Now this area had belong to the French. And the English, remember, had defeated the French in the French and Indian War and now claimed it was theirs. But, of course, the Indian knew whose land it was. It was the Indians. So they start this rebellion against the English. Why hadn't they rebelled against the French? Well the French, they were fur traders. They came to trade with the Indians and give them things that the Indians wanted and leave. But the English, they came to stay. They built farms and plowed fields and cut down the trees and came to stay. So they resist the English where they had accepted the French. Well this rebellion was no small thing. Isolated cabins, of course, were attacked. Women working in the fields didn't know if they would get back to their house at night. Men out hunting.

Well, the wife might never see them again. They attacked those things but they attacked forts too. There were twelve major British forts in the region. Eight of them were captured by Pontiac's man. Well what can the English do about this? Well, the English come up with a solution that they think is very logical, but the colonists are just going to hate it. The English looked at it this way; two people are fighting your separate them until you can work out a solution. All right, let's take the settlers out of this region until we deal with the Indian problem. They drew a line right down the top of the Appalachian Mountains. Issued a proclamation, called it the Proclamation of 1763, and it said no one can move west of the mountains until we solve this problem. And if you're already west you've got to come out. The colonists hated that. They said look we just fought a war with the French to get this territory and now you want to take it away from us. When we just fought a war to get it? Why? Don't give us the stuff about the Indians we don't believe that. You want to take it and give it to your rich

friends and then they'll sell it back to us. That's what'll happen. So the colonists resisted it. Now, the English also felt they needed to send an army over here to deal with the Indian problem. And that army will lead to all sorts of problems. [background noise] There wasn't much argument over the fact that an army needed to be sent over here. Nearly everyone accepted that. The argument came when you started talking about who ought to pay for it. The British position was quite simple. We sent it over here to protect you from the Indians, to protect the colonists. The colonists should be taxed to pay for it. The colonists of course didn't accept that at all. They felt the Army had been sent over here to protect Britain's empire and the British ought to pay for it. Well, the British came up with some new taxes to raise money for that army. By

far the best known of those was the Stamp Act. It's one of the best known laws in American history I guess, everybody's heard of it. But what was it? Well, it was a law that put a tax on paper goods. And you could tell if the tax had been paid because they'd put a stamp onto the piece of goods. Pretty much like you would see on cigarettes or liquor today. There were 54 items that this applied to: newspapers that would be a penny, a college degree would be $10.00, playing cards would be something else. In a way it wasn't too wise a tax because it taxed people that could make a lot of noise. Newspaper editors bought a lot of paper. They had to pay the tax. And they were in a position to write all sorts of hateful things about this law. Lawyers dealt in paper and legal documents. They had to pay it. And they were in a position to make

a great deal of noise about it. And the colonists did make noise. They objected to that law for really two reasons. One, it was direct tax. When you bought the goods you paid the tax. It was just so obvious what you were paying, it wasn't hidden in the cost at all. This paper used to cost this much now it costs a penny more. I see I'm paying a penny to the King. Then there was the objection that it was an internal tax. It only applied to the colonies. The Navigation Acts had applied to the entire British Empire. Okay, we'll let the British parliament pass laws that regulate things in the entire empire. But this law applies just to the American colonies. Shouldn't we vote on it? This is where you get people like James Otis and others talking about no taxation without representation. We are being taxed and we're not having any representation.

The British should have given them just one representative and said OK you're represented. Now we'll out vote to do as we please but, they resisted the idea of giving the colonists any representation at all. The colonists fought the Stamp Act really in two ways. First of all they called a stamp act Congress. Nine colonies sent representatives, and met in New York. That's pretty good. Nine of the 13 are now willing to cooperate against this thing. And they decided first of all to stop buying English goods until this law was repealed. That's known as the boycott. We'll hit them in the pocketbook. The merchants are going to hurt. The merchants are going to go to parliament and say get rid of this tax it's ruining us. Other colonists preferred a more direct approach. Violence. This is where you begin to get groups like the Sons of Liberty. They were a very radical revolutionary group. And they're going to harass these

stamps sellers. Eventually every stamp seller in the colonies resigned. The tar and feathering, get these folks, pour tar over them, sprinkle feathers on them, that was unpleasant. Feathers were no great deal I just need to look ?. The hot tar dumped on you? And it hardens and you have to peel it off. You've had chewing gum in your hair before. It wouldn't be that much different only it's all over your whole body. Pulling off your hair and your skin and everything else when you pull that off of you. You only wanted to go through that once. Others' ships that had stamps on them were burned at the dock. It just got to the point where it wasn't worth the hassle to try to sell those stamps. Then Britain repealed the Stamp Act. They backed out. How do you suppose the colonies looked at that? What would the colonists think?

That England is kindhearted and understands our position? [a-uh negative sound] We've got them on the run. They gave in on this. We can go after other things. There probably was a chance there for some reconciliation between Britain and the colonies. Incidentally, when Britain backed down they passed another little law called the Declaratory Act, in which they said we still have the right to tax you if we want to. We're repealing this but we're not giving up on the principle of the thing. Reconciliation? [um-um negative]. England has a new King, George the Third. George the Third as far as the colonies are concerned was both ignorant and prejudice. A combination that you often see even in the modern world. And an undesirable one, certainly an undesirable one in the King of England. He eventually is going to go insane.

