As we celebrate the 250^th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, it is worth pausing to ask a basic question: What caused Americans to rebel in April 1775, and what role did the Declaration play fifteen months later in legitimizing to posterity the transformation of collective protest into Revolution? The Declaration’s 56 signatures—a list of highly educated and accomplished men who risked their lives and considerable material wealth by signing it— suggests that deep principles were at stake. But what principles?

A primary purpose of the Declaration was to explain why its authors were engaging in high-stakes political violence: when people revolt “a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.” The signers provided a list of 27 grievances, comprising 655 of the 1320 words of the Declaration’s text.

Every grade school child in America is taught to believe that their most important grievance was “taxation without representation.” But taxes are mentioned only once in the long list: Grievance number 17 is “imposing taxes on us without our consent.” Not only does this single complaint about taxes occur very late in the list, it refers to an argument that the Colonists had apparently won with the Mother Country a decade before, making it perhaps the most substantively questionable of the 27 grievances.

Some background is helpful. The North American British Colonies were, for the most part, populated by immigrants who had chosen to come to America to improve their economic prospects.[1] Tobacco was the primary crop profitable enough to motivate the importation of a large number of slave laborers (prior to the invention of the cotton gin much later). The non-slave labor force mainly included current or former indentured servants, most of whom had agreed to work for several years in exchange for passage to the New World. After their agreed work term ended, they could look forward to living standards substantially higher than the ones they had left behind in Britain or Europe, as well as the option to own land.  And, importantly, as free citizens they participated in self-governance. Every British North American Colony–starting with Virginia in 1619—enjoyed its own elected legislature, which controlled local taxation.

From the standpoint of the Mother Country, the North American Colonies were a poor source of Imperial wealth (again, with the exception of the tobacco growing areas), in sharp contrast to the sugar- or silver-producing colonies of the Caribbean or South America. Their role in the Empire was more to expand its military reach and security. Indeed, it was the very poverty of its resources that made it necessary to endow North America’s poor immigrants with special land ownership privileges not enjoyed in the Caribbean or South America, to entice them to migrate there; which was not necessary in Colonies populated almost entirely by slaves.[2]

North Americans paid little in taxes. Robert Roswell Palmer, a distinguished 20^th century American historian of the Revolution estimated that English citizens paid taxes twenty-six times those paid by Americans.[3] This became a major issue in Britain as the result of the costly French and Indian War of 1754-1763. British critics of America complained of the high costs of waging a war to obtain and defend an expanding frontier, which brought opportunities to local Americans but little profit to the homeland. Seeking to defray those costs, in 1765 the British Parliament passed the Stamp Tax. It was unprecedented because it was an internal tax on local transactions in the Colonies. The locals saw it as violating the principle that local taxes were controlled by local legislatures. A Stamp Act Congress was organized in October 1765 to protest the tax, and this was the movement that made famous the expression: “no taxation without representation.” Colonial legislatures passed resolutions opposing the Stamp Act, rioting mobs forced British stamp agents to resign even before the Act took effect, sometimes after they had been tarred and feathered. The Stamp Act was repealed by Parliament in 1766.

Surprised by the Colonial reaction, Parliament asked Benjamin Franklin to explain it. Franklin’s 1766 testimony provides a candid and informed assessment of American attitudes toward taxation by Parliament.[4]

Mr. Franklin, did you ever hear the authority of Parliament to make laws for America questioned till lately?

Franklin: The authority of Parliament was allowed to be valid in all laws, except such as should lay internal taxes. It was never disputed in laying duties to regulate commerce.

What is your opinion of a future tax, imposed on the same principle with that of the Stamp Act? How would Americans receive it?

Franklin: Just as they do this [i.e., the Stamp Act]. They would not pay it.

Have you not heard of the resolutions of this House [of Commons], and of the House of Lords, asserting the right of Parliament relating to America, including a power to tax the people there?

Franklin: Yes, I have heard of such resolutions.

What will be the opinion of the Americans on those resolutions?

Franklin: They will think them unconstitutional and unjust.

Was it an opinion in America before 1763 that the Parliament had no right to lay taxes and duties there?

Franklin: I never heard any objection to the right of laying duties to regulate commerce; but a right to lay internal taxes was never supposed to be in Parliament, as we are not represented there.

After the Stamp Act was repealed, the British took Franklin’s testimony to heart and substituted tariffs for the Stamp Act as a means of raising revenue (the so-called Townshend Acts of 1767). Some Colonists objected to this use of tariffs as a revenue tool, arguing that Parliament had legitimate authority over tariff policy only when used to regulate Imperial commerce rather than to raise revenue, and so tariffs imposed to raise revenue from the Colonies became another example of taxation without representation. They objected even more to the stationing of British troops whose purpose was to ensure collection of the tariffs. The Boston Massacre of 1770 (in which five people died and six more were injured) occurred outside its Custom House after an argument between one of those British soldiers and a local resident. Grievance number 10 in the Declaration references the erecting of“a multitude of New Offices…and swarms of Officers to harrass our people, and eat out their substance” and this is generally regarded as a reference to the presence of soldiers to enforce the Townshend tariffs, and the later actions imposed on the Colonies to quarter them. In 1774, as part of what the Colonists called the Intolerable Acts, Governors (not local legislatures) were given the authority to fund the quartering of troops and to place them in any vacant buildings, not just in barracks.  

Although many Colonists objected to the 1767 Townshend Acts as an unfair tax, that opposition did not give rise to a Revolution. As Franklin recognized in his 1766 testimony, Parliament had for centuries exercised legitimate authority to tax international trade.

