Transcript
I'd like to begin by summarizing some of the points I tried to make last Friday about the Great Awakening in prelude to a discussion of the crisis of the 1760s and 1770s. A major point I think I was trying to make is that as far as its political and social impact, the Great Awakening contributed to the revolution in that it undermined traditional forms of authority. In my mind at least, this is the beginning of, or one
of the beginnings, of the erosion of this deferential society that we're talking about, or that we have been talking about several times before. A society in which authority is really based on artificial, well, not exactly artificial, but natural orders of creation. You're simply born with authority. It's not earned or in any sense found through actual experience. The location of salvation in the Great Awakening is in a direct experience with God, and that in contrast to other
forms of religious experience or other definitions of salvation really marks something rather new in the American scene. Now the undermining of ecclesiastical authority that I emphasized in that lecture takes place at exactly the same time that the social order was being undermined by a variety of economic and political strains. So that what you have is a simultaneous development taking place in three different areas, politically, socially, and ecclesiastically. The other effect that I think is extremely important
as far as the contributing to the revolution was concerned is that the awakening unifies in a certain sense the colonies in a common experience. Whitefield and other itinerants are really bringing together the colonies in a way that they had not been brought together before. It's not at all uncommon for you to find in the 18th century people speaking of their particular colony as their country or their nation, and after the Great Awakening with people finding out
what's going on in Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina, New Jersey, Connecticut, and Massachusetts, this begins to break down and there's more of a sense of colonial consciousness. This is also I think another stage in the redefinition of authority. Authority is not granted according to virtue or piety as it was in the earliest Puritan political thought, but according to the ability to care for the social welfare, Mayhew's sermon, the excerpts that I read yesterday, emphasize very strongly
that a ruler is only a ruler if he cares for the social welfare, and this is something very different than early Puritan political thought where a good ruler is seen in terms of his virtue, his piety, his personal character. Now the ruler is seen in terms of something that he does, and this connection may be somewhat strained, but I think Jonathan Edwards' conception of true virtue, which he defines as disinterested love for being in general, implies
in a certain sense that this is once again a concern for the social welfare for God and all of creation. This is a new and more cosmic conception of Christian ethics. It also redefined, the Great Awakening also redefined authority away from something artificial to something that could be earned or even better experienced. Authority was no longer based on wealth or birth or status, but on the ability to care for the general welfare. And finally, I think
in ecclesiastical terms as far as how the church thought about society, there's a decisive turning toward the future, a millennial hope that is generated by the Great Awakening, which really marks a basic reorientation as far as the American churches are concerned. And the location of that hope for the future is seen specifically in the American colonies. So you have the beginnings in a certain sense of this fusion of religion and America coming out of the Great
Awakening. Jonathan Edwards concludes some of his descriptions of the revivals that are taking place with the observation that surely God's work or God's kingdom is coming to pass, particularly England. Well, once you expand that conception a little bit, it's not long before you get this conception of God's special role for the American nation. Now turning to the crisis of the 1760s and 1770s, this crisis, it really has three dimensions. It's an economic crisis, a political crisis,
and a religious crisis, or a crisis in which a religious issue plays an important role. In the lecture that I gave outlining some theories of revolution, we talked about the important role which foreign wars have in precipitating a revolution. And this is usually a defeat for the power or for the nation which then undergoes a revolution. But in the case of England, it was a victory. The war was the Seven Years War from 1756 to 1763.
