On December 2, 1767, there appeared in the Pennsylvania Chronicle the first letter in a series collectively called “Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania.” The anonymous first letter came at a critical time in the growing debate between Britain and her colonies over colonial policy. By late 1767, when the first of the letters appeared, […]
On November 16, 1775, Robert Dixon lay dying not far from Quebec. Among the first American troops commissioned by the Continental Congress, he was a sergeant in Matthew Smith’s Company of Thompson’s Rifle Battalion. The previous July, he had walked with his company from the backcountry of Pennsylvania all the way to Boston, a distance […]
BOOK REVIEW: 1764: The First Year of the American Revolutionby Ken Shumate (Yardley, PA: Westholme, 2021) When did the Revolution begin? This seemingly simple question has been answered in a variety of ways over the last three centuries. John Adams thought it was effected in “the minds and hearts of the people” long before shots […]
The Townshend Revenue Act of 1767 awoke Americans to the fact that import duties for the purpose of revenue were taxes just as much as the direct internal taxation of the Stamp Act. The rejection of the Townshend duties by the colonies is a well-known story; less well known is the connection between a boycott […]
The threat of continued oppression and an encroaching condition of slavery was central to the American colonists’ call for separation from Great Britain and the corresponding shift to direct resistance. While the lack of effective political representation was crucial, importantly the colonists held other more acute concerns than the issue of representation in Parliament. Crucially, […]
In 1984, Ross Perot purchased a copy of the 1297 reissuance of the Magna Carta from the Brudenell family who had held the document for centuries. In 1988, it became a permanent fixture of the National Archives Museum where it stayed in the rotunda along with the American charters of freedom for several years. Nearly […]
India, the fabled land of rubies, diamonds, gold, tigers, and mystery, captured the imagination of the British people in the mid 1700s. Robert Clive provided fodder for gossip when he returned to England in 1760 with a reported “£1,200,000 in cash, bills, and jewels. He is said to be the richest subject in the three […]
“I know not why we should blush to confess that molasses was an essential ingredient in American independence.”— John Adams[1] A one penny per gallon import duty on molasses was the only important exception to the American demand for “no taxation without representation.” The duty was a tax, levied by Parliament in 1766, and collected […]
The Molasses Act of 1733 levied a duty of six pence per gallon on foreign molasses imported into British colonies in North America. The duty was not intended to raise revenue, but to be a prohibition against the importation of molasses from foreign sugar plantations. It was at first a nullity, a dead letter, but […]
The Sugar Act of 1764 levied taxes on imports to British colonies in North America. In doing so, the act marked a change in British colonial policy—an empire-shaking change—from commercial and trade regulation only, to taxation by Parliament. There was an earlier Sugar Act that established a foundation for the act of 1764. The First […]
