History

They were members not of one civilization, but three — New England, the South, and the Middle Colonies. They differed in religion, in past politics (Cavalier or Puritan), in form of government, and in economic interests. They even differed in their original demographics, which had shaped them in different ways. New England (like Oregon, later) had been settled by families, sometimes by transplanted communities; the South (like California, later) had been settled by wild young men seeking to make their fortunes. And, in social makeup as in geography, New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania were in the middle.

It took a lot of doing to turn thirteen colonies into one fledgling nation. History had left them a legacy of mutual suspicions and misunderstandings. But under the pressure of events, representatives of the colonies learned to share information with one another and then, gradually, to meet, understand each other as representatives of their respective regions, work together, make common plans, and carry out those plans. Learning to work together and to depend upon one another meant overcoming all those differences, a process that was fueled by certain commercial interests, and concrete resentment of a high-handed and distant government, and was bolstered by the political theory all these men had learned as young Englishmen.

But, one by one, England’s actions seemed to imperil the autonomous status the colonies had taken for granted for a century and a half, until the colonists began to think of themselves less as thirteen equally sovereign entities and more as one entity faced with a common peril. It was a long road. The first step, arguably, was the creation of committees of correspondence.

Samuel Adams was in at the beginning of the movement, as in so many things connected to the revolution, and so was Dr. Joseph Warren. Very early on, they recognized that if they were to gain popular support, they would have to influence the town meetings held throughout Massachusetts, which, of course were initially dominated by Loyalists. In November, 1772, they persuaded the Boston town meeting to create a standing Committee of Correspondence, in order to (among other things) prepare “a letter to be sent to all the towns of this province and to the world, giving the sense of this town.” Its first communication was a list of grievances against Britain, along with a request that their views be supported and that “a free communication of your sentiments to this town, of our common danger” be returned.

Among the grievances listed were

that Parliament had assumed power of legislation for the colonists without their consent;

that it had raised illegal revenues;

that tax collectors had been appointed by the Crown, rather than, as hitherto, by the province;

that the tax collectors were “entrusted with power too absolute and arbitrary,”

that the king was using tax revenue to pay provincial government officers, “making them dependent on him, in violation of the charter,”

etc.

In response, most Massachusetts towns joined in establishing a network of Committees of Correspondence throughout the colony.

The Virginians followed a few months later, in March, 1773, establishing an eleven-man permanent Committee of Correspondence, among whose members were Patrick Henry and Thomas Jefferson. The cooperative spirit prevalent in colonial society was naturally receptive to the idea. Other colonies followed the lead of the two most populous and most influential colonies, and by the following year, such committees were functioning in all thirteen colonies, acting as a sort of non-electronic internet to keep each other informed.

It is estimated that in all between 7,000 and 8,000 men served as delegates at the local and colony level on the various committees. The committees gradually extended their power over many aspects of American public life, until they became shadow governments, superseding colonial legislatures and royal officials.

These committees enabled the leading statesmen of the various colonies to get to know one another virtually, prior to the call for the Continental Congress in 1774 that allowed many of them to meet in the physical. That First Continental Congress, as we have seen, called for the Second Continental Congress to convene in May, 1775, by which time the events at Lexington and Concord, Massachusetts, had moved things far beyond what anyone had anticipated. After that point, in 1774 and 1775, local committees supervised the elections of provincial conventions, which took over the actual operation of colonial government.

Meanwhile the Second Continental Congress became the coordinating body during the revolution, and morphed into something between a permanent alliance and a sort of super-government with the passage of the Article of Confederation.

The Committees of Correspondence were not the voice of the majority; but they were loud, vigorous, and coordinated. With time, and in response to the pressure of events, the committees moved from being a network of communication to being provisional governments. The French say, it’s the first step that counts. The Committees of Correspondence, in their collective impact, were that first step.

Now, granted, Thomas Hutchinson was bull-headed. And granted he collected offices the way Franklin Roosevelt collected postage stamps. And granted that he was neither well loved nor well respected. (John Adams described him as an avaricious “courtier.”) Granted, too, that as the last royal governor of Massachusetts, he was an amazingly thorough failure. Lord North (himself not much of a statesman) thought that the outbreak of the revolutionary war was caused as much by the publication of Hutchinson’s confidential letters as any other single thing. So, as a statesman, a failure. But was the American-born Hutchinson a traitor to the colonies, and to the cause of freedom, as so often charged? Hardly. For all his faults, he deserves sympathy as the highest-placed victim of the unofficial lynchings sponsored by the Sons of Liberty.

