Transcription
In 1776, a group of men in Philadelphia drafted a Declaration of Independence. Have you ever stopped to think about what they were doing? What they were doing was declaring themselves in rebellion against their king. They were declaring themselves in rebellion against their government, and, of course, the consequences for this action could be death. So what is it that prompted these English colonists, by 1776, to finally decide that they’d had enough, that they were willing to risk their lives, and declare independence from Great Britain? Okay, that’s the question we want to explore in this lecture. Okay, as we start to look at the road to the Revolution, what is it that, in the minds of the revolutionary generation of Americans, convinced them that they were justified in declaring independence? Okay, because you have to remember, people aren’t going to rebel; people aren’t going to go to war unless they believe that they are fully justified in their actions. So what is it that happened to confirm, in the minds of this generation of Americans, that they were justified in their actions?
In order to answer, explore that question; first of all, we need to think about two philosophical developments, right, and the influence of those two philosophical developments. The first of these is an intellectual movement that was especially prominent by the 18th century called the Enlightenment. Okay, the Enlightenment was certainly very powerful in Europe, okay, but we certainly felt the influence of the Enlightenment here, and certainly there were enlightened thinkers here in the United States, and they contributed to the independence movement. Okay.
Now, in order to understand the impact of the Enlightenment on America’s, you know, that revolutionary generation and their political philosophy, we first need to remember a very important point, and, and you know, probe an important question. Okay, what is it that gave kings the right to rule? Okay, why did kings have the right to be kings, or queens have the right to be queens? Well, if I ask this in class, the common response is, well, it was a birthright; that is, kings were born kings; kings were, you know, the the the power of the monarchy was passed on from generation to generation within families. So there was a birthright that gave kings the right to rule, and that, of course, then begs the question, well, what about the first kings? Okay, what is it that gave the first kings, or what happens if there isn’t an heir to a king? Okay, why do kings have the right to rule? Well, in the end, what we know in history is that typically what happened is kings had a right to rule that was secured and established through might; that is, might makes right, and it was usually military power that gave kings the right to rule. Okay, but the problem is that if you use might as your justification, then might can always be challenged by other might. Okay, and so in order to establish a right in its own right, you have to have a philosophical justification for the right to rule. Okay, and in the Middle Ages, going back into European history, the long-standing justification for a king was what was called the divine right of kings. Okay, the Bible talks about the importance of honoring civil governments. Okay, civil governors have a very important role to play. Okay, and in the case of kings and queens in Europe, the kings and queens of Europe almost always had to have the sanction of the crown itself, or, excuse me, not the crowd, of the Pope. Okay, the Church had to sanction a king or queen, and so it was what was called divine right; in other words, the power to be king was something that came down from God himself, right, through the Church. So when a king is a king, a king is a king because God says that that individual should be the king. All right, so it’s called the divine right rule of kings. Okay.
Now, during the Enlightenment, this notion of divine right, that that king’s rule by right or by the mandate of God, it came under challenge. Okay, and it came under challenge from the man who’s pictured in this slide; his name was John Locke. John Locke was an English political philosopher, and in 1690 he published a very important work called *Two Treatises of Government*. Okay, and in this *Two Treatises of Government*, he took an idea that was very popular during the during the Enlightenment called natural rights, okay, and he articulated it in it and explained natural rights, and he argued that all humans are born with certain natural rights that they are entitled to simply by virtue of their birth in this world. Okay, and he specifically identified these natural rights as life, liberty, and the pursuit of an estate or property. Okay, this would later get translated by Jefferson into life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, but no, it wasn’t originally conceived by John Locke; his life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; it was life, liberty, and the pursuit of property. Nevertheless, John Locke’s ideas were very important because what that basically meant then is that all humans have these certain important rights, and he further went on to argue then that government has an obligation to protect those rights. Okay, government cannot deny individuals of life, liberty, and pursuit of of property; government must indeed protect those rights. Okay.
