When was the revolutionary war inevitable

And so, in the spring and early summer of , most of the colonial assemblies adopted resolutions condemning the Stamp Act. The government in London was unimpressed by the constitutional arguments made by the colonists or the petitions and resolutions adopted by their assemblies.

If the Americans wanted to register their dissatisfaction with the Stamp Act, they would have to resort to less subtle means. Its major town, Boston, had a long tradition of rioting and popular demonstrations to defend local interests and it was particularly hard hit by the downturn. The combination of economic hard times, an unpopular and unprecedented tax as well as a local tradition of violent resistance was potentially dangerous.

On 14th August, an angry mob attacked the house of Andrew Oliver - the local man rumoured to be responsible for collecting the tax. Then on the 26th they damaged the houses of colonial officials and completely destroyed the home of the colony's Lieutenant Governor. The demonstrations spread throughout the colonies and, through threats, intimidation and violence, American opponents of the Act rendered it a dead letter by the autumn.

Having nullified the proposed tax on the streets, American protestors wanted to secure the repeal on the offending legislation in Parliament. In October several colonies sent delegates to New York to attend a 'Stamp Act Congress' which proposed a commercial boycott as means to pressure Parliament to act.

American opponents of the Stamp Act would refuse to purchase British goods in order to put commercial pressure on Parliament to repeal the act. The tactic worked. In March , Parliament acquiesced and repealed the Stamp Act. Parliament simultaneously declared:. Parliament assembled, had, hath and of right ought to have, full power and authority to make laws and statutes of sufficient force and validity to bind the colonies and people of America.

In other words, although Parliament was repealing the Stamp Act, it retained its right to govern America. Many Americans took a different view. The Boston loyalist Peter Oliver - the brother of Andrew Oliver who had suffered during the riots of August - wrote bitterly of the repeal:.

A Law without Penalties, or one with Penalties not exacted, is It is in Government as it is in private Life: a desultory, undetermined Conduct often induces Contempt. Oliver was one of the few supporters of British rule in America who understood its limits and could explain its failure.

Having given in to colonial pressure, Parliament ceded the authority it was trying to assert. For most of the previous years, the colonists had been left largely to their own devices in what some historians have described as 'salutary neglect'. If we take the long view, the American Revolution was one of the great surprises of the early modern Western world.

American independence was inevitable, but victory in the American Revolution was not. The American colonies were filling up quickly and building a distinctly American culture. However, victory in the American Revolution from was far from inevitable.

French entry into the war in changed the war by diverting British military resources from the U. This, coupled with the improvement of the Continental Army, created parity between the two militaries.

At that point, the inability of the British to effectively support nascent Loyalist counter-insurrections in the South, made their defeat inevitable. But this was only the case after the first few years of the war. No, as the example of Canada shows. In fact, but for the obstinacy of Parliament in ongoing taxation exercises, the issue would have gradually receded.

Some sort of commonwealth of looser association of the American Colonies, as has spread throughout former British possessions, was the more likely outcome.

Burke also glimpsed the possibility of using proffered concessions to play on the divisions in the Continental Congress, which included many delegates who opposed a break with Britain.

But from the beginning the great majority in Parliament thought that in a worst case scenario the use of force would bring the colonists to heel. Given the political realities of the day, war appears to have been virtually inevitable.

Even so, independence very likely would have been prevented had Britain had an adequate number of troops in America in April or a capable general to lead the campaign for New York in , someone like Earl Cornwallis. Yes, I believe independence was not only inevitable but pretty much already existed before the revolution was conceived. The British had allowed the colonists far too much autonomy over the past years to go back.

The Stamp Act and the run to revolution can be described as an attempt by Parliament to bring the colonies back from a state of independence and into a state of subjugation instead of the other way around.

The King responded by sending an army of 25, against an armed populace of 1. American Independence was not inevitable, but for some communities the American Revolution was unavoidable. Many communities and individual revolutionaries tried to reform imperial policies that offended them, at least initially.

