13 Reasons for the American Revolution

"No taxation without representation" is often thought of as the main beef that led to the American Revolution, but it was only one of many moving parts in the bigger picture. Read the show notes for this episode here.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff you missed in history class from how
Stuffworks dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm
Tracy Wilson, and so back in our Boston Massacre podcast,
we talked pretty extensively about the vast difference between how

(00:23):
people wrote about the event in the American colonies and
how people wrote about it in England. So basically, Paul Revere,
Samuel Adams and others and the colonies wrote about the
Boston massacre as an outrage that was perpetuated by a
tyrannical government on innocent people, while on the other hand, uh,
folks who were loyal to the British government or living
in England generally wrote about it as quote, the unfortunate

(00:46):
incident in King Street involving a bunch of gravel rousers
who were disloyal to the crown. And so one of
our favorite listener males came in the wake of this,
you remember, just from Andrew who lived outside London and
wrote to us about the tone of Revolutionary War lessons
in England. And after we read Andrew's letter, we got

(01:07):
so much email like a landslide, the landslide of email.
Many of these were in all capital letters, and some
of them questioned our intelligence in our memory of our
own history classes, because neither we nor Andrew's letter talked
about the idea of no taxation without representation, so that
that we didn't talk about it because that was wasn't

(01:29):
the point, uh right, The point was to talk about
what the tone of revolutionary Revolutionary War history is like
when taught in England, Like that was why I read it,
um And the messages that we got about it weren't
all rude, No, many of them were very insightful, and yeah,

(01:50):
many of them were thoughtful. Only some of them were rude.
But they all did seem to sort of labor under
the same misapprehension, which was that the root cause of
the Revolutionary War was that the American colonies were paying
taxes to the crown and not being represented in Parliament.
We got so many emails that boiled down to this

(02:11):
sort of core idea, uh, that it seemed like we
really needed to do a whole episode on it, because
there were a lot of causes of the of the
American Revolution. Yeah, it's really a disservice to say it's
that one thing, yeah, because it's there are a lot
of moving parts as there are to almost any political

(02:31):
situation like that, Like there's very rarely just one thing
that catalyzes something on the level of a revolution. Right,
So today we're going to talk about thirteen causes of
the American Revolution. And this is not all of the causes,
it's just thirteen of them I thought would be good
to talk about, uh, And only one of them was

(02:52):
the one that we got all that email about. So
that's where we're going to start with Number one. Yes,
taxation without representation. That was a factor. So the colonists
in North America were being taxed by the government, but
they were not directly represented in parliament. And that is
entirely true. And there were people who pointed out that
by being taxed but not represented, colonists were really being

(03:15):
denied a basic right that was granted to other British
subjects many years before the revolution even started. That was
just like one of those things like, hey, this is
not okay, right, way before things got to the level
that we called the revolution. Right. So there's also a
common misperception among Americans that what the colonists were missing

(03:36):
out on was basically the same thing as a seat
in Congress. Today. And while Congress in the United States
does have some stuff in common with the House of
Commons in Parliament, being that they are both made up
of elective representatives, Parliament was at this point in history
a little different from Congress today. The House of Commons

(03:56):
was mostly about protecting the interests of the Crown and
keeping the king's peace, and it looked after its own interests,
which were the interests of the landowners who had been
elected um and it pretty much ran the show when
it came to taxation. But serving in the House of
Commons was mostly at this point about power and prestige
and not about influencing policy or influencing huge changes in

(04:20):
the government. And on top of those differences, while no
taxation without representation did become a rallying slogan that was
part of the revolution, a huge part of the colonial
protest was really about the taxes themselves. Before people started
deliberately organizing resistance to British rule, the idea that they

(04:40):
were not being represented in the government was not really
top of mind for a lot of people there. There
beef really was one about cash, right, and that brings
us to reason number two. Taxes full stop before the
War of Spanish Succession. Most of Britain's income came from
taxes on land, but war as are extremely expensive and

(05:01):
so the government had to find other ways to make money.
Like we just said, the people who were running the
taxation show in the House of Commons were all landowners.
They really did not want to be raising a bunch
of more taxes on their land. They would be shooting
themselves in the foot financially if they did that, and
that's where excise taxes on specific items came in, so

