The Petition to His Majesty, The Memorial to the House of Lords and The Remonstrance to the House of Commons, commonly referred to collectively as the 1768 Petition, Memorial and Remonstrance, are a series of imprints that record a protest by the Virginia House of Burgesses in April 1768 that was sent to the British government by then-acting Lieutenant Governor John Blair.
This particular imprint had been owned by David Hartley,[1] sometime Member of Parliament and a long-time friend of Benjamin Franklin. He probably received it from G.W. Fairfax, a George Washington friend, who returned to England in 1773. Hartley was the sole official British signatory of the 1783 Treaty of Paris formally ending the American Revolution. Hartley had long supported freedoms for all Englishmen, at home and in the colonies: freedoms sought in the PMR and later reflected in the Declaration of Independence.
This Virginia protest elicited no formal response from the British government. However, in mid-1768, Virginia Governor General Sir Jeffrey Amherst was unceremoniously replaced by Lord Norborne Berkeley, Baron de Botetourt, who promptly came to Virginia, with a royal instruction "to reside constantly within the Colony" and to call for military aid if there was any "sudden commotion of the populace".
Virginia had notified the other colonies of its PMR, seeking support for its positions.[2] This letter, together with the Massachusetts Circular Letter, stimulated further protests. By December 69, all the American colonies had formally protested taxation called for by the Townshend Acts.
Background
In 1683, the Assembly of New York passed a Charter of Liberties and Privileges asserting that "supreme legislative power should forever be and reside in the Governor, council, and people, met in general assembly", and enumerated citizen's rights including taxation voted only by the citizenry's representatives, trial by peers, exemption from martial law, exemption from the quartering of soldiers, and religious toleration.
In a 1748 visit to New York, Massachusetts Governor William Shirley wrote of the New York Assembly, "They seem to have left scarcely any part of His Majesty's prerogative untouched, and they have gone great lengths toward getting the Government, military as well as civil, into their hands."
Britain gained immensely by the 1756–1763 French and Indian War (a.k.a. Seven Years' War) but incurred large debt in doing so. To secure peace, the Grenville Ministry maintained 7,500 troops in America. Saddled with huge national debt and expenditures, the English government sought to have the colonies share this burden. Several times, Parliament sought tax revenue to pay its debts, abandoning each attempt soon after it heard Colonial objections. The 1764 Sugar Act imposed a high tariff on molasses imports, followed by the 1765 Stamp Act, then the 1766 Declaratory Act, and then the 1767 Townshend Acts.
Early colonial objections emphasized taxation, later ones a constitutional issue—"no taxation without representation". Already in 1764, it was clear that the British measures were not working. George Grenville, the King's First Minister, drafted tax legislation but delayed it for a year. Scheduled to go into effect on 1 November 65, the Stamp Act taxed legal and commercial documents, newspapers, books, dice, and playing cards. After the 1765 Virginia Resolves appeared in colonial newspapers, merchants refused to buy the required stamps. Parliament repealed the Stamp Act on 18 March 66.
Although official news of the Townshend Acts reached North America in September '67, organized colonial protests began in 1768. Between 2 December 67 and 15 February 68, the Pennsylvania Chronicle published twelve articles by John Dickinson—his letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania, arguing that "Parliament had no right to impose taxes, only duties to encourage and regulate trade". These letters were reprinted throughout colonial America. On 20 January 68, the Massachusetts Assembly petitioned the King to repeal the legislation.
Seeking American unity, Boston's Samuel Adams suggested that colonial objections "should harmonize with each other". This 11 February 68 Massachusetts Circular Letter, invited every colony to cooperate in resistance. The British ordered the Massachusetts Assembly to rescind the letter. It refused, and its royal governor dissolved it. This led Virginia to generate the PMR on 14 April 68, and to announce it to sister colonies. Then the 6th May New Jersey Assembly Petition to the King asserted "the Privilege of being exempt from any Taxation except as imposed … by themselves or Representatives". Soon every colony protested.
Starting in 1766, the colonies tried non-importation agreements. These helped induce the Stamp Act repeal because English merchants lost money shipping goods to destinations that would not accept them. In 1768 every port city and nearly every region adopted its own agreement. However, signing a non-importation agreement was one thing; making it effective was something else. Some merchants asked for exorbitant prices; some defied the rules by importing goods, to the chagrin of those who complied. The early agreements collapsed. Nevertheless, non-importation was agreed on in the first Continental Congress.
