Chapter 4. Timeline for American Legal History, to 1776

A. From early European Settlements to 1763

 

1565 St. Augustine, Florida, founded as the first lasting Spanish colony (and first permanent European colony) on mainland North America.
1585-7 Roanoke Island, NC: attempted English settlement of 91 people recruited by Walter Raleigh failed; when Raleigh returned in 1590 the island was deserted.
1607 Jamestown, Virginia, founded as first lasting English colony on mainland North America. Only 32 of 105 original settlers survived the first year. The Virginia colony was at first a “corporate” colony, because it was founded by a royal grant to a company, the London Company of Merchant Adventurers. This company lost its charter in 1624 (see below).
1608 Quebec founded as the first lasting French colony on mainland North America
1609 Henry Hudson, an Englishman working for the Dutch, explored the river in New York that would be named for him. This began Netherlands’ claim on the region, which became New Netherlands in 1624.
1618 Headright system begun by the Virginia Company in order to attract more settlers. The Company offered 50 acres of land to each new settler that came to Virginia, plus an additional 50 acres for each individual accompanying the head of household (family members or servants). Settlers already in Virginia received 100 acres each. Also, settlers could get an additional 50 acres for each person for whom they paid the cost of the trans-Atlantic passage. Those with money could amass large plantations, with those whose passage had been paid in this way usually becoming indentured servants. Maryland would adopt a similar system by 1640.
1619 The House of Burgesses, the first legislative assembly in America, met in Jamestown, Virginia. It consisted of 22 burgesses representing 11 “plantations” (or distinct settlements).
1619 A Dutch ship delivered twenty Africans to Jamestown, Virginia, for sale as servants. These were the first Africans known to have come to English North America. Their precise status is unclear, but Virginia settlers probably considered them to be indentured servants, because most settlers were unfamiliar with slavery as a distinct legal status. Nonetheless, this is usually considered as marking the origins of slavery in mainland America.
1620 Plymouth Bay Colony established, marking the founding of Massachusetts as the second of the colonies that later became the original thirteen U.S. states. The Mayflower ship landed at Cape Cod, Massachusetts, with 101 colonists, and after a few days 41 men signed the Mayflower Compact, by which they agreed to govern themselves.
1624 New Netherlands founded as first Dutch colony on mainland North America, on Manhattan Island (New York), by the Dutch West Indies Company.
1624 Virginia was made a royal or crown colony, by revoking the London Company’s charter and appointing a royal governor as the colony’s chief executive. The legislative assembly (known in Virginia as the House of Burgesses) was also at first abolished, but by 1634 it began meeting again and would continue to meet annually down to the Revolution.
1630 Massachusetts Bay Colony founded in the Boston area, by a royal grant to the Massachusetts Bay Company, which was led by John Winthrop. With 900-1000 settlers, this was the largest single migration from England of the seventeenth century. One-third died in the first year, but after that the colony grew quickly. In 1691 Massachusetts Bay was merged with Plymouth Bay to create the colony or Province of Massachusetts.
1632-4 Maryland founded by a group of mostly Catholic settlers, marking the founding of the third of the colonies that later became the original thirteen U.S. states. Maryland is considered as the first “proprietorial” colony, because it was founded by a personal land grant from King Charles I to Lord Baltimore, who thus became Maryland’s “proprietor.”
1636 Rhode Island founded by Roger Williams, marking the founding of the fourth of the colonies that later became the original thirteen U.S. states. (At first there were two separate colonies of Providence and Rhode Island, but these were merged in 1644.) Williams was banished from Massachusetts for his call for religious freedom and the separation of church and state. These policies, unique among the colonies, were implemented in Rhode Island and confirmed by the colony’s royal charter of 1663. Rhode Island and Connecticut were also unique among the colonies to have governors who were elected by the local population, rather than being appointed by the king or a proprietor.
1639 Connecticut founded, at first as two separate colonies: settlers from Massachusetts founded Hartford, while others from England founded New Haven. The two were merged as the royal colony of Connecticut in 1662. 1639 thus marks the founding of the fifth of the colonies that later became the original thirteen U.S. states. The first five of these later states were all founded as colonies between 1607 and 1639 (two on the Chesapeake Bay and three in New England), in the early years of the Stuart dynasty before the English Civil War.
