702. The Acts That Sparked the American Revolution

Hello, everybody. Welcome back to another episode of The Way the World Works. The day I want to continue talking about America 2.50 and all the cool history behind things that led to the Revolutionary War. So today I want to talk about the acts, the acts that sparked a revolution. And what do I mean with that? I don't mean an act like a thing you chop a tree down with. I don't mean an act like a thing you do to somebody else's behavior. I mean the acts like the laws, these laws that one by one built onto each other

until the colonists just couldn't take it, it became too oppressive and they were built. And just kind of as a spoiler, as a teaser you've probably heard them as the Stamp Act or the Intolerable Acts. So I want to dive into each of them today in order and talk about how they each built on each other. Because one thing about the revolution that it's really important to understand is that it wasn't one thing. It wasn't just one event that made everybody take up arms and risk their lives and their sacred honors to fight for independence. It was the culmination, which means it was the result of many smaller things that finally led to a breaking point.

If you're familiar with the saying straw that broke the camel's back, I remember my mother saying that all the time, when we get in trouble, she'd say that was the straw that broke the camel's back. But that little thing on top of many big things that results in a revolution. So let's talk about it and let's begin with something called salutary neglect, which I've probably talked about before. But that was this period of time prior to the French and Indian War. So it's going to be the 1600s where the king was kind of not really paying attention to the colonists.

And because of that, their economy thrived. They were able to get away with not really abiding by the customs rules. And by customs, I mean, if a merchant ship was importing something, if they were going to another country and buying goods and bringing them back on paper, England had a lot of rules that said, no, you can only trade with certain countries. You have to come through us first so you can pay the tax on whatever you're bringing over here. You have to use a British ship.

They had all these rules, but the king really wasn't paying attention to the colonies, right? So he was leaving them to do whatever it was they were doing because he was off getting into a bunch of foreign entanglements, a bunch of wars. And so the colonists were able to just kind of be, right? They were able to create their own laissez-faire economy, so to speak. But then something different happened, the French and Indian War. And so this is a very expensive, very ongoing war.

Sometimes you'll hear it called the Seven Years War. It's like a part of the Seven Years War. But the French and Indian War was very much fought on the American continent. And there's some for parents, if you've ever seen last of them on the weekends, very violent, not for kids, but it was a classic back in the day and the 90s. And it's a really good, it kind of shows you how the French and Indian War was fought here. But one thing about that is that the king was in a lot of debt after that war.

And he didn't have the money to pay that debt. So all of a sudden, all those years of looking the other way and letting colonists get away with not paying attention to the law, that went away. Suddenly, he's starting to put new laws in place or enforce laws that he never was enforcing before. And they'll tell you, the British excuse was, well, we protected you guys during this war because it did happen on your soil. Therefore, you owe us, you do need to start complying with these laws. But if we look at it, that's not really what he was doing.

What he was doing is he was saying, I'm in debt from this war and I need to figure out a way to pay it. Guess what? We haven't really been taking the money from the colonists for the taxes. We should utilize that. And so that's what's going to start happening. So the crackdown all begins in 1764 with the Sugar Act.

And here's a really interesting thing about the Sugar Act. It wasn't a tax increase. In fact, it was a tax decrease. The king was saying, you know what, I'm going to lower taxes on molasses. That's another sweetener and sugar in these things. But it's the first time I'm going to enforce it.

So yes, it's cheaper, but you're going to have to pay it. Well, the colonists don't see this as a great tax decrease. They see this as, wait a second, the king has never been in our business before. Now, all of a sudden, he's enforcing this. Like, OK, things are getting kind of weird. Now, this tax, it's also important to note, was more on merchants.

It was more like import. Things they were bringing into the colonies. So this is not something that everyday colonists are going to have to deal with. But as we know, because we understand economics, if a price is raised on a merchant who now has to pay additional duties, as they were called, or taxes on these items they're importing, who do they pass that cost down to so they can afford it, the consumer.

So it is going to affect everybody, but not in the sense that they're on the hook for the actual tax. Shortly after that, you had what was called the currency act. This is going to basically have the king or Britain come in and say, you're no longer in control of your money supply of your economy. Because the colonists had started their own currency, their own, you know, paper money.

We can get into paper money another time, but this was their system. They had set up the king comes in and says, you have to follow our rules. So this, this is a big loss of autonomy, a loss of sovereignty to the colonists who had been using their own system forever. And here the king comes in and says, no, you've got to use British currency. You've got to follow our rules.

