Nation of Nations Concise 2/e Davidson, Gienapp, Heyrman, Lytle, & Stoff
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Americans liked being English. They celebrated the English triumph over the French. But in the dozen years thereafter they came to realize that English politicians would not allow them to be English. In short, the Seven Years' War resolved the contest for supremacy in North America between the English, the French, and the Indians. Yet it also set the stage for the coming of American independence.

The Seven Years' War

The conflict, triggered when the French drove George Washington from Fort Necessity in 1754, quickly became global. Until 1758, the French and their Indian allies in North America seemed likely to sweep to victory. Then William Pitt took personal control over the war in Britain and the tide of battle turned. By 1759 British and colonial forces had claimed most of Canada. The Treaty of Paris in 1763 officially ended the French presence on the continent of North America.

The Seven Years' War was pivotal, because it created opposing expectations for the future. Once the French were removed from the frontiers of British America, George III and his ministers could renew their efforts to centralize and consolidate the empire.

On the other hand, the British victory left Americans overflowing with great expectations of the role that they would play in the expanded empire. But many leading Britons came away from the conflict disaffected with the colonies, charging that Americans had withheld support and even traded with the enemy. Such conflicting perceptions lit the fuse of imperial crisis.

The Imperial Crisis

Britain determined to impose tighter controls on its newly enlarged empire and pay for the expense by raising revenue in the colonies. The new measures of the early 1760s-the Proclamation of 1763, the Sugar Act, the Stamp Act, the Currency Act, the Quartering Act, and the stationing of British troops in the colonies-were all designed to advance the cause of centralization.

The timing of these new measures was disastrous. They deflated American expectations of a more equal status in the empire and coincided with a postwar downturn in the colonial economy. Perhaps more important, the new measures abridged what Americans understood to be their constitutional and political liberties-the right to consent to taxation, the right to trial by jury, the freedom from standing armies.

Above all, British actions seemed to confirm American suspicions that ambitious politicians, abusing their power, were part of a deliberate plot to enslave Americans by depriving them of property and liberty. The understanding of history that Americans had learned from the English Opposition, that power inevitably conspires to encroach on liberty, colonials now applied to the crisis within the empire. As a result, Americans displayed an unprecedented unity in opposing the innovations in imperial policy, turning to petitions, crowd actions, and boycotts as resistance tactics. Although Parliament bowed to pressure from British merchants and repealed the Stamp Act, it reasserted its authority to tax Americans by passing the Townshend Acts in 1767. Americans renewed and institutionalized their resistance, enforcing boycotts with committees of inspection, and affirmed their unity in responses to the Massachusetts Circular Letter. The stationing of British troops in Boston only increased hostility to imperial authority, erupting into violence with the Boston Massacre.

With the repeal of all of the Townshend duties except for the tax on tea in 1770, American resistance subsided until the Gaspee incident in 1772. The formation of the committees of correspondence, inspired by Samuel Adams, fostered intercolonial consensus and spread the scope of the resistance inland. When Britain responded to the Boston Tea Party with the Coercive Acts in 1774, many more Americans, primed by resistance propaganda, joined the cause. The stage was set for concerted intercolonial action.

Toward the Revolution

The growing unity of the resistance movement came to fruition when the First Continental Congress convened at Philadelphia in September 1774. Delegates walked a middle course, resisting radical demands for immediate mobilization for war and conservative appeals for accommodation. Congress denied Parliament any authority in the colonies except the power to regulate trade, but acknowledged the colonies' allegiance to George III. Delegates also drew up the Continental Association, an agreement to cease all trade with Britain until the Coercive Acts were repealed.

But the collapse of royal authority in Massachusetts was moving the colonies toward a showdown with Britain. To make a show of force, General Thomas Gage dispatched troops from Boston in April of 1775 to seize arms being stored at Concord. A battle between British soldiers and the Massachusetts militia resulted. In January of 1776, Thomas Paine's Common Sense announced that the imperial crisis had passed from "argument to arms." Paine's pamphlet undermined the emotional tie to England by attacking George III, persuading many Americans of the necessity of becoming independent and republican-to become not English, but American.

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