French assistance to U.S. independence

Which adds up to how much for your average colonial?

Generally most of the taxs raised at the time (home & in colonies) were raised specifically for the gathering of money to fund the military. Some were directly & obviously for that (Quartering Act) but many were just taxes on anything they could think of (luxury goods like sugar & tea, for example). This is actually true of all countries the world over up until fairly recently.

And what did the Currency Act & Intolerable Acts actually do/repress?

 

Again, I can't speak to the level of taxes in England at the time. Colonists were enraged most of all by the taxes in that they came without representation, a violation of English law for its own colonies at that time. Had this issue been successfully addressed, your accusation of a "rich-man's revolution" could well have been true, and it would have never come off.

Hey, if we expanded eastwards we would have conquered England!
Since we're an imperial power, why not? Get rid of those Cricket bats guys, baseball's coming to town!

There were colonial "butchers" to be sure, but many (not all) were reprisals for English misbehavior. It only takes a few rogues to give a whole army a bad name (witness our Abu Greb prison debacle). Even in Gibson's movie, only one British officer causes most of the problems.

You still give the Indians far too much credit. They surely erred in aligning with the English, but their contribution was so minor the Colonials only sent significant troops once (1778 in Pennsylvania) to deal with them.

 

I did a little digging - only on the web, but I've posted my links...

Sugar Act

3d (pence) per gallon of sugar. American sites claim it as “the first law specifically aimed at raising colonial money for the Crown”

http://www.walika.com/sr/timelin1.html

Currency Act

This act prohibited American colonies from issuing their own currency.
This is not repression – how would Bush react if Alaska started printing its own currency?

Stamp Act

The Stamp Act was passed by the British Parliament on March 22, 1765. The new tax was imposed on all American colonists and required them to pay a tax on every piece of printed paper they used. Ship's papers, legal documents, licenses, newspapers, other publications, and even playing cards were taxed. The money collected by the Stamp Act was to be used to help pay the costs of defending and protecting the American frontier near the Appalachian Mountains (10,000 troops were to be stationed on the American frontier for this purpose).
The actual cost of the Stamp Act was relatively small. What made the law so offensive to the colonists was not so much its immediate cost but the standard it seemed to set. In the past, taxes and duties on colonial trade had always been viewed as measures to regulate commerce, not to raise money. The Stamp Act, however, was viewed as a direct attempt by England to raise money in the colonies without the approval of the colonial legislatures. If this new tax were allowed to pass without resistance, the colonists reasoned, the door would be open for far more troublesome taxation in the future.

http://www.history.org/history/teaching/tchcrsta.cfm

The Townshend Revenue Act
1767
Taxes on glass, paint, oil, lead, paper, and tea were applied with the design of raising £40,000 a year for the administration of the colonies. The result was the resurrection of colonial hostilities created by the Stamp Act.
Reaction assumed revolutionary proportions in Boston, in the summer of 1768, when customs officials impounded a sloop owned by John Hancock, for violations of the trade regulations. Crowds mobbed the customs office, forcing the officials to retire to a British Warship in the Harbor. Troops from England and Nova Scotia marched in to occupy Boston on October 1, 1768. Bostonians offered no resistance. Rather they changed their tactics. They established non-importation agreements that quickly spread throughout the colonies. British trade soon dried up and the powerful merchants of Britain once again interceded on behalf of the colonies.

http://www.ushistory.org/declaration/re ... nshend.htm

http://www.lexrex.com/enlightened/laws/ ... nd_sum.htm adds that the Act was passed when Pitt (an opponant of the Stamp tax and popular in America) was unwell.

Quartering Act
British Parliament - 1765

An act to amend and render more effectual, in his Majesty’s dominions in America, an act passed in this present session of parliament, intituled, An act for punishing mutiny and desertion, and for the better payment of the army and their quarters.

http://ahp.gatech.edu/quartering_act_1765.html

As far as I can tell an Act mainly resolving issues regarding the billeting of soldiers, and trying to ensure colonists get fairly paid by the army for billets & supplies provided.

Tea Act

The Tea Act (1773) once again inflames the radicals, in spite of the fact that it will lower tea prices. If the Americans accept the lower tea prices, they also accept the duties (taxation without representation), and put many of the founding fathers out of business smuggling tea. Throughout the colonies "tea parties" are held where men turn back ships or board them and toss packaged tea into the harbor. Although no "tea party" is held in Georgia (no tea was allocated to Savannah), a party was held at the harbor in nearby Charles Town, South Carolina.

http://ngeorgia.com/revolution/amrev5a.html

Intolerable Acts

Closes Boston Harbor; eliminates current government of Massachusetts; restricts many other government meetings.
http://www.ngeorgia.com/revolution/actsofwar.html

Basically a series of laws punishing the people of Massachusetts for their rebellious behaviour.
http://www.glc.k12.ga.us/passwd/trc/tto ... oadind.pdf

Actually, the last link is very good & spells out the chronology of events with a little detail for each.


So really, only the Townsend Acts offer legitimate excuse to rebel due to excessive taxation & repression...
Some even aimed to lessen the colonist's burden (tea, quartering)

 

Are you sure on that point? I really struggle to remember any West Indian members of Parliament in the 18th Century...
Heck, new industrial towns like Manchester & Liverpool in England didn't have representation, and they paid a shed-load of taxes.

