Please write a paragraph on TWO sections of your choice. In each paragraph, please evaluate, in your own estimation, how credible you believe that section’s argument is and why.
Good Luck! The Assignment is attached below:
American Independence Exercise #5
Please Read Introduction
Despite interpretive differences among historians, certain facets to the surrounding context to Americas War for Independence from Great Britain are regularly mentioned. Demographic changes, political ambiguity and certain sources of stress upon Mother England in the mid-1700s often make that list.
In the 1700s, the population of British domains grew tremendously and shifted geographically. Nowhere did this occur more dramatically than in the thirteen English, North American colonies. Between 1750 and 1770, asserts historian Gordon S. Wood, they doubled in number, from 1 million to more than 2 million. Between 1764 and 1776, 125,000 emigrants left the British Isles alone for the thirteen colonies. As in England proper, this demographic boom coincided with urbanization, as thousands of people flocked to cities ill equipped to handle them. This not only doubled and tripled the population of cities like New York, Philadelphia, Charleston and Boston, states historian Howard Zinn, but it also resulted in the salience of class differences and wealth inequity. By 1770, cites Zinn, the top 1 percent of property owners (in Boston) owned 44 percent of the wealth. Consequently, it may be of little surprise to know that thousands of English North Americans fled cities for frontier environments and opportunities, especially after England took French and Spanish-held lands at the end of the Seven Years War. Mother England possessed legal entitlement via treaties and conquest, but properly administering and extracting resources and commercial wealth from frontier regions was something entirely different.
Moreover, the ambiguity of Americans rights as Englishmen is also often mentioned by historians as relevant context to the War for Independence. Firstly, English Common Law constitutes an amalgamation of judges decisions, historical traditions, royal edicts, and Parliamentary laws. There was not one written, definitive constitution. In some court cases, place of birth alone (jus soli) was ruled to determine ones subjectship (as close as the English got to a modern notion of citizenship and its rights). However, in other famous cases, judges decided that descent from English fathers (jus sanguinis) merited subjectshipeven if the child were born outside England. Jurists, or legal interpreters of the law, representing American interests often stressed the latter. Furthermore, the colonies were sometimes granted to proprietors (one man owners like William Penn) or to joint-stock-companies, to which the power to decide enfranchisement/citizenship was given to the colonial rulers. As for royal colonies, directly controlled by the English crown, some colonial charters had written assurance that migrants from England could enjoy the full rights of Englishmen in said coloniesother charters mentioned it not. Although proponents of the Enlightenment of the mid-to-late 1700s took human rights as an axiom (assumption you do not question), King George III and many Tory Party members of Parliament and the royal cabinet (against whom the thirteen colonies would declare independence) did not embrace Enlightenment assumptions or discourse. This would constitute a bone of contention in the 1770s.
Finally, historians often cite as relevant context certain sources of stress with which Mother England had to contend that may have directly or inadvertently led to the American War for Independence. In his Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, historian Bernard Bailyn provides a plethora of examples to suggest that visible protest and organized opposition to King George III and his government became much more alarmingly ubiquitous in England proper during the mid-to-late 1700s. That king and Parliament would not allow rightful election winner John Wilkes to serve his district because of his anti-institutional rhetoric testifies to how contentious politics were becoming in England. Within the North American thirteen colonies, states historian Howard Zinn, eighteen uprisings aimed at overthrowing colonial governments, forty riots, and six black rebellions had historically occurred before the end of the Seven Years (or French & Indian War). If anything, the pace and severity of political instability within the Thirteen Colonies increased in the mid-to-late 1700s. During the early 1720s, reports were filed in England that slaves were very near succeeding in a new revolution. Boston had several market riots, a flood of political pamphlets urging that people in exalted stations be replaced, and town meetings calling for paper currency to end oppression by the merchant elite. In the 1740s and 1750s, poor tenant farmers in New Jersey raised an actual rebellion against the colonial militia, forcefully freeing prison inmates once arrested for debt. And from 1766 to 1771, the Regulator Movement was spawned in the western, frontier region of North Carolina, writing petitions, running colleagues for political office, and eventually rising up in rebellion with an actual battle against their states militia. Finally, as the English fought the French throughout eastern North America between 1754-1763, British leaders like William Pitt bemoaned the fact that none of the colonies had proverbially pulled its weight in the war regarding requisitioned supplies and soldiers.