On 10 May 73, the Tea Act granted a tea monopoly to the East India Company. It also continued a small duty on tea. Philadelphians protested en masse in October. Bostonians tried to get their English tea agents to resign but failed. On 16 December, after Governor Thomas Hutchinson blocked an attempt to return the Dartmouth, still loaded, to England, activists boarded three tea ships and dumped 342 containers of tea into the harbor. Massachusetts and Virginia, the most populous and wealthy colonies, were also the most influential. On 17 June Massachusetts called for "a meeting of Committees from the several Colonies on this Continent". Virginia supported the idea. In 1774 this happened—the First Continental Congress. Delegates included George Washington (Va.), Patrick Henry (Va.), John Adams (Ma.), Samuel Adams (Ma.), Joseph Galloway (Pa.), and John Dickinson (Pa.). Peyton Randolph (Va.) was chosen as its president.
The Stamp Act 1765, also known as the Duties in American Colonies Act 1765, was an Act of the Parliament of Great Britain which imposed a direct tax on the British colonies in America and required that many printed materials in the colonies be produced on stamped paper from London which included an embossed revenue stamp. Printed materials included legal documents, magazines, playing cards, newspapers, and many other types of paper used throughout the colonies, and it had to be paid in British currency, not in colonial paper money.
Thomas Hutchinson was an American merchant, politician, historian, and colonial administrator who repeatedly served as governor of the Province of Massachusetts Bay in the years leading up to the American Revolution. He has been described as "the most important figure on the loyalist side in pre-Revolutionary Massachusetts". Hutchinson was a successful merchant and politician who was active at high levels of the Massachusetts colonial government for many years, serving as lieutenant governor and then governor from 1758 to 1774. He was a politically polarizing figure who came to be identified by John Adams and Samuel Adams as a supporter of unpopular British taxes, despite his initial opposition to Parliamentary tax laws directed at the colonies. Hutchinson was blamed by British Prime Minister Lord North for being a significant contributor to the tensions that led to the outbreak of the American Revolutionary War.
The House of Burgesses was the elected representative element of the Virginia General Assembly, the legislative body of the Colony of Virginia.
The Intolerable Acts, sometimes referred to as the Insufferable Acts or Coercive Acts, were a series of five punitive laws passed by the British Parliament in 1774 after the Boston Tea Party. The laws aimed to punish Massachusetts colonists for their defiance in the Tea Party protest of the Tea Act, a tax measure enacted by Parliament in May 1773. In Great Britain, these laws were referred to as the Coercive Acts. They were a key development leading to the outbreak of the American Revolutionary War in April 1775.
The American Colonies Act 1766, commonly known as the Declaratory Act, was an Act of the Parliament of Great Britain which accompanied the repeal of the Stamp Act 1765 and the amendment of the Sugar Act. Parliament repealed the Stamp Act because boycotts were hurting British trade and used the declaration to justify the repeal and avoid humiliation. The declaration stated that the Parliament's authority was the same in America as in Britain and asserted Parliament's authority to pass laws that were binding on the American colonies.
Sir Francis Bernard, 1st Baronet was a British colonial administrator who served as governor of the provinces of New Jersey and Massachusetts Bay. His uncompromising policies and harsh tactics in Massachusetts angered the colonists and were instrumental in the building of broad-based opposition within the province to the rule of Parliament in the events leading to the American Revolution.
The Province of New York was a British proprietary colony and later a royal colony on the northeast coast of North America from 1664 to 1783.
The Sons of Liberty was a loosely organized, clandestine, sometimes violent, political organization active in the Thirteen American Colonies founded to advance the rights of the colonists and to fight taxation by the British government. It played a major role in most colonies in battling the Stamp Act in 1765 and throughout the entire period of the American Revolution. Historian David C. Rapoport called the activities of the Sons of Liberty "mob terror."
The Townshend Acts or Townshend Duties were a series of British acts of Parliament passed during 1767 and 1768 introducing a series of taxes and regulations to fund administration of the British colonies in America. They are named after the Chancellor of the Exchequer who proposed the programme. Historians vary slightly as to which acts they include under the heading "Townshend Acts", but five are often listed:
The Stamp Act Congress, also known as the Continental Congress of 1765, was a meeting held in New York City in the colonial Province of New York. It included representatives from some of the British colonies in North America. It was the second gathering of elected representatives from British American colonies after the Albany Convention of 1754. The Congress sought to devise a unified protest against new British taxes by the British Parliament, which passed the Stamp Act, requiring the use of specialty stamped British paper for legal documents, playing cards, calendars, newspapers, and dice for virtually all business in the colonies starting on November 1, 1765.
The Tea Act 1773 was an Act of the Parliament of Great Britain. The principal objective was to reduce the massive amount of tea held by the financially troubled British East India Company in its London warehouses and to help the struggling company survive. A related objective was to undercut the price of illegal tea, smuggled into Britain's North American colonies. This was supposed to convince the colonists to purchase Company tea on which the Townshend duties were paid, thus implicitly agreeing to accept Parliament's right of taxation. Smuggled tea was a large issue for Britain and the East India Company, since approximately 86% of all the tea in America at the time was smuggled Dutch tea.
