“Good News From a Far Country”: A Note on Divine Providence and the Stamp Act Crisis

1976 ◽  
Vol 45 (3) ◽  
pp. 308-315 ◽  
Author(s):  
John F. Berens
Keyword(s):  
North America ◽  
American Revolution ◽  
Good News ◽  
Divine Providence ◽  
British North America ◽  
American Colonies ◽  
American Poet ◽  
American Thought ◽  
Stamp Act

November! gloomy Month! approaches fast,When Liberty was doom'd to brethe [sic] her last,All, all her Sons agree to fast that Day,To mourn, lament and sigh, and hope,—and prayThat the Almighty god of all below,Some Pity would to suffering Mortals show1.With these lines an anonymous American poet addressed the first day of November 1765, the date the Stamp Act was to take effect throughout British North America. The hopes of patriots and lovers of liberty, he argued, rested upon the interposition of God on behalf of the American colonies. If the Lord would look with mercy on his afflicted people and come to their aid, their freedoms could yet be preserved. In assigning the continuation of American liberty to the intervention and protection of divine providence, this patriotic poet employed one of the deepest and most popular strands of American thought expressed during the era of the American Revolution.

Sophistry, Security, and Socio-Political Structures in the American Revolution; or, Why Jamaica did not Rebel

1986 ◽  
Vol 29 (2) ◽  
pp. 319-344 ◽  
Author(s):  
T. R. Clayton
Keyword(s):  
North America ◽  
British Empire ◽  
American Revolution ◽  
North American ◽  
Western Hemisphere ◽  
American Colonies ◽  
Constitutional Principle ◽  
Mother Country ◽  
Political Structures

Britain's most important American colonies did not rebel in 1776. Thirteen provinces did declare their independence; but no fewer than nineteen colonies in the western hemisphere remained loyal to the mother country. Massachusetts and Virginia may have led the American revolution, but they had never been the leading colonies of the British empire. From the imperial standpoint, the significance of any of the thirteen provinces which rebelled was pale in comparison with that of Jamaica or Barbados. In the century before 1763 the recalcitrance of these two colonies had been more notorious than that of any mainland province and had actually inspired many of the imperial policies cited as long-term grievances by North American patriots in 1774. Real Whig ideology, which some historians have seen as the key to understanding the American revolution, was equally understood by Caribbean elites who, like the continental, had often proved extremely sensitive on questions of constitutional principle. Attacks of ‘frenzied rhetoric’ broke out in Jamaica in 1766 and Barbados in 1776. But these had nothing whatsoever to do with the Stamp Act or events in North America.

Colonial Quakerism

2020 ◽  
pp. 267-290
Author(s):  
Andrew R. Murphy ◽  
Adrian Chastain Weimer
Keyword(s):  
North America ◽  
Rhode Island ◽  
Legal Systems ◽  
Strong Ties ◽  
British North America ◽  
American Colonies ◽  
The Law ◽  
Anglo American

Highly mobile and often confrontational, Quakers came into frequent conflict with magistrates in the Anglo-American colonies. As they endured fines, whippings, and banishment, Quakers put pressure on emerging colonial legal systems, which they denounced as anti-Christian and unjust. In the ‘Quaker colonies’, however, the movement looked quite different. Quakers in West Jersey and Pennsylvania adapted to the roles of organizing institutions and enforcing the law. Across British North America, Quakers maintained strong ties to London. They increasingly developed networks across colonies as well, especially among meetings in Barbados, Maryland, Pennsylvania, and Rhode Island.

REFASHIONING PURITAN NEW ENGLAND: THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND IN BRITISH NORTH AMERICA,c. 1680–c. 1770

2010 ◽  
Vol 20 ◽  
pp. 85-112 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeremy Gregory
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
North America ◽  
New England ◽  
American Revolution ◽  
Church Of England ◽  
Key Factors ◽  
Success Story ◽  
British North America ◽  
Colonial New England ◽  
The Church

ABSTRACTThe position of the Church of England in colonial New England has usually been seen through the lens of the ‘bishop controversy’ of the 1760s and early 1770s, where Congregational fears of the introduction of a Laudian style bishop to British North America have been viewed as one of the key factors leading to the American Revolution. By contrast, this paper explores some of the successes enjoyed by the Church of England in New England, particularly in the period from the 1730s to the early 1760s, and examines some of the reasons for the Church's growth in these years. It argues that in some respects the Church in New England was in fact becoming rather more popular, more indigenous and more integrated into New England life than both eighteenth-century Congregationalists or modern historians have wanted to believe, and that the Church was making headway both in the Puritan heartlands, and in the newer centres of population growth. Up until the early 1760s, the progress of the Church of England in New England was beginning to look like a success story rather than one with in-built failure.

