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During class on Monday, we learned about the Proclamation of 1763 and its explicit prohibition of colonial settlement past the Appalachian Mountains. Today’s assigned readings (a series of primary source documents) underline the rationale behind this prohibition. Interfering with American Indian affairs and allowing non-consensual appropriation of their land was simply not conducive to trade. Colonists migrating westward beyond the ‘backcountry’ (a spatial term explored in James Merrell’s Second Thoughts) created administrative problems for the British. The British government preferred to conduct formal diplomatic proceedings with Native American assemblies to ‘legitimize’ the seizure of their land (although the British themselves acknowledged the treaties they produced were largely unfair and lopsided). This is a consistent theme in Atlantic history and reminiscent of the Spanish treatment of Indians: they, too, made token efforts to express concern over Native well-being with ineffectual legal documents and vapid declarations (Egerton et al., 152).
Naturally, the Proclamation of 1763 translated to the tumultuous revolutionary milieu of 1770s colonial America. Colonists were upset at being forbidden to settle the lucrative Ohio River Valley, and the added burden of taxation to finance the cost of maintaining an army further exacerbated tensions. As my classmate Andre Escalante states in his own blog post, “leading up to the American Revolution, cultural distinctions between the British and colonists deepened.” As colonists endured more and more tax burdens, they naturally began to foster a collective identity and ferment revolutionary ideals (many of these ideals being explored in Jefferson’s letter to Lafayette). These developments culminated in the Boston Massacre, depicted in a print by Paul Revere. His print purposefully portrays the British soldiers who fired upon a Bostonian crowd as aggressors, although the truth is, the colonists attacked first. As the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History states, Paul Revere’s print “was probably the most effective piece of propaganda in American history.” Atlantic history is rife with exploitation and injustices, so it is quite ironic how a rallying point behind “the first big breakaway from an imperial power” in the Atlantic is a propagandist spin of a provocation by revolutionaries.