Chapter Overview

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 but it also set the stage for American independence.

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.

The British victory left Americans overflowing with great expectations of the role that they would play in the expanded empire. But many leading Britons charged 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 -- e.g., the Proclamation of 1763, the Stamp Act, and the Quartering Act -- 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 and coincided with a downturn in the colonial economy. The new measures abridged what Americans understood to be their constitutional and political liberties.

British actions seemed to confirm American suspicions of a deliberate plot to enslave Americans by depriving them of property and liberty. Americans displayed an unprecedented unity in opposing imperial policy, turning to petitions, crowd actions, and boycotts as resistance tactics. Parliament bowed to pressure from British merchants and repealed the Stamp Act, but reasserted its authority to tax by passing the Townshend Acts in 1767. Americans renewed their resistance, enforcing boycotts with committees of inspection, and affirmed their unity in responses to the Massachusetts Circular Letter. The stationing of British troops erupted into violence with the Boston Massacre.

With the repeal of most of the Townshend duties, American resistance subsided until the Gaspee incident in 1772. The formation of the committees of correspondence 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 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 met at Philadelphia in September 1774. Delegates resisted both radical demands for immediate mobilization for war and conservative appeals for accommodation. They denied Parliament any authority in the colonies except the power to regulate trade, but acknowledged the colonies' allegiance to George III.

The collapse of royal authority in Massachusetts was moving the colonies toward a showdown with Britain. As a show of force, General Thomas Gage dispatched troops 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 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