And in the colonies, it was known as the French and Indian War. Now there were several results of this war, all of which have an enormous amount of impact on the American colonies and subsequently in leading to the American Revolution. The first and most obvious was that the French were defeated and the North American continent was largely turned over for English colonization and English rule. This is the emergence of England as the dominant North American colonial
power. For England, this meant a dramatic increase in the governmental debt. In 1755, just before the war started, the English crown owed to people just over 72 million pounds. In 1763, the last year of the war, the crown owed 122 million pounds, almost 123 million. And in 1764, a year after the war was over, they owed 129 million pounds, so that there's a dramatic increase of more than 50 million pounds during the years that the war
was being waged. The English nation seized a vast amount of territory, seizing all of Canada and many other possessions from the French. But this seizure of land came as a mixed blessing. The English confronted the simple fact that just in terms of population, they were outnumbered by the combination of the French and the Indians on the American continent. And like any sensible nation, any colonial power, they decided to station troops in the colonies. And the wisdom
of this was confirmed immediately by an Indian uprising in 1763. So one of the major results of the Seven Years War or the French and Indian War is the decision to permanently station troops on the American continent. You notice that the barracks in Trenton dates from the period of the French and Indian War. But that decision to station troops in the colonies came at a price, too. The estimated cost of keeping 10,000 troops in the
colonies was approximately 220,000 pounds. Now the purpose of keeping these troops in the colonies, as the colonists believed and the British believed, that this was for the protection of English life and property in the colonies, protection from the French. And the cost of maintaining these troops was added to the enormous cost of waging the war in the first place and the interest on the debt that had been involved. Now compounding the difficulty of what to
do with this new empire and the cost of maintaining it, there was a tremendous amount of inflation generated by the Seven Years War. And this inflation had three important results as far as the colonies were concerned. First of all, it brought a period of tremendous prosperity. Just as the Vietnam War in the 1960s produced a great deal of prosperity for the United States, however false or illusory that prosperity may have been, at the same time the
French and Indian War brings exactly the same to the colonies. Tobacco and rice exports from the southern colonies reached a peak during the 1760s and 1770s, a peak for the entire colonial period. Wheat crops fail in Europe during the late 1760s and this sends the price of American wheat soaring. And during this period the trade with West Indies turns in favor of the northern colonies. In the 1770s, you exchanged one bushel of wheat for every five
gallons of molasses. In the 1740s, you got three gallons of molasses for one bushel of wheat. So there's a dramatic change in the purchasing power of New England. And there's a difference also, the second important change that it brings is that there's a difference in the pattern of acquisition and the standard of living. There's more and more consumption of British goods during the 1760s and '70s. Per capita consumption goes from 19 shillings in 1750 to 26
shillings in 1760. And it's not only British goods but the goods from other countries as well. This prosperity manages to produce a great deal of desire for foreign goods of all kinds and at least one of the purposes of the various acts of Parliament during the 1760s and '70s is to try to reduce some of this consumption of other kinds or other countries' goods in the colonies. But the prosperity and the new type of and the
increased consumption in the colonies was also accompanied by a great increase in debt, personal debt as well as the balance of payments between the colonies and England. Prior to 1755, the American colonial trade with England pretty much broke even, but the war changed that dramatically. By 1760, the colonies were two million pounds in debt. By 1772, they were four million pounds in debt. One Virginian in 1766 recalled that a debt of a thousand pounds used to
be excessive, but now, he said, writing in 1766, ten times that sum is now spoken of with indifference and thought no great burden on some estates. Indeed, in 1740, I don't remember to have seen such a thing as a turkey carpet, Oriental rug, a turkey carpet in the except a small thing in the bedchamber. Now, nothing are so common as turkey or Wilton carpets, the whole furniture, rooms, elegant and every appearance of opulence. This is a
very quick change in the way people are spending their money. George Washington also commented that many of his friends were unable to keep up with this new standard of living and they really felt ashamed of their ability to spend the way their neighbors were spending. Now, the war and the economic crisis of the 1760s produced a very, very basic shift in the English colonial policy. This was discussed by Professor Craven last Monday night and it really
can't be emphasized too strongly what a basic shift this was. As he said, it'd be too much to say that the war really created a colonial policy where before there hadn't been any, but in some respects, that's almost the case. The colonies had been largely ignored for most of the century and a half prior to the end of the war and the new financial demands that are placed upon the English government prompt this very dramatic shift.
