PSCI 1014 Chapter Notes - Chapter 2: First Continental Congress, Albany Congress, Intolerable Acts
23 Feb 2017
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The Logic of American Politics Chapter 2 – The Constitution
• Epidemic of free riding undermining the revolution’s cause
• Britain had ceded to Americans responsibility for managing their domestic
affairs, including taxation = home rule
• Albany Congress proposed the first serious proposal for a national government
o Ben Franklin proposed a Plan of the Union that would have created a
national gov, called for an American army to provide for the colonies’
defense, a popularly elected national legislature with the power to levy
taxes, and an executive appointed by the British King
• At the end of the French Indian War, Britain was broke → imposed taxes on
colonies, broke home rule
o Stamp Act of 1765: law imposed tax on all printed materials, including
legal documents, licenses, insurance papers & land titles, consumer
goods, including newspaper & playing cards
• American response = no taxation without representation
o Asserting home rule
o Americans countered by boycotting British products and forming
protest organizations like the Sons of Liberty, the Daughters of Liberty
& the Committees of Correspondence
o Boston tea party = dumped 342 chests of tea owned by the East India
Company into the Boston Harbor to protest the tea tax
o Britain responded with the Restraining Acts & Coercive Acts, which
closed the ports of Boston to all commerce, dissolved the Massachusetts
Assembly, decreed that British troops in Boston must be quartered in
American homes, & ordered that Americans charged with protest crimes
& British soldiers charged w/ crimes against colonists be sent to Britain
for trial
• First continental congress in Philly in 1774
o Each colony sent its leading professionals, merchants & planters
o Passed resolutions condemning British taxes & administrative decrees
• Second continental Congress in 1775
o War had already broken out
o State conventions mobilized local volunteer militias & disarmed
suspected British loyalists
• Congress instructed the conventions to reconstitute themselves as state
governments based on republican principles, using their former colonial
governments as model
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