And then you had things like the quartering act, which we've talked about before, the quartering act. Well, it's kind of thought about as like, oh, the king was forcing the colonists to house, you know, British soldiers that they didn't agree with. That didn't happen quite as often. What it really was is it was putting the colonists on the financial hook.

So they did have to give their food or they did have to help pay for the barracks where they lived. And so it was placing the financial burden of the British army who was brought there to police the colonists and to enforce these new laws. It was putting that financial burden on them. So it's like, it's like having somebody in your house who is supposed to follow

you around all day and make sure you're obeying every single law, but you have to pay for it. It would be ridiculous, right? So that's all going to be creating an environment where the colonists are really, really angry because just like you would be, right? Let's say your parents are your government, right?

And they start taxing your toys or taxing this and this and it's small. It's small, but then it turns into one thing and then another thing and then another thing until you're getting pretty fed up. So then we're going to have the stamp act by now. This is only 1765. So within one year, all of a sudden, the king has gone from nothing to steadily

increasing the laws on the colonists, the stamp act. That one's going to hurt. Now, I remember hearing about this in school and thinking it was like a tax on stamps. It wasn't. It was a tax on pretty much all paper products, glass as well.

So it was a tax on a lot of everyday items. The stamp was the item had to have like a stamp saying it had been through custard, not customs, but it had been through the proper channels that the government had, you know, the duties had been collected. It was official. So that way they would know if you were using contraband, right?

They would know if you were trying to skirt the taxes because you'd be using something that didn't have the stamp on it. So the stamp act is going to be a huge moment for the colonists because this was a symbol, right? Even though the sugar tax was attacked. Like I said, that was like on merchants to have to pay.

Now the stamp act, this is going to be a direct impact on the everyday lives of the colonists because it's on items that every single one of them is using. And so this is going to hurt, right? This is going to send the message that guess what were in all of your lives now, this is what's happening and they're not going to like it.

Obviously that this is not a good trajectory or course that that the crown is following because more and more every day he's inserting himself into their lives. So it's around this time you're going to start hearing this no taxation without representation. This is when you're going to start seeing boycotts of British goods.

So this is when the colonists are going to start getting pretty angry because they're saying, hold on. First of all, you ignored us for many years and we liked it. We thrived. Now you're like two up in our business. But wait, Parliament didn't even give us a say about this tax.

We don't have representation there. How can you tax us without representation? And so it's it's it's lit a fire, right? This is where the the fire of Liberty while it's always been there is really starting to burn. This is also where you're going to see the real activation of the sons of

Liberty, who we know are one of the most, you know, radical and outspoken groups that's, you know, Sam Adams, people like that. So this is a really big time. Liberty has been brewing for a while, but this is it now. Again, I want to mention that each of these acts, like the stamp tax, like the stamp act where you had to get the revenue stamp.

It wasn't that expensive, right? The financial burdens of each individual thing was not backbreaking. It was not going to make them destitute. But each thing was building on the other and it was just this growing control that never happened before. And so they don't like where this is heading.

So then in 1767, we get the town Schindachs. Now, the town Schindachs are going to expand everything that's happening. It's going to basically confirm the fears of the colonists. It's going to extend taxes. It's going to be on tea. It's going to be on glass.

It's going to be on other things, but that's not the worst part about this. It's going to extend or expand customs enforcement. That means the people who are in charge of making sure everyone's paying their duties and their taxes, that's going to get bigger. But the worst part of it is it's going to expand vice admiralty courts. So what is that?

A vice admiralty court is where somebody was taken with they were caught violating a customs law. Okay, these are jury lists courts where the king gets to a point his own judge. And that's the only person who gets to decide. If you're gilled here or not. So this is a huge affront to the rights of the colonists because remember,

the right to a jury trial didn't come from America. The right to a jury trial started with Magna Carta. It started in England. And so this is the colonists being denied their rights as British subjects. It's not even then just being taken advantage of as colonists. So this is really, really scary because now they're saying,

we're going to enforce these laws and guess what? You're also not going to get a jury of your peers. That doesn't exist. You're going to be tried in our courts. This also meant you had to increase customs officials. You had to increase enforcement and you had to start, you know,

putting more British troops in place anyway to make sure people weren't getting away with these laws. Now, I don't want to tell this full story because I'm going to do a whole episode on John Hancock and what we know is the liberty affair. But let me just say the Townshendex had direct repercussions in the colonies because you're going to have John Hancock, a high profile guy get busted

and they didn't even really have evidence to bust him and try to take him to Vice Admiral Seacort. I don't want to spoil what's going to happen. So you're just going to have to listen to the next episode to find out. But I want to bring it up to tell you that this was clearly something the colonists weren't ignoring.

