Benjamin Franklin, born in 1709, stepped on the historical stage at exactly the right moment to be swept up in the dispute between Britain and her colonies–and to influence that dispute. Understanding the events that would eventually lead to the Revolutionary War is valuable in gaining greater insight into Franklin’s Autobiography. What follows is a very brief accounting of these events.
The American colonies, mostly established throughout the early 17th century (Jamestown, Virginia was founded in 1609; Georgia was the latest in 1731), had a relatively amicable relationship with the Crown and Parliament throughout the 1600s. There were occasionally issues regarding trade, such as a furor over the strict Navigation Laws and the hated Edmund Andros’s Dominion of New England, which sought to combine all of the New England colonies into one monolithic bloc, but the mercantilist system of the colonies providing raw materials for and buying goods from the mother country seemed to mostly meet with acceptance. This was essentially a period of salutary neglect in which the colonies had a higher degree of autonomy than they would in the subsequent century. The fact that they saw themselves as British citizens rather than as “Americans” also kept them quiescent for a time.
As the 18th century proceeded, however, things began to change. One’s identity became more associated with the colony one lived in rather than British citizenship. When the Massachusetts Bay Colony’s original charter was revoked in 1691 and the province was made a royal colony, the inhabitants were furious.
One of the most significant events that exacerbated tensions was the French and Indian War. Both the British and the French claimed the fertile Ohio River Valley for their nation, and such disputations flared into armed conflict in 1754. Native Americans fought for both sides, though they tended to side with the French more often, hoping to kick the British out. The colonists begrudgingly supported their British government, but they groused at the rudeness of British soldiers and the lack of protection for their families on the frontier.
Colonial ambivalence about the conflict, which ended with Britain’s impressive victory in 1763, meant that they were not particularly thrilled when Parliament began to implement a series of taxes in order to pay for the expensive war. That same year of 1763 saw the passage of the Proclamation of 1763, which stated that the colonists were not to settle beyond the Appalachians; while it was actually intended to forestall more conflict with Native Americans, the colonists viewed it as a breach of their liberty and openly flouted it.
The taxes, starting with the Sugar Act of 1764, were not financially onerous but represented a disturbing denial of the rights colonists had come to believe they possessed by virtue of being British citizens. Calls for taxation with representation echoed throughout the colonies, but Parliament only replied that they were “virtually represented” already. The Stamp Act of 1765, the first direct tax levied on the colonies after the war, resulted in outrage and tumult. There were protests, effigies burned, tarring and feathering of British officials, and calls for further action. Parliament repealed the tax but reminded the colonists in the Declaratory Act of 1765 that they had the power to bind the colonies in all cases whatsoever.
Tensions increased with subsequent taxes, forced quartering of British troops in private colonial residences, and the Boston Massacre, in which British troops fired into a crowd and killed several people (they were provoked by the hostile mob, but this fact did not matter much at the time). Colonial resistance was marked by committees of correspondence, a boycott of British goods, protests, acts of defiance (such as the Boston Tea Party in 1773), and the convening of the First Continental Congress to decide what to do.
The first Congress was mostly concerned with amicable reconciliation, but the Second Continental Congress began to splinter in terms of opinions regarding subsequent action; Franklin, John Adams, Jefferson, Samuel Adams, Washington, and others began to advocate for independence. After the shots fired at Lexington and Concord and the King’s rejection of an olive branch petition, these patriots got their wish: the Declaration of Independence was signed on July 4th, 1776, and the war had begun.
