Founding America (Barnes & Noble Classics) - Jack N. Rakove [5]
In London, the following winter was given over to concocting a different, more potent brew of measures. In response to the news from Boston, the government of Lord North, firmly backed by King George III, asked Parliament to approve a set of acts to punish Boston and the province of Massachusetts for their defiance of the empire. These measures, known as the Coercive or Intolerable Acts, had several goals. The first, the Boston Port Act, closed the town harbor to commerce until full restitution was made for the destroyed tea. Next came the Massachusetts Government Act, altering the colony’s royal charter of government in ways that would presumably strengthen the authority of the empire. In adopting these acts, the King, his ministers, and their loyal majority in Parliament had two further objectives. One was to isolate Massachusetts by showing the other colonies just how costly defiance of the empire could be. The other was to provide a conclusive demonstration of just how sovereign Parliament really was. A Parliament that could adopt these measures and see them enforced would indeed be America’s sovereign.
Both calculations failed, and their failure converted American opposition to the claims of Parliament into a genuine revolution against the empire. Far from isolating Massachusetts, the Coercive Acts persuaded the other provinces to rally to its defense because it was only “suffering in the common cause” of securing American rights. At the First Continental Congress of September-October 1774, delegates from twelve colonies (only the frontier settlement of Georgia did not attend) adopted a common strategy of resistance and agreed upon the basic constitutional positions Americans would uphold. A Second Continental Congress met at Philadelphia in early May 1775. Three weeks earlier, violence had erupted in Massachusetts when its new royal governor, General Thomas Gage, sent soldiers to seize colonial arms and munitions stored in nearby Concord. Faced with the specter of civil war, the Second Congress did not flinch from converting the Massachusetts provisional army into a Continental Army under the command of George Washington, the colonies’ best-known soldier. Nor were the delegates (now including representatives from Georgia) willing to modify the strong positions they had adopted the previous fall.
Even though a full year passed before Congress felt that Americans were ready for independence, the outbreak of war made that decision inevitable because neither Congress nor the British government was prepared to retreat from the positions each had adopted. Neither side had sought this result. The colonists had no cadre of revolutionary agitators seeking to foment crises or exploit British miscues in the cause of national liberation. Most Americans would have been content to remain subjects of the British Crown. And the British obviously had no reason to try to provoke Americans into acts of defiance as a pretext for cracking down on colonial rights. But on the key issue of Parliament’s jurisdiction over America, the two countries found themselves in fundamental disagreement. Both had valid and potent arguments to make, and neither side could see how its fundamental concerns would be answered if its positions were not vindicated. Both found themselves increasingly suspicious of the other’s motives—even though Americans repeatedly declared they sought nothing more than the restoration of rights, while spokesmen for the British position argued that it was only reasonable to require the colonists to contribute to the costs of the empire. Had the British government ever offered the colonists a bona