In fact, the Townshendex were such an abomination to people that Ben Franklin, who at the time was living in London, he was representing like colonial interests in front of Parliament. He wrote a whole essay telling the people of England to like, Hey, if you want to understand why the American colonists are so mad right now, you have to realize that their livelihoods, their ability

to make money to live from the fruits of their own labor. As John Locke said, that's being taken away because of all these new acts, these laws that the king is putting into place. And that was directly written about the Townshendex and this era. So tensions are building, tensions are building, 1770 comes around what happened in 1770, the Boston massacre.

So obviously things are brewing and people are getting mad. Now, Massachusetts, you know, Boston especially is known for its big role in the revolution. And part of that is because there was a harbor, you know, it was easy to transport goods there, but there's going to be a lot of things going on there.

I'm not going to go into a lot of detail about the Boston massacre because we've talked about it in separate episodes. But just to show you the cause and effect that that the Townshendex and all these acts that came before are going to result in this unrest that one of the biggest instances we know of is, of course, Boston massacre.

Now, 1773, you're going to have the T Act, which just like the Sugar Act actually didn't make T more expensive. It made it cheaper, but that didn't matter, right? It was a symbol. It was the principal of the matter. And the T Act was telling the call and as, Hey, you have to buy

T from the East India Company, which was a crown subsidized company. And we could get into all this. I think I actually did get into all this in the Tea Party episode. So I don't want to go into it further, but you know, that the colonists had really liked to trade with the Dutch.

The Dutch had great cheap, you know, items for them to trade with, but under Britain's laws, they couldn't do that. And even though they had looked the other way for years, that was that salatary neglect. Now they were saying, Nope. And also we have this East India Company that can't even get

rid of their tea. So you know what we'll do? We'll force the Americans to buy it. That's all they can buy. So that is where you see this Tea Party. Go listen to the episode on that.

I won't, I won't rehash that, but that's the next big event that's going to occur in the colonies. And now we are at 1774. So now we are 10 years after the king started cracking down on the colonists. And I've mentioned this quote many times that John Adams always

said that the real revolution was actually born in the hearts and minds of the of the American colonists in those 10 years, you know, before the declaration was signed. And that's because you can see now it was these 10 years of one law adding on to another law adding on to another law. And so now we're going to have my favorite because it's called the

intolerable acts and I always thought that was kind of fun. The intolerable acts is obviously going to be the colonist nickname for it. That's not what the king named his own act, but the intolerable acts, essentially what that's going to do is it's going to be a punishment to Boston to Massachusetts for their rebel

rousing, right? For the Boston Tea Party, probably a little bit for the massacre too. And it's basically going to cut them off. They're going to restrict their ability to self govern. They're going to close off their harbor, which is where all the trade comes from.

And they're basically going to send a message to the rest of the colonists saying, if you disobey us, this is what's going to happen to you. And so it was a lot of, you know, fear tactics and it had a very profound effect, not just on Massachusetts, but on all of the colonies, because one thing we, we forget and we see these,

you know, join or die flags and it's the, it's the snake and it's the separate. It's like separated into pieces and it has each of the, the colonies, the initials on there. So you're going to see that and it says join or die. And what does that mean?

That meant that these were separate colonies. Okay. They were not really united. They traded with each other. They lived near each other, but they had their own, you know, ways of life.

They had their own customs. There was nothing unifying other than that most of them you spoke English. That was pretty much the only thing, but they didn't see themselves as this one unified body. But Austin and Massachusetts and what's happening there with

the intolerable acts, that's going to send a message that's going to say, hold up. If this can happen in Massachusetts, this can happen to all of us. So this is really, you know, what I like to call the road to revolution because it was all these acts built onto each other

and then finally the intolerable act being the one where everyone was like, okay, they can do this to each of us that led to the formation of the first continental Congress and then eventually the second continental Congress. And then, you know, you also have the shot heard around the world.

So these are the reasons why the colonists felt so compelled to fight for their own independence. And it all started with one little law that actually made taxes on sugar cheaper, but that wasn't the point that one little logic into another and then another and then another and it took 10 years for them to be like, oh, no, we've we've

lost our freedom. We've lost the the liberty that made the colonists what they were and what made the economy of the colonies, what they were. And so it was these little acts that led to the big act of the revolution. So I want to leave it there because the other things that

we that it goes into next, we've talked to in different episodes, so I'm going to save it for there. But I can't wait to tell you guys about the Liberty affair and John Hancock, which I teased in this episode. So we will get to that soon. As always, don't forget to like and subscribe to the podcast.

And until next time, I will talk to you later.