Consequently, the English king, cabinet and ruling coalition in Parliament began passing laws and enacting edicts in an effort to better coordinate the functioning of their newly aggrandized empire. They declared, via the Proclamation of 1763, that would-be American pioneers could not claim or inhabit land west of the Appalachians and east of the Mississippi Riverin reference to commercial dealings and diplomatic peace with Native American tribes. The next year, the English government mandated and facilitated royal control over trade to and from the colonies via the Sugar Act. This act entailed a mandate that certain American products be shipped first to England for taxation and that American consumers of several English imported goods pay a tax for such. It also strengthened the practical and legal capacity of the British Navy to discover, try and punish those Americans refusing to abide by the legal dictates. American colonists political institution representative of their voice at the colonial (or state, versus local) level was the assembly. Formal petitions of this law were sent to the English government by eight colonies assemblies. However, it was in 1765 that American political protest greatly escalated in scale and passion. That year, King George IIIs cabinet and Parliament issued the Stamp Act, which mandated that Americans pay a small tax on all legal documents, almanacs, newspapers, and nearly every form of paper used in the colonies. Elected American delegates from nine colonies met in New York in agreement with Virginias assembly: that Parliament did not have the right to pass laws for and take tax revenue from Americanswho had no elected representatives in Parliament to give their collective consent. Moreover, pamphleteering soared, with rhetoric about Natural and Civil/English rights. Extra-legal associations were established by Americans (like local Sons/Daughters of Liberty chapters that politically educated and collectively engaged in acts of civil disobedience, or Committees of Correspondence that tied colonial assemblies together in collective unity), mob violence ensued, and Benjamin Franklin left England disgraced as a rabble rouser who had failed to convince Parliament to acknowledge that the colonies had already merited and received the full rights of Englishmenincluding the right to actual representation.
From there, the imperial relationship devolved into a vicious, reactive cycle of American political leaders choosing to symbolically defy what they held to be the slightest infringement upon their rights as Englishmen and as humans and of an English Parliament and king convinced that concessions to Americans would only condone and encourage further rebellion. As a notable example, the English government rescinded all taxes except on tea, and they gave a monopoly the sole rights to sell such tea to the colonies. In return, the Boston Sons of Liberty chapter organized the Boston Tea Party, when they dumped a fortunes worth of tea into the harbor. The English government then shut down city councils and Massachusetts assembly (it had also refused to rescind its decision not to collect taxes that, as an elective body, had not voted for such taxes). Of equal note, the committees of correspondence had helped organize a body of American elected politicians whose assemblies had been cornered by their councils and royal governors & militias to tow the linethese assemblymen formed their own joint congress in defiance of Englandknown as the Continental Congress. When the Massachusetts royal militia tried to confiscate arms and gun powder being illegally stock-piled by the Continental Congress, and tried to arrest any ringleaders in the process, they were unexpectedly met by defiant Minute Men who had broken with the royal militia and pledged to defend American rights at a minutes notice. Someone fired the first shot in Lexington, Massachusetts, and battles ensued. As fighting progressed, American defiant leaders refused to renege on their demands, and King George III refused to give in to theirs via rejecting their Olive Branch Petition. As one colony after anothers assemblymen met in defiance of the crown and declared independence, and as battles raged, the Continental Congress then declared independence from England. England would finally give up in 1783.
Now Please Choose 2 of the Subsequent Sections to Analyze & Evaluate
Section #1: Salutary Neglect Thesis/British View (Test2: #1)
American political independence did not emanate from indignation against repeated injustices. American colonists had it made: and they simply fought to keep a good thing going. Under Great Britains lenient rule, English North American subjects garnered political powers and economic opportunities that subsequent British generation would come to resent. When such resentment materialized into an attempt to put an end to Americas party, the Americans simply fought to maintain their privileged way of living.