1649 Maryland’s Toleration Act passed. It granted freedom of worship to all Trinitarian Christians: “no persons professing to believe in Jesus Christ shall from henceforth be anyway troubled…in respect of his or her religion nor in the free exercise thereof.” But it also punished with death anyone who denied either the Trinity or Jesus’s divinity. While Maryland’s proprietor and some settlers were Catholic, they were a minority, and eventually the Protestant majority repealed this act, at first only briefly in the 1650s, and then permanently in 1692.
1640-1659 English Civil War & Commonwealth Periods
1660-1688 Restoration Period in England (Stuart Kings Charles II & James II restored). This period saw the founding of the next six of the colonies that would later count among the thirteen original U.S. states (so that a total of eleven of these states trace their foundations to 1681 or before).
1660 Navigation Act: required exclusive use of English ships for trade with the colonies, and that colonial products be exported only to England.
1663-1670 Carolina founded by a grant from King Charles II to a group of eight loyal supporters, thus making it a proprietorial colony, and beginning a new wave of colonial settlements. In 1729 this colony was divided into North and South Carolina, so that 1663 may be taken as the date for the founding of both the sixth and seventh of the colonies that later became the original thirteen U.S. states. John Locke helped to write Carolina’s original charter, which, though never fully applied in practice, shows the tenor of the times and of Locke’s thinking, in that it included several ranks of hereditary lords and allowed for slavery.
1663 Navigation Act of 1663 requires that most imports to the colonies must be transported via England on English ships.
1664 New York founded as an English colony, by conquest of New Netherlands from the Dutch. New York became the eighth of the colonies that later became the original thirteen U.S. states.
1664 Lifelong servitude made obligatory for black servants by a Maryland law. Other colonies followed suit.
1665 New Jersey founded by royal grant to two royal favorites, marking the founding of the ninth of the colonies that later became the original thirteen U.S. states. (Between 1674 and 1702 there were two separate colonies of East and West Jersey.)
1667 Baptism as a Christian declared not to affect a slave’s status, according to a Virginia law.
1673 The Navigation Act of 1673 set up the office of customs commissioner in the colonies to collect duties on goods that pass between plantations.
1675 The Lords of Trade, a committee within the king’s Privy Council that had met sporadically over the seventeenth century, became more active as an office responsible for colonial policy. They began recommending stricter control of the colonies, by enforcing trade laws and by transforming corporate and proprietorial colonies into royal colonies (by revocation of earlier charters).
1675-76 King Philip’s War (King Philip was the colonist’s nickname for Metacomet, chief of the Wampanoags) erupted in New England between colonists and Native Americans as a result of tensions over colonists’ expansionist activities. This was the largest single armed conflict between Natives and English settlers of the seventeenth century, resulting in about 1000 settlers and at least 3,000 Native Americans killed, including women and children on both sides.
1676-77 Bacon’s Rebellion: the largest rebellion in colonial American history. Violence broke out on Virginia’s western frontier between Native Americans and poor settlers (mostly white, but including both white and black indentured servants and former indentured servants), who had been encroaching on their land. Virginia’s colonial government, which was dominated by rich planters of the coastal (or Tidewater) region, tried to avoid any further antagonism of the inland tribes. The backcountry settlers, led by Nathaniel Bacon, then rebelled against Virginia’s government, burning its capital Jamestown. The rebellion subsided when Bacon suddenly sickened and died. King Charles II tried to increase control over the troubled colony by sending 1100 royal troops, replacing the royal governor, and conciliating the smaller farmers. But disease ravaged the English soldiers, who were all withdrawn by 1682. In response to this crisis, the Virginia elite turned increasingly to slave labor, rather than relying on indentured servants, and began encouraging settlement on the western frontier. This rebellion reveals the tensions that typically divided poor, land-hungry settlers, and colonial elites. The royal military intervention, which ultimately accomplished very little, was the largest, and indeed virtually the only such interventions in conflicts among the colonists before the Revolutionary period.
1681 Pennsylvania founded by a grant from King Charles II to William Penn, a Quaker. The Quakers were a dissident sect of Protestants who suffered from second-class status in England, and the creation of this haven for them and other less accepted Protestant groups further increased the religious diversity of the American colonies. This proprietorial colony originally included Delaware, which separated from Pennsylvania in 1776. Thus 1681 marks the founding of both the tenth and eleventh of the colonies that later became the original thirteen U.S. states.
1682 Louisiana (the lower Mississippi valley) explored and claimed by the French.