Hutchinson was born in 1711, which made him not quite 60 at the time of the Boston Tea Party. There was nothing to be said against his ancestry. He was a direct descendant of Anne Hutchinson, who took on the Puritans of Boston, helped found Rhode Island, and wound up taking refuge with the Dutch to avoid bigoted Puritan revenge. In fact, his own life may be seen as a sort of distorted mirror of hers. His more immediate ancestry, on both sides, consisted of well-off merchants. Hutchinson was born respectable, and never got over it.

He graduated from Harvard College at 16, was conspicuously successful at commerce from an early age, made a happy marriage, and at age 26 was elected first as a selectman in the city of Boston and then as a member of the General Court, which is what Massachusetts called its general assembly. He was a “hard money” man long before the term came into use. Thomas Hart Benton would have approved, but his contemporaries did not, until in 1749 he sponsored a bill that succeeded in replacing the colony’s paper money with specie without bringing on a depression. After that, he was very popular for a while. But time would demonstrate that he had a positive genius for misreading the times and alienating people.

No reason to detail his career before 1758. Among other things he was appointed to the Governor’s Council; was appointed judge of probate and a Common Pleas justice; he was named a delegate to the Albany Convention (of which we shall take notice in due course) where he drafted a plan for colonial union in cooperation with Benjamin Franklin. Then he was appointed lieutenant governor. When the governor obtained leave to return to England, in 1759, Hutchinson served as acting governor until the next governor, Francis Bernard, arrived to assume office. Bernard promptly appointed Hutchinson Chief Justice of the province’s superior court, although Hutchinson had no legal training and had not sought the post.

He never should have accepted the post, for at least three reasons. One, Hutchinson made some bad decisions, including authorizing arbitrary searches by customs officials. Two, he left himself open to criticism as avaricious of power, since besides being chief justice, he was lieutenant governor and a member of the Governor’s Council. Three and perhaps most important, in taking the post he made an enemy of James Otis Sr. and the popular party.

Bad enough, but then came the Sugar Act, and the Stamp Act. Hutchinson opposed the Sugar Act, and he and Bernard warned London not to proceed with the 1765 Stamp Act, but Hutchinson opposed the use of radical language in the assembly’s petition to Parliament, got it moderated, and privately supported calls for its repeal. His reward was to be accused of secretly favoring the act.

Hutchinson opposed the Stamp Act, but he allowed his brother-in-law to become “stamp master,” responsible to implement the act in the province. On 13 August 1765, mobs sacked the brother-in-law’s home and office, and two weeks later they destroyed Hutchinson’s Boston house (the family narrowly escaping). The family silver was stolen, the furniture was stolen or destroyed, and Hutchinson’s collection of historically important manuscripts was scattered. There were no police, there were no troops. The Sons of Liberty had it all their own way.

The house he lost in Boston

Governor Bernard requested troops to protect crown officials, a little late. When the Stamp Act was followed by the Townshend Acts, Bernard was recalled, and left for England in August, 1769, leaving Hutchinson as acting governor, in the time for the Boston Massacre. He went to the scene, promised that justice would be applied fairly, and had the British soldiers arrested. Then he resigned.

But while his letter of resignation was traveling east, his commission as governor was traveling west, and with the commission came strict instructions. One restricted meetings of the governor’s council, another required the governor’s approval of appointment as colonial agents. A third relocated the provincial assembly across the river in Cambridge, to insulate it from Boston hooligans under political control. The radicals saw, or pretended to see, this as a usurpation of power, never conceding that mob rule might inspire and require counter-measures. And when Hutchinson announced that his salary henceforth would be paid by the crown, even the province’s moderates moved closer to the rulers of the mob, as fears continue to escalate.

In 1772, Hutchinson had told the assembly that the colony either was wholly subject to Parliament, or was effectively independent. The assembly’s response stated that the colonial charter granted autonomy. This was of course reported to the colonial secretary in England, and he told colonial agent Benjamin Franklin that the assembly must retract its response.

Now, here’s where you have to decide how big a camel you are willing to swallow. Franklin sent, to the speaker of the Massachusetts assembly, a package of letters that Hutchinson and other colonial officials had written in the late 1760s, saying that they must not be widely circulated, because he was not “at liberty to make the letters public.” Franklin, in reading the letters, had concluded that they had misinformed Parliament of the situation. He sent the letters hoping to deflect the colony’s anger from Parliament to Hutchinson and others. But how could they do that if they were not to be circulated?