Now, if you think about it, this is really a revolutionary idea because prior to this, people didn’t have rights; common people didn’t have rights; the right to to government came from down on high, but now what what John Locke is effectively saying is that government effectively exists for the benefit of the people, and that power then comes from the governed themselves; it doesn’t come down from God; it doesn’t come down from the king; it comes down, or it comes up from the people. Okay, kings rule not because God gives them the right to rule, but because the people consent to be governed by a king. Okay, and that’s what it’s called consent of the governed, and this was a revolutionary new way of thinking about, um, you know, about government; it was also now a revolutionary way of thinking about religion. Okay, because if power comes from the people and they have natural rights, if power doesn’t come down from God and and the Pope, then effectively this enlightened way of thinking is starting to challenge not only the place of kings but the place of God. Okay, and enlightened thinkers now are going to start, you know, thinking about the place of God in the universe much differently; we’ll talk about, talk later on about how that impacted men like Thomas Jefferson. Okay, but the point is this: this idea that consent of the governed means that the people are in charge, and if a king, if a government fails to adequately protect the natural rights of the people, then the people are justified in rising up and throwing out that government, throwing out that king. Okay, so this is very important; this enlightened way of thinking. Okay, natural rights theory now is going to begin telling a whole generation of educated Americans that they not only have the right to throw out their king, indeed they have a natural duty to do so because that king is not protecting their natural rights. Okay, so that’s critical to understand because this Enlightenment now is going to influence especially educated young men, men who are going to school in the 1740s and 1750s; they’re going to start reading *Two Treatises of Government*; they’re going to start debating John Locke’s ideas, and they’re going to start questioning the power of kings. So the Enlightenment, one of the important philosophical foundations; the second of these philosophical foundations was a very powerful religious movement, an evangelical movement that really began to to emerge in Europe and especially then in North America, for our purposes, especially in the 1730s and 1740s. Okay, it was an evangelical movement called the Great Awakening. Okay, and to a very large degree it was brought to North America from England by an evangelical minister by the name of George Whitefield. I know it looks like Whitefield, but it’s actually pronounced Whitefield; George Whitefield was actually a a, well, he was a relatively poor young man who grew up in in England, but he was very bright and very capable, and at Oxford University they recognized his talent and they actually enrolled him at Oxford University even though he couldn’t afford to go there; basically the arrangement was he had to quite literally serve as a servant to the more privileged students at Oxford, but because he was enrolled as a student he could also take classes there. All right, so George Whitefield went to Oxford, and when he was at Oxford he actually met two brothers, the Wesley brothers; let’s see, it was John Wesley, and real quickly I can’t remember the other Wesley’s name off the top of my head; Charles Wesley was the other. In any case, the point is Charles and John Wesley were students at Oxford, and they were starting to launch a very powerful evangelical movement. Okay, now the the the Anglican Church at this time typically was not especially evangelical; that is, it wasn’t really active in going out and converting people to Anglicanism. Okay, but George Whitefield is going to start changing that all now. Okay, the the Wesleys and and Methodism more generally, in fact, we’re going to see the emergence of Methodism as a Protestant denomination now, and and Methodists are going to start being more evangelical; they’re going to start going out in the world; they’re going to start preaching; they’re going to start trying to convert people, and so George Whitefield arrived in North America and he began preaching widely; he especially began to preach widely in rural areas, and one of the things that he began to talk about is the need to repent and reform society; society had become, had become, I don’t want to say corrupt, but I would say more sinful is probably the way to put it, especially under the influence of enlightened thinkers. Okay, enlightened thinkers were challenging the place of kings, but enlightened thinkers were challenging the place of God as well, and so George Whitefield and others began to instill in listeners this idea that they needed to fix society, okay, that society was going down the wrong path and that they needed to correct that problem. Okay, and without a doubt, with perhaps the most powerful of the evangelical ministers of this Great Awakening, was a minister in Massachusetts; he was actually born and raised in the North American colonies; his name was Jonathan Edwards. Jonathan Edwards for a while had been the president at Harvard University; he was a very powerful, very persuasive man, but he was also a minister who was incredibly persuasive. All right, he was a Calvinist in the Puritan tradition and believed that God was angry, angry with the direction that that society and humanity was going, angry that the Puritan mission was being abandoned, and that the abandonment of the Puritan mission was only going to bring down the angry wrath of God faster and more painfully unless people began to repent. Okay, and that was effectively the message in his his sermon entitled *Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God*. Okay, that you’ve got to repent; you’ve got to to correct the changes that exist within society. All right, this message that that that that Great Awakening ministers were delivering all over the colonies had the effect then of instilling in a whole generation of of Americans of of the Christian persuasion that they needed to reform; they needed to repent, and they needed to change society. Okay, it created in them this idea that they must change. Okay, now they’re going to begin to see the king differently; they’re not going to, they’re going to see their their mission on on some level as being religious. Okay, but ultimately it is a it is a need for change that they that they are eager to bring about. Right.