Paul Johnson states that the popularly-elected lower houses of most colonial legislatures (assemblies) fought for and often won increased powers in colonial government. For example, Rhode Island & Connecticut assemblies had secured virtual power over the upper house/council & even governor by 1700: all taxes and decisions concerning how the peoples taxed money (revenue) would be spent had to be passed by the assembly, this body also having control over the governors salary (which, as you may know, they could and sometimes did use to bully him into compliance). The governor had no veto power over the assembly, as he too was popularly elected. The Pennsylvania assembly securedvia documents like the Charter of Privilegeslike powers by the 1730s. The famous Massachusetts assembly earned the right to demand approval of councilmen hand-picked by the governor by the 1690s, and ultimate power concerning taxing and financial decisions was allegedly won by the end of the 1720s. By the 1740s, historian Paul Johnson contends that the Massachusetts assembly was more powerful than the upper house/council & royal governor! (A History of the American People pg. 107) Colonial assemblies in South Carolina & New York did not acquire such power, and some historians state that it is not coincidental that such colonies did not host a large proportion of rebel Patriots later (they had not developed a taste for power over the British at the colonial levelas had other colonies). Under Tory Prime Ministers and a young, insecure king, the English government began to resent and fear American political independenceespecially when it seemed to generate American apathy regarding the French & Indian War (while the British government was allegedly, partially fighting against the French to defend American colonists, not a single American colony raised the number of troops nor tax revenue asked of them to contribute to this war effort). Consequently, the British Parliament began to directly tax the colonies without the assemblies compliance. Furthermore, Parliament concluded, in debates with American representative Benjamin Franklin, that the colonies were virtually represented by Parliament and that initial charter decrees in Virginia and Massachusetts (that colonists of English blood or born in English domains were guaranteed the rights of Englishmen) were nullified. Americans had accumulated too much power in their assemblies, for too long, to suddenly give them up. (James Kettners The Development of American Citizenship, 1680-1870 pp. 13-20)
Moreover, historian Paul Johnson contends that the colonies began to economically flourish during the early-to-mid 1700s. The colonies were labor scarce, so he contends that laborers were able to negotiate more generous salaries & terms than they could have hoped for back in England. Land was always available, if one had no moral qualms with squatting upon Natives territory and could convince a local judge that he had improved said land with farming, etc. Also, smuggling was almost ridiculously easy to engage in and make a lot of money from, as failed British shipments left port cities desperate for goods (hungry mouths and spoiled tastes not caring if the goods came from a Frenchman), as British customs officials were often so angry for having been sent to North America and paid so poorly by the crown that many did not even perform their jobs or made fortunes in extorting smugglers to have them look the other way, and as not nearly enough money and men were employed in enforcing mercantilist restrictions across the Atlantic Ocean, Seaboard & Caribbean. Laws forbidding colonists from manufacturing their own clothing, hats, metals, etc. were blatantly disregarded, states historian Paul Johnson. During the French & Indian War, Johnson & Alan Brinkley contend that American colonists did NOT contribute as much to the British war effort against the French & her Native American allies as the British hoped & demanded, so when the British angrily decided at the end of the war in 1763 to crack down on the colonists, the colonists were already almost economically self-reliant, accustomed to seeking fortune without mercantilist restrictions, and even physically two and a half inches taller and fifteen pounds heavier than their British counterparts due to their flourishing economy and abundance of resources. American colonists garnered political rights and economic freedom that they grew accustomed to. They were not fed up with restrictions and tyrannythey merely fought to keep a good thing going.
Section #2: Court History–America as A Special, Enlightened Nation (Test 2: #2, #3)
Historian Bernard Bailyn argues that America was born from beliefs that have come to characterize the country. He contends that America is exceptional in this way: that its independence emanated not from mere economic motives and desire for power, but from an insistence that certain freedoms and rights are the birthright of all human beings.
During the mid-1700s, similar ideas began spreading across the Atlantic Ocean and Eastern Seaboard of British North America from very disparate sources. For example, calling themselves philosophes, intellectuals from Western European capitals (mainly in France) began publishing works that tended to operate from the same premises: the universe & all that is in it was created to work like a predictable clock (Deism), and everything (even human relations & institutions) would be at its best (healthiest, happiest) if it only conformed to the Natural, Rational principles that the Creator established; that mans passions, greed, manipulation, ignorance & superstition had corrupted these Natural principlesespecially during the Dark Ages/Medieval Period. They concluded that while freedom, equality, accountability & humanitarianism were natural and rational (hence, best), tyranny, inequality & privilege, arbitrary power & intolerance were man-made corruptions of the original state of things and the source of mankinds woes: misery, exploitation, rebellions & civil wars, crime, violence, poverty & ignorance. Voltaire stressed freedom of conscience, Diderot & Condorcet stressed education & free-thinking for all, Montesquieu avowed the need for checks & balances in government, and Rousseau (before him, Locke & Hobbes) surmised that the first governments were established by the Social Contract (first humans allegedly found it beneficial for their protection & needs to unify and give PERMISSION for a government to be established by and for them, and Scottish Enlightenment thinkers swayed from Rousseaus contention that men had to subordinate their individual desires & freedoms for the general welfare in stating that the government, even after being given permission by the people to rule, was to serve as their SERVANT in protecting their freedom & natural rights liable to being rightfully overthrown by the people should it fail to do so). English Radical Whigs like Bolingbroke, Coleridge & John Wilkes incorporated such notions into their protests of George III of England, who they claimed was attempting to reverse Englands beneficial evolution or march toward a freer & more rational society. Back in England, they published George IIIs choice of cabinet members without Parliaments approval (which went against the customs of English political tradition), his offers of wealth, positions, and privileges to Parliament politicians in order to sway them from the opposing Whig Party, and his refusal to allow popularly-elected opponents or vocal critics like John Wilkes to sit in Parliament. English Radical Whigs used such instances, as well as Parliaments revocation of English rights for American colonists, as examples of an English government conspiracy to strip rights from her people.