Of course the inevitable happened. Samuel Adams, clerk of the assembly, got his hands on them and got them published in June 1773, and in short order they were reprinted throughout the colonies. Can anybody believe that Franklin intended any other outcome? And Samuel Adams was careful about what he did and didn’t allow into print, making it seem as though Hutchinson had been conspiring with officials in London to deprive the colonists of their rights.

It was as ruthless as using mobs to terrorize Boston, and as successful. The assembly demanded Hutchinson’s removal. Hutchinson requested permission to come to England to defend himself. By the time he received the letter authorizing his return, the season was too late for travel, so he was still in Boston for its Tea Party, which he inadvertently helped cause by preventing the ships from leaving port without having paid duty.

In May, 1774, Massachusetts got a new governor, General Thomas Gage. And in June Hutchinson sailed for England, thinking it was for only a short time, not dreaming that he would never see his country again. He was well received by the king, by the colonial secretary, and by the prime minister, but his political life was over. The king offered to make Hutchinson a baronet, but he had lost most of his fortune when his American properties were confiscated, and had to decline. On July 4, 1776, of all dates, Oxford University awarded Hutchinson an honorary doctorate of law degree.

In exile, Hutchinson continued work on his history of the colony, the first two volumes of which had been published in Boston in 1764 and 1767, spanning the years 1628 to 1750. The third volume (posthumously published in 1828, in London), covered the years 1749-1774 and comprised, he said, “a detailed narrative of the origins and early states of the American revolution.” Hutchinson died in London in 1780, aged 68, an unwilling exile, maligned and impoverished.

 

The sequence of events that led from the Stamp Act to the revolution isn’t much fun to read. In this case history is something like what Bismark said about sausage and legislation: If you like it, don’t look too closely into how it is made. So we’re going to trot quickly through a sequence of events that warrant closer examination than they’re going to get.

Seven years of war, which we will trace shortly, had expelled France from North America. Canada was now British, and Louisiana was now Spanish. The colonists had been glad for England’s protection against the French, but the Spanish, and the Indian tribes, they could handle by themselves. Happy ending.

But then Parliament decided that since the North American colonies were the chief beneficiaries of a very expensive war, it was only right that they should help pay for it. Enter the Stamp Act of 1765. The British people had paid it for three quarters of a century, so why should the colonies be exempt? Only fair, right? The MPs, as is so often the habit of legislators, apparently legislated without understanding what they were doing, how it would be perceived, or why it would be opposed. They never did seem to understand why the colonies objected, and apparently it never occurred to them that they might be unable to have their way. The Stamp Act passed by overwhelming margins — 205–49 in the House of Commons, unanimously in the House of Lords.

It was to go into effect November 1, 1765. After that date, every newspaper and legal document would have to use stamped paper. (In this instance, stamped means embossed. We’re not talking about the equivalent of postage stamps.) Can you think of a better way to assure a people’s hostility to a given tax than to be sure that it bears particularly on lawyers and editors? Attorney licenses, court papers, land grants, playing cards, dice, newspapers and pamphlets….

Add to that the fact that, by law, the tax could be paid for only in English specie, rather than colonial paper, which was impossible even if the tax were not objectionable for other reasons. Add to that the fact that the tax was imposed in order to help pay for British troops to be stationed in North America, when the peace had made their presence entirely unnecessary.

But what was worst was that according to their royal charters, all the colonies were subject to the king, not the parliament. They had their own long-recognized legislatures, and other than in matters of imperial trade and defense, they governed themselves and taxed themselves without interference from a legislature they were not represented in (and did not want to be represented in, since they would be so hopelessly outnumbered).

Samuel Adams cogently argued: “For if our Trade may be taxed why not our Lands? Why not the Produce of our Lands & every thing we possess or make use of? This we apprehend annihilates our Charter Right to govern & tax ourselves…. If Taxes are laid upon us in any shape without our having a legal Representation where they are laid, are we not reduced from the Character of free Subjects to the miserable State of tributary Slaves.^”

Taxation without representation became the burning issue among the colonials, while the MPs appear to have considered the issue little more than a smokescreen used to avoid taxes.

Well, Parliament passed the Stamp Act, stamp tax collectors were named in various cities, stamped paper was sent across the ocean – and they collected hardly anything! Resistance was immediate, organized and seemingly unanimous. The first joint colonial response to any British measure, the Stamp Act Congress, met in New York City in October, 1765, to petition for repeal. The Congress met in secret for 12 days, and produced a Declaration of Rights and Grievances. Besides protesting the Stamp Act, it asserted that Parliament could not represent the colonists. The Declaration was sent to the king, and petitions were also sent to both Houses of Parliament, but the most important result of the congress was that it met at all. From the Stamp Act Congress to the First Continental Congress was only a step, although that step took nine years.

