1760-1800

Introduction. Part two of your course covers the period from 1760 to 1800, the era of the American Revolution. I have said elsewhere that the first half of American history has a plot: a beginning, a middle, and an end. The beginning of early American history takes us through 1760 (though history rarely divides itself into clear-cut eras), when the colonies were developed to the extent that they had the capacity to become a separate nation. In fact, the Americans were already a different people by 1760, if for no other reason than through their physical separation from the mother country.

It has been said that contact with a frontier environment changes people and the way they think, and there is much evidence to support that claim for American history well into the 19th century. Practices that were accepted as normal in the home country did not necessarily work in America, and skills that were undervalued in Europe offered a path to selfsufficiency for many American colonists. Life in the fields and forests of America was very different from life in the streets and alleys in London as well as in the British countryside.

I have also suggested that there was a difference between the people who came to America, at least those who came voluntarily, and the people who did not. It took a certain character to leave one's hearth and home and family and travel across the ocean on a dangerous voyage into an uncertain future. The conditions that confronted the colonists when they arrived, especially in the early decades, must have caused them to rethink the way they intended to live their lives.

As we shall see, it is ironic that the Americans who rebelled were in many ways the freest people in the civilized world in 1760. Until then the hand of government had touched them but lightly; even where British laws sought to control their lives, as with the navigation acts, Americans found it easy to work their way around the legal restrictions imposed by the Empire. In short, the colonists had gotten used to doing things their own way. When the British decided to change that and attempted to bring the Americans back into the fold, as they saw it from their perspective, the Americans were not so sure they wanted to go. In that sense, the American Revolution was not only about change, but about preserving a way of life to which the hardy colonists had grown accustomed.