Conceived in Crisis by Christopher R. Pearl

Author:Christopher R. Pearl
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: IDENTIFIER: Pearl
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
Published: 2020-05-12T16:00:00+00:00

The Consolidation of Power and the Beginning of Revolution

The developing colonial resistance effort in the 1770s and the imperial reaction radically transformed the popular mobilizations and political activity of Pennsylvanians. It gave focus, collective purpose, and legitimacy to new oppositional forces that substantially differed from those of the past. Pennsylvanians with considerably different ideas for the future came to power in extralegal spaces during these years and offered a plan of action to redress both imperial and provincial concerns. In the months before American independence, the committees and conventions birthed in the resistance movement became the popularly accepted government, and they set Pennsylvania on a path to governmental reform that had been demanded for decades, except now this reform would be enacted and created by a new government with a new constitution existing on an entirely different calculus, the sovereign authority of the people. Revolutionary forces waxed strong in the 1770s, and the colonial government, try as it did, could not contain or resist them.

With the partial repeal of the Townshend duties in 1770, opposition ebbed but did not completely disappear. A duty on tea remained and provided enough animosity to keep resistance afloat. In Pennsylvania, internal problems kept colonists extremely active and ever questioning the government. For example, it did not take much in 1773 with the Tea Act, which gave the East India Company a monopoly over the North American tea trade, for popular forces to materialize and violently deter the landing of tea and the tea agents from carrying out their office. The popular threat was so menacing that one onlooker remarked, “Any further attempt to enforce this act must end in blood.”94

Those in power frowned upon such popular gatherings. Earlier that same year, the Virginia House of Burgesses suggested that the legislatures throughout the continent create committees of correspondence, and the Pennsylvania assembly balked. Creating committees remained a nonstarter for someone like Speaker of the House Joseph Galloway. After all, the control of those committees shifted over the course of the 1760s into the hands of artisans, shopkeepers, and farmers who openly challenged the representativeness of the legislature. By February 1774, every colony except Pennsylvania and North Carolina had established committees, which left the resistance effort in the hands of what politicians considered illegitimate groups and assemblages of people.95 Resisting the landing of tea, for instance, was carried out by artisans and others working within town meetings and through published calls for action. The old committees and the legislators were nowhere to be found.96

As a result, broadsides, pamphlets, and newspaper articles shot from the presses blasting the legislature. One article noted that the assembly’s failure to establish committees in the face of parliamentary attacks confirmed that Galloway and “his Junto” conspired “against the Liberties of their Country.” They should “lose the Power they have so arrogantly assumed.” Moreover, Pennsylvanians began to turn the “weakness of government” argument back on the political leaders. The strong government that those politicians promised in the 1760s, writers claimed, could only occur if new people took the helm of government.

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