(05:24):
many of them that they eventually brought in more money
than taxes on land. There were also trade duties, which
were more lucrative the more British government traded with other nations,
so there still was not enough money, especially after the
end of the French and Indian War, which was fought
between France and Great Britain. The French and Indian War
was sort of the American arm of the Seven Years War,

(05:47):
and as its name suggests, it was very long, was
also very expensive, and by the end Britain wound up
in control of all of North America east of the Mississippi,
including what is now Canada. It also end up with
a huge amount of debt, which only got worse as
the colonies slid into the economic depression that followed the
end of the war. So all of this new territory

(06:10):
was also a whole lot more expensive to maintain and defend,
and it required a standing army that Great Britain itself
had never really needed on British soil because it was
separated from the rest of Europe by water. So the
government used taxes in the colonies to try to raise
money to pay off this debt, saying that it had
fought the war in order to keep the colonists safe.

(06:32):
And the colonists really were not buying that line, saying
that no Britain had fought the war to expand its
own empire. And even if they had been represented in Parliament,
the colonies would still have objected to these taxes on
the grounds that they were being made to foot the
bill for a military action that they did not ask for. Uh,
because they created an economic hardship, and just on principle

(06:55):
that they were taxes that people living in Britain were
not having to pay. They were just for the colonists. Okay,
So number three the Sugar Act. So the Sugar Act
was part of this whole plan to save the British
economy through taxes. It was really called the American Revenue
Act of seventeen sixty four, and it expanded a previous

(07:16):
Sugar and Molasses Act, which had required a sixpence tax
per gallon of imported molasses. The Sugar Act actually reduced
the tax to threepence per gallon, but it took steps
to actually enforce that tax, which the colonies have become
quite good at evading through smuggling. This added a slew
of oversight and bureaucracy to importers and exporters, and it

(07:38):
sparked skirmishes with merchants on one side and the navy
and customs officials on the other. It's tempting to think
that the people protesting these taxes were all patriots that
were angry about an unjust government. But the reality is
that a lot of these merchants, and we used the
air quotes there, were really angry that their illegal smuggling

(07:58):
business had, you know, falling on some difficulty. Yeah, they
were gonna have to work a lot harder to keep
it going. It just got a lot harder to do.
An end run around the law with with with your molasses,
which was important for making rum um. The Sugar Act
also did implement new taxes on sugar, coffee, printed calico,
other goods, and these taxes hit the middle and upper

(08:19):
classes the hardest because they were the ones who were
using these goods the most. The Sugar Act also really
disrupted the colonial economy because all the trade restrictions that
were put in place to try to, you know, cut
the smuggling down um really just had a big effect
on where the colonies could sell their exports. So on
top of hitting people in their wallets, the whole thing

(08:42):
rankled disrupted the greater economy and led to people boycotting
British goods, which angered the British government enormously. So number
four in our medical list of causes of the Revolution
is the Currency Act. So this same year, the Currency
Act was passed, and it was an attempt to standardize

(09:03):
currency in the colonies. There were no known gold or
silver mines in North America at the time, so the
colonies couldn't mint their own coins. They were printing paper
money instead, but this money had not been standardized, and
the different currencies all had different values and rules. So
it's not a big leap to imagine what a confusing
state that would be. Obviously, that was not going to

(09:26):
be workable for very long. To have all these different
paper moneys that were not you know, no, my money
is worth this much, Well, my money is worth this
much he had. Like, having a bunch of incompatible money
was not going to to work. So what the Currency
Act did? It? It meant well, but it abolished all

(09:46):
of the currencies that the colonies had created and instead
put in a monetary system that was based on British
pounds sterling. Because the colonies had a huge trade deficit
with Great Britain, this whole deal wound up working out
vastly in Great Britain's favor, which also made the colonies
really angry. And because the Sugar Act and the Currency

(10:08):
Acts hit right at the same time as people started
to really feel the effect of the economic depression that
was following the French and Indian War, the colonists perception
was also that they had a huge negative impact on
their personal lives. The common conclusion was that the reason
nobody had any money anymore was all these new taxes,
and not just the inevitable postwar decline that happens anytime

