A decree issued by the British Crown on October 7, that was aimed at eliminating the ever-escalating and costly armed conflicts between the colonists and U.S. First Americans by, in theory if not in practice, forbidding land-grabs by colonial land speculators of the former’s lands which the Act now specifically designated as lying west of the Appalachian Mountains, the crest of which constituted the border. It was this decree together with such other legislation as the Quartering Act of 1765; the Stamp Act of 1765; and the Townshend Acts of 1767 that helped to precipitate the U.S. War of Independence.[1] In other words, the fundamental source of the grievances of the domestic colonial elites against the British lay in such matters as settlement expansion, taxation, and the like that threatened to undermine their inexorable accumulation-driven greed. Their anti-British ire sprang essentially from the perception that the various measures that the British Parliament had enacted in the aftermath of the costly Seven Years’ War ([1756–63]—also variously known as The French War, The French and Indian War, and The Great War for Empire and which had benefited the colonists greatly by securing the defeat of French colonial designs in North America—for the purpose, quite reasonably and legitimately, of getting the hitherto lightly taxed U.S. colonists to assist with paying off the huge debts incurred by the British citizenry as a direct consequence of the war (as well as assist with tightening the grip of British suzerainty in the face of an increasingly sullen U.S. colonial elite), were the thin end of a wedge that would lead to unacceptable economic burdens down the road.[2]
[1]. Although some of these measures were repealed the following year because of impudent intransigence on the part of the colonial elites, the damage to the legitimacy of continuing British colonial presence was now irreversible.
[2]. The “American Revolution,” as the War of Independence is also known, was a revolution from above; consequently it had little to do with democracy per se. The Revolution at its core was nothing more than a conflagratory overthrow of the hegemony of one section of the elite (colonial) in preference for that of another (domestic), in which the masses, even though participants in the conflagration, did not act to secure their own interests—the existence of the safety valve of abundant lands to pillage having dulled their senses in this regard, coupled with the elite-inspired emergent ideology of nationalism. The socio-economic and political consequences of this history continue to hound us to the present day; the clearest symptom of which is the constant glorification of the hollow shell of procedural democracy (in lieu of building corporeal democracy) by U.S. capital and its allies, even as the masses look on. As Gregg (1997: 273) states pithily: “the endurance of pluralism and the potential for liberal change in the United States appears less likely to be a rule of history than a luxury enjoyed by the lucky few.”