Piracy in Colonial North America

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark G. Hanna
Keyword(s):  
North America ◽  
New England ◽  
North American ◽  
18Th Century ◽  
Historical Narrative ◽  
British North America ◽  
American Colonies ◽  
The North ◽  
The Pacific ◽  
British North American

Historians of colonial British North America have largely relegated piracy to the marginalia of the broad historical narrative from settlement to revolution. However, piracy and unregulated privateering played a pivotal role in the development of every English community along the eastern seaboard from the Carolinas to New England. Although many pirates originated in the British North American colonies and represented a diverse social spectrum, they were not supported and protected in these port communities by some underclass or proto-proletariat but by the highest echelons of colonial society, especially by colonial governors, merchants, and even ministers. Sea marauding in its multiple forms helped shape the economic, legal, political, religious, and cultural worlds of colonial America. The illicit market that brought longed-for bullion, slaves, and luxury goods integrated British North American communities with the Caribbean, West Africa, and the Pacific and Indian Oceans throughout the 17th century. Attempts to curb the support of sea marauding at the turn of the 18th century exposed sometimes violent divisions between local merchant interests and royal officials currying favor back in England, leading to debates over the protection of English liberties across the Atlantic. When the North American colonies finally closed their ports to English pirates during the years following the Treaty of Utrecht (1713), it sparked a brief yet dramatic turn of events where English marauders preyed upon the shipping belonging to their former “nests.” During the 18th century, colonial communities began to actively support a more regulated form of privateering against agreed upon enemies that would become a hallmark of patriot maritime warfare during the American Revolution.

Empire

Quarters ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 89-126
Author(s):  
John Gilbert McCurdy
Keyword(s):  
North America ◽  
American Colonies ◽  
The Law ◽  
Colonial Resistance ◽  
Do So ◽  
The Ideal ◽  
Stamp Act

This chapter examines how colonial resistance to quartering British soldiers led the British Parliament to authorize the Quartering Act in 1765. Built on the ideal of the unitary empire, the Quartering Act sought to transfer British rights and responsibilities to North America by requiring that the colonists supply and barrack troops, but exempted private houses from billeting soldiers. Enforcement of the Quartering Act was delayed due to the Stamp Act riots, and implementation failed in Canada. From 1766 to 1768, General Gage enforced the law throughout the American colonies, deriving monies for quartering expenses from eight colonies, although he was only able to do so by recognizing the different legislative approaches of the different American colonies and abandoning the ideal of the unitary empire.

Lord Howick and Colonial Church Establishment

1974 ◽  
Vol 25 (4) ◽  
pp. 381-405 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Burroughs
Keyword(s):  
North America ◽  
American Revolution ◽  
Church Of England ◽  
Religious Dissent ◽  
Special Position ◽  
British North America ◽  
Formed Part ◽  
The Church ◽  
Civil Government ◽  
Colonial Church

Because the Church of England traditionally formed part of the British constitution, Englishmen in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries often discussed the importance of extending the Established Church to settlements overseas. Yet nothing constructive was done in North America before the Revolution to complete the constitution of the colonial Church or reinforce its special position as the partner of the civil government. There were no bishops in America, and the remote bishop of London was left to supervise as best he could an institution that enjoyed few privileges and displayed an inveterate tendency towards independence. After the American Revolution, however, imperial administrators and colonial churchmen appreciated the need to buttress and reinvigorate the Church of England in British North America. In official circles at least, the loss of the Thirteen Colonies was attributed to the growth of a democratic spirit which a debilitated Church had been powerless to check. British administrators consequently agreed that the dangerous development of republicanism and religious dissent might be thwarted in the remaining colonies by strengthening the position of the Church as the ally of government in the task of preserving colonial loyalty.

2 Canada: From Privy Council to Supreme Court

2007 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hogg Peter W
Keyword(s):  
North America ◽  
Supreme Court ◽  
Separation Of Powers ◽  
Supreme Court Of Canada ◽  
Aboriginal Rights ◽  
Legislative History ◽  
British North America ◽  
American Colonies ◽  
The United Kingdom ◽  
British North American

Canada has no single document that is customarily described as ‘the constitution’. The closest approximation of such a document is the Constitution Act 1867, which was originally named the British North America Act 1867. This is a statute of the United Kingdom Parliament that created the new Dominion of Canada by uniting three of the colonies of British North America and by providing the for the admission of all the other British North American colonies and territories. This chapter presents an overview of Canada's constitution and discusses its interpretation, the Supreme Court of Canada, separation of powers, problems of constitutional interpretation, interpretation of the residuary clause, interpretation of the Charter of Rights, interpretation of Aboriginal rights, interpretation of judicial independence, sources of interpretation, constitution as statute, legislative history, modes of interpretation, originalism, unwritten constitutional principles, influences on interpretation, dialogue between the Court and legislatures, presumption of constitutionality, and formalism and creativity.

Quarters

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
John McCurdy
Keyword(s):  
North America ◽  
Social History ◽  
Colonial America ◽  
British Army ◽  
British North America ◽  
American Colonies ◽  
Military Geography ◽  
History Of ◽  
Indian War ◽  
Private Homes

This book examines the quartering of British soldiers in North America in the eighteenth century, using ideas of place to understand the political and social history of quartering. In colonial America, quartering in houses was common, but this practice was challenged with the arrival of the British army during the French and Indian War. Eager to keep British regulars out of private homes, the colonists built barracks and planted military geography in the heart of their cities. The Quartering Act emerged after the war as an attempt to extend British rights and responsibilities to the colonies, but the size and diversity of British North America inhibited this effort and fractured the empire. As quartering in Canada and the backcountry diverged from that in the American colonies, friction emerged between the colonists and the British army. Following the Boston Massacre, quartering became a divisive issue that encouraged the Americans to contemplate forming their own nation.

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