The top fifteen grievances listed in the Declaration all referenced Imperial actions that violated longstanding rights enjoyed in the Colonies, including the failure to enforce local tax collections based on local legislative actions.

He has refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.

He has forbidden his Governors to pass Laws of immediate and pressing importance, unless suspended in their operation till his Assent should be obtained; and when so suspended, he has utterly neglected to attend to them.

He has refused to pass other Laws for the accommodation of large districts of people, unless those people would relinquish the right of Representation in the Legislature, a right inestimable to them and formidable to tyrants only.

He has called together legislative bodies at places unusual, uncomfortable, and distant from the depository of their public Records, for the sole purpose of fatiguing them into compliance with his measures.

He has dissolved Representative Houses repeatedly, for opposing with manly firmness his invasions on the rights of the people.

He has refused for a long time, after such dissolutions, to cause others to be elected; whereby the Legislative powers, incapable of Annihilation, have returned to the People at large for their exercise; the State remaining in the mean time exposed to all the dangers of invasion from without, and convulsions within.

He has endeavoured to prevent the population of these States; for that purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations hither, and raising the conditions of new Appropriations of Lands.

He has obstructed the Administration of Justice, by refusing his Assent to Laws for establishing Judiciary powers.

He has made Judges dependent on his Will alone, for the tenure of their offices, and the amount and payment of their salaries.

He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harrass our people, and eat out their substance.

He has kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies without the Consent of our legislatures.

He has affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil power.

He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution, and unacknowledged by our laws; giving his Assent to their Acts of pretended Legislation.

For Quartering large bodies of armed troops among us.

For protecting them, by a mock Trial, from punishment for any Murders which they should commit on the Inhabitants of these States.

The core objection underlying all of these, and other, listed complaints in the Declaration was that the British government’s actions or inactions failed to respect Americans’ rights as British subjects, and this was a problem that grew over time culminating in the 1774 Intolerable Acts, which responded to the Boston Tea Party of 1773.

The Boston Tea Party was perpetrated by Boston merchants in response to the Tea Act of 1773. The Tea Act responded to the declining economic performance of the British East India Company by changing the Navigation Acts to permit the Company to ship tea directly to the Colonies. Previously, tea shipments were required to be sent to Britain, and then were shipped from there to the Colonies. American merchants—especially New Englanders—played a major role in the trans-shipment of tea from Britain to America, and many faced ruin as the result of the Tea Act. The Tea Act was intended to address a problem of Imperial Commerce, and was within the purview of Parliament in its traditional role as commercial regulator. It also resulted in a steep fall in the price of tea in the Colonies, which was a major consumption good that virtually everyone there purchased. But Americans resented that Parliament had given so little weight to their own merchants’ economic interests, and in solidarity with merchants, locals outside of Boston also organized boycotts of tea and prevented its unloading, although unlike the Bostonians, they did not destroy any tea shipments.

The Intolerable Acts not only closed Boston Harbor, they shifted some powers away from legislatures, and away from local courts—preventing them from trying Royal Officials that suppressed riots in local courts—and limited the right of assembly in trouble-making Massachusetts. In 1774, Britain also moved to limit Westward expansion (a major source of its expanding costs of military protection, with no offsetting gains to the Mother Country) by transferring control of lands above the Ohio River to Royal officials controlling Quebec (which was under British control after the defeat of the French in Canada in 1759-1760). Many American Founders—including George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Robert Morris, Patrick Henry, George Mason, and Richard Henry Lee—were active Western land speculators adversely affected by the Quebec Act, which shifted control rights over land in a way that reduced its prospects for development, and therefore, its value. Jefferson, Lee, Franklin, Morris and the two Adams all signed the Declaration.

Increasingly frustrated by the high cost of defending the Colonies, Britain had principled objections to the behavior of the Colonies that motivated these unprecedented actions: they resisted bearing even a modest share of the costs of defending them, and the British saw this as justification enough for unusual treatment. The destruction of property in the Boston Tea Party was seen in Britain as an unacceptable criminal action (it was also regarded as such by many Colonists, including George Washington and Benjamin Franklin, although prominent Bostonians, such as John Adams and Samuel Adams, supported it).[5]

In summary, it was not taxes per se, but conflicting notions of fairness that put Britain and America on a collision course that led to Revolution. And some British actions had disproportionately negative economic effects on the most powerful Americans—especially the Tea Act and the Quebec Act—which likely contributed to their willingness to risk so much by signing the Declaration or waging war on the Mother Country. In 1775, most Americans initially hoped that organized resistance would lead Britain to reconsider and repeal its unprecedented actions, as it had done in 1766. But by 1775, Britain was determined to rein in lawlessness in the Colonies, make its residents share more of the burden of their own defense, and force them to act more in synchrony with Imperial interests. It was core beliefs about fairness that drove people on both sides of the Atlantic to spend so much and risk so much from war.

For the generation of Americans that fought the Revolution, the War was not a source of economic gain. Fighting the Revolution consumed so much of America’s resources that it left most Americans much poorer than they were in 1775.[6] They risked so much because they loved their country, and were willing to do what was necessary to defend a way of life that was under increasing threat. They and their ancestors had come to America to enjoy the freedoms that its political and economic institutions had made possible, and they would not relinquish them lightly. The willingness of common people to sacrifice so much for that way of life deserves to be celebrated as we mark the 250^th anniversary of the signing of our Declaration on July 4.

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