All these ideas coalesced/ran together in political tracts/pamphlets, newspaper articles, theater plays, public speeches & books, and people like Benjamin Franklin, John Dickinson & Thomas Jefferson kept regular correspondence with leaders of this Enlightened or Whig criticism of the contemporary British regime & all others like itpopularizing such sentiments within the thirteen colonies in their own newspapers, pamphlets, etc. According to historian Bernard Bailyn, that such ideas influenced the colonies is supported by the instances in which ideas (popular sovereignty or the people are the true leaders and freely choose their own governments to SERVE them; limited government/that power corrupts & rulers must be held in check; natural rights/ basic rights all people are entitled to simply upon being born as human beings ranging from Beccarias rights of humans suspected of having committed crimes, Voltaires insistence upon freedom of thought & belief, to Scottish writers insistence upon people physically defending themselves from a powerful government, etc.) & names were cited in organizations, declarations, protests, etc. (Cato, Cincinnatus & Tacitus as symbols of Republican government & civic virtue/virtuous citizens putting the best for the general welfare ahead of their own ambitions, temptations & self-interest; Nero, Caligula, Caesar & Charles I as symbols of stubborn, undemocratic, tyrannical leaders only out for themselves & dangerous to the common people & their rights). With the highest colonial literacy rate in the world & dummied down versions of Enlightened & Whig ideas present in many pamphlets, plays, articles & even popular expressions muttered in taverns, Bailyn finds it easy to believe that even the common colonists became enlightened concerning human rights. Such ideas, contends Bailyn, make America special, and the nation was born from widespread credence in them.
Section #3: Revisionist History–George Washingtons & Founding Fathers Ideals Steeped in Self-Interest (Test2: #4)
According to historian Joseph Ellis, George Washingtons biography offers a glimpse into the role that self-interest played in the Founding Fathers motivations. Joseph Ellis portrays the young George Washington asalthough not immune to insecuritiesvery confident in his own abilities and almost disdainful toward many British policies & even superior officers. Despite his insecurity around intellectuals like Thomas Jefferson & James Madison concerning his lack of formal education, Washington is depicted as almost arrogant in expecting to succeed in land surveying (even then, mathematically complex but an obvious path to wealth), in asking the hand of a wealthy gentry planters daughter, in writing formal grievances to British customs officials regarding his English business middle-men partners, and in applying for key military positions and privileges with the British royal governor of Virginia.
When the royal governor gave a military position he coveted to a British nobleman named Edward Braddock, Washington was formally soon reprimanded for violating the chain of command and informing Braddocks superiors that the latter was chosen simply for his royal connections and did not possess the qualities, talent, brains, or knowledge of fighting in an American geographical context to succeed in his job. When Braddock died in the battle for Fort Duquesne against the French & Washington (as next in command) took Braddocks position and the battle supposedly turned less tragic for British forces, Washington feigned/pretended no humility in criticizing the dead commanders decisions and claiming that he had saved the forces from total annihilation. After such success, Washington was supposedly stunned to learn that he would not receive as high of a position, nor as many business privileges in fur-trading in the Ohio Valley (which the common colonists were barred from) as he had thought his success would earn him.
By this time, Washington was smuggling his farm products (tobacco, wine, cotton, hemp, etc.) on his own unofficial boats, with his own unofficial middle men, to forbidden ports (as in the French Caribbean, where he could sell his products for more than twice the price that the British consignment house claimed to be offered at British ports, without the British taxes at those ports), writing in his correspondences that he had given British officials their chance, and that their ineptitude/stupidity and greed had rendered him unashamed for doing so. When asked about the Proclamation of 1763 that had forbidden colonists from crossing west of the Appalachian Mountains (west of them, until the Mississippi River, was to be formally reserved for Native American tribes that had signed the treaty with Great Britain at the end of the French & Indian War), Washington claimed that not only would the British fail to enforce such a law, but that colonists ought to break it. The West, Washington contended, offered some their only chance, because he doubted the Britishs genuine concern for Natives, and because the British royal leaders themselves were breaking it in land speculation, fur-trading & other business enterprises within the supposedly Natives-only region. Some historians tie this image of Washington to other eventual leaders of the War for Independence, claiming that they may not have even joined the American rebellion had their ambitions not been thwarted and their profits not been threatened.