Protest was not confined to the Stamp Act Congress. Colonial legislatures sent petitions and protests, the first committees of correspondence arose, to create communications links among the colonies, and — the darkest manifestations of resistance, and perhaps the most effective — incidents of mob violence became common, orchestrated by groups such as the Sons of Liberty. The revolutionary nature of the struggle is here apparent for the first time, as the lower classes begin to express their resentment of the rich and powerful, and find their own strength as they do so. Leaders such as James Otis and Samuel Adams were riding the back of the tiger, needing to retain mob support but attempting at the same time to restrain them from the worst excesses.

Boston was in the forefront of the violence. Its stamp distributor was hanged in effigy, had his stable house and coach and chaise burned, and his house looted, and resigned the next day. Thomas Hutchinson, the Lieutenant Governor of Massachusetts colony, suffered mob violence which evicted his family from his mansion, destroyed the furniture, tore down the interior walls, emptied the wine cellar, and scattered his collection of Massachusetts historical papers. The governor offered a reward for information on who led the mob, but mobs freed everyone arrested. Naturally, in short order, every stamp tax distributor had resigned his commission, and a lot of stamped paper had been seized and either burned or dumped in harbors. For lack of the official paper, the courts couldn’t function. Wills couldn’t be probated, nor lawsuits entered or settled. It was an impossible situation.

Non-important agreements among merchants added to pressure on Parliament, for the American colonies were an important percentage of British trade. London merchants began coordinating a a national effort to pressure Parliament for repeal. The Act was repealed in March, 1766, having served to coordinate colonial resistance to Parliamentary interference with American domestic affairs. Naturally, Parliament made things worse, affirming its power to legislate for the colonies “in all cases whatsoever.”

Then came the Townshend Acts. In order to provide posts for 150 politically connected army officers who otherwise would have had to make an honest living, the British proposed to maintain a standing army in America when all external threats had been eliminated. That army cost money. In 1767,  Charles Townshend, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, proposed to raise that money by taxing America. The Revenue Act of 1767 levied duties on paper, paint, lead, glass, and tea. These were five items that could not be manufactured in the colonies, and could not be bought legally from any source but Britain. (Townshend apparently thought that the colonists objected to direct rather than indirect taxes, and therefore would not object to tariffs. He never could understand about taxation without representation. He told MPs that he was establishing a precedent, which could be expanded.) So then the MPs needed the Commissioners of Customs Act of 1767, to create the American Board of Customs Commissioners to enforce trade regulations, and the Vice Admiralty Court Act of 1768, to create four district court to help customs officials prosecute smugglers.

Not only did Townshend want to tax America, he proposed to use some of that revenue to pay the salaries of governors and judges, to render them independent of the colonial legislatures upon whom they heretofore had been dependent. And, he wanted to tighten up compliance with trade regulations (that is, crack down on smuggling). And as if that weren’t enough, he proposed to punish the colony of New York for refusing to quarter troops as required by the 1765 Quartering Act.

You can imagine (but apparently Parliament could not) how well any of this went over. It is as if the MPs were deliberately working to teach the Americans to cooperate against them. In short order, matters were out of hand, mobs were intimidating Boston, and four British Army regiments were being sent to preserve or restore order. This worked about as well as anything else the MPs did, and on March 5, 1770, harassed troops threatened by a mob killed five American civilians (the “Boston Massacre”), and the Sons of Liberty had the incident they needed.

In April, the Repeal Act left in place the American Board of Customs, but removed the tax on everything but tea — to assert “the right of taxing the Americans.”

While we’re building monuments to those who made the American Revolution possible (not to say necessary!), we should include Lord North, still remembered in England as the man who lost America. And let’s not forget that much-abused Loyalist, Massachusetts Governor Thomas Hutchinson. Between them, North and Hutchinson lit the fuse, and Samuel Adams and others blew on it as hard as they could, to keep it burning, and Boston Harbor, December 16, 1773, is where and when it blew.

You know the bare bones of what happened. The government tried to make colonists pay tax on imported tea. The colonists refused, the government insisted, and a suspiciously organized mob fed the tea to the fishes. Then followed the Intolerable Acts, and revolution.