(10:31):
a war ends. So that brings us two numbers five
and six, which we've talked a little bit about before,
the Stamp Act and the Town's in Revenue Acts. Um,
we're not going to go into huge detail about either
of those or about the Boston Massacre, since we just
covered all of that in our Boston Massacre episode, but
they were still important factors and the revolution, So if

(10:52):
you did miss the episode on the Boston Massacre, the
Stamp Act and the Towns and Revenue Acts were both
deeply unpopular tax acts that sparked everything from Boycott's to
violent protests. The Boston massacre was an altercation between the
colonists and the British regulars that led to the deaths
of five people, and it happened in the wake of
these two acts. And the Stamp Act in particular was important,

(11:15):
not just because it continued to stir up distrust to
the British government, but because opposition to it really united
many of the colonies for the first time. Although the
King in Parliament were technically in charge, the colonies had
been more or less governing themselves and they didn't have
any central connection point, and the response to the Stamp
Act actually changed that. Yeah, it gave it. Basically, people

(11:39):
built up networks uh and and better ways of communicating
with each other, better ways of organizing themselves. The Stamp
Act also spawned the formation of groups that it just
intended to protest and and combat its implementation, including the
Sons of Liberty, which is the best known of these groups.
After this Stamp Act was repealed, the Sons of Liberty

(12:02):
and these other groups turned their attention to other issues
with the British government and trying to spread awareness about
things that need to be changed, organizing protests, all of
this kind of stuff. So number seven is the t Act,
And unlike all of these other acts, the t Act
was not about a new tax, although the t involved

(12:23):
was taxed under the Towns and Revenue Act, which already existed.
Parliament passed it on May tenth, the seventeen seventy three,
but it took a while for news of it to
reach the colonies at all, and even longer for its
full text to be printed in a newspaper so people
could actually see what it said. Basically, the East India
Company had a lot of tea. It had more tea

(12:45):
than it could sell very well, and it also had
other financial problems, so Parliament gave it monopoly on selling
tea to the colonies. There were also other provisions in
this Act that were meant to help prop up the
East India Company and allow it to undercut the prices
of any other tea importer. The colonies interpreted this as tyranny,

(13:06):
and ports refused the shipments from the East India Company
or let them just rot on the docks. In Boston,
a group of men disguised as Native Americans dumped the
tea into the harbor, a protest known today as the
Boston Tea Party, which there's a whole episode on in
our archive. So, Holly, would you like to take a
second and take a take a little break from talking

(13:27):
about all these causes of the American Revolution and instead
talk about a word from our sponsor. Okay, so let's
get back. We have several things under the same umbrella. Now.
This is reasons eight through twelve, the intolerable acts, also
known as the coercive acts. There are lots of different
names for all these acts, and lots of different ways
of arranging them into a list, but basically This is

(13:50):
an umbrella term of the government's response to all the protesting, boycotting, skirmishing,
and like that had been going on in the colonies,
especially in Boston, and it included specific uh acts that
were meant to be punishing and to try to quell
all of this dissent. The Boston Port Act closed the

(14:11):
Port of Boston entirely until the East India Company was
repaid for all the tea that had been dumped in
the harbor during the Boston Tea Party. Boston had become
one of the most prominent opponents of British rule, and
closing the port was intended to cut it off from
the other colonies, thus curtailing its influence. Because so much
of the Massachusetts economy relied on shipping through the Boston Port,

(14:34):
this really had the potential to be economically disastrous, and
it also had the opposite of the intended effect, because
the other colonies rallied around Massachusetts and they started bringing
in supplies. The next of these acts was the Massachusetts
Government Act, which effectively disbanded the government of Massachusetts and
put it under direct control of the Crown under a

(14:55):
military government, and it also forbade Town meetings and other sumblies.
I had a history teacher in high school who said
this was basically Britain putting Massachusetts in a time out.
And really that's a good way to summy, it's flip.
But yeah, I agree you were bad. You'd sit and

(15:16):
think about what you've done. Uh. The Administration of Justice
Act gave British officials charged with committing capital crimes while
doing their duties in Massachusetts their right to have their
trial moved to England or another colony. The British point
of view on this was that, uh, this was to
ensure that they would get a fair trial, and the

