Bunker Hill

Englanders now lacked a buffer to protect them from the French and
their
Indian allies to the north. Over the course of the next century, an unrelenting series of brutal wars forced Great Britain to take an active part in the defense of the colony. Within a decade of King Philip’s War, the colony’s original charter had been revoked, and Massachusetts became a royal province ruled by a governor holding office at the pleasure of the king. In the confusion surrounding Britain’s Glorious Revolution of 1688, Bostonians took the opportunity a year later to jail Governor Edmund Andros and his hated customs surveyor Edward Randolph, the same official who thirteen years earlier had complained about Governor Leverett’s audacity. With the eventual arrival of a new charter and a new governor in 1692, an uneasy sense of order was reestablished in Massachusetts, even if the colonists never became reconciled to a governor whose first loyalty lay with Great Britain instead of them.
    And always, it seemed, there was another war—a bloody business at which the New Englanders excelled. In 1690, the colony participated in the first of the assaults that would eventually turn the peninsular portion of French Acadia into British Nova Scotia. In 1745, Massachusetts mounted the New World equivalent of a crusade into Canada when an army of 4,200 provincial soldiers sailed from Boston in a fleet of ninety ships against the French fortress at Louisbourg. Despite receiving just token assistance from the British military, the colonial soldiers triumphed, only to see the fortress returned in subsequent treaty negotiations between Great Britain and France. After the eventual conquest of Canada in 1763, during which the provincials helped retake the fortress they had first won more than a decade before, the New Englanders turned their attention from the enemy to the north to anyone who might meddle in their affairs.
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    For most of the early eighteenth century the American colonies had enjoyed the benefits of a policy later known as “salutary neglect.” Left to do pretty much as they pleased, the colonies had been free to pursue economic growth unhindered by the onerous taxes paid by most British subjects. But by the end of the French and Indian War in 1763—a war fought, in large part, on the colonies’ behalf that had saddled Great Britain with a debt of about $22.4 billion in today’s U.S. currency—the ministry determined that it was time the colonies began to help pay for their imperial support.
    Even the colonists admitted that they must contribute in some way to maintaining the British Empire. The question was how to go about raising the money. Well before the slogan “No taxation without representation” became a battle cry in America, the New Englanders’ Puritan ancestors had used the same logic to object to the early Stuarts’ attempts to increase taxes. But the colonies had more than just a principle behind their reluctance to be dictated to by the British ministry. They had three thousand miles of ocean between them and the mother country, along with seemingly limitless prospects for growth on a continent that stretched another three thousand miles to the Pacific Ocean. Rather than propose a means of raising revenue that they deemed fair, the colonials were more than happy to direct their considerable energies toward opposing whatever plan the British ministry put forward. When the old Puritan sense of certainty was combined with New England’s proven ability to put up a fight, it was not surprising that Massachusetts confronted the taxation question with a pugnacity reminiscent of the backwoods battles of the previous century.
    In 1765 Parliament passed the Stamp Act, a bill that required colonists to purchase special paper embossed with a revenue stamp for legal documents, newspapers, journals, and other printed materials. Whereas the British government saw the act simply as a way for the colonists to begin paying for their keep, the colonists viewed the Stamp Act as a violation of their basic liberties. What surprised almost everyone was the violence the act inspired, particularly in Boston, where a mob ransacked the house of then lieutenant governor Thomas Hutchinson. Parliament quickly repealed the hated act in 1766, but not without insisting on its future right to tax the colonies. A year later, with the passage of the Townshend Acts, Parliament tried taxing only paper, paint, lead, glass, and tea imported