Colonists even didn't like him when he was sane for that matter. And you have a new minister in England that's in charge of dealing with the colonies. Charles Townshend, Chancellor of the Exchequer, we would call Secretary of the Treasury. Champagne Charlie and he is going to come up with a series of laws designed to get money out of these colonists. Well Charles Townsend dreamed them up and they're called the Townshend Acts. No big surprise in that. What do they do? Well they went back and said we're going to enforce the Navigation Acts. They always went back to those old things. We're going to collect those taxes. We're going to see that those things are carried out. It also put a tax on some new objects. Lead, paint, tea. There's a good item, tea.

The colonists drank a lot of that, a lot of tea. Find bags of it in any colonial warehouse in the country. But they don't have to have it. So we'll tax it every time they drink it, we're going to make money on it. And he decided to crack down on smugglers. We're tired of this. They began issuing what were call writs of assistance. A writ of assistance was a search warrant, a blank search warrant. A British soldier could simply take that, go into your home, fill it in and look for smuggled goods. The colonists didn't like that, these guys snooping and prowling around. I'll take that and I'll take that and I'll take her. I mean whatever they saw that they wanted they pretty much could fill it in and take it with them. It is not surprising that when we wrote the Bill of Rights we included protection against illegal search and seizure in there. People were remembering those old writs of assistance.

What do you want to do about the Townshend Acts? The boycott had worked before. Why not try it again? So they do. The Sons of Liberty come marching out again. A group of merchants organize an association called the Association and they're going to enforce it. If you're a merchant and you have British goods in your shop you're going to be in trouble. They'd better not be on your shelves, we're checking on you. Well, once again the British backed down. They decided to repeal the Townshend Acts. All except one. We want to save a little face in this whole thing. We'll keep the tax on tea. That's the one tax they decide to keep. One, of course, they're going to regret.

The harassment of British officials didn't really stop with that repeal. In fact, it got worse. Britain sent an army, sent more troops into Boston, supposedly to protect them from the Indians. Nobody was fooled by that. Boston was in no more danger of an Indian attack then than they are today. Those troops are here to keep their eyes on us. And worse yet they moonlight. They come and take our jobs when then ought to be sticking to the soldiering duty. A lot of tension in Boston between that army and the local citizens. And it all erupted on the night of March the 5th, 1770. In one of those incidents that's kind of minor in and of itself, and yet you take enough minor incidents and they equal something major. It erupts into what we know as the Boston Massacre. "On March the 5th of this year. A few minutes after nine, a most

horrid murder was committed in King Street. This affair began by some boys and some young fellows throwing snowballs at the sentry placed at the State House door. After which eight or nine soldiers came to his assistance. Soon after a number of people collected. The captain commanded the soldiers to fire. Which they did. Three men were killed on the spot and several mortally wounded." The first person killed in the Boston Massacre was Crispus Attucks, and sometimes March the fifth is still called Crispus Attucks day. He was a black man killed in the Boston Massacre. What's really significant there isn't so much what happened it's what people thought happened. Look at this newspaper circulated a few days later. Those coffins are supposed to symbolize people killed on the streets of Boston. The CA that stands for Crispus Attucks. And what are the colonists saying now? They're saying look what these cold blooded killers are doing. We've told you they're taxing you without your permission. You've refused to listen. Now they're shooting down innocent people in the streets of

Boston. When are you going to wake up? That's the way it was interpreted as the word spread. And they had a great deal to do in stirring up a feeling of hatred toward the British in the colonies. Well Boston's the site of another one of the well-known events leading to the war, The Boston Tea Party. Here you have a situation where there's a large company in England, the British East India Company. And the British East India Company sells tea and they want to sell it to the colonies, but the colonies aren't buying it. Why? Because the tax is too high or because they didn't get to vote on the tax? Which is it? Just the high tax or is it the idea of a tax? Well the British East India Company convinces parliament, many of whom owned shares in the company, to give them a monopoly on selling tea to the colonies. They have 17 million pounds stored up that they haven't been able to sell.

They get a monopoly and the tax is cut from six cents a pound to three cents. That made it cheaper than smuggled tea. Will the colonists buy it now? No. Britain is ? on that. They sent the ships over here and no place was it landed, no place. Charleston, South Carolina, the colonists seize the tea, sold it and bought weapons with it. New York and Philadelphia, they had to go back home. Annapolis, they forced the ship captain to burn his own ship up. But the best known reaction was in Boston. For Samuel Adams and his group of Sons of Liberty got themselves together, disguised a group of 50 or 60 people as Indians, went on board that ship and threw it into the sea. It's hard to say how much it was worth, maybe fifty, sixty thousand dollars in modern money.

But it was an act of major defiance. You're on a point now you see where Britain can no longer just keep giving in, and giving in, and giving in. They've got to decide. Are we going to govern these colonies or are we going to turn them loose? We'll see how they answer that question next time.