(15:37):
colonists point of view on this was that this would
ensure that they could get away with it. Yeah. Now,
I come to the Quartering Act of seventeen seventy four,
which was similar to an earlier Quartering Act that had
also made people really angry. It required the colonists to
basically provide for all of the troops needs, including their provisions, housing, fuel,

(15:58):
and their transportation. This was like being taxed some more,
except instead of directly giving money, they were having to
pay for all of this stuff and for building barracks.
And if there were no barracks or other housing available.
People had to house soldiers in their homes. So you
can conclude how much this upset people by the fact

(16:20):
that the Third Amendment to the Constitution prohibits this entirely
in peace time. The only rights more important, by going
by Bill of Rights order are all the First Amendment
protections of speech, freedom of religion, and that kind of thing,
and the Second Amendment freedom to keep in their arms.
The Quebec Act ordered territory and fur trading in the

(16:41):
area between the Ohio and Mississippi rivers to Quebec. This
made this part of what had been English colonies French instead,
and also Catholic Protestant colonies in the area began to
fear for their freedom of religion. And this whole act
was meant to win favor with the French, but instead
it just infuriated the colonies. Did it probably did get

(17:01):
some favor with the French, but at what cost. So
various lists just as a as a side note, various
lists of the intolerable or coercive acts. Some of them
leave out the Quartering Act or the Quebec Act for
various reasons. You will find you will find things that
say that there were four intolerable acts, and and they
leave out one or the other of those. So, um,

(17:25):
reason number thirteen is kind of a weird umbrella. There
were these things we've just we've been talking about concrete things,
like concrete activities and specific laws, like the steps that
were taken by the British government, yes, negatively impacted the colonies,
or by the colonies to uh to protest with the

(17:45):
government was doing correct. But knitting this altogether was reason
number thirteen, which was a bunch of vague social and
political factors that sort of tied all of these things together.
So the colonies were being run at this point like
a monarchy, but there really wasn't an aristocracy the way
there is in a typical monarchy. There were certainly some
wealthy people, but they didn't have that whole system of

(18:07):
titles and clout and corresponding responsibilities that the aristocracy in
Britain did. Now there's kind of a weird middleman layer
between the crown and Parliament and the people that didn't
exist in the colonies, and it made that that system
of government kind of weird. It also contributed to the

(18:30):
colony's general lack of respect for authority. While the purpose
of government in Britain was mostly to maintain the king's peace,
the colonies were so removed from the king that they
didn't really feel the need to be beholden to a
government that had that as its ultimate end. And there
were more people who owned property in the colonies, and

(18:51):
there was much more religious diversity than there was in England. Well,
this made for a completely different balance of power and
religion than UH. England and Great Britain were experiencing in
this set of a disconnect between the government and the people. Yeah,
that the you know, Parliament and and the Crown were
more like things were a little more homogeneous in England specifically,

(19:16):
you sort of branch out into more of Great Britain.
There's a little more diversity that the colonies was a
lotle more all all over the place in terms of
all of that um. The constant presence of troops also
perpetually stoked anti British sentiment. UH. Since Great Britain had
not really had much of a standing army in peacetime,

(19:38):
this constant presence of soldiers was a reminder that the
colonists were being treated differently from people in England. It
really rankled, and as the Boston massacre showed, having armed
troops constantly in proximity to citizens who were angry at
them being there was basically a powder keg always ready
to explode. There was also this whole problem of long

(20:00):
communications delays, and they ran all through the lead up
to the Revolution, and it's entirely possible that today's communication
methods would have diffused some of the tensions, since either
the colonies or Britain would have been able to react
to things quickly rather than allowing them to fester. Like
Parliament would would pass a law and it would take

(20:23):
months for the colonies to hear about it. Collegues would
react to something and it would take a long time
for uh for the government back and written to hear
about it. And during these long periods of time between
when the thing happened and when people found out, stuff
would just kind of fester. Yeah. Well, I mean, you

(20:43):
can imagine it happens between one person and another sometimes
where you know, you'll leave someone an email or send
them a text and say something and then you don't
hear back right away, and you get frustrated and think
that they have ignored you or they're angry and it's
just like the community. So if you expand that out
over months in this political climate, yeah, well, and if

