250 and Counting

Category: Petition to the King

  • February 9, 1775

    Cover art for February 9, 1775: text of the address to the Joint Session of Parliament declaring the Colonies to be in rebellion

    The first week or two of February 1775 could best be described as a series of misunderstandings and communication breakdowns. Any attempts on both sides to reach out with some form of conciliation managed to fail for various reasons.

    And during all these breakdowns, the situation on the American side of the pond only got worse as time went on, largely because each side thought that the other wasn’t being responsive.

    In the end, however, it didn’t really matter, because as we’ve discussed with the episodes dealing with Massachusettensis and Novanglus debating one another in print, the one thing they agreed upon was that these attempts to reach out were always, at their heart, rooted in some attempt to wrest control from the other party. Both reaching for it, neither attaining it nor caring what the other side’s argument meant at the core.

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  • February 5, 1775

    Cover art for February 5, 1775: Portrait of Benjamin Franklin by David Martin

    As noted previously, the First Continental Congress composed a Petition to the King asking him for some relief from the Intolerable Acts. The petition arrived in London in mid-December, which turned out to be some bad timing for a number of reasons.

    Benjamin Franklin was in town for diplomatic purposes, and he composed a letter to Charles Thomson, the Secretary of the Continental Congress, which summed up the problem: not only was the Petition but one among many, many other documents, it appeared that Parliament didn’t much care what the Colonies thought. And that’s the kind of thing that makes for bad relationships.

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  • 250 and Counting: January 19, 1775

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    Cover art for January 19, 1775: An image of the Petition to the King.

    Most people (we think) have this popular notion of American history involving the British imposing taxes and massacreing people in Boston and the Colonists responding with an indignant “Oh, we need to dump some tea and write a Declaration of Independence and take up arms and shoot those red-coated monsters right now!”

    But if you’ve been listening to this show for the past couple of weeks, you already know that wasn’t the case. There were many, many attempts to seek out a peaceful solution to the troubles going on. Some of them were rather covert: backchannel people talking to one another, negotiating quietly, Others, of course, were overt. And today we’ll be talking about one of those. It was an attempt by the First Continental Congress to bring up their issues, ask for relief and simultaneously affirm their allegiance to the King.

    (Spoiler Alert: it didn’t work.)