1686-89 Dominion of New England: King James II merged all of the New England colonies, as well as New York and New Jersey, into a single new colony, in which the colonial assemblies were abolished and the King’s governor and other agents assumed all legislative and judicial powers.
1688 Germantown Quakers (or Mennonites) protested against slavery. This protest is the first known opposition to slavery in colonial America, but it had no practical effects at the time. From around 1700 Quaker opposition to slavery gradually increased, though this still had little or no effect on Pennsylvania’s laws, which allowed for slavery until after the American Revolution.
1688-89 English Glorious Revolution (Dec. – Feb.): James II deposed & replaced by William and Mary. English Bill of Rights.
1689 Dominion of New England overthrown, and then abolished. On news of the revolution in England, in April Americans revolted against New England Governor Andros, who was jailed in Boston. In July, the English government ordered Andros to be returned to England to stand trial.
1691 Representative government restored to the former Dominion of New England colonies, but now Massachusetts’ new royal charter makes it a royal colony, whose government includes a royal governor and a governor’s council.
1691 New Hampshire founded as a separate royal colony (it was formerly part of MA), marking the founding of the twelfth of the colonies that later became the original thirteen U.S. states.
1692 Salem Witch Trials. In May, witchcraft suspects in Salem, Massachusetts, were arrested and imprisoned. By September a special court set up by the governor of Massachusetts had accused 150 people, 20 of which, including 14 women, were executed. By October, the hysteria subsided, remaining prisoners were released, and the special court was dissolved.
1696 Navigation Act: required colonial trade to be done exclusively via English built ships. The Act also expanded the powers of Vice Admiralty courts and colonial custom commissioners, including rights of forcible entry, and required the posting of bonds on certain goods.
1696 Board of Trade created from the former Lords of Trade committee, to become a distinct office, overseen by the Privy Council. A small group of eight commissioners that served as an advisory body to the king’s Privy Council, this was the only office in the British government specifically charged with colonial policy. Its recommendations had to be approved by the king and Parliament, but the advice of the government’s only full-time colonial experts was often taken very seriously.
1699 Woolens Act passed by Parliament to protect British wool industry by forbidding the export of wool or woolen products from Ireland and the American colonies.
1705 Naval Stores Act passed by Parliament to encourage the import from America into Britain of strategic shipbuilding material, including pine tar and resin, for which bounties were offered. The Act also reserved to the crown large pine trees in unenclosed land.
1732-3 Georgia founded as a proprietorial colony by a grant from King George II to James Oglethorpe and a group of trustees, who originally hoped to provide land for settlement by England’s “worthy” poor, so that fewer of them would fall into debt and be sent to debtors’ prisons. Initial land grants were to be capped at 50 acres, and at first slavery was prohibited. But both of these policies were soon dropped as impractical, and in 1752 Georgia was made a royal colony. Georgia was the thirteenth and last of the colonies that later became one of the original U.S. states.
1732 Hat Act passed by Parliament to protect British hat industry by prohibiting the export of hats from the American colonies.
1733 Molasses Act passed by Parliament to protect sugar producers in the British Caribbean. It taxed imports to the mainland American colonies of molasses (six pence per gallon), rum (nine pence per gallon), and sugar (five shillings per hundred pounds) from non-British sources (mainly in the French, Dutch, & Spanish Caribbean). It was later replaced by the Sugar Act of 1764.
1734-35 Zenger Trial set a precedent favoring freedom of the press. From its start in 1733, John Zenger’s New York City newspaper, the New York Weekly Journal, published much criticism of New York’s royal Governor William Cosby. In late 1734 Cosby had Zenger arrested, but a grand jury refused to indict him. New York state’s attorney general then charged Zenger with seditious libel, but in the criminal trial the jury defied the judge’s instructions by finding Zenger not guilty. At this time and for long afterwards freedom of the press in Anglo-American law meant only that the government could not impose any “prior restraint” on a publication (i.e., censorship). But after their publication, any statements about government officials deemed to be dangerously offensive or rebellious, whether true or not, could still be prosecuted as criminal libel. Zenger’s lawyers persuaded the jury that the Weekly Journal’s criticisms of Cosby were true, and that truthful criticism of public officials was not libelous. Although in legal theory and statute law the more limited earlier approach to freedom of the press (“no prior restraint”) persisted, in practice Zenger’s famously successful defense made it much harder to prosecute political speech as criminal libel.
1740

