The American Revolution emerged out of the intellectual and political turmoil following Great Britain’s victory in the French and Indian War. Freed from the threat of hostile French and Indian forces, American colonists were emboldened to resist new British colonial policies that raised issues of inequalities of power, political rights, and individual freedoms. People such as John Adams and Mercy Otis Warren believed that the British policies stimulated the minds of Americans to demand independence and expanded individual rights. This revolution of the mind had physical consequences as Americans openly and sometimes violently opposed Great Britain’s new assertions of control. The right to representation, political independence, separation of church and state, nationalism, slavery, the closure of the Western frontier, increased taxation, commercial restrictions, use of the military in civil unrest, individual freedoms, and judicial review were some of the salient issues that boiled up in the revolutionary cauldron of Britain’s American colonies.
John Adams to Thomas Jefferson, August 24, 1815
Benjamin Franklin (1706–1790), America’s consummate “wise man,” was among the first to imagine a national confederation. In 1754, he proposed a union of American provinces at a conference of provincial delegates at Albany, New York, to better battle the French and their Indian allies. The Albany Plan, calling for proportional representation in a national legislature and a president general appointed by the King of Great Britain, served as a model for Franklin’s revolutionary Plan of Confederation in 1775.
Benjamin Franklin. Plan of Proposed Union (Albany Plan), 1754. Manuscript. Hazard Papers in the Peter Force Collection, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress (2.00.02) [Digital ID# us0002_2, us0002, us0002_1] Bookmark this item: //www.loc.gov/exhibits/creating-the-united-states/revolution-of-the-mind.html#obj2
The works of John Locke (1632–1704), well-known English political philosopher, provided many Americans with the philosophical arguments for inalienable natural rights, principally those of property and of rebellion against abusive governments. In the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson did not incorporate Locke’s emphasis in his “Second Treatise of Government” on the right to property but gave the right to rebel a prominent place.
John Locke. Two Treatises of Government. . . .The Latter is an Essay Concerning the True, Original Extent, and the End of Civil Government. London: Awnsham Churchill, 1690. Rare Book and Special Collections Division, Library of Congress (003.00.04) [Digital ID# us0003p4, us0003_1, us0003, us0003_2, us0003_3, us0003_4, us0003_5] Bookmark this item: //www.loc.gov/exhibits/creating-the-united-states/revolution-of-the-mind.html#obj3
When Thomas Jefferson asserted the inalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness in the Declaration of Independence, he was influenced by the writings of Henry Home, Lord Kames (1696–1782). Kames was a Scottish moral philosopher who argued for the right to “the pursuit of happiness” in his acclaimed work Essays on the Principles of Morality and Natural Religion. Jefferson owned and annotated this copy.
Henry Home, Lord Kames. Essays on the Principles of Morality and Natural Religion, in Two Parts. Edinburgh, 1751. Thomas Jefferson Library Collection, Rare Book and Special Collections Division, Library of Congress (4) [Digital ID# us0004] Bookmark this item: //www.loc.gov/exhibits/creating-the-united-states/revolution-of-the-mind.html#obj4 Back to Top
America’s Last Monarch—George III
George III (1738–1820) of Great Britain had the misfortune to become king in 1760, shortly before the drive to revolution in his American colonies began to gather momentum. Many historians and contemporaries have blamed the stubborn, inexperienced, and mentally unstable monarch for the repeated British miscalculations and mistakes that led to the independence of the United States. Certainly George III displayed no creativity or imagination in the formulation of policies toward the British colonies in America. Bookmark this item: //www.loc.gov/exhibits/creating-the-united-states/revolution-of-the-mind.html#obj6
The British government enacted the Stamp Act to raise revenue from its American colonies for the defense of North America. Prime Minister George Grenville (1712–1770) also wanted to establish parliament’s right to levy an internal tax on the colonists. Viewing the act as taxation without representation, Americans passionately upheld their rights to be taxed only by their own consent through their own representative assemblies. Future revolutionists saw the act as a harbinger of greater direct taxation and the loss of political rights. Widespread American opposition led to repeal of the act in 1766.