Section #4: Revisionist History–The American Colonial Elite Hijacked the Rebellion for Fear of the Poors Wrath Being Directed Toward Them (Test 2: #5)
According to historian Howard Zinn, the American colonial elite, like all socio-economic classes, had its own interests and ambitions. This wealthy, colonial class, Zinn contends, saw an opportunity to avoid the poors wrath and to use the poor in removing the British leaders from power (as a scapegoat for the poors grievances) and hence secure their own domination of the colonies.
Howard Zinn contends that the gap between the rich & poor, and the number of poverty-stricken colonists identified in historical sources greatly increased during the 1700s. Zinn cites growing numbers of almshouses (public buildings for the homeless to receive food & shelter, to be taught trades & assisted in gaining employment) within the major colonial cities like Boston, Philadelphia and New York City. Just between Bacons Rebellion and 1760, cites Zinn, there had been eighteen uprisings aimed at overthrowing colonial governments and forty riots. (Zinn 59) Zinn mentions the Regulator Movement or rebellion in North Carolina from 1768-1771. Western, poor farmers wrote petitions to the royal governor (and English-born executive placed over them), complaining that the assemblymen (well-to-do colonials) were privileged lawyers, merchants & well-to-do farmers (who would later help lead the rebellion against Great Britain) who taxed them more than they taxed themselves, used none of the tax revenue for roads, schools, etc. in the western districts, and who failed to force judges to offer more lenient programs for poor farmers, squatters & servants to pay off their debts without going to jail. When these oppressed Regulators did not receive the governors help, they began militarily freeing debtors from jails and were eventually defeated by the colonys militia at Alamance (their well-to-do, fellow colonists in the assembly supported cracking down on them). Also indicative of the poors resentment toward the more fortunate colonists, states Zinn, are rebellions & drama in Boston, where in town-hall meetings, common folk voted against and tried to run candidates for assemblymen against not just British officials but also colonial bourgeois leaders who they also saw as privileged parasites. During the Stamp Act riots, for instance, the mob began to attack ALL homes of wealth, not just British officials residenceswhich scared the heck out of colonial elites who would later lead the rebellion against Britain. Zinn cites Sons of Liberty, Committees of Correspondence & assembly leaders protesting the Stamp Act issuing edicts, statements, or just pleas to the commoners NOT to engage in indiscriminate MOB violence & destruction of propertyZinn contends because these bourgeois leaders of the rebellion feared that the poors anger might rear its ugly head toward them, their families & their property.
Zinn controversially contends that the leaders decided to combine their own selfish ambitions to oust the British with their fear of the masses in taking over this rebellious movement themselves. George Washington quickly established a military hierarchy, and he had to contend with mutinies of soldiers from New Jersey and Pennsylvaniafrom soldiers who did not feel like colonial resistance leaders had the common soldiers best interests in mind. That Washington had to threaten soldiers (he almost personally killed a soldier who had fired at his own leader, Nathaniel Greene, in battle; and he had leaders of the New Jersey mutiny executed in front of his soldiers) and offer them incentives (he offered salaries and land to his own soldiers) is perceived by historian Howard Zinn as evidence that the average American soldier became apathetic from a perception that his colonial leaders had their own ambitions in mind. This perception was enhanced when American political leaders enriched themselves from confiscated Loyalist (those remaining loyal to Mother England) property.
As for American political leaders (namely, those in the Continental Congress & Committees of Correspondence), Zinn contends that continual colonial protests against rebel leaders (as in Maryland, New York and Virginia) and new colonial state constitutions (they did not change much, as property requirements for citizenship were maintained and few declarations of individual freedoms were pronounced) suggest that these leaders were not radical idealogues wanting to democratize society. They had, Zinn contends, their own economic class interests in mind: to secure and enlarge their personal property; to ensure that government did not become too democratic; and to keep common soldiers fighting for them via rewards when necessary and punishments when possible. Zinn quotes Hamilton to exemplify the attitude of the colonial elite: All communities divide themselves into the few and many.the people are turbulent and changing; they seldom judge or determine right. Give therefore to the first class a distinct permanent share in the government. (A Peoples History of the U.S. Howard Zinn pp. 96)
According to historian Howard Zinn, our Founding Fathers were greedy elitists who distrusted and exploited their generations class of commoners so that the poor would not attack them but their British superiors instead. With the British out, they could rulegiving some concessions to but primarily lording it over their poorer constituents.