 

 

 

 

1747

 Naturalization Act for the American Colonies passed by Parliament. In order to facilitate the growing foreign (non-British) immigration to the American colonies, and in order to replace the generous but diverse terms by which the American colonies had allowed foreigners to be naturalized, this act established new, uniform procedures for naturalization in the colonies. Aliens seeking to become British subjects had to reside in any of the American colonies for seven years, take an oath of allegiance to the king, and provide a certificate witnessed by two people that they were observant Protestants (exceptions were made for Quakers and Jews, but not for Catholics). Colonies then sent lists of the people naturalized in this way to the royal government’s Board of Trade. See also the law of 1761 that adjusted the residency requirement for veterans and the royal order to colonial governors of 1773.

 

Knowles Riot and Samuel Adams’s Response. For three days a mob took over much of Boston in response to a “press gang” that the British commander Commodore Knowles had used to forcibly conscript 46 men, in order to man his ships for the royal navy. The mob captured several British officers and held them hostage. After the Massachusetts governor intervened, the Boston men were released in exchange for the British officers. Samuel Adams made his political debut by publishing an anonymous pamphlet that criticized the practice of naval impressment and argued that people had a right to resist unjust authority.
1750 Iron Act passed by Parliament to protect the English Iron industry, by encouraging the export of pig iron (raw iron) from the American colonies, but limiting the export from the colonies of finished iron and steel products by prohibiting the building of any new finishing mills.
1754 Albany Conference: at the British government’s suggestion, delegates from the seven most northern colonies met for three weeks in Albany, NY, to discuss an alliance with Native Americans (especially the Mohawk and Iroquois tribes) against the French. The delegates approved Benjamin Franklin’s “Albany Plan,” which would have created a confederation of 11 colonies (Delaware was still part of Pennsylvania and Georgia was still being settled), with a president appointed by the British crown, with responsibility over relations with Native Americans. But the colonial assemblies, unwilling to cede any of their powers, rejected the plan. Nonetheless, this was the first formal meeting of delegates from most of the colonies. It may have provided a model for the first Revolutionary-era meeting, the Stamp Act Congress of 1765. Similarly, Franklin’s Albany Plan resembles in some ways the Articles of Confederation of 1777, which created the first formally independent U.S. government.
1754-1763 French and Indian War: this war began because of conflicting claims to land in the Ohio River valley. After suffering many defeats early in the war, British and Americans forces rallied to conquer not only the disputed territories but also all the areas of French settlement (known as Quebec). Anglo-American success owed much to new strategies introduced by William Pitt, a leading British politician (formally, Britain’s Secretary of State for the Southern Department, 1757-61). Pitt sent more troops and otherwise put more effort into the North American war than previous leaders had done. He also elicited more cooperation from the colonists by putting them in charge of recruitment and supplies and paying those who served (instead of trying to get the colonial governments to pay them). As a result of the war, Britain became the sole European power with claims over everything east of the Mississippi River. Britain also decided that for the first time it would leave a large body of its troops (about 10,000) in mainland North America, though at first they were stationed mainly along the western frontiers.
1761 Naturalization made easier for foreign soldiers. The British Parliament amended the naturalization law of 1740 by allowing aliens who had fought in British armies in America to become naturalized British subjects after only two years of service (rather than seven years of residency). The other requirements of the 1740 law remained in effect.
1763, Feb. 10 Treaty of Paris ended the French and Indian War. France ceded to Britain all its mainland North American territories, except New Orleans (though in fact in 1762 France had provisionally ceded New Orleans to Spain by the Treaty of Fontainebleau, as part of an effort to ally with Spain against Britain; this treaty was made in secret, but became known in 1764). Famously, France traded one Caribbean sugar-producing island, Guadeloupe, for its claims to Canada, which the British had conquered in the war (also, Guadeloupe brought in more revenue for France!). Britain gained all territory east of the Mississippi River. Spain kept territory west of the Mississippi, but exchanged the Gulf Coast territories known as East and West Florida for the return of Cuba. Left in debt from war, Great Britain looked to colonies for revenue.
1763, Oct. 7 Proclamation of 1763: to ease tensions with Native Americans, George III prohibited English settlement west of the Appalachian Mountains. This was resented by American settlers.