What this means, the converse of this is that for virtually all of the colonial period, the American colonies had been able to develop social values, religious institutions, and economy, and even to some extent, governmental institutions without interference or with very little interference from English control. Now, the one thing, the one precedent for what happened in the 1760s was, as Professor Craven pointed out, the Dominion of New England, which was abolished during the Glorious Revolution. Specifically, what
happened here was that the Lords of Trade tried to get Massachusetts to obey the Navigation Acts and to do so, they first annulled the Massachusetts Charter in 1684 and then they established the Dominion of New England, which put eventually Connecticut, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, the Colony of Plymouth, New Hampshire, New York, and New Jersey, all under the same governmental structure. What this meant was that all of the assemblies were abolished in favor of just one council and
part of the decree or the establishment of the Dominion of New England was freedom of worship, which was immediately interpreted by the largely Puritan factions in New England as an attempt to get the Church of England more firmly established in the colonies. Sir Edmund Andros is appointed governor of the Dominion of New England and he's an Anglican as well and they're furious about this and the crowning blow is a tax that's put on all land and
a questioning of the deeds, a statement now that all the deeds have to be issued in the King's name. Well the Glorious Revolution, the deposing of James ends all that and what happens with the accession of William and Mary to the throne is that you have once again a monarch who's really unconcerned about the colonies. There's very little attempt after that to do anything like establishing the Dominion of New England and this is largely the case
up until the 1760s, but this kind of benign neglect was no longer possible or even feasible for English authorities after that. The huge amount of land that they had acquired and the fact that this was acquired during a war, they actually had to fight for it, meant that they were suddenly much more conscious of the colony or the colonial empire which they had acquired. Now one further point I think to keep in mind about English colonial
policy prior to the 1760s, even though it wasn't much of a policy, was that it was always designed to regulate trade and not tax it and the revenue generated by the customs duty was not terribly significant and in many cases the colonists were terribly adept at being able to circumvent the customs duty. Now the response to this economic crisis for the English government was a series of new measures passed by parliament and designed to raise the
money to reduce the war debts and pay for the stationing of British troops. Incidentally this also corresponds with what many historians have seen as the rise of a new kind of bureaucrat in English government, the kind of ruthlessness with which the English government put down food riots in London, the kind of really callousness with which they treated many things that were developing in England indicate that these were bureaucrats of a kind of classic caricature, in some
sense concerned far more with efficiency rather than with seeing that somehow justice was done or some more enlightened point of view. But beginning even before the war is over, parliament passes a revenue act of 1762 and this ends the absentee system in the customs service. In other words it's no longer possible for somebody to get an appointment to the customs service in England and then stay in England and send a friend who is paid a quarter
or half of what the person who gets the job is actually paid. Instead the customs service, the customs officials actually have to be in the colonies carrying out their duties. It also assigns the Royal Navy the job of assisting in the apprehension of smugglers. And in 1764 you get the Sugar Act immediately after the war. It's designed by George Grenville and what this does is to reduce the tax on molasses from six pence to three pence
per gallon. It actually reduces the tax but this time the government was very insistent upon the fact it was going to be collected. It was avoided in most cases and the cost of smuggling molasses into the colonies generally ran from about a half to one and a half pence per gallon. Since the new tax was going to be collected it meant a doubling of the cost of carrying on business. The Sugar Act also forbade exporting lumber
to any port except English ports and it extended the right of the vice admiralty courts, the courts belonging to the English Empire to try cases of violators of the act. Now the colonial protest to the Sugar Act took two forms. One they insisted that they were taking away the right of trial by jury because these these cases were going to be tried in the admiralty courts where you were tried just before a judge and not before
a jury. And secondly they began to argue that Parliament was assuming the right of taxation as opposed to mere regulation of trade but this was at a very early stage and it wasn't pushed very hard. There was an initial protest but not very strong. Adding to the aggravation of the Sugar Act of 1764 was a Currency Act which said that the colonies could no longer issue paper money and the uh that produced a great deal of
irritation because it immediately cut down on the sources of money available. Now as the Sugar Act was being passed Grenville announced to Parliament that because of the cost of maintaining troops in the colonies he was going to institute a stamp tax for the cost of maintaining these troops. And he said that he would not propose such a tax if the colonial assemblies found a way of raising what he called an adequate amount or an equivalent sum.
Now this attracted some attention in the colonies but the difficulty was that no one knew what Grenville meant by an adequate sum or what an equivalent sum was. And another problem was that if Grenville was really interested in having the colonial assemblies pass some laws such as this he never communicated formally with any the colonial governors or any of the colonial assemblies. And the result was a year later the famous Stamp Act of 1765. Now keep
in mind when you read about the Stamp Act that this was a similar tax was collected in England but this was the first time that this had ever been attempted in the colonies. Now today we think of stamps as things to be put on postcards or letters or whatever but this was not what they had in mind. This was a stamp which was to be placed on a piece of paper a kind of watermark or engraving
and the insistence was that you had to buy these pieces of paper for certain kinds of documents. And the documents that were to be used on this kind of paper or the paper that was to be used for these kinds of documents included any document that was to be submitted in a court, papers to be used in clearing ships from harbors, college diplomas, appointments to public office, bonds, grants and deeds for land, mortgages, indentures, leases, contracts,
bills of sale, articles of apprenticeship, liquor licenses, plane cards, dice, pamphlets, newspapers, as well as the advertisements in the newspapers and almanacs. All of these publications had to have the stamp paper and they had in buying the paper they had used sterling. They were forbidden to use colonial currency. Now in prosecuting the violators the acts provided that the accused could be brought before common law courts where you had the right of trial by jury or admiralty
courts. Now colonists looked at the act and there was a tremendous protest. It appeared that first they were being taxed without their consent for purposes of revenue, their right of a trial by jury in a common law court was being threatened and the power of the admiralty courts was being extended. And all of this was taking place at exactly the time that there was a great deal of talk about establishing a bishop in the American colonies.