For many British North Americans social and cultural issues stood at the center of their quarrels with imperial rule. For these Americans, the American Revolution was as much about social reform as it was about politics. For example, in Albany, New York many inhabitants rebelled and protested because they wanted Britons to accept them as fellow Britons.

During the French and Indian War, the British Army had treated the Albanians poorly and violated their English constitutional rights with forcible quartering policies. Many in Albany embraced the Revolution as a movement for social reform. However, they became wary as talk and protests turned towards war and as war turned towards independence.

Once the British turned their focus to their Southern Campaign in , some form of American independence was inevitable. Thomas P. Slaughter, author of Independence: The Tangled Roots of the American Revolution , argues that this sense of inevitability is more than hindsight: rather, it was the consensus opinion of both Americans and Britons for much of the eighteenth century. American colonists mostly desired some level of independence within the empire, along a spectrum perhaps somewhere between what American imperial possessions like Puerto Rico and Commonwealth countries like Canada enjoy today.

Only the most perceptive observers on either side, among them Benjamin Franklin and Edmund Burke, intuited the distinction between these two conceptions of independence. Radical and even moderate colonists saw each of these actions as an attempt to curtail their independence, while unsympathetic Britons characterized colonial resistance as a stalking horse for full national independence.

Those perceptions, Slaughter demonstrates, resulted in an escalation of mutual misunderstandings in the s and s, until, by , each side was entrenched in a position from which retreat was unthinkable.

The challenge for any author is that there is no best way to cover that much time and space in a straightforward story. Slaughter decides on a more episodic approach, nonetheless managing to weave in a great many incidents and issues that serve as pieces to the puzzle. Yet Slaughter elegantly illuminates often overlooked details in the literature that provide human context.

Failure to enforce a decade-long lawsuit over the cutting down of Massachusetts pine trees prized for masts and reserved by law for the Royal Navy and the many specific ways that s and s colonial smugglers flouted the Navigation Acts demonstrated how the American economy marched forward with little respect for imperial oversight. And accounts of futile, last-minute bids to salvage an accommodation, among them back-channel discussions between Franklin and well-connected London banker David Barclay as well as public proposals by William Pitt and Edmund Burke, showed just how unsalvageable the Anglo-American relationship was.

Ultimately, Slaughter implies that no mutually acceptable accommodation could be drawn from a well already so poisoned. Over a century of recriminations had been exacerbated by a decade of increasingly outrageous violations of what each side perceived as the basis of the imperial relationship: for Americans, the ability to rule themselves within the empire, and for Britons, the necessity of Parliamentary prerogative in running its global enterprise.

Americans wanted to solve their own problems. The Americans had many disagreements with the way Great Britain was treating Americans. Great Britain believed the Americans sent to the new land to be used to help the economy and the King.

Another many cause of the American Revolution was the taxes that were imposed on the colonist by Britain. After the French Indian War broke out in , American colonists gradually developed an American identity. Even if the colonists were initially reluctant to challenge British authority, they became united under a common cause; the discontent of the virtual representation, and the frequent turmoil in Boston and the Continental Congress are all motivation for independence and unity.

In the first place, Americans were dissatisfied with the lack of rights compared to Englishmen and the extra tax they were forced to pay. Colonies occupied a large portion of western territory as a result of the victory in the French and….

It took a lot of commitment and dedication on both sides. I still feel however that if certain things, like raising tax on important things that the British knew the colonies would need, never happened the war could have been by-passed it never would have happened. However, I guess the king thought making those laws were best for the colonies. A lot of items, such as playing cards, stamped paper, and government document, were required to raise taxation as a result of this act David, The American Journey, page All nine colonies showed the loyalty to the British emperor, which caused that Parliament could tax the money to printing matters as much as they want, which affected the American native publishing industry.

In many colonies at that time, many kinds of presswork, such as newspapers, were not able to publish by themselves.