The History Behind the “Pennsylvania March”
By: Kevin Fleming
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Written in 1775, the Pennsylvania March expressed the increased colonial hostility to British imperial rule. Twelve years earlier, Great Britain and her American colonists had achieved a decisive victory in the French and Indian War, the North American element of the Seven Years’ War. Instead of uniting the two parties, however, the Seven Years’ war ultimately set Great Britain and her American colonies on a path towards dissolution. To prevent future conflict with the Native Americans in North America and help defray the cost of defending the colonies, , Great Britain tightened imperial control and implemented increased taxation.
Following the war, Great Britain imposed the Proclamation Line of 1763, which prohibited colonial settlement west of the Appalachian Mountains. Designed to mitigate the risk of future conflict with Native Americans, the proclamation angered land-hungry colonists. This proclamation was quickly followed by the Sugar Act in 1764, which raised the tax on molasses, and the Stamp Act in 1765, which placed a tax on legal documents (as well as other printed items, and gambling dice). Organized resistance influenced Parliament to repeal the Stamp Act the following year. Unwilling to cede their authority, the British passed the Declaratory Act, which asserted their right to pass laws and govern the colonies, on the same day. In 1767, Great Britain reasserted its authority by passing the Townshend Acts, which placed import duties on glass, paint, paper, lead, and tea. Parliament also soon repealed this act, but maintained the tax on tea. The 1773 Tea Act gave the British East India Company a monopoly on the colonial tea trade by allowing the company to sell directly to the colonies without paying export duties. Colonists could now purchase tea from the East India Company for half its previous cost. Even though it made tea cheaper, the Tea Act retained the externally imposed tax introduced in the Townshend Acts, which colonists objected to on principle. On 16 December 1773, patriots in Boston raided British ships and dumped 342 chests of tea overboard.[1] Angered by this bold act of resistance, Parliament passed the Coercive Acts, which closed Boston Harbor until the colonists paid damages for the destroyed tea.
With each act, colonial anger and resistance grew. American patriots voiced opposition to the oppressive imperial authority and their lack of representation in these legislative processes. The writings of John Dickinson typified colonial anger. Publishing twelve essays, beginning in 1767, under the pseudonym “A Farmer in Pennsylvania,” Dickinson commentated on Britain’s increased interference in colonial affairs. His letters soon appeared in newspapers across the colonies.[2] British taxation and regulation, he concluded, remained unconstitutional and tyrannical. Each legislative intrusion, he reasoned, threatened the colonies’ very existence. Employing a “slippery slope” argument, he called on the colonists to resist every unjust imposition. “When an act injurious to freedom has been once done, and the people bear it,” he explained, “the repetition of it is most likely met with submission. For as the mischief of the one was found tolerable, they will hope that of the second will prove so too.”[3] The end, Dickinson reasoned, would be not just oppression, but subjugation. “Those who are taxed without their own consent, given by themselves, or their representatives, are slaves,” he concluded, “we are therefore — I speak it with grief — I speak it with indignation — we are slaves.”[4]
The colonial disdain and fear of slavery raises questions of hypocrisy; while they railed against British encroachments on their own freedoms, colonists held hundreds of thousands of Africans in literal slavery. Historian Edmund Morgan classified the concurrent rise of American liberty (for Whites) and slavery (for Blacks) as “the central paradox of American History.”[5] While the outlook of the founding generation does not, as Morgan explained, make this contradiction “less ugly,” it does help contextualize the seemingly incongruent colonial opposition to British oppression.[6]
The Pennsylvania March appeared in newspapers across the country, adding to the chorus of calls to oppose imperial overreach.[7] Circulating after the Battle of Lexington and Concord (fought on 19 April 1775), it challenged British assertions that the colonists were (in the words of Earl Sandwich, the First Lord of the Admiralty) “raw, undisciplined, and cowardly men.”[8] The following year, the Second Continental Congress discussed secession from Great Britain. In July, the representatives issued the Declaration of Independence, fulfilling the words of the Pennsylvania March: “And all the world shall know, Americans are free.”
[1] Alvin Rabushka, Taxation in Colonial America (Princeton University Press, 2008), 747. See also: Max Farrand, “The Taxation of Tea, 1767-1773,” The American Historical Review 3, no. 2 (1898): 269.
[2] John Dickinson, Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania, to the Inhabitants of the British Colonies, ed. R. T. H. Halsey (The Outlook Company: 1903), xvii.
[3] Halsey, Letters from a Farmer, 121.
[4] Halsey, Letters from a Farmer, 77-78.
[5] Edmund Morgan, “Slavery and Freedom: The American Paradox,” The Journal of American History 59, no. 1 (1972): 6.
[6] Morgan, “Slavery and Freedom,” 29.
[7] “The Pennsylvania March,” The General Advertiser (New York, New York), August 24, 1775; “The Pennsylvania March,” New Hampshire Gazette (Portsmouth, NH), September 12, 1775; “The Pennsylvania March,” Massachusetts Spy (Worcester, MA), August 23, 1775; “The Pennsylvania March,” Pennsylvania Packet (Philadelphia, PA), August 7, 1775.
[8] Henry Steele Commager and Richard B. Morris, eds., The Spirit of ‘Seventy-Six: The Story of the American Revolution as Told by Participants (The Bobbs-Merrill Company, 1959), 61.