US History Survey

7th lecture

colonial conflicts & changes,

1760s & 1770s

British colonies in N America

• can you identify the colonies?

poverty & wealth:colonial merchants

poverty & wealth:colonial planters

“free” workers

women’s work

boat builders

enslaved workers

wealth & poverty

• Who was poor? Why?– widows with young children (some husbands

killed in war)

– urban workers (fluctuations in economy)

– enslaved people

– almost all free people of color

– many Indians living among whites

Class conflicts

• Landowners and tenants

• Employers & workers in cities

• Slave owners & enslaved

French & Indian War, 1754 – 1763(aka Seven Years War)

results of French & Indian War

• British desire for land expansion

• Land speculators• British defeated French

@ Quebec & Montreal

• Indians wanted Appalachians as border.

• Treaty of Paris – French lost all lands on mainland.

• Britain claimed all land east of Mississippi River.

• Indians could no longer play off Europeans against each other.

• Colonists connected with each other.

Parliament

mercantilism

• Benefit for the mother country. • Sugar Act, 1764 – tax on imported sugar &

enforcement of customs’ service regulations.• Stamp Act, 1765 – taxed all paper goods.• Declaratory Act, 1766 – Parliamentary supremacy

over colonies. Ability to enact legislation. • Townshend Revenue Acts, 1767 – taxed

commodities, lead, glass, paint, paper, tea.• Tea Act, 1773 – monopoly to Brit. E. India Co.• quartering of British troops.

Stamp Act, 1765

Non-importation associationsNon-consumption

• Massachusetts boycott of British products.

• Daughters of Liberty – weaving homespun fabric for clothing.

• 1768 British troops occupied

Boston.

Boston Massacre, 1770

• Crispus Attucks, 1st casualty – former slave.

Boston Tea Party, 1773

1st Continental Congress, 1774, Philadelphia

1st Continental Congress

• representatives elected by town meetings & colonial assemblies. (British governors had dissolved colonial legislatures.)

• wanted to avoid war.• policy of economic coercion.• created Committees of Observation & Safety,

which took over local government.• began to refer to selves as states. • rights of Englishmen being violated.

battles at Lexington & Concord, Massachusetts, 1775

• British troops to capture American ammunition.