I'll go into that later but keep in mind that 1765 is also the height of the controversy over the bishop. In 1765 the Stamp Act Congress was convened, Congress with representatives from colonies and out of the debate that was generated in the colonies two basic points were made. First the colonists insisted that no taxation could be levied without the consent of the colonists themselves. This is the great cry of no taxation without representation. And there was
no distinction made between internal and external taxation. That is a tax on trade going out of the colonies was just as bad as a tax made for commerce within the colonies, the kind of tax that the stamp tax really aimed at. Now all of this is spelled out in a beautiful, very clearly written book by Edmund and Helen Morgan called The Stamp Act Crisis. It's available in paperback, I'm fairly sure it's in the bookstore. And what
the Morgan's say about the results of the Stamp Act Crisis is very significant as far as the American Revolution is concerned. First of all what the Stamp Act Crisis really does is to make the colonies united around a given set of principles. For the first time the act of resistance is beginning to be based upon a fairly enunciated set of principles and values. And these values involve an assertion of colonial rights. The second important result was
that the colonies get unified in a common protest and there's an organization that begins to emerge out of that unification. The Sons of Liberty arise to agitate against the Stamp Act. The non-importation agreements among merchants begin to emerge and so that you begin to have the beginnings of organization necessary to bring about revolution. And it's during this period too that the middle begins to drop out of the political discussion. This is the period of the
rise of Patrick Henry, Samuel Adams, James Otis, some of the firebrands of the revolution. They, excuse me, emerge into positions of leadership and succeed for a while in dominating the political discussion. There's a sense in which they go into eclipse during the late 60s and early 1770s but they emerge for the first time as important political leaders. I also think that there's a new concern that begins to be expressed as a result of the Stamp Act
for the values of American life. Not in the book that I mentioned by Edmund and Helen Morgan but in an article by Edmund Morgan published about five years ago called The Puritan Ethic and the American Revolution. Morgan emphasizes how the non-importation strategy, how they were not going to import British goods, was not only a strategic economic move which eventually crippled the London merchants and caused them to push for repeal of the Stamp Act but it
was also a means of redirecting American values away from the concern for luxuries and frivolities and toward the pure products of American labor. In George Duffield's sermon yesterday you had the expression of concern about the luxuries and frivolities of American life and this is a constant theme really for the whole period but during the 1760s and 1770s it really takes on a new kind of pitch and you have more and more preachers denouncing foreign goods as
being immoral and American goods as being somehow more morally pure because they are made by the people's hands. The people are demonstrating their self-sufficiency and you take a look at any of the new colonial new nations of Africa or the emerging third world and in every case there's a strong emphasis in those societies and cultures upon trying to remain self-sufficient, trying to cut off the kind of colonial ties that they've had with the West
or with the colonial power and this is exactly what's going on in the 1760s and 70s and the pulpit in this case is really gearing the people up toward this fusion of American goods with moral purity. Now the preachers and the political pamphleteers also use the repeal of the Stamp Act as a indication of the principles for which the protest was conducted and here you have a subtle but ultimately very dramatic change in the way colonists
began to think about themselves and about their past and why the American nation existed. Increasingly the talk was of liberty and usually in all capitals when it was printed and this is best illustrated by another sermon, a famous sermon by Jonathan Mayhew again preached on May 23, 1766 on the anniversary of the repeal of the Stamp Act. The sermon was entitled The Snare Broken and Mayhew says, having learned from the holy scriptures that wise, brave, and
virtuous men were always friends to liberty, that God gave the Israelites a king or absolute monarch in his anger because they had not sense and virtue enough to be like a free commonwealth and to have himself for their king, that the Son of God came down from heaven to make us free indeed and where the Spirit of the Lord is there is liberty. This made me conclude that freedom was a great blessing. Having also from my
childhood up been educated to the love of liberty, though not of licentiousness, I would not, I cannot now, though past middle age, relinquish the fair object of my youthful affections. Liberty whose charms instead of decaying with time in my eyes have daily captivated me more and more. Well this is a whole new style of rhetoric in the colonies. Go back to John Winthrop and his speeches to the people of Massachusetts and he's not emphasizing liberty there
so much as obedience, obedience to rulers, and this is a subtle but ultimately over the long term very dramatic shift in the way people are talking about the political order. What Mayhew proclaimed was being followed by a lot of other colonists as well. The spirit of resistance had been awakened by the Stamp Act and while it was repealed, the British authorities were still unwilling to allow the old pattern of benign neglect to continue and the process