(21:03):
you even think about like, uh, like I just this
week had an email that got crossed where the thing
got answered while I was typing my answer, and I
was like this, I cannot imagine how much more difficult
it would have been to have productive relations with some
you know, with the government on the other side of
the ocean, when it took months, Yeah, that long for

(21:24):
direction to move from one place to another. So as
the colonies got together to resist British rule and work
out problems for themselves, putting together their own communications networks,
convening things like the First and second Continental Continental Congress,
they were basically building a blueprint for self governance. So

(21:45):
the colonial, the colonial response to all the things that
that the government was doing was gradually putting pieces together
of the colonies having their own government instead. So by
the time the first shots were aired at the battles
of Lexington and Concord, the Revolutionary War was inevitable and
having had representation uh in British Parliament would not have

(22:09):
stopped that. So that's why taxation without representation really falsely
summates it under one of It was definitely an important thing,
but it was definitely not the only thing. And especially
before people started, you know, educating one another about the
whole issue of representation at all, they were playing of

(22:29):
people who were like, man, these taxes are awful. I
don't want to pay them. I'm angry. Um. To wrap
all this up, the other comment that we get any
time we talk about the revolution is that we shouldn't
think of it as us versus them. The thread sort
of continues that everyone was English, so it was all us,
and that's not really accurate either. The English were the

(22:52):
majority of people in the colonies at this point. The
next largest population group was slaves, and then following slaves,
there were huge groups of Scotch, Irish, and German immigrants,
as well as immigrants from Denmark, Sweden, Finland and other
European nations. So this was not a homogeneous group of
English people on one side of the ocean versus the other.

(23:15):
There was a lot more diversity going on, a lot uh,
a lot of different influences on how people thought and
what people felt about the things that the government was doing. So, um,
it is kind of appealing to think of it as
being us on both sides. But really a lot of
people in the colonies were not English at all, even

(23:39):
if they were, you know at this point technically citizens
under the crown, you know, maybe newly arrived from Germany
with a totally different religion than anything practice in England.
So yes, a complicated political and social situation it is
that really can't be summed up as anyone calls. No,

(24:03):
do you also have the listener mail for us this
go around? Yes, I do, but this is from Ginger.
Ginger says, dear Tracy and Holly. First, like everyone says,
I'm a big band of the podcast. It's really great. Second,
I'm a reporter who works in the US capital. So
I was excited during the recent prep Pueblo Revolt episode
when I learned that Pope a statue was in the Capitol,
so I set out to find it. I'm sad to

(24:24):
report the statue was no longer located in Statuary Hall,
which means I couldn't confirm if it once had its
back turned to a mural of Christopher Columbus. It is
now located in the Visitors Center, a large open area
that welcomes all of the capital's visitors. It is a
new addition to the capital. Construction finished in two thousand eight,
so it's likely that the statue was located in Statuary

(24:46):
Hall before then. A fun fact. I asked one of
the tour guides where I might find it, and he
was able to promptly direct me to its new location
and told me that Pope was the man who led
the uprising. And I responded that I had recently learned
on your podcast about the rope, and the tour guide
told me that he did not know that fact, and
what's going to be again using it when tourists about
asked about the statue? Uh, and then Gender sent a

(25:08):
photo of the statue which is definitely not in the
same place as some of the other photos I have
seen about statue. Um. And then she recommends a future
topic which we may do. So I'm just going to
leave that secret through UM. Yeah, we got a couple
of notes being like, oh, the statue is not there anymore.

(25:28):
I'm sorry, I didn't know they moved the statue. They did.
The statue is now somewhere else, But thank you very
much for writing to his Gender. Now other people going
to the Capitol can go see the statue where it
really is um, but it sounds like they If you
ask in the place where it used to be, they
know pretty you know where it went to. Thank you
tell you so. If you would like to write to us,

(25:50):
we were at History Podcast at Discovery dot com. We're
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would like to learn more about what we talked about today,
you can come to our website. Put the word revolution
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(26:11):
the American Revolution so revolutionary? You can learn all that
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