Not to be outdone, the citizens of Massachusetts reacted by staging their own version of the Glorious Revolution in Boston just as the English Bill of Rights was being finalized.
The Boston Revolt of 1689 as if came to be known, resulted in a couple of interesting outcomes. The foundation of the revolt was that the Colonists were upset with the governor, Sir Edmund Andros, for beginning to enforce the Navigation Acts again at the behest of Charles II after the Restoration. In fact, one of Charles’ first orders of business was to whip the colonies into shape and get them filling the royal coffers as quickly as possible so he could avoid dealing with Parliament for cash. He began by consolidating the northeastern colonies into The Dominion of New England, disbanded their governments and civil institutions, and placed them under a governorship that answered to the king. The colonists were not particularly fond of any of this, largely because they had been living in a period of relative autonomy, developing their own governments, laws and customs as the people of each colony saw fit. Moreover, the Crown’s interference and profiteering from their commerce was a grand affront to their economy.
Unfortunately for Andros, since he was the king’s proxy governor of the Dominion of New England, he was the one that primarily took the flack of the colonists. When he began stringently enforcing the Navigation Acts and telling everyone what to do, the good people of Boston ran him off the continent. He was never to return. Perhaps even more significantly, this was the first time that the idea of Englishness itself began to be associated with totalitarianism and oppression. During the revolt, included in the list of suspicious citizens were those who belonged to the Anglican Church—the very people whose counterparts back in England started the Glorious Revolution in the first place. The English government, royalty, and all things English would be henceforth regarded as a de facto encroachment upon American autonomy.
In retrospect, it is no surprise that prejudice against a particular religious group would be the starting place for larger social concerns. Religion was the one piece of intellectual ground the New World and the Old World never would or could share. The Catholic/Protestant conflict in England was a matter of national pride and social hatred going back hundreds of years. This was about England and her people. However, in the Colonies no such history existed. It was a seller’s market, and therefore nobody cared if you’re Dutch, French, Spanish, or from Mars. America was first and foremost a capitalist machine as chartered, and by definition as a colony. As time went on it became more and more that the attachment to England itself was the problem, not just the King and a few of his puppets.
Furthermore, it became harder and harder for a plantation owner to make sense out of why their entire civic and personal life should be subject to England when the only influence the homeland seemed to have on them was blatant interference in their affairs. It seemed this had been percolating in everyone’s mind up and down the coast, because once the Bostonians threw out the governor the entire Dominion of New England happily broke up into thirteen separate colonies and established their own local governments again.
By the mid 1700’s tensions began to boil over. Americans blatantly defied the Navigation Acts and simply started smuggling the excess goods out of the country.
These were the final straws. No self-respecting monarch could tolerate blatant defiance from his subjects, and the new King George III—confronted with the mature thirteen Colonies, their legislatures, and increasing economic and social consolidation without the need of the Crown—decided to put his foot down. Rumblings from the colonists about the King’s increasing attempts to disempower their legislatures and deny them their rights as English citizens mounted, and a tipping point arrived when, after the Boston Tea Party, King George passed the Intolerable Acts. Not only were the Colonists going to be subject to severe political restrictions, but these were to be enforced by a standing wing of the British army that would be permitted to stay in their houses, eat their food, and, in the event they killed someone, be taken back to England to be tried there. George Washington famously referred to it as the “murder act”, since soldiers committing crimes could be taken back to England and let off the hook. Worse, on September 1,1774, the a group of soldiers under General Gage removed gunpowder from a colonial magazine, resulting in the Powder Alarm— the mustering of the regional colonial militias fearing that this disarmament was preempting open war. Similar incidents followed. Where George III got these ideas is anybody’s guess, but the American complaints essentially boiled down to the following:
1. Keep religion out of government
2. Don't drain our wallets
3. Don’t screw with the legal system
In response, the Colonists formed the First Continental Congress to decide how to respond to the the outrage, and in October of 1774 delivered the Declaration and Resolves of the First Continental Congress. In these grievances we see the last vestiges of a colonial appeal to English law disappearing into open rebellion. To summarize, they first and foremost informed the King that they claimed the right as English citizens to all the benefits and protections granted to the citizens living in England, pointing out “that our ancestors, who first settled these colonies, were at the time of their emigration from the mother country, entitled to all the rights, liberties, and immunities of free and natural- born subjects, within the realm of England,” andfurthermore, “that by such emigration they by no means forfeited, surrendered, or lost any of those rights, but that they were, and their descendants now are, entitled to the exercise and enjoyment of all such of them, as their local and other circumstances enable them to exercise and enjoy.” Second, they condemned the Intolerable Acts and noted that the beginnings of Colonial disarmament were stirring, and finally, declared they were enforcing a trade embargo against England and the West Indies until they received redress.
Kings do not like to be told what to do. Unwilling to retract the Intolerable Acts, his appointee Lord Dunmore, the governor of Virginia, attempted to diffuse the situation, but at the Second Virginia Convention on March 23rd,1775, the goal of which was to decide whether to form up the militia, Patrick Henry forced the issue with his famous “Give Me Liberty or Give Me Death!” speech. Less than a month later on April 19th, the first shots were fired at Lexington and Concord. The next day, in what came to be known as the Gunpowder Affair, Lord Dunmore attempted to empty the powder from the colonial magazines and was stopped by Patrick Henry and a mob of militiamen. Lord Dunmore left Virginia for the relative safety of a ship off the coast, and would never again set foot on American soil.
The threat of violence and forcible removal of the king’s men toppled the scale. In August of 1775, George III signed the Proclamation of Rebellion, officially declaring war against the Colonies.