assumes a kind of inexorable quality. The Townsend Acts are passed in 1767. British troops are moved into Boston in 1768. The Boston Massacre of 1770. The Tea Act of 1773, followed by the Boston Tea Party of December 16, 1773. The Intolerable Acts are passed in 1774 and particularly the Quebec Act, which extended the province of Quebec into the American colonies or what was considered land previously a part of the American colonies and it gave religious freedom
to Catholics. And it also established an appointed parliament rather than an elected one. The Quebec Act gave Canada an appointed parliament. Also in 1774, the first Continental Congress meets from May until September. The momentum is beginning to build and finally in 1775, in April, the initial bloodshed at Lexington and Concord. Now this is the political background against which the religious crisis takes place and the issue, as I've indicated, is one of establishing an American bishop for
the Church of England in the American colonies and this is a hot and divisive issue. The best source for reading about this is a fascinating book by Carl Bridenbaugh, B-R-I-D-E-N-B-A-U-G-H, called Mitre and Scepter. Now on its surface, the attempt to establish a in the colonies was really a perfectly sensible one. The Anglican Church in the colonies was disorganized and without direction. For most of the colonial period,
it's really congregational in its polity and in many ways you can say that the Presbyterians and Congregationalists were far better organized and far better directed than the Anglican Church. The absence of a bishop from the colonies was a particularly serious problem because it posed all sorts of difficulties in securing ordination. If a pious young Anglican wanted to be ordained in the American colonies, if he was born and raised in the colonies and wanted to be ordained,
he had to go to London to be ordained. Now this cost usually as much or could cost as much as a hundred pounds and it involved a six months journey, both three months each way plus the time London. And several of these fellows, given the dangers at sea, actually died in the attempt to secure ordination in England. And on a theoretical basis, if the colonies were part of England, which they were, and if the Church of
England was the established church, why should the Church of England be restricted from having a bishop in land that belonged to the English government? Particularly since most of the people were English themselves. So there was a strong theoretical argument for the case of putting a bishop in. Now from the earliest time that this was considered seriously, the colonists protested about it. It was a smoldering tension that runs all the way back into the 17th century and
continues right on up to the revolution and reaches a peak in the 1760s. The first real genuine attempt to put a bishop in the American colonies took place in 1713, but it was quickly squashed and never was seriously raised again until the 1760s. Now why were the colonists so opposed to this idea of having a bishop over here? First, I think it's very important to see that a lot of themselves were opposed to the idea. In
general, the agitation for a bishop came from missionaries sent by the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, the SPG. This was an organ of the England established in 1701 by Thomas Bray. The initial charter for the Society of the Propagation of the Gospel contained no reference to what the missionary work that it was presumably to do among the Indians, but this was assumed to be the function of the Society, that they would serve the Indians
or seek to evangelize the Indians. Between 1701 and 1783, when the Society was abolished after the end of the revolution, the SPG spent more than 227,000 pounds and sent 309 missionaries to the colonies. It was primarily these missionaries who agitated for the bishop. Generally speaking, these missionaries were English-born. They were generally without ties to either American wealth or to American families. From within the Church of England, the idea of a bishop was opposed by
Anglican priests, primarily in the South, who enjoyed the freedom of the American setting. As I've said, these were priests who were generally operating within a kind of congregational framework, and they enjoyed the kind of freedom and latitude that they had without a bishop looking over their shoulders. By this time, by the 1760s, these priests are also heavily linked up in the various families of Virginia and Southern society, and so there's much more reluctance about the wisdom
of having a bishop here than there was in the case of the missionaries. Two very different social backgrounds for these people. Now, the religious or ecclesiastical reason for opposition to the idea of the bishop was that the SPG was interpreted by many of the religious groups, particularly the Presbyterians and the Congregationalists, as an attempt to convert people to the Church of England. All of this activity by the SPG was seen as an attempt, really, to break
into a congregational or Presbyterian stronghold, and they actually had some reason for seeing that this was the purpose of the SPG. Of these 309 missionaries that came over in the 82 years of the SPG's existence, New England got the most. They got 84 missionaries. New York got 58. New Jersey had 44. Pennsylvania had 47. Virginia, during those entire 82 years, got two. Now, that's where most of the Anglicans were. That's where some of the best work