The story behind the story reads differently to us than it did to the patriots of the day. It has a strangely modern ring:

• the company with special access to government;
• the quasi-official position that made it “too big to fail”;
• the arrogant, insulated bureaucracy that proposed to solve a problem by taking new injudicious action rather than by undoing what it had previously done to cause it;
• the conspiracy theorists who found dark plots in every official action;
• the rabble-rousers who poured unmeasured abuse on whatever official made their blacklist; and
• the “show of government resolution” that unerringly made a bad situation worse.

The background on tea is complicated but can be simplified to this.

In 1698 – three-quarters of a century before the events we’re looking at — Parliament conferred on the East India Company a monopoly on the importation of tea, but required it by law to sell its tea only at auction in England, wholesale, and assessed it a 25% ad valorum tax on every pound imported. Tea imported into Holland was not taxed by the Dutch government, which of course made Dutch tea much cheaper. Big surprise, and who would have guessed it, suddenly there was this huge market for smuggled tea in England and in British America.

It took a while, but in 1767, Parliament decided to refund to the East India Company the tax on any tea re-exported to the colonies. Then, to recover the income, it imposed various taxes on the colonies (as well as in the home islands). That didn’t work spectacularly well. The result, throughout the colonies, was political protest, non-importation agreements, and vigorous smuggling.

The taxes were repealed in 1770. Two years later, Parliament restored the tea taxes within Britain that had been repealed in 1767, which once again drove up the price of British tea, and of course sales dropped. By late 1772, the East India Company had imported a huge surplus of tea that it couldn’t sell, and was in serious financial trouble.

The tea couldn’t be sold cheaply in Europe, because it would be smuggled right back into the islands. The best market for the surplus tea was the American colonies, if it could be made cheaper than smuggled Dutch tea. So, the Tea Act of 1773 not only restored the refund on the duty for importing tea into Britain, it permitted the company to export tea to the colonies without a middleman. The East India Company could now sell its tea slightly cheaper than what smugglers were charging, so, once again, happy ending – except that there was still that Townshend tax. The Tea Act retained the three pence duty that Townshend had imposed on tea imported to the colonies, and North refused to repeal it.

Of course the company knew that the tax was a sore point with the colonials, and if it had had its way, the government would have removed it. All it wanted to do was unload that mountain of unsold tea. The company appointed colonial merchants in New York, Philadelphia, Boston, and Charleston as consignees for the tea, and tried to have the tax paid in London, or have the consignees quietly pay the duties after the tea was sold. But, no such luck. Although the people by and large just wanted to go about their business, and although the merchants were willing to pay three pence per pound, and although most of the tea that came into American ports was smuggled anyway, the political activists saw that if you once admitted Parliament’s right to tax the colonies, the camel’s nose was under the tent. So now it wasn’t about the tea, it was about the principle of the thing.

In September and October 1773, the company sent four shiploads of tea to Boston (one of which was destroyed by a storm en route), and one each to New York, Philadelphia, and Charleston. In all, nearly 300 tons of tea. Faster ships gave America the details of the Tea Act while the ships were on their way, and in Boston, particularly, the Sons of Liberty set out to terrorize the consignees in the way they had terrorized the stamp distributors. In New York, Philadelphia, and Charleston, tea consignees were forced to resign or to return the tea. But in Boston, Governor Hutchinson convinced the tea consignees not to back down. A show of resolution, you know.

Opposition centered around three issues:

• Taxation without representation.
• Independence of the judiciary and elected officials. The revenue to be derived from the tax was to be used to pay the salary of officials hitherto dependent upon the colonial legislatures, hence responsive to them.
• Official monopolies. Tea importers who had not been named as consignees by the East India Company were threatened with financial ruin. Also, if tea could be made subject to official monopoly, so in principle could other goods, leading to potential economic strangulation.

(A fourth, unacknowledged, concern was that the Tea Act, in making legally imported tea cheaper, threatened the interests of the smugglers of Dutch tea.)

So when the first of the tea ships, the Dartmouth, arrived in Boston Harbor in late November, Samuel Adams convened a mass meeting, attended by thousands, that passed a resolution urging the captain to send the ship back, and assigned twenty-five men to watch the ship and prevent the tea from being unloaded. But Governor Hutchinson refused to grant permission for the Dartmouth to leave without paying the duty. Two more tea ships arrived in Boston Harbor, and sat there too.

British law allowed customs officials to confiscate the cargo of any ship that did not pay duties within twenty days of arrival. On December 16—the deadline for the Dartmouth  — Hutchinson again refused to let the ship leave. In response – and it can hardly have been spontaneous, unless some of the men were in the habit of bringing along costumes designed to disguise themselves as Mohawk Indians – a group of men boarded all three ships, and flavored the waters of Boston Harbor with the contents of 342 chests of tea. As usual, nobody saw anything or heard anything or recognized any of the perpetrators.

