The chapter opens with an event that marked both a beginning and an ending. The Seven Years' War resolved the contest for supremacy in North America among the English, the French, and the Indians. Yet it also set the stage for the coming of American independence.

The Seven Years' War

The conflict, triggered when the French drove George Washington from Fort Necessity in 1754, quickly became global. Until 1758, the French and their Indian allies in North America seemed likely to sweep to victory. Then William Pitt took control of the British war effort and the tide of battle turned. By 1759 British and colonial forces had claimed most of Canada. The Treaty of Paris in 1763 officially ended the French presence on the continent of North America.

The Seven Years' War was pivotal because once the British removed the threat of the French from the colonial frontiers, George III and his ministers could renew their efforts to centralize and consolidate their American empire. Of course, the Stuart monarchs had attempted to centralize colonial government in the 1680s, with the Dominion of New England (Chapter 3). In 1763, though, Parliament accepted a crucial role in this process and displayed an unprecedented determination to assert its authority directly in America.

The British victory in the Seven Years' War left Americans overflowing with millennial optimism about the future of the empire. They had great expectations of the role that they would play in it. But many leading Britons came away from the conflict disaffected with the colonies, charging that Americans had withheld both financial support and men from the war effort and even traded with the enemy. Some anticipated that Americans would exploit their new military security by making a bid for independence. British policymakers had no intention of granting the colonies greater influence within the empire.

The Imperial Crisis

Britain did intend to impose tighter controls on American trade and territory and pay for the expense by raising revenue in the colonies. Through a series of new measures during the early 1760s, including the Proclamation of 1763, the Sugar Act, the Stamp Act, the Currency Act, and the Quartering Act, Parliament revealed its design for advancing the cause of centralization.

However, the timing of these new measures was disastrous. They deflated American expectations of a more equal status in the empire and coincided with a postwar downturn in the colonial economy. Perhaps more importantly, the new measures abridged what Americans perceived as their constitutional and political liberties, including the right to consent to taxation, the right to trial by jury, and the freedom from standing armies. As a result, Americans displayed an unprecedented level of opposition to these innovations in imperial policy, turning to petitions, crowd actions, and boycotts as resistance tactics.

Although Parliament bowed to pressure from British merchants and repealed the Stamp Act, it reasserted its authority to tax Americans by passing the Townshend Acts in 1767. Americans renewed and institutionalized their resistance by enforcing boycotts through committees of inspection, and affirmed their unity in responses to the Massachusetts circular letter. The stationing of British troops in Boston only increased hostility to imperial authority, which erupted into violence in 1770 with the Boston Massacre.

With the repeal of all of the Townshend duties except for the tax on tea in 1770, American resistance subsided until the Gaspee incident in 1772. Yet even during this quiet period, the formation of the committees of correspondence, inspired by Samuel Adams, fostered intercolonial consensus and spread the scope of the resistance inland. When Britain responded to the Boston Tea Party with the Coercive Acts in 1774, many Americans, primed by resistance propaganda, concluded that all British actions in the last decade were part of a deliberate plot to enslave Americans by depriving them of property and liberty. The political theories of the English Opposition—which taught that power inevitably conspires to encroach on liberty—and resistance movements overseas in places such as Corsica informed the perspectives that colonials now applied to the crisis within the empire.

With the stage set for concerted intercolonial action, the First Continental Congress convened at Philadelphia in September 1774. Delegates maintained a middle course, resisting radical demands for immediate mobilization for war and conservative appeals for accommodation. Congress denied Parliament any authority in the colonies beyond the power to regulate trade, but acknowledged the colonies' allegiance to George III. Delegates also drew up the Continental Association, an agreement to cease all trade with Britain until Parliament repealed the Coercive Acts.

Toward the Revolution

The collapse of royal authority in Massachusetts moved the colonies toward a showdown with Britain. To make a show of force, General Thomas Gage dispatched troops from Boston in April of 1775 to seize arms stored at Concord, a move that led to the first battle between British soldiers and the Massachusetts militia. In January of 1776, Thomas Paine's Common Sense pronounced that the imperial crisis had passed from "argument to arms." Paine's pamphlet undermined the emotional tie to England by attacking George III, and persuaded many Americans of the necessity of independence.