• Parliament rejected the First Continenta Congress’ petition • April 1775 Br. Commander in Boston sent detachment of troops to nearby Lexington and Concord
Advantages
•Naval power •Wealth •Professional army • Ireland worry •French backstab
• disjointed/jealous •Badly organized •No currency
Disadvantages
•No Wm பைடு நூலகம்itt to organize
– Shot heard around the world – British lost 1/3 of their army
On the Eve of the Revolution ?
Britain
• pop adv 3:1
Americans
• defensive fight
• self sustaining agric •Moral advantage just cause
• Liked American cousins
Write this down!
Second Continental Congress
• May 1775 • Conservative • No well defined desire for independence • Best political move - drafting G Washington • Va to balance Ma - aristocrat to balance “masses”
The Road to Revolution
• What is meant by “salutary neglect” and how does this lead directly to the revolution?
Revolution?
What was the Revolutionary mov’t at its core really all about? The amount of taxation? The right of Parliament to tax? The political corruption of Britain and the virtue of America? The right of a king to govern America? The colonies’ growing sense of nat’l identity apart from Britain? Was the Revolution truly a radical overturning of gov’t and society - the usual definition of a “revolution - or something far more limited or even “conservative” in its defense of traditional rights?
Whose Revolution
Varying viewpoints: whose revolution?
An ideological view of the Revolution as resulting from the colonists’ ideas about liberty and power. “The colonists believed they saw emerging from the welter of events during the decade after the Stamp Act a pattern whose meaning was unmistakable…They saw about them, with increasing clarity, no merely mistaken, or even evil, policies violating the principles upon which freedom rested, but what appeared to be evidence of nothing less than a deliberate assault launched surreptitiously by plotters against liberty both in England and in America…. This belief transformed the colonists’ struggle…” Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (1967)
Whose Revolution
Varying viewpoints: whose revolution?
Progressive view of the Revolution as product of social conflict among colonial groups. “It was the opposition of interests In America that chiefly made men extremists On either side…. Those men who wished to take a safe middle ground, who wished neither to renounce their country nor to mark themselves as rebels, could no longer hold together” Carl L. Becker Beginnings of the American People (1915)