 

 

B. The Revolutionary Era to 1776

 

1764, April Sugar Act (or American Plantations Duties Act) passed by Parliament to finance the defense of the colonies. This act amended the Molasses Act of 1733, which had never been effectively enforced and was about to expire. The Sugar Act succeeded in its goal of increasing the collection of taxes on imports, until it was repealed in 1766. The most important product affected was molasses from non-British sources (mainly the French Caribbean), on which the tax was actually decreased from six pence per gallon to three. But with better enforcement molasses became more expensive for Americans, which hurt the rum industry. The act also set duties on many other imported products, most of which were luxuries, including refined sugar, coffee, wines, silks and other textiles, and indigo (a dye). The Act established a Vice-Admiralty Court in Halifax, Nova Scotia, to hear smuggling cases without juries. These measures were unpopular in the colonies, but protests focused mostly on their economic impact and were largely confined to the merchants of Boston, New York, and Rhode Island.
1765, March Stamp Act passed by Parliament to finance the defense of the colonies. To go into effect Nov. 1, this law required that most printed documents, including such legal documents as deeds, wills, and licenses, as well as newspapers and pamphlets, use watermarked, or ‘stamped’ paper, which owed the new tax. The tax itself was relatively light, but it sparked much more protest than the taxes on foreign trade mandated by the Sugar Act, because it was considered to be a ‘direct’ tax on domestic economic activities. The stamp tax also affected a much broader range of politically active people, including merchants, lawyers, tavern owners, and printers.
1765, March Quartering Act passed by Parliament, requiring Americans to house British troops and supply them with food, or to pay for supplies to British garrisons.
1765, May Virginia Resolutions opposing the Stamp Act presented by Patrick Henry to the Virginia House of Burgesses, which claim that only the Virginia assembly can legally tax Virginia residents.
1765, July The Sons of Liberty, an informal movement of those opposed to the Stamp Act, began to make their appearance through pamphlets, broadsides (posters), and, in some cases, the intimidation of stamp agents and American merchants (to block import of British goods). Collection of the stamp tax virtually stopped. The Daughters of Liberty emerged about the same time; they focused on encouraging the domestic production of clothing and other products, in order to support the boycott of imported goods that owed the new duties.
1765, Oct. Stamp Act Congress met in New York City, with representatives from nine of the colonies. The Congress sent a resolution to King George III and the English Parliament, asserting that only colonial legislatures can tax colonial residents, and asking for the repeal of the Stamp Act and the Acts of 1764.
1766, March Stamp Act repealed and Sugar Act repealed and replaced by Parliament. The new law that replaced the Sugar Act (the Revenue Act of 1766) reduced the tax on imports of molasses to one penny per gallon, the same whether it was British or foreign molasses. This tax was generally accepted and paid, even though smuggling also continued.
1766, March Declaratory Act passed by Parliament, at the same time as it repealed the Stamp Act and modified the Sugar Act. This act states that the British government has the power to legislate for the American colonies.
1767, June Townshend Revenue Acts passed by Parliament. In order to avoid the direct or internal taxes that colonists had so strongly opposed in the form of the Stamp Act, Charles Townshend, Chancellor of the Exchequer, sought to raise revenues for administering the colonies by creating a new series of taxes on goods that were imported into the colonies, such as paper, tea, glass, lead, and paints. Technically these revenues were no longer earmarked for the payment of British troops, but rather for the salaries of colonial governors and judges, over whom Townshend hoped to gain more control. But Townshend and other British leaders did not understand that the colonists still objected to taxes on trade when these were explicitly meant to raise revenues from the colonies. In order to improve tax collection, other Townshend acts established a board of customs commissioners in Boston and created three new Vice Admiralty courts in Boston, Philadelphia, and Charlestown, SC.
1767, June-July New York Restraining Act passed by Parliament. Because the New York Assembly refused to provide supplies as required by the Quartering Act of 1765, this act decreed that, if supplies were still not provided by October 1, 1767, then the governor was prohibited from approving or signing any bills the legislature might produce, and any laws it might try to pass would be null and void. This was the most extreme measure taken by Parliament before 1774, but it was not enforced for long, because within two years a compromise was worked out.
1768, Feb. Samuel Adams of Boston’s circular letter opposing taxation without representation is passed by the Massachusetts Assembly, and is then sent to other colonies, calling for them to unite against the British government, including through a boycott of British imports.