 

Haha, you got me there. Did I write eastwards? Duh!!! I meant westwards of course! .Must've still been thinking I was writing about the east in WW2. Oh you can get rid of the cricket bats by all means. I never liked the game anyway. Give me football (soccer) anytime. That's our national sport. :lol:

As for the Indians, I don't mean to say they were omnipresent on the British side. Just that there were a fair few on our side and more so than the Colonial's side. You're right that a lot stayed out of it but I think many knew it would be in their interests if the British won simply because the Colonials were the ones who were going to be exploiting their land more. The British didn't really expand to a great extent westwards considering how long they were there for.

 

Colonists were rarely reimbursed in full under the Quartering Act, if at all. And, to blunt, a large number of the troops had a drinking problem which made them miserable guests wherever they stayed.

The Currency Act was a disaster because the colonies had been using various form of colonial notes for a long time, mostly due of the lack of hard English currency. Shutting down this form of money exacebated the trade deficit of the colonies with England and severely crimped colonial merchants. English merchants were the force behind this law (and many more).

The British basically regarded any colonial trade with anyone but England as smuggling. This of course provided the East India Company and others with a monopoly that would enrich them but severely limit the colonial merchants.

The crux of the matter is that England badly needed revenue for its other adventures. After treating the colonies rather well, they began to get greedy (or desperate). When the colonies protested, they were treated even more roughly and strong-armed. Again, if the rebellion had only been the merchants and "rich", it wouldn't have ever gotten off the ground. Once the oppression reached the level of the common man a revolution was inevitable.

 

I've read it but can't find a quote now to back it up. I'll keep looking.

 

I've found it very ironic to find out that scalping was most widely practised by Colonials, not Indians; they were paid per scalp of killed Indians... Just a sidenote. About that war of independence, it really did have plenty of reasons: no representation was only one. IMHO, the Enlgihtenment played a much greater role in the development of certain ideas about colonies in general and white-populated colonies in specific. With the first major rises of nationalism, in the late 18th century, the idea that Americans were a people took hold and the ideals of the Enlightenment caused further events. The many well-educated, newly rich people living in America would want their ground for experimenting with a new kind of perfect society.

Oh,and Lyndon, here it is for you, eastward expansion. :lol:

 

I thought Roel might find this quote interesting:

"According to Axtell's book, the English in Connecticut paid the Mohegans for the heads of Pequots, and the DUTCH paid wampum for Raritan heads. After the start of King Philip's War in 1675, it said, Rhode Island's Narragansetts were paid for heads in lengths of cloth."

(Article from Boston Globe, 2000)

 

Interesting, indeed. Thank you for that SgtBob. Of course I said colonials in general, and the Dutch living on Manhattan were definitely colonials too.

And a nice little low blow, too.

 

Ah those Dutch, I always suspected they were savages at heart!

 

Thanks Roel. I shall accept it with good grace. And to think geography was my best subject at school. I really have to stop thinking about that bloody Eastern Front dammit!

 

Yeah, I have a book somewhere that credits the Dutch settlers with introducing the idea of scalping victims to prove a kill...

Remind me to stay at least 3 feet from Roel in future

Anyway.

Quite possibly not. But they were supposed to be by the Act. The Quartering Act cannot be argued as a cause of the revolt when actually it tried to make things better.

Yes. But if you thought they were bad, you should have met our navy!

 

I wouldn't worry about it. He'll probably be too stoned to care! :smok:

 

Oh, but my arms could reach... Gni gni gni :lol:

Don't worry, I already have a restraining order... Just joking. Okay, that's enough kids! Why did you say I'd be too stoned, Lyndon?

Oh and SgtBob, we are all savages at heart.

 

I have a pet theory that the phrase:
"man's inhumanity to man" is misused.
Go look at history.
Humanity is not kind. Society & civilisation gives us manners & codes of behaviour, but we are basically selfish. Watch any child. It's a survival thing.

Surely:
Man's humanity = not caring about others
Man's inhumanity = caring

I should now point out that, as a Christian, I reckon people are redeemable & with God can begin to match the 'ideal'.

 

Oh at last someone gets that idea too! Thank you Ricky!

I always get really worked up when people call something 'inhuman' while it is actually something only humans ever do. There's a whole bunch of words in the Dutch language that describe things as non-human, and they are all used to indicate things that are purely human...

 

As far as I know during the 7 years war, most indian tribes were allied to the french(Hurons being the most known), the Iroquois being the most known exeption as they were with the british.
Does anyone know why?(Because I do not think we were any more friendly to them).

I do not think the actual US can be blamed more for the fate of the indians than europeans can.Even if the US would not have become independent, the indians wouldn't have been bether of.Just look how they were treated in Canada, or South america.

 

In fact, back then there was no such thing as the United States except for the name. Remember, it took until 1788 for the constitution to be signed, and even then most inhabitants of the new federal state did not feel like one homogenous people at all. So the Indians really were wiped out more by colonials than by Americans, if you want to give them a common name.

 

Well regardless it took us a long time to learn better behavior. We pushed them westward, breaking treaty after treaty, until the early 1900's. Many of them just wanted to be left alone anywhere that was liveable.