The creation of this first British empire brought its own vexations. Weighted with war debts, the treasury spent half of the government’s annual tax revenue on interest payments. It seemed only fair to the King and his government that colonists should help shoulder the burden; a typical American, by Treasury Board calculations, paid no more than sixpence a year in Crown taxes—one-50th of the average Englishman’s payment—even as Americans benefited from the eradication of the French and Spanish threats and from the navy’s protection of North American trade.
Yet Americans bridled at all attempts by Parliament to extract further revenue from them without the approval of their own provincial assemblies. For generations, a British policy of “salutary neglect” had left colonists accustomed to self-sufficient autonomy. They also resented British prohibitions against making hats, woolens, and other goods that might compete with manufacturers in the mother country. The deployment of British army regiments in America to keep white colonists from encroaching on Native lands to the west further aggrieved men such as George Washington and Benjamin Franklin, who saw opportunity and wealth just over the horizon. Almost imperceptibly, a quarrel over taxes and filial duty metastasized into a struggle over sovereignty.
While rescinding earlier tax measures, including the Stamp Act, Parliament, with the King’s agreement, asserted its own fiscal authority by keeping a small residual tax on tea. Whooping insurrectionists, said to be “dressed in the Indian manner,” responded by dumping 45 tons of British tea into Boston Harbor in December 1773. The King’s heart hardened. Spurning pleas for moderation, he denounced “a dangerous spirit of resistance” among “my deluded subjects” in America, whom he likened to froward children. This resistance to Crown authority, with its sulfurous whiff of republicanism, threatened not only to undermine Parliament’s authority but also to bring moral disorder and the collapse of European hegemony in the New World. “Blows must decide,” George wrote of the colonists in November 1774, “whether they are to be subject to this country or independent.” He advocated “the most coercive measures.”