(Four American merchants offered to pay for the losses, but Lord North turned them down. He thought it important to take a stand.)

The tea party discredited and alienated America’s friends in Britain, at least for the time, and there was little opposition when the government closed the port of Boston. The other American colonies took note, concluded that while today it was Massachusetts, tomorrow it could well be them, and mentally took the next step toward joint action. The fuse had reached the powder keg.

A disadvantage to this plan of proceeding from topic to topic in short sections, from most recent to less recent, is that a series of closely linked events may make little sense if sketched without their immediate background, but may involve tedious repetition if the background is sketched in, only to be repeated in detail in the next section. So, it may be worthwhile to take a fast look at the sequence. Here in a nutshell is how the British government managed to turn total victory over the French in 1763 into the American revolution in just a few years.

Consider the whole subject of Parliament taxing America. Would you throw away a continent to avoid retiring a few army officers? Or to prove that you had the right to legislate taxes that you couldn’t enforce? Or just to show that you could make the colonists obey you? Parliament did all those things, and in the process threw away the first British empire. Sometimes governments make monumentally stupid decisions for reasons that seem, to them at the time, perfectly sensible.

The Americans of the day believed that these measures were part of a dark purpose. It would be rash of us to assume that dangers seen by so many eminent practical men – New Englanders, southerners, and men of the middle colonies alike — were totally nonexistent. The danger lay more in the tendency than in the intent, perhaps, but that didn’t make things less dangerous. Nonetheless, we in our day can see how great were the elements of chance involved in the drama.

Here was the sequence: First came victory over the French in 1763, a victory so total as to free the North American colonies from military danger. Then came the need to pay for that war. Then came “practical” measures to obtain the revenue by taxing the colonies. Then came resistance, and insistence, and an escalation of tensions and suspicions, and within a dozen years of victory, the two halves of the empire were at each other’s throats, and within a couple years more, France was exacting its revenge, forcing its hated rival to make a peace that cost it the most populous part of its empire.

And it started as a way to prevent some army officers from losing their positions.

In the wake of Britain’s victory over the French in 1763, the ministry of the Earl of Bute decided to keep 10,000 British regulars in the American colonies. Why? To avoid having to demobilize 1,500 politically connected officers. Just that!

It was politically impossible to maintain a large standing army in the home islands. (Britain historically looked for protection to its navy, not its army.) So, Bute’s brilliant idea was to station the army in the colonies, and the prime minister after Bute, George Grenville, made the even more brilliant decision to tax the colonies to pay to maintain the army, since it was there for their defense. But after the peace of 1763, Americans saw no need for British troops, and they weren’t willing to pay for them.

What made things worse was the means proposed. First came the Sugar Act of 1764, an import levy that was largely avoided by smuggling. But then came the Stamp Act of 1764. Great Britain had had its own Stamp Act since 1712, taxing newspapers, legal documents, pamphlets, etc. – even commercial bills and advertisements, but in 160 years, Parliament had never directly taxed the North American colonies. It had regulated colonial trade, but it had not imposed taxes. (Americans had contributed to the cost of their defense by providing colonial militias and sometimes by voting funds to help maintain British troops.)

Next came the Townshend Acts — the Revenue Act of 1767, the Indemnity Act, the Commissioners of Customs Act, the Vice Admiralty Court Act, and the New York Restraining Act — designed to make the governors and judges independent of colonial legislatures, to suppress smuggling (that is, to enforce compliance with trade regulations), to punish New York for failing to comply with the Quartering Act of 1765,  and to establish that the British Parliament had the right to tax the colonies.

When widespread resistance to these acts showed that they were impractical, Parliament repealed all but the tax on tea, which was just enough to keep the pot boiling, because it told the colonists that Parliament was still intent on taxing them at its will, regardless of the fact that it included no American representation.

Naturally, the British government attempted to deal with the colonies separately, on the theory of divide and conquer. This very effectively taught the colonists the need for increased coordination, and so came into being the Committees of Correspondence. Those committees were one of the roots of the call for a Continental Congress, in response to the Boston Tea Party and the retaliatory acts that followed.

It’s fascinating, really, to watch. It tempts you to conclude that ministerial stupidity of such magnitude can only have come by way of divine providence, in the sense of the old saying, “whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad.”

