Road to Revolution: Colonial Rights & British Rule

An analysis of the events that led to the Declaration of Independence helps uncover the tyrannical actions against American revolutionaries who claimed their rights and freedoms. The Declaration of Independence serves as a crucial historical reference, stating that the tyrannical actions of the English monarch had extended for years, preceding 1776, back to 1765. In that year, delegates from 9 of the 13 colonies met in New York for the famous Stamp Act Congress, where they challenged a series of tax provisions imposed by the motherland on internal consumption within the colonies.

The Stamp Act Congress: Seeds of Resistance

It was soon realized that the long period of colonial rule, whose origins were purely economic and commercial, had evolved into political and constitutional realities. The protest in the colonies quickly shifted from a merely financial plane to a constitutional one, intertwining the tax issue with the fundamental rights and liberties of the colonists.

Beyond Taxes: A Constitutional Struggle

In this way, the decisions of many colonial assemblies and the Congress in New York took on a constitutional tone, raising the question of the legitimacy of taxes imposed by the motherland without the consent of the colonists and their representative assemblies.

Colonial Loyalty and Appeals to the Crown

Thus, the colonists appealed to the English monarch, invoking the established principles of rights and freedoms. They respectfully asked him to repeal the taxes, reminding him that they too were his subjects, living under the precepts of the ancient British Constitution, which protected their rights and guaranteed their property.

None of the colonists initially wanted independence; all proclaimed themselves good and loyal subjects of Her Britannic Majesty. In the perspective of 1765, secession from the motherland was not contemplated. Instead, they envisioned a confederate political structure, with the monarch at its head to preserve unity.

The colonists believed that any taxation of residents in the colonies should obtain the consent of the representative assembly of the people of that colony, not the English Parliament, as was the case in 1765. It is undoubtedly true that colonists fought in those years to restore legitimate government and to continue living under the provisions and guarantees of the ancient British Constitution.

British Parliament's Unyielding Authority

This solution was not possible. From their point of view, the mother country could not accept that the assemblies of the colonists, often of uncertain and precarious institutional standing, were equated with the ancient and noble English Parliament. Furthermore, in the British constitutional model, the presence of a highly differentiated upper chamber, distinct from a house of direct popular extraction, was absolutely necessary. It was very difficult to replicate on the social, political, and institutional landscape of the Atlantic an aristocratic element, even remotely comparable to the English House of Lords.