1768-9 Protests Spread: several colonial assemblies adopted Samuel Adams’ letter, but then some were dissolved by the royal governors, as had already been done in New York in 1767. A new series of such dissolutions began with Massachusetts in July, 1768. By August, merchants in Boston and New York agreed to boycott British goods. In September, 1768, two regiments (a few thousand troops) of British infantry set up permanent residence in Boston to keep order. By March, 1769, Philadelphia merchants joined the boycott, and in May George Mason and George Washington presented the Virginia Resolves opposing taxation without representation to the House of Burgesses, which was then dissolved by the governor.
1770, March Boston Massacre: British soldiers fired into a crowd that had been harassing them, killing five. The royal governor, Thomas Hutchinson, withdrew British troops to nearby harbor islands.
1770, April Townshend Acts repealed by Parliament. All duties on imports into the colonies were eliminated except for tea. Also, the Quartering Act was not renewed. A period of relative quiet ensued (1770-73), and during this time the tea tax was generally paid.
1772, May Somerset v. Stewart case set a precedent against slavery in Britain. James Somerset had been purchased as a slave in Boston by Charles Stewart, a customs official there, but he escaped after having been brought to England. He was recaptured, but then abolitionists sued Stewart for Somerset’s release through a writ of habeas corpus. Lord Mansfield, Chief Justice of the King’s Bench, ruled that slaves could not be forcibly removed from England, a narrow judgment that was interpreted much more broadly as saying that slavery could not exist in England. Mansfield’s decision also became famous for the recognition that in England neither statutes nor custom supported the practice of slavery: “The state of slavery is…so odious, that nothing can be suffered to support it, but positive law [i.e., statutes].”
1772, June Gaspée Affair: A British customs schooner, the Gaspée, ran aground off Rhode Island. Residents of Providence removed the crew and burned the ship. In September, a 500 pound reward was offered by the English Crown for the capture of those colonists, who would then be sent to England for trial. This announcement upset many Americans, and no culprits were ever identified.
1772-3 Committees of Correspondence, which had operated off and on since the Stamp Act crisis, were set up more permanently in Boston and then several other colonies. These committees led the patriot efforts to organize people against British policies, and were specifically tasked with communications among the colonies. As colonial assemblies were dissolved by royal governors, they became a kind of ‘shadow government.’ Boston’s committee was headed by Samuel Adams, while Virginia’s included Thomas Jefferson and Patrick Henry.
1773, May Tea Act passed by Parliament to support the struggling British East India Company and to better compete with the inferior tea smuggled into the colonies. It allowed the East India Company to export its tea duty-free from Britain to the colonies, so that it would be cheaper than smuggled tea even with the import duty of three pence per pound that colonists had to pay (the import duty itself was already in effect; it was retained from the Townshend Revenue Act of 1767, the rest of which had been eliminated in 1770). If colonists bought the Company tea, they would be effectively consenting to the import duty. The Sons of Liberty and others had been trying to boycott British tea imports precisely in order to reject the validity of such import duties.
1773, Nov. 19 Naturalization acts by colonial assembles banned. By an ‘order-in-council’ (a royal order issued by the king’s Privy Council), the British royal government prohibited colonial governors from assenting to acts of naturalization passed by the colonial assemblies, effectively ending this practice. In 1740 Parliament had created a new procedure for naturalizing aliens in the colonies (see above), partly in order to replace the practice whereby colonial assemblies used their own authority to do so. But the law of 1740 did not prohibit this latter practice, which continued even as thousands of immigrants took advantage of the new procedures provided by Parliament. This royal order finally ended the colonies’ own, alternative methods of naturalization, which in the political climate of late 1773 angered many colonial leaders.
1773, Dec. 16 Boston Tea Party: colonial activists, some disguised as Mohawk Indians, boarded three East India Company ships and dumped about three hundred boxes of tea into the harbor.
1774, March-June Coercive Acts (called Intolerable Acts by Americans) passed by Parliament in response to the rebellion in Massachusetts. This was the collective name given to the four acts of 1774 listed below.
1774, March 25 Boston Port Act passed by Parliament, closing the port of Boston until damages from the Tea Party were paid.
