10.2 — America

The Stamp Act of 1765 was a modest tax. It required paper used for legal documents, newspapers, licences and playing cards in the American colonies to carry a revenue stamp.

The revenue expected was small. The colonists' objection was not about the amount.

Britain had just fought the Seven Years War, partly in North America, at enormous cost, and its national debt had roughly doubled. The war had been fought substantially for colonial security. Parliament thought it entirely reasonable that the colonies contribute.

And the colonists replied that Parliament had no authority to tax them at all, because they elected nobody to it. They had their own assemblies, which had been taxing them for a century and a half.

The British answer was "virtual representation" — the doctrine that members of Parliament represented the whole empire, not just their constituencies. The colonists regarded this as absurd, and pointed out, accurately, that the same argument had been rejected in England in 1689 (Chapter 10.1).

So the dispute was constitutional from the first week: who has the authority to tax.

The escalation

Stamp Act, 1765, repealed after boycotts and riots — and accompanied by a Declaratory Act asserting Parliament's right to legislate for the colonies "in all cases whatsoever", which conceded the money and doubled down on the principle.

Townshend duties, 1767, on glass, paint, paper and tea, again resisted by boycott.

The Boston Massacre, 1770, in which British soldiers fired on a crowd and killed five. John Adams, later the second president, defended the soldiers in court and secured acquittals for most of them — a detail worth keeping, because it complicates the story in a useful way.

The Tea Act of 1773 is the one most misunderstood. It lowered the price of tea, by allowing the East India Company — which was in financial difficulty after the Bengal famine and its own mismanagement (Chapter 6.16) — to ship directly to America. The objection was not the price. It was that buying the cheap tea would concede Parliament's right to impose the duty, and that it favoured a monopoly over colonial merchants and smugglers.

The Boston Tea Party followed: several dozen men, some disguised as Mohawks, threw 342 chests of tea into the harbour.

The response — the Coercive Acts of 1774 — closed the port of Boston, restructured the Massachusetts government, and permitted the quartering of troops. They were intended to isolate Massachusetts and they unified the colonies instead, producing the First Continental Congress.

Fighting began at Lexington and Concord in April 1775.

The Declaration

Adopted 4 July 1776, drafted principally by Thomas Jefferson.

Its structure is a legal brief. A statement of principle, a list of specific charges against the king, a record of attempts at redress, and a conclusion.

The principle is Locke (Chapter 8.9): that all men are created equal, endowed with unalienable rights including life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness; that governments are instituted to secure these rights and derive their just powers from the consent of the governed; and that when a government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it.

Jefferson changed Locke's "property" to "the pursuit of happiness", and the change has been argued over ever since.

And the document contains a clause that was removed. Jefferson's draft included a passage blaming the king for the slave trade. It was struck out at the insistence of delegates from South Carolina and Georgia, and, as Jefferson noted, of northern delegates whose states profited from carrying slaves. The contradiction was visible to the people in the room.

The war

Britain's problem was distance and scale. Three thousand miles of ocean, a continent to hold, a hostile population, and a war that could not be won by taking cities because the rebellion was not in the cities.

The colonists' problem was that they had no army, no money and no navy.

Two things decided it.

Saratoga, 1777, where an entire British army surrendered — which persuaded France that the rebels could win.

And French intervention. France provided money, arms, troops and — decisively — a fleet. At Yorktown in 1781, a French fleet blocked the sea escape while French and American land forces closed the siege. The war's decisive engagement was won by French naval superiority.

France's motive was to weaken Britain after the Seven Years War, and the cost bankrupted the French monarchy — which is a direct cause of Chapter 10.3.

The Constitution

The first American government, under the Articles of Confederation, was deliberately weak and did not work — no power to tax, no executive, no national court, and each state acting as it pleased. Shays' Rebellion in 1786, an armed rising by indebted Massachusetts farmers, demonstrated that the arrangement could not maintain order.

The Constitutional Convention of 1787 produced the document still in force.

Its architecture is deliberate and its sources are named in the debates.

Separation of powers — legislature, executive, judiciary — from Montesquieu (Chapter 8.9).