So the point is, between these two these two philosophical movements, the Enlightenment and the Great Awakening, you have a whole generation of Americans now who, as they come of age in the 1760s and 1770s, throughout their whole lives have been told that they must change; they must fix things; they must make things better. Okay, and that is critical now to the American Revolution. Okay, so having laid the foundation philosophically, let’s look at some of the important events now that are going to take the country, or to take the the colonies in the direction of revolution. Okay, and the first of these important developments is the struggle for empire that began to take place in North America in the 1750s and 1760s; it was a struggle for empire that took place especially between Great Britain and France. Okay, and it’s going to lead to warfare; the French and Indian War; we’ll talk about that here in just a second. All right, so let’s lay the foundation for the French and Indian War. First of all, remember that the French had established a colony up in Quebec in 1608 in Canada, and they remained very actively trading in the Great Lakes region even as the British expanded their colonial possessions in, you know, further south and what would become the United States. By the 1750s, the two imperial powers, Britain and France, were in a contest for control over the Ohio River country that was west of the Appalachian Mountains. Okay, the British had claims in this region, and the French had claims in this region, and the region was very important because of the very profitable fur trade that existed in the Ohio River country. Okay.
In 1754, in order to try and cement their claims to the fur trade in the Ohio River country, the French came south from the Great Lakes and they established a fort at the mouth of the Ohio River in western Pennsylvania. Okay, that fort they called Fort Duquesne; it was a French fort, and it gave them now a claim to all of the water of the Ohio River between Fort Duquesne and the Mississippi River. Okay. Now, while the French claimed this territory, the British, by virtue of their colonial charters, also claimed this territory, and they were not going to simply surrender that territory. So in 1754, a young man from Virginia, 22 years old, arrived in arrived in western Pennsylvania at the head of a force of men, Virginians and Pennsylvanians, for the purpose of basically unseating the French and asserting British claims to the Ohio River country. Okay, George Washington was only 22 years old at this time. All right, he was a man who had career military aspirations, but his problem was he was a colonist, and it was very difficult for colonials to secure appointments as officers in the King’s army. Okay, officers were Englishmen who lived in England. Okay, colonists had a hard time securing appointments as officers in the royal army. So George Washington, if he was going to secure a military position as an officer, he was going to have to do something to catch the the crown’s attention and to demonstrate to the king that he was worthy of appointment as an officer in the King’s in the King’s army. All right, so in 1854—1754 now, excuse me—he’s going to lead these men into western Pennsylvania; if he can defeat the French, he might secure his position in the army. Okay, unfortunately, George Washington’s first step into the international spotlight did not turn out very well for him at all. Okay, in fact, it turned out to be a disaster. Okay, in 1754, he and his men arrived in western Pennsylvania, and at a point about 30 miles southeast of Fort Duquesne, he erected a wooden block stockade that he called Fort Necessity. Okay, Fort Necessity was made of wood; it was hastily thrown up, and it was haphazardly, or the location, I should say, was haphazardly selected. Okay, the reason I say it was haphazardly selected is because it was built in a river bottom that was susceptible to flooding, and it was also built in a position where the opponent could actually secure the high ground and fire down into this this stockade. Okay, you can see by the location of Fort Necessity. So, for example, Frenchmen could even get into the trees surrounding Fort Necessity and and fire down and and and place Fort Necessity under siege; it was a it was not a good location for a wooden stockade. Okay, but his bigger mistake was in dealing with the French directly. Shortly after he arrived there, Washington received word that a French envoy was on his way to meet with with Washington. Okay, it was the Count Jumonville. Okay, Jumonville was a French envoy who hoped to negotiate with Washington; he didn’t want war; he didn’t want to fight; he wanted to settle the matter peacefully. Well, Washington didn’t trust Jumonville, and it’s unclear exactly whether he believed that Jumonville was coming peacefully or whether he just didn’t trust him; it’s not real clear. What we do know is that Washington allowed himself to be manipulated essentially, and he organized an ambush in which his men ambushed Jumonville and nine other men and and killed them in what became known in France as the Jumonville Massacre. Okay, the British called it the Jumonville Affair, claiming that it was all a misunderstanding. Okay, but the French claimed that that Jumonville had come peacefully, that he had been ambushed, that he had been murdered, and that Washington himself had even signed a testimony in which, because he did not read French, agreed that he had assassinated Jumonville. Okay, so the the point is that the French now were furious; Washington had to suffer the embarrassment of the whole ordeal, and ultimately the net result now was going to be a declaration of war. Okay, now that war won’t officially be declared until 1756. Okay, officially France and Great Britain went to war in 1756, and it lasted till 1763, and for that reason it’s called the Seven Years’ War, but here in North America the fighting started two years before the declaration of war, and it became known as and is known as the French and Indian War. Okay.