The American revolution was a snowball rolling downhill, gathering mass and momentum as it went. Conspiracy theorists see a deep design behind each new event. Coincidence theorists argue that the revolution “just happened,” because of this or that decision or action.

Well, it didn’t “just happen,” but neither was it planned. We of a later age can see that many of the events were the unintended consequences of decisions made for other reasons, but on the other hand, those events had their own logic, rooted in a century and a half of de facto American self government. The way America was governed was going to change, but it didn’t have to change in just the way it did. The specifics were determined by chance, or divine providence, or destiny, however you choose to think the world’s events are determined. The one thing we may be sure of is that no one envisioned what happened.

Take, for example, the First Continental Congress. Who really brought it into being, the colonists, or Parliament? You could argue it either way. The delegates were meeting to coordinate a response to what were called the Intolerable Acts. Parliamentary spokesmen might have replied, accurately, that the acts were passed in response to the Boston Tea Party, which took place the previous December. Colonists might have replied that “the Tea Party only took place because…” You get the idea. You can always find a preceding cause for anything.

We’ll get to the Boston Tea Party in the next section. You know what happened anyway. To English eyes, it was an act of vandalism and defiance that had the complicity of the colonial government of Massachusetts. As all governments think themselves obliged to do, it took firm measures, and, as usually happens, those actions proved to have unexpected and undesired consequences.

The acts were:

The Boston Port Act, which closed the port until the East India Company should be repaid for the tea that was destroyed.

The Massachusetts Government Act, which suspended the legislative functions of the colonial government, and the Administration of Justice Act, which provided that royal officials accused of crimes could be tried in Great Britain rather than in Massachusetts.

The Quartering Act, which required private citizens to lodge British soldiers in their houses upon official request.

The Quebec Act, which expanded the boundaries of the province to the Ohio, and guaranteed freedom of religion to Catholics.

Taken together, these laws were a masterpiece of legislative stupidity. One can imagine the British MPs, rubbing their hands together and saying to each other, “this will teach those recalcitrant colonials.” It did. It taught them the need for unity amongst themselves.

It didn’t occur to the MPs, perhaps, that the major port cities of New York, Philadelphia, Norfolk and Charleston might look at Boston’s fate and consider that they might be next, and hence might better unite to defend Boston than wait their turn. Or that the other colonial governments might look at what happened to the Massachusetts government and draw analogies to their own situations. Nor that the Quartering Act went directly against a cherished English tradition that said that a man’s home was his castle. And as for the Quebec Act, there they managed to jangle two nerves with one measure: Regardless what the Crown wanted, the colonists were going to cross the Appalachians and settle. And (less creditably, but also in the English tradition of the previous 200 years) granting Catholics freedom of religion aroused all their fears of renewed domination by a Roman church. (To understand this fear, we need to recall American fears of Communist subversion that were rife in the 1950s.)

The acts presented a common threat. They required a common response. In Boston, the Sons of Liberty called for a boycott, but to succeed a boycott would require unanimity among the colonies, or at least widespread agreement, and enforcement provisions. That required coordination. Various colonial legislatures named delegates to attend a common assembly to argue it out. And so in September, 1774, in Philadelphia (which was not only centrally located but was the largest city in the colonies), 55 men met, calling themselves the Continental Congress, and representing every colony but Georgia. Among them were George Washington and John Adams.

The delegates weren’t radical. They still thought their position, if stated clearly enough, might obtain a fair hearing. They sent separate addresses to the people of Great Britain and to the North American colonies, explaining the colonial position, and added a similar address for the people of Quebec. They sent a “Declaration of Rights and Grievances” directly to the king. (Note, they didn’t send it to Parliament, which they saw as the source of the problem.)

But they didn’t just plead. They made it clear that they were serious.

For one thing, they agreed that the colonies boycott British goods beginning on December 1. Each colony was to form committees of observation and inspection to assure enforcement of the boycott. (And, in fact, in 1775, imports from Britain were down to three percent of the 1774 figures.) They also provided that if the Intolerable Acts were not repealed, exports to Britain would cease as of September 10, 1775, but by the time that date came around, matters had proceeded far beyond boycotts.

Then they agreed to reconvene in Philadelphia on May 10, 1775, and they went home.

So what had they accomplished? More than they knew, perhaps. For the first time representatives from New England, southern and middle colonies had met in a common assembly and had learned to work together and understand each other. They had come to common understanding, had agreed on measures, and – more important than anyone could guess – they had arranged to meet again, the following year, never dreaming that in calling for that meeting they had provided the nucleus around which a government and a nation would eventually coalesce.

