http://jpfo.org/pdf03/charleston-law-review-id1967702.pdf (http://jpfo.org/pdf03/charleston-law-review-id1967702.pdf)
This is NOT helping me prepare a simple and precise lead-in to the First Strike! :slap: Can we have a Zero-eth Strike?? I promise not to go too far past the 1691 Massachusetts charter.
Good article, I love in depth articles and all the sourcing so I know where to find the original documents. And this is one aspect (mind, a really interesting aspect to Riflemen!) of a systematic effort over a decade to deprive the colonists of their rights of self government, along with taxes, banning town meetings, shutting down the legislature, etc. It really hit home to me when I read the colony charter and saw that it was not only a tradition of self-government, but that these rights were guaranteed in writing. (See how I stopped short of mentioning how the previous colony charter had been revoked and replaced with one more favorable to the crown, so this wasn't the first time the government had changed the ruleson the colony? :sb: Oh...I almost made it.)
I can't help but think of the British government collectively as Darth Vader talking to Landro Calrissian in The Empire Strikes Back: "I am altering the deal. Pray I don't alter it any further." 1765-1775 would have been a looooong decade to live through dealing with that attitude.
One of the great things about having a Harvard-educated, self professed history wonk in the Michigan cadre that is always emailing me his latest find (cough...cough...Oz...cough) is that I'm learning a broader view of the events leading up to the early 1770's. And while my stock schpiel for 1st strike has been fiscal-crisis-tax-colonies-open-defiance-tighten-grip-more-defiance-intolerable-acts, what is really the bell ringer for me is
+ Colonists were guaranteed a lot of leeway in the early 1700's to govern themselves
+ They took it to heart, did just that, were good at it
+ England started stripping those liberties away, one by one, and imposing even more draconian rules, regulations, interference in everyday life -- they were altering the deal
+ Taxation without representation and the Powder Alarms were trip wires, versus the cause. The seeds of the Revolution were planted long before.
The best quote that sums this up is from the crotchety old Captain Preston "Young man, what we meant in going for those Redcoats was this: we always had governed ourselves and we always meant to. They didn't mean we should."