Checks and balances. The president can veto legislation; Congress can override a veto and can impeach; the Senate confirms appointments and ratifies treaties; and the courts asserted the power to strike down legislation as unconstitutional in Marbury v Madison in 1803 — a power not written in the document.

Federalism, dividing power between the national and state governments.

A written constitution with an amendment procedure, which was itself novel.

And a Bill of Rights, the first ten amendments, added in 1791 as the price of ratification.

The compromises are as important as the principles, and two of them concerned slavery.

The three-fifths compromise counted an enslaved person as three-fifths of a person for the purpose of apportioning representation and direct taxes. It is frequently misdescribed as a statement about human worth. Its actual effect was to inflate the political power of slave states in Congress and in the presidential electoral college, since enslaved people were counted toward representation and could not vote.

And the slave trade was protected from prohibition for twenty years, until 1808.

The Senate compromise — two senators per state regardless of population — was necessary to get small states to ratify and it means today that a voter in a small state has many times the Senate influence of a voter in a large one.

The contradiction

This must be stated directly.

Jefferson wrote that all men are created equal and enslaved around six hundred people over his lifetime. He fathered children with Sallie Hemings, an enslaved woman who was his late wife's half-sister — established by DNA evidence in 1998 and now accepted by the Jefferson Foundation. He freed very few people, and not her.

Washington enslaved people and freed them in his will, effective after his wife's death.

At independence, roughly a fifth of the population of the United States was enslaved.

And the contradiction was named at the time, by people in the room and outside it. Samuel Johnson's line in 1775 — how is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes — was written before the Declaration. Enslaved people petitioned Massachusetts for freedom in the 1770s using the language of the revolution. Abolitionist societies existed and several northern states abolished slavery during or shortly after the war.

The honest reading is that the principle was stated in universal terms by people who did not intend it universally, and that the universal terms could not be recalled. Every subsequent American rights movement — abolition, suffrage, civil rights — has quoted the same sentence back at the country. Frederick Douglass's 1852 speech asking what to the slave is the Fourth of July is the sharpest example, and Martin Luther King's 1963 speech does the same thing.

The document was better than its authors, and Chapter 10.8 is the war that resolved the contradiction at a cost of around 620,000 to 750,000 dead.

And the other people

Native Americans lost.

Britain's Proclamation of 1763 had restricted colonial settlement west of the Appalachians — a policy intended to reduce conflict and to control expansion, and one of the grievances driving colonial elites toward independence. Independence removed the restriction.

Most Native nations that took a side sided with Britain, correctly assessing that a British empire that limited settlement was preferable to a settler republic that did not.

What followed is a century of removal, treaty violation and war, of which the Indian Removal Act of 1830 and the forced march of the Cherokee — the Trail of Tears — are the most cited episodes. This is not a footnote to American independence; it is a direct consequence of it.

Why it mattered to the world

It was the first successful colonial independence movement, and it demonstrated that a European empire could be defeated by its own colony.

It was the first large modern republic in an age of monarchies, and it survived, which was not expected.

It produced a written constitution with enumerated rights and a mechanism for amendment, which became the template for constitutions everywhere including India's (Chapter 13.3).

And it bankrupted France, which produced the French Revolution within six years (Chapter 10.3).

Where this shows up in your life

Written constitutions, bills of rights, judicial review, federalism and the separation of powers are the standard architecture of modern states, and India's Constitution takes judicial review and fundamental rights substantially from this model while taking parliamentary government from Britain (Chapter 13.3).

And the pattern to carry forward is the one this chapter demonstrates most clearly. A principle stated in universal language cannot be permanently confined to the group that stated it. The people who wrote "all men are created equal" meant something narrower, and the sentence escaped them within a generation and has been used against their successors ever since. Chapter 6.20 showed Indian nationalists doing exactly the same thing with British constitutional principles.

What the next page covers

France helped America win and could not pay for it. Chapter 10.3 covers the French Revolution — the fiscal crisis that started it, the Declaration of the Rights of Man, how a movement for constitutional monarchy became a republic, how the republic became the Terror, what the Terror actually was and why it happened, and the honest assessment of a revolution that produced both the modern idea of citizenship and the modern idea of political mass killing.