S: The Olive Branch Petition

A COLONIAL Action with a BRITISH Response

(and then another COLONIAL response)

On July 5, 1775, the Continental Congress adopted the Olive Branch Petition, written by John Dickinson, which appealed directly to King George III and expressed hope for reconciliation between the colonies and Great Britain. Dickinson, who hoped desperately to avoid a final break with Britain, phrased colonial opposition to British policy as follows: "Your Majesty's Ministers, persevering in their measures, and proceeding to open hostilities for enforcing them, have compelled us to arm in our own defence, and have engaged us in a controversy so peculiarly abhorrent to the affections of your still faithful Colonists, that when we consider whom we must oppose in this contest, and if it continues, what may be the consequences, our own particular misfortunes are accounted by us only as parts of our distress." The letter clearly states many times that the colonists were loyal to the King and guaranteed that they were not seeking independence. They simply wanted the king to address their grievances.

By phrasing their discontent this way, Congress attempted to notify the king that American colonists were unhappy with Parliament’s policy, not his own. They concluded their plea with a final statement of fidelity to the crown: "That your Majesty may enjoy long and prosperous reign, and that your descendants may govern your Dominions with honour to themselves and happiness to their subjects, is our sincere prayer."

They sent it to England by the hand of Richard Penn, son of William Penn, founder of Pennsylvania. However, the king refused to receive it. Two days later, he wrote publicly that the colonies were going into full scale rebellion and called for Parliament to come to his aid in settling the American rebellion. What did not help is that John Adams, opposed to the Olive Branch Petition, had written a letter to General James Warren speaking of readiness for independence and mentioning the stockpiling of arms. It was intercepted by the British and published. This only solidified the king's worries that the colonies were in rebellion.

On November 7th, the Olive Branch Petition was presented to the House of Commons, where they tried to consider it as a petition for reconciliation. The motion was defeated. On December 4th, the Continental Congress forged a second document attempting to persuade the king to hear their grievances. They published the letter and sent it to agents in Great Britain. This, too, was rejected by King George without being read.

The King's response to the Olive Branch Petition struck a hard blow against the colonists, especially those who wanted to stay in peace with Britain. Now that the reality was known, most colonists felt reconciliation would be impossible.

By July 1776, the Declaration of Independence proclaimed something very different from the Olive Branch Petition: "The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States." Congress' language is critical to understanding the seismic shift that had occurred in American thought in just 12 months. Indeed, Congress insisted that Thomas Jefferson remove any language from the declaration that implicated the people of Great Britain or their elected representatives in Parliament. The fundamental grounds upon which Americans were taking up arms had shifted. The militia that had fired upon Redcoats at Lexington and Concord had been angry with Parliament, not the king, who they still trusted to desire only good for all of his subjects around the globe.

This belief changed after King George refused to so much as receive the Olive Branch Petition. Patriots had hoped that Parliament had curtailed colonial rights without the king’s full knowledge, and that the petition would cause him to come to his subjects' defense. When George III refused to read the petition, Patriots realized that Parliament was acting with royal knowledge and support. Americans' patriotic rage was intensified by the January 1776 publication by English-born radical Thomas Paine of Common Sense, an influential pamphlet that attacked the monarchy, which Paine claimed had allowed crowned ruffians to impoverish the nation and set it together by the ears.