CONTENTS
  
An ambitious young English king, George III (reigned 1760-1820)
The colonial reaction to King George's autocratic ways
Meanwhile, the Westward expansion of Anglo-America continues

        The textual material on this webpage is drawn directly from my work
        America - The Covenant Nation © 2021, Volume One, pages 112-115.



AN AMBITIOUS YOUNG ENGLISH KING, GEORGE III (REIGNED 1760-1820)

A New and Very Different Hanoverian King: George III

In 1760, with the death of his grandfather (George II), a young and very ethnically English Prince of Wales (unlike his grandfather and great-grandfather who were quite German) took the throne of England as George III.  Almost from the beginning of his reign he ran into trouble with the Whigs, who were used to a quite free hand in their political activity.  But George was already in financial trouble, having inherited debts accumulated from the wars of his grandfather, and he pushed for economic policies designed to correct this problem policies that frequently put him at odds with his Whig ministers.  Soon, because of this and other political issues, he was accused of autocratic behavior on the model of the European monarchs who ran their governments as they alone decided to do so.  This was not what English politicians (at least Whigs, anyway) expected of their kings.  Nonetheless, with considerable encouragement from his mother, George was indeed trying very much to be the king in England that his Hanoverian predecessors had not troubled themselves to be.

Taxing the Colonies to Help Pay for England's Wars

Problems along these same lines began to develop between the young king and his colonies in America.  Since the end of the French and Indian War in 1763, the English had found that although they had gained considerable North American territory from the French because of the war, the English national debt had also nearly doubled in the process.   It had been a very costly war.  Thus the sentiment arose with both the king and his Tory supporters in Parliament that the American colonists, who had benefited from the increased security of having the French threat removed and the Indian threat (presumably) neutralized, should help repay the debt through the imposition of new taxes on the colonies.

But the colonists were very sensitive to the fact that they themselves had made considerable contributions to the English victory with their own military support and with the loss of lives and property which occurred during the war.   Thus the imposition of taxes by king and parliament, without even any consultation with the colonists themselves (which was the historic right of all Englishmen), seemed totally unfair.




The young King George III



English leaders attempting to please King George III in his quest
to rebuild the empty British treasury (too many pointless wars)

George Grenville wanted to rebuild the English royal treasury
by placing new taxes on the colonials (1763-1765)

The English Whig leader Charles Rockingham (Prime Minister 1765-1766)  
(but would ultimately prove to be strongly opposed to George's war with the Americans)

Charles Townshend (1766-1767) imposed the deeply hated Stamp Act
on colonial documents and papers (including newspapers)

 

A British tax stamp
New York Public Library

THE COLONIAL REACTION TO KING GEORGE'S AUTOCRATIC WAYS

Bostonians reacting to the Stamp Tax
Library of Congress

The 1765 Stamp Act

Worst of all was the fact that the first taxes to be collected would be from the revenue acquired by the purchase of official stamps or stamped paper, required to be printed on or attached to all colonial documents even church documents. Boston Pastor Jonathan Mayhew preached a fiery sermon against this tax, claiming that this was a guise to establish royal control over the voice of the American church.  The next day angry Bostonians burned down the home of the lieutenant governor.

But the Virginians were no less outraged, and the burgesses, under the influence of Patrick Henry's oratory, voted a refusal to pay the taxes.  British Parliament quickly repealed the Stamp Act (although other taxes would be imposed in place of the stamp tax). But the political damage was done.  The Bostonians and Virginians demonstrated that they had no hesitation in rejecting the authority of the King in America if he overstepped the ancient rights of Englishmen.

On this matter they even had supporters in the English parliament back in London, the Whigs, who agreed in principle with the colonists.  But the king also had supporters in Parliament, the Tories, who agreed with the king, that he as sovereign had the right to make his subjects pay for the expenses of running the government.  Thus beyond the issue of the costs involved in the war, the matter of high political principle dividing Whigs and Tories became a key part of the matter.

The 1770 Boston Massacre

The issue came to violence when an angry group of Bostonians began taunting British Redcoat soldiers stationed in Boston to protect British agents sent to collect the hated taxes.  Nervous soldiers fired into the surrounding crowd, killing three and injuring eight (two of whom would subsequently die of their wounds).

Volunteering to defend the soldiers was a dedicated lawyer (and future American president) John Adams.  Six of the soldiers were acquitted and just two charged with manslaughter.  This was a daring act on Adams's part, considering the temper of the city, but indicative of his moral integrity (or ambition) which the nation would later recognize and call into service.

Nonetheless, the event itself was an early indication of the mood that was developing in the colonies.

Reaction in New Hampshire to the Stamp Tax
Metropolitan Museum of Art

The Admiralty Courts  Halifax, Nova Scotia

General Thomas Gage commander of British forces in America (1763-1775)
by John Singleton Copley
1788
Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection

The British Fleet arrives in Boston   1768
Winterthur Museum

 

The Boston Massacre March 5, 1770
Metropolitan Museum of Art

John Adams
He served as the defense lawyer for the Redcoats involved in the shooting
... actually launching his political career!

MEANWHILE, THE WESTWARD EXPANSION OF
ANGLO-AMERICA CONTINUES

The English-Americans were not paying any attention to King George's promise
to his Indian allies that he would stop further expansion westward
into Indian lands by his Anglo colonial subjects

George III's Efforts to Halt the Spread West
of English Settlers into Indian Lands

The colonists were also very unhappy that King George III had promised his Indian allies that, in recognition of their assistance in his war against the French (and France's Indian allies), no Anglo settlers would be allowed into the Indian lands west of the Appalachian Mountains.  The colonies had long assumed that their boundaries, never fully defined to the West, actually extended westward across the Appalachian Mountains at least to the Mississippi River (or even beyond).

Colonists had been looking westward in that direction with the expectation that these lands would become available as the lands in the East filled with settlers and their descendants. Indeed, in 1775 Daniel Boone had laid out his Wilderness Road through the Cumberland Gap in the Appalachian Mountains and had founded a settlement in Kentucky (subsequently named after him as Boonesborough).

Thus the proposed restriction by the king on that expansion was a major irritant if not even a direct threat to the future well-being of the colonials.

Along the same lines of logic as his promise to his Indian allies, George issued in 1774 a promise to his French subjects in Canada that their Catholic faith and French civil law would be recognized in a greatly expanded province of Quebec, a Quebec which now would include the territories to the West of the thirteen colonies on the other side of the Appalachian mountain range. What?!!!  The king was now not only supporting Catholicism in principle but also moving to establish the Catholic church (and its bishops) as the spiritual governors in the colonies' Western territories.

This move to support Catholicism in the Western lands, plus the king's talk of wanting to appoint Anglican bishops to oversee the religious life of the English colonies, appeared simply to be a ploy to bring the English colonials' highly cherished 150-year-old religious freedoms in America to an end.

Even before this event, concern had been rising in New England over the missionary efforts of the king's Church of England, not to the unsaved in the colonies, but aimed at good Congregationalists in an effort to bring them under the Mother Church.  Already, in the 1750s, the pastor-activist Mayhew had taken up the cause of fending off the efforts of the Church of England to absorb the independent churches of New England, and by 1762, when there was open talk about positioning Anglican bishops over the colonies, Mayhew did his best to stir the stiffest opposition to such an invasion of colonial religious rights.

Leading the way westward was Daniel Boone
Tennessee State Library and Archives

Daniel Boone escorting settlers through the Cumberland Gap George Caleb Bingham (1851-1852)
St. Louis, Washington University Gallery of Art



Go on to the next section:  The Conflict Turns Violent

  Miles H. Hodges