In this war then, the United States—not the United—and St. Indian allies. Okay, so that’s the French and Indian War. Now, for the duration of this war, and I don’t have time to go into into great detail, but I will say this: for the most part, here in the United States, the colonists fought their war—the war, rather—independently. Okay, that is, they received assistance in the in the form of arms and munitions, but for the most part it was the colonists themselves who fought the war against France here in the in North America. For that reason then, these colonists began to think about themselves much more independently, as we will see. Okay. In the end, in 1763, France and Great Britain signed a treaty, the Peace of Paris, that ended the French and Indian War. Okay, and the fighting came to a conclusion. Let’s talk a little bit about the the Paris Peace Treaty, the legacy here, because it is the is a legacy that ultimately is going to have an important impact on the coming of the Revolution, the American Revolution. All right.
So, first of all, under the Peace of Paris, the French are going to surrender all of their territories in North America. Okay, in other words, the British are now going to claim Canada as well as Louisiana. Okay, Louisiana will ultimately be transferred to the Spanish and then back to the French. Okay, but initially, initially the the French were forced to give up Louisiana, and they also were forced to give up Canada. Now that’s very important because the loss of those territories is actually going to, that’s going to leave a bad taste in the in the mouth of the French king, and the French are going to want to reclaim those territories, and one of the things, one of the reasons that the French are later going to support the independent United States is because if they defeat the the British, then they hope to be able to reclaim their their territories. All right, so the loss of French territories is going to serve as an incentive for the French to later support the United States in its revolution against Britain. The second important outcome is very important. Okay, it is important to remember that these 13 colonies, though they were British colonies, they all functioned somewhat independently of one another. Right, they were all tied more directly to the crown than they were to one another. Okay, especially when you’re talking about the southern colonies of the Carolinas and Georgia versus the northern colonies of Massachusetts. All right, these were all British colonies, but they weren’t really unified; they weren’t tied together, but the war is going to change that; the war is going to start to bring all of these colonies more of a unified feeling; they’re going to start thinking of themselves as a people. Okay, they’re not calling themselves Americans; they’re still Englishmen. Okay, but they have a stronger identification with one another. Okay, and very closely related to that is a growing sense of military unity. Okay, they had fought together to defeat the French. Okay, and in so doing they had organized themselves militarily. Right, yes, George Washington’s first step into the spotlight had been disastrous, but he learned from his mistakes, and others began to learn from their mistakes as well, and as a result, well, this military organization now is going to start giving these colonists a sense that they can fight together and and that they can lead themselves in warfare. Okay, now are they talking about warfare against the crown? No, not at this point, but the idea that they can organize themselves is is very important. Okay. Fourth, the French and Indian War had been very, very expensive. Okay, the war had nearly doubled England’s national debt. Okay, and on top of the national debt now there was also going to be the added expense of having to defend those colonies, right, because Spain might now try and sweep in and claim those colonies. So the point is that the cost of maintaining these colonies now was going to grow exponentially. Okay, and the net result, well, the crown is going to have to find ways to raise money, okay, not only to pay off the cost of the war itself but to pay for the defense of those colonies. All right, so the net result, well, as as we’ll see, we’re going to start seeing tax programs, tax policies, and it is those tax policies that are going to launch the protest movement. All right, so we’ll talk about those in our in our next lecture; we’ll start talking about the taxes. Finally, the fifth and final outcome that I really want to talk about is that what we start to see in the aftermath of the the French and Indian War are expressions of liberty. Okay, that is, these colonists now are starting to think of themselves as being more free. Okay, again, part of that is the Enlightenment; part of it is the idea of natural rights, and because you have natural rights you have liberty. Okay, and we start seeing this expressed in their writings. Okay, the need to be free; the need to be able to govern themselves; the need to be freed from oversight by Parliament in London. Okay, they’re going to start talking about liberty and the importance of liberty. Okay.
Now, where this really starts to become problematic then is that you’ve got Americans talking about the necessity of liberty while at the same time they are enslaving a considerable portion of their own population. Okay, this concept of liberty is something that Black Americans, African-Americans, are also going to begin to embrace; liberty to them means something very, very different; liberty to them, especially, means an end to slavery; it means freedom. Okay, and so this whole notion of liberty, of freedom, becomes very, very important now in this post-French and Indian War era. Okay, but it’s important for for very different reasons to different people. Okay, and it is critical that you keep that in mind because by the time we get to the Revolution now, yes, slavery and the demand for liberty among Black Americans is going to be very, very important; it’s going to be a central part of the the drive to, on the American Revolution. Okay, so I’m going to wrap that up here; this up here. When we come back in our next lecture, we’re going to start talking about some of the particular developments that led to the Declaration of Independence.