An Act for Repeal [of] the Stamp Act, March 18, 1766, At the Parliament Begun and Holden at Westminster.… London: Mark Baskett, Printer to the King, 1766. Marian S. Carson Collection, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress (8) [Digital ID# us0008_1] Bookmark this item: //www.loc.gov/exhibits/creating-the-united-states/revolution-of-the-mind.html#obj9
Mock Funeral Procession for the Stamp Act
This 1766 cartoon depicts a mock funeral procession along the Thames River in London for the American Stamp Act. The act generated intense, widespread opposition in America and was labeled “taxation without representation” and a harbinger of “slavery” and “despotism” by the Americans. Colonists convened a Stamp Act Congress in New York in the fall of 1765 and called for a boycott of British imports. Bowing to the pressure, Parliament repealed the Stamp Act in 1766. In this cartoon, a funeral procession to the tomb of the Stamp Act includes its principal proponent, Treasury Secretary George Grenville (1712–1770), carrying a child's coffin, marked "Miss Ame-Stamp born 1765, died 1766." Bookmark this item: //www.loc.gov/exhibits/creating-the-united-states/revolution-of-the-mind.html#obj10
Reports that the Church of England (Anglican), the established church, was going to appoint a bishop in America stoked fears of increased and oppressive government limitations on religious freedoms. In this political cartoon, angry American colonists chase a British bishop aboard a ship labeled “Hillsborough” for the British Colonial Secretary, Wills Hill, Earl of Hillsborough (1718–1793), and then use long poles to push the ship away from the dock. Bookmark this item: //www.loc.gov/exhibits/creating-the-united-states/revolution-of-the-mind.html#obj11
At the suggestion of the Massachusetts Assembly, delegates from nine of the thirteen American colonies met in New York in October 1765, to protest the imposition by the British Parliament of a “stamp tax” on paper, legal documents, and other commodities, limits on trial by jury, and increased powers of the vice-admiralty courts. Only six delegates, including Williams Samuel Johnson (1727–1819) from Connecticut, agreed to draft a petition to the King based on this Declaration of Rights.
William Samuel Johnson. “Declaration of Rights and Grievance,” October 19, 1765. Manuscript. Manuscript Division, Library of Congress (10.01.00) [Digital ID# us0010_01] Bookmark this item: //www.loc.gov/exhibits/creating-the-united-states/revolution-of-the-mind.html#obj12 Back to Top
A rebus, in which pictures represent words, was a favorite amusement in the eighteenth century. [Britannia toe] Amer[eye]ca (Britannia to America) is the first of a pair of political satires concerning Britain’s last attempt to end the Revolution through diplomatic means by sending to Philadelphia an unsuccessful delegation known as the “Carlisle Peace Commissioners.” The rebus portrays Britannia as a mother urging her daughter who is planning to marry a Frenchman to jilt him and stop rebelling, a reference to the American alliance with France. Bookmark this item: //www.loc.gov/exhibits/creating-the-united-states/revolution-of-the-mind.html#obj16
When the French and Indian War ended in 1763, Great Britain sought to reassert its authority over the American colonies and recoup some of the money expended in defending its American colonies by passing the Sugar Act (1764) and a Stamp Act (1765) to levy internal taxes on sugar products, paper products, and legal documents in the American colonies. Under the rallying cry of “No taxation without representation,” Americans resisted (sometimes violently) these attempts to violate what they claimed were their natural and constitutional rights as freemen.
An Act for Granting Certain Stamp Duties. London: 1765. Peter Force Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress (007.04.00) [Digital ID# us0007_04] Bookmark this item: //www.loc.gov/exhibits/creating-the-united-states/revolution-of-the-mind.html#obj20 |
Which statement best illustrates the influence of the American Revolution on the French Revolution
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