could be done with the Indians. They got two missionaries in 82 years. And so that there was some reason for believing that the SPG really was an agency of the Church of England to try to extend its influence among the English people of the colonies, not the Indians. Now, part of the opposition was simply instinctive. Many of the colonists that came over here came over because of a fight to purify the Church of England. Their errand
into the wilderness was to establish a purified church and take it back to England. All of this was still, in a certain sense, a part of the mythology by which people used to understand their lives. And so opposition to the Church of England was so ingrained in the culture by this time that it's not surprising at all that they would resist a bishop. Another reason was that there was slowly developing in the colonies the experience, if
not the theory, of religious toleration and religious liberty. And in everyone's mind, or virtually everyone's mind, Anglicanism represented a threat to that religious liberty by its embodiment of political and ecclesiastical power allied together. This was the Church of England, the established church, and you had political and ecclesiastical power inextricably intertwined. Puritan and Calvinist political thought throughout the 17th and 18th century was gradually moving toward an understanding of the ruler as someone who served the people. Christianity,
if it needed to be defended, was defended in terms of its power to save individuals, as in the case of Edwards, not in terms of its social utility. In contrast, Anglicanism was moving much more strongly in the direction of seeing the function of religion as serving a social goal or a social value. And let me try to illustrate this with one somewhat long quotation from William Smith, an apologist for the Anglican cause in the 1750s, and
he's writing against William Livingston, a Presbyterian in New York, a layman who's agitating against the Church of England, against the Anglican power in New York. Smith writes, national establishment of a church can alone diffuse through a country the full social advantages arising from religion and men set aside to explain and inculcate it. If all religions were equally favored by the civil power, none established, and every man left at liberty to practice what he thought proper. What
a scene of confusion would thence arise from such unbridled liberty of conscience. And as to the political uses of national establishments, he must indeed be a very shallow politician who does not see them. The statesman has always found it necessary for the purposes of government to raise some one denomination of religions above the rest, to a certain degree. This favored denomination by these means becomes, as it were, a creature of the government, which is thus enabled
to turn the balance and keep all in subjection. Well, this is the church as an agency of the state, religion serving a political end. Now, when you see the way in which the Anglicans were tying together the issues of political authority and ecclesiastical establishment in the colonies, it's little wonder why one newspaper said that stamping, stamp act, and episcopizing, the idea of establishing a bishop, that stamping and episcopizing were only different branches of the same plan
of power. And the attempt to establish a bishop in the colonies became, to many colonists, ecclesiastical imperialism linked to the political and economic imperialism of the Stamp Act and various other acts of the 1760s. Ezra Stiles, the president of Yale, argued that if a parliamentary revenue had been established independent of the colonial assemblies, it would have permitted half a dozen bishops on the continent. So what he's saying is that if Stamp Act would have gone through,
the revenues would have been used for a bishop as well, and the two issues became closely connected. Now, there's always a question. What issues excited the people more? Was it the economic issues of the Stamp Act and the political issues of troops in Boston and things of that sort, or was it these religious issues of trying to establish a bishop? We'll never know. It's impossible to do that even today, the way one issue is being more
important than another. But one observer, John Adams, said, thinking back on the 1760s, the apprehensions of episcopacy contributed as much as any other cause to arouse the attention not only of the inquiring mind, but the common people, and urged them to close thinking on the constitutional authority of parliament over the colonies. Well, I think I'll stop there. And if you have any questions, we can keep going. Yeah. Right. Okay, sure. There were 309 total during from
the period from 1701 to 1783. 1701. 1701, 83. That's the length of time that the SPG is in operation. Right. And New York gets 58, New Jersey 44, and Pennsylvania 47. Yeah. I think that's true. The fear of, well, I would say that in general, any large military establishment or military people by themselves, and I don't mean to cast aspersions on John or his base or anything else, but it's a strain for a local community because
soldiers tend to go out and drunk and become disorderly and all the rest, and there are innumerable ways in which military tend to aggravate local communities, and I think that Ferguson is right in putting a great deal of emphasis on the kind of. Well, I don't know. Zip may have some thoughts on that. The American Revolution and military history by Digenbach, which is one of the best things about the Revolution, and he argues and engaged to
some degree was responsible for the policy that the innovative thing was started in Boston putting the troops in the coastal communities and not in the frontier establishments, which was a challenge to anyone who had a long tradition to stay in the army. The whole dark revolution and everything else, where they had troops that were stationed in Ireland and...