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A Hessian on the Revolution

Part in preparation for next week's Independence Day festivities, partly as an attempt to drive out the noise of a nearby table of enthusiastic Esperantists, I've typed up Johann Conrad Döhla's account of the causes of the Revolution. Döhla was a Hessian private who took extensive field notes of his experience and elaborated on them upon his return to Anspach-Bayreuth. Click more to see his account.

Already in the year 1773 the quarrel broke out between America and England. England, whose Parliament has to be understood, wanted the citizens and inhabitants of the thirteen colonies or provinces of North America , which were under the protection and direction of England up to this time, to pay more taxes and help bear the cost of government. To this end, England sent them tea, which they were to buy at a very high price, in order to get more use and income from the land. But, since the Americans raised enough of the best tea, which the inhabitants had in abundance, they objected to the idea of accepting the tea and sent a written petition to the King and Parliament in order to be spared buying this tea. However, they also sent the ship with the tea, and enough money to cover the value of the tea, back to England, where it was unloaded.

This upset the Parliament in England quite a bit, so that it immediately sent other ships loaded with tea to America, especially to Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and Charleston, in South Carolina, with the shapest orders and printed instructions in all four ships that they should accept this tea at once or, failing this, they should be prepared to be held as disobedient insurrectionists and rebels and actual enemies in the English view, and drawn into war on land and sea, and brought under a heavy yoke. Many of the rights and privileges that they had had from England for a long time were taken away, and they were put under new restrictions. But the Americans allowed this to be spoken into the wind, and secured help from France, which already some years earlier had put a flea in the ear that they would be generously supported. Spain also encouraged them in order to annoy England. As a result, things went so far that the Bostonians, or New Englanders, entered the port of Boston and burned the English ship with its tea, and thereby openly rebelled against England. The other tea ships were not accepted either, but again sent back. These ships arrived in November and December 1773.

Thus the quarrel in America continued, and the war had its beginnings. On 13 May 1774, Lieutenant General Thomas Gage arrived in Boston with some ships and troops from England to straighten out hte situation with the Americans and on the orders of King and Parliament, to investigate the burning of the tea ship. However, as he could straighten out very little with the unruly Americans, the port of Boston was closed on 1 June 1774 on orders of Parliament, and no American ship was allowed to enter or leave this port.

On 5 September 1774 the first meeting of the American Congress took place in the capital at Philadelphia. The Congress consisted of men, two or three from each province, who were sent as representatives of the colonies. The President thereof was Hancock. The first belligerent act was initiated by the English in America at Lexington in North Carolina on 19 April 1775, when a number English soldiers plundered some Americans, and as the inhabitants resisted, some of them were killed and wounded.