The Reign Of King George III And How It Led to America

In the story of America's birth, King George III is portrayed as the enemy, a hostile monarch who attempted a stranglehold on fledgling colonies yearning for free breathing. But what was really happening to King George? Sure, he was a tyrant given to mania attacks that literally left him foaming at the mouth, but his ego eventually created the United States, so if nothing else, he deserves thanks for it. .

George's War

When George III took the crown in 1760, he was initially a welcome presence on the throne. The Seven Years' War was coming to an end, and the end of the war was always a thorny situation for the impending emperor, but George managed to secure a peace agreement to end the war and return France to mainland North America. All areas were sidelined. , Pushing France out of North America, he argued, ensured that the growing colonies would have no backup if they decided to commit something like a rebellion. He had quite a war, thank you.

Unpopular With Colonists

In 1765, Britain's Parliament passed the Stamp Act, imposing a tax on all paper and documents purchased by British colonies in America. Basically, if the colonists wanted to use any type of legal paper, they would have to use this specially stamped document. It cost more money than the colonists threw in, with trying to settle a new land and all, and that's because Britain was broken. After the end of the Seven Years' War, the King and Parliament decided to rebuild their finances by creating new taxes and raising the old ones, and the Stamp Act specifically paid for soldiers who defended the peace between Native Americans and colonists. was built for. Nevertheless, the colonists hated the Stamp Act, and when it was announced that anyone who refused to pay the tax would be tried and convicted without a jury in the vice-admiralty courts, they rebelled. Colonial resistance to the tax was so bitter that Parliament repealed the act the following year without formally establishing it. He then promptly passed the Townsend Act of 1767, which taxed not only paper but everything from paint to glass to tea.

Boston Tea Party

The colonists weren't wild about implementing all these new taxes without their input, and being of British origin, tea was really the last straw. On December 16, 1773, colonists felicitated in Boston Harbor and threw 342 chests of tea overboard, an act that was seen as one of the most important moments of the American Revolution.

George did not like that all that tea was wasted, especially because Britain was desperate for cash. To put the colonists in their place, he closed Boston Harbor until the destroyed tea was paid for, declared martial law in Massachusetts, and ordered the colonists to march on troops to their homes. Gave.

Resistance Of The Rebels

King George did everything he could to break up the colonists and make them realize the cost of going to war with a world leader. Apart from all the concrete ways he made them feel his anger, he continued to refer to the revolutionaries as his subjects because he knew it was on his nerves. According to Victorian writer George Trevelyan, "plaguing the rebels, anxious and wanting to keep the poor," he promised "never to accept the independence of the Americans and to prolong the indefinitely long period of a war, who had promised to be eternal". Until that day, by a natural and inevitable process, discontent and despair were transformed into repentance and repentance."

King George's Sour Grapes

When the Declaration of Independence was signed on July 4, 1776, George was suspiciously silent on the matter. It was revealed that he was busy raising funds and pushing the military to eliminate the colonies, but on October 31, he finally shot back at the colonists in a speech in Parliament. In his address, King dismissed the revolutionaries as nothing more than power-hungry, declaring that "the spirit of the courageous and desperate leaders, whose aim has always been domination and power, is that they Now openly renounced all allegiance to the Crown and all political ties with this country."

Even though George wanted nothing to do with the colonists after the war, his commander-in-chief of British land forces in the colonies, William Howe, hoped that he could persuade them to rejoin the British Empire. When that did not work, the war continued for the next four years.

Final Step: Acceptance

The final three years of the Revolutionary War were costly on either side of the war, but despite the superiority of the British forces, colonial troops led by George Washington and his French allies overcame their hardships, besieging the British at the Battle of Yorktown. , and ended the American campaign of British forces. After the Treaty of Paris in 1783, the king finally accepted his fate and agreed to treat the Americans equally after giving him the best on the battlefield. In 1785, he told John Adams:

I wish, sir, you believe, and that it should be understood in America that I have done nothing in the contest of late, but that which I have regarded as essentially obliged to my duty to my people. I'll be very clear with you, I was the last person to consent to the separation; But alienation has been, and has become inevitable, I have always said, as I say now, that I will be the first to meet the friendship of the United States as an independent power.