Opinion: The runup to the Declaration of Independence

From the Stamp Act to the Boston Massacre, Natelson traces the decade of colonial defiance that forced independence.

🎧 The Road to Independence: Colonial Defiance and British Power

Next installment: John Dickinson and the Case Against Independence

Rob Natelson
Mountain States Policy Center

Rob Natelson

This is the first in a series on the Declaration of Independence, written for its 250th anniversary.

In the years before 1763, the British Empire—although in theory a unified entity—was really a federation. The central government in London controlled foreign affairs and the imperial post office. It also regulated trade with foreign countries and among units of the empire.

But otherwise, the thirteen future American states were largely self-governing. In each, the elected lower house in the colony’s legislature controlled taxes and spending. That body, in conjunction with a governor and upper house, regulated most aspects of colonial life. The colonies also controlled their own militias, which fought side by side with British troops in the conflict known in Europe as the Seven Years War (1756-1763) and in America as the French and Indian War.

Once hostilities ended, however, the British government decided it was time to curb American autonomy. Colonial migration into the area west of the Appalachian Mountains was provoking retaliation from local Indian tribes, so the British issued the Proclamation of 1763, which restricted westward migration. The war had left Britain deeply in debt, so Parliament passed the Sugar Act (1764) to more effectually enforce the tax on molasses. The following year, it enacted the Stamp Act, which imposed duties (indirect taxes) on paper, playing cards, and nearly every colonial legal document.

Because the Stamp Act raised revenue without the consent of the colonists’ elected representatives, the measure provoked widespread American alarm and resistance. To coordinate this resistance, the colonies met in New York City for a “Stamp Act Congress”—one of a long line of federal conventions that foreshadowed the Constitutional Convention and the Constitution’s “Convention for proposing Amendments.”

In response to colonial outrage and petitions from English merchants who relied on the colonial trade, Parliament repealed the Stamp Act. But about the same time, it also adopted the law known to history as the Declaratory Act (6 Geo. iii, c. 12). It provided in part: “the said Colonies . . . have been, are, and of Right ought to be, subordinate unto, and dependant upon, the Imperial Crown and Parliament of Great Britain; and that the King’s Majesty, by and with the Advice and Consent of [Parliament] had, hath, and of Right ought to have, full Power and Authority to make Laws . . . to bind the Colonies and People of America, Subjects of the Crown of Great Britain, in all Cases whatsoever.”

In other words, the British government claimed absolute supremacy over its American colonies. But Americans knew of the long struggle for liberty waged against the Crown by their British ancestors. Absolute submission to a government in which they had no representation was not a condition they were prepared to accept.

In 1767, in furtherance of its declaration of supremacy, Parliament imposed further taxes on America: the Townshend duties. These exactions provoked renewed colonial resistance. A series of essayists, most of them distinguished American lawyers, laid out the American case and pleaded for peaceful resistance. Their publications drew what their authors considered to be the proper lines between colonial and imperial prerogatives, and in doing so they foreshadowed the Constitution’s division between state and federal powers.

Among the essayists were James Otis, John Adams, James Wilson, Alexander Hamilton, and Thomas Jefferson. But it was John Dickinson’s “Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania” that really set the colonies on fire. As explained in the next essay in this series, Dickinson played a major role in the subsequent debate over Independence.

Parliament eventually repealed all of the Townshend duties except the tax on tea. But it continued to insist on absolute British power over America. British intransigence was answered with similar intransigence on the colonial side, particularly in Massachusetts, where much of the unrest was provoked by Samuel Adams, an accomplished grassroots agitator.

The British government therefore sent troops into Boston, and on March 5, 1770, the inevitable occurred: A local mob taunted British troops, who in panic fired back. Five Americans lost their lives in this altercation, which Adams and his allies dubbed “The Boston Massacre.” The first to die was Crispus Attucks, a sailor of African and American Indian extraction—about whom, by the way, I wrote my college senior honors thesis over fifty years ago.

The agitation continued, notably with the Boston Tea Party (1773), in which a group of citizens, dressed as Indians, protested the tax on tea by boarding a ship and tossing its cargo of tea into the harbor. Many Americans were incensed by this unlawful act, and the British even more so. In 1774, Parliament adopted four laws designed to punish Massachusetts: the Coercive Acts.

Even those Americans outraged by the conduct of the Boston “Indians” thought the British response to be far out of proportion to the transgression. Representatives of the Colonies again met in convention—this time in Philadelphia—to plan further peaceful resistance and to petition the King. But the British remained unmoved by the efforts of this “First Continental Congress.”

Colonial unrest continued, and in February 1775, the king declared Massachusetts to be in a state of rebellion. Two months later, British troops moved to confiscate the arms of the Massachusetts militia. This provoked the April 19 hostilities at Concord and Lexington that marked the first battles of the American Revolution: In Ralph Waldo Emerson’s representation: “By the rude bridge that arched the flood, Their flag to April’s breeze unfurled, Here once the embattled farmers stood, And fired the shot heard round the world.”

In May, the colonies again convened in Philadelphia. This Second Continental Congress became a de facto treaty organization and the agency by which Americans prosecuted the war. It also was the entity that produced the Declaration of Independence.

Next installment: John Dickinson and the Case Against Independence.

Rob Natelson, a former University of Montana constitutional law professor, is Senior Fellow in Constitutional Jurisprudence at the Mountain States Policy Center, an independent research organization based in Idaho, Montana, Eastern Washington and Wyoming. Online at mountainstatespolicy.org. Rob authored the book “The Original Constitution,” and Justices of the U.S. Supreme Court have cited his constitutional research repeatedly.

Next installment: John Dickinson and the Case Against Independence

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