Neither the Battle of Bunker Hill nor the siege that preceded and followed it will make much sense if you don’t understand the geography of Boston as it was in the 1770s. In those years, prior to decades of land-filling, Boston was little more than an island, with only the narrowest connection overland, an ideal place for a naval power to defend.

In June, 1775, Washington had not yet arrived. The Continental Army did not yet exist. It was only two months after Lexington and Concord. The colonial militia – 15,000 strong — surrounded the town and cut off the Roxbury Neck to the south, the only land access. But of course the British navy dominated the waters of the harbor, which meant that British troops in the city could be resupplied and reinforced indefinitely. In the absence of a navy, the only way to force the British out of Boston would be to mount artillery somewhere capable of bombarding the city.

We think of Bunker Hill as being in Boston, but actually it was across the Charles River, and the battle was fought less on Bunker Hill (which commands the Charlestown Neck, the only way off the peninsula) than on Breed’s Hill, farther east. Why the British didn’t land west of Breed’s Hill, flanking it and rendering it irrelevant, says a lot about the causes and progress of the revolution. The British got a shock that day they never forgot.

The only reason the colonials were able to occupy and fortify Bunker and Breed’s Hill in the first place is that commanding officer General Thomas Gage had withdrawn the British troops to Boston after their long retreat from Concord in April. Yet if he had left a garrison on the Charlestown Peninsula, they would have had to defend against the pursuing colonial militia, so perhaps we would have seen a Bunker Hill in reverse. Hard to imagine the colonials attacking a fortified British position, though. At any rate, that isn’t what happened.

Throughout May, Gage received reinforcements, and by June he had about 6,000 men. On May 25, three generals arrived on the same ship. We know them all: William Howe (Lord When?), Gentleman Johnny Burgoyne, and Henry Clinton. If a camel is a horse designed by a committee, the assault on Breed’s Hill was strategy designed by a committee of four able generals. Gage’s plan was to take Dorchester Neck, fortifying the heights, then march on Roxbury, then take the Charlestown heights and scatter the forces in Cambridge. General Clinton wanted to attack from the Charlestown Neck, sensibly enough, but he was outvoted. Howe thought that the hill would be easy to take, and Burgoyne agreed, thinking that the “untrained rabble” would be no match for trained troops.

By the 13^th the colonials knew all about the British plans. By the 15^th, the Massachusetts Committee of Safety ordered defenses set up on the Charlestown Peninsula, specifically on Bunker Hill. (Bunker, not Breed’s.) On the night of the 16^th, Colonel William Prescott led 1,200 men to the peninsula. They started to fortify Bunker Hill, decided that Breed’s hill was a better choice, and built their main fortification there, six-foot-high earthen walls with ditches outside them. In the morning, Prescott had breastworks built from the hill to the water on the east side, to protect from being flanked.

No point in discussing the battle in any detail. Suffice it to say that the British made three frontal assaults before they took Breed’s Hill when the colonials ran out of ammunition. In those attacks, they took terrific casualties. Of 3,000 men engaged, they lost 226 killed (including a lieutenant colonel, two majors, seven captains and nine lieutenants) and 828 wounded. In all, a third of the force went down. With respect to casualties, this was the worst single day of the war for the British; they never again lost so many men in one encounter.

American casualties came to 450, which included 115 killed. The death chiefly noted was that of Dr. Joseph Warren, the President of Massachusetts’ Provincial Congress. He had been appointed a Major General three days earlier, but since his commission had not yet taken effect he was serving as a volunteer private. Warren was killed during the retreat from Breed’s Hill on the third British charge.

It is hard to adequately estimate the effect of Bunker Hill, on either side (not to mention the large population uncommitted to either side). A faint analogy would be if a party of home-grown self-styled patriots took on a unit of the United States Army and inflicted heavy damage on it, with the obvious sympathy of a good part of the people. Regardless who held the field at the end of the day, such a battle would change everything.

The colonials abandoned the field, but they merely retreated to Cambridge and regrouped. Gage was dismissed from command as soon as London received his report, and Howe was named to succeed him. Like Clinton and Burgoyne, Howe was influenced by the slaughter he had witnessed. Perhaps this contributed to the indecisive and unaggressive style that he subsequently displayed.

As we know, within a year, cannon from Fort Ticonderoga would be installed on Dorchester Heights (at the bottom right of the map below), and the British would have to leave. The British never assaulted Dorchester Heights: After Bunker Hill, no British officer ever again had an appetite for attacking Americans in entrenched positions.