"No taxation without representation" is a political slogan that, though rooted in the Magna Carta, originated in its present form during the American Revolution and which expressed one of the primary grievances of the American colonists for Great Britain. In short, many colonists believed that as they were not represented in the distant British parliament, any taxes it imposed on the colonists were unconstitutional and were a denial of the colonists' rights as Englishmen.
The Massachusetts Circular Letter was a statement written by Samuel Adams and James Otis Jr., and passed by the Massachusetts House of Representatives in February 1768 in response to the Townshend Acts. Reactions to the letter brought heightened tensions between the British Parliament and Massachusetts, and resulted in the military occupation of Boston by the British Army, which contributed to the coming of the American Revolution.
The Boston Tea Party was an American political and mercantile protest on December 16, 1773, by the Sons of Liberty in Boston in colonial Massachusetts. The target was the Tea Act of May 10, 1773, which allowed the British East India Company to sell tea from China in American colonies without paying taxes apart from those imposed by the Townshend Acts. The Sons of Liberty strongly opposed the taxes in the Townshend Act as a violation of their rights. In response, the Sons of Liberty, some disguised as Native Americans, destroyed an entire shipment of tea sent by the East India Company.
Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania is a series of essays written by the Pennsylvania lawyer and legislator John Dickinson (1732–1808) and published under the pseudonym "A Farmer" from 1767 to 1768. The twelve letters were widely read and reprinted throughout the Thirteen Colonies, and were important in uniting the colonists against the Townshend Acts in the run-up to the American Revolution. According to many historians, the impact of the Letters on the colonies was unmatched until the publication of Thomas Paine's Common Sense in 1776. The success of the letters earned Dickinson considerable fame.
The Hutchinson letters affair was an incident that increased tensions between the colonists of the Province of Massachusetts Bay and the British government prior to the American Revolution.
Samuel Adams was an American statesman, political philosopher, and a Founding Father of the United States. He was a politician in colonial Massachusetts, a leader of the movement that became the American Revolution, a signer of the Declaration of Independence and other founding documents, and one of the architects of the principles of American republicanism that shaped the political culture of the United States. He was a second cousin to his fellow Founding Father, President John Adams.
The Boston Non-importation agreement was an 18th century boycott that restricted importation of goods to the city of Boston. This agreement was signed on August 1, 1768 by more than 60 merchants and traders. After two weeks, there were only 16 traders who did not join the effort. In the upcoming months and years, this non-importation initiative was adopted by other cities: New York joined the same year, Philadelphia followed a year later. Boston stayed the leader in forming an opposition to the mother country and its taxing policy. The boycott lasted until the 1770 when the British Parliament repealed the acts against which the Boston Non-importation agreement was meant.
The 27 grievances is a section from the United States Declaration of Independence. The Second Continental Congress's Committee of Five drafted the document listing their grievances with the actions and decisions of King George III with regard to the Colonies in North America. The Second Continental Congress voted unanimously to adopt and issue the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776.
Bailyn, Bernard. 1968. The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution.
Campbell, Douglas. 1879. Historical Fallacies regarding Colonial New York. Address in Utica, N.Y.
Dickinson, John & Richard Henry Lee. 1769. Empire and Nation: Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania and Letters from the Federal Farmer.
Gerlach, Larry R. 1976. Prologue to Independence.
Gipson, Lawrence Henry. 1954. The Coming of the Revolution, 1763-1775.
Gladney, H.M. 2014. No Taxation without Representation: 1678 Petition, Memorial, and Remonstrance. ISBN978-1-4990-4209-2. See also a book description and links to 18th-century document images.
Guttridge, G.H. 1926. David Hartley, M.P.: An Advocate of Conciliation, 1774-1783. U. California.
Kammen, Michael G. 1975. Colonial New York: a History.
Knollenberg, Bernhard. 1975. Growth of the American Revolution, 1766-1775, ISBN0865974160.
Morgan, Edmund S. and Helen M. Morgan. 1953. The Stamp Act Crisis: Prologue to Revolution.
Reid, John Phillip. 1986. Constitutional History of the American Revolution.
Thomas, P.D.G. 1975. British Politics and the Stamp Act Crisis: First Phase of the American Revolution 1763-1767.
Thomas, P.D.G. 1987. The Townshend Duties Crisis: the Second Phase of the American Revolution, 1767-1773.
Thomas, P.D.G. 1991. Tea Party to Independence: the Third Phase of the American Revolution 1773-1776.
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