1774, May 13 General Thomas Gage, commander of British colonial military forces and royal Governor of Massachusetts, arrived in Boston. In June, under the authority of the Massachusetts Government Act of May 20, he dissolved the Massachusetts Assembly and officially became the colony’s military ruler. In September he augmented his forces in Boston, which grew to four regiments (or about 4000) of British troops.
1774, May 20 Massachusetts Government Act passed by Parliament. It tried to make an example of Massachusetts by effectively ending its self-government; power was centralized in the hands of the governor, who could appoint most officials, authorize town meetings, etc.
1774, May 20 Administration of Justice Act passed by Parliament. It allowed for any royal officials who were accused of murder or any other capital crime in the course of carrying out their duties in Massachusetts to be tried in another colony or in Britain.
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1774, June 2 Quartering Act passed by Parliament, amending the Quartering Act of 1765 by allowing royal governors to house troops in any available buildings if a colony did not provide for sufficient housing (though applicable to all the colonies, this act was also passed in reaction to the Boston rebellion)
1774, June 22 Quebec Act passed by Parliament to reorganize Quebec’s government and territory. Though for Parliament this act was not part of the Coercive acts and was not aimed at Massachusetts or any other eastern colony, American patriot leaders considered it to be similar in intent. It based Quebec’s government on a royally-appointed governor and council, without provision for a locally-elected assembly, and it permitted the use of French law in civil matters. It allowed for the free exercise of Catholicism and removed references to Protestant doctrine from the oath required of government officials. Finally, it expanded Quebec’s territory to include most of Ontario and the ‘Ohio Country,’ which included the later territories of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, and Wisconsin. American patriots saw the governmental provisions of the act as a model for what Britain intended for their own colonies, and they resented both the allowances made for Catholicism and the transfer of territory to Quebec.
1774, Sept.-Oct. First Continental Congress assembled in Philadelphia with 56 delegates, representing every colony except Georgia. The delegates were divided between moderates (led by John Dickinson among others) and radicals (led by the cousins Samuel and John Adams among others), with the moderates ultimately prevailing. The Congress protested against the Coercive Acts, asserted the colonists’ rights to self-rule and “life, liberty and property,” and agreed to a boycott of British imports. But it also petitioned the king for reconciliation.
1775, April Battles of Lexington and Concord, MA: first engagement of the Revolutionary War. About 1000 British troops left Boston to seize a cache of arms in Concord, but, warned by Paul Revere and other Sons of Liberty, the patriot militia, known as the Minutemen, fought back, driving the troops back to Boston, and resulting in about 50 patriot and 100 British killed.
1775, May – 1781 Second Continental Congress began meeting, first in Philadelphia. This Congress, though never formally established as a government for the U.S., was effectively the first U.S. government. It would continue to meet in various places until 1781, when it was replaced by the Confederation Congress (1781-89). In June, 1775, the Congress created a Continental Army out of the militia units around Boston, and appointed George Washington as its commanding general.
1775, June Battle of Bunker Hill, Boston. British forces retook two strategic hills near Boston from patriots, but suffered high casualties, including more than 200 killed.
1775, July Olive Branch Petition, whose lead author was John Dickinson, was sent by Congress to King George III.
1775, Dec. 22 Prohibitory Act, or the ‘American Prohibitory Act,’ passed by the British Parliament. In an attempt to quell the rebellion, this act prohibited all colonial shipping and maritime trade, instituting a blockade of American ports, and declared that ships taken in violation of the blockade would be treated the same as ships taken from enemies.
1776, Jan. Common Sense published by Thomas Paine in Philadelphia. This short book quickly becomes a colonial bestseller. It is often credited with persuading more Americans of the need for breaking away from Britain.
1776, Jan.-Sept. ‘Hessian’ soldiers: from Jan., 1776, a number of German states began making agreements with the British government to supply contingents of mercenary soldiers to fight against the American rebels. The German state of Hesse supplied many of these troops, so Americans often called all German mercenaries ‘Hessians.’ By the late spring American opinion was enflamed by news that Britain was sending such contingents to America; by July some of them had arrived.
1776, July 4 Declaration of Independence issued by Continental Congress

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American Legal History to the 1860s Copyright © 2020 by Richard Keyser. All Rights Reserved.

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