Glorious Revolution in America

Glorious Revolution in America. Political principle and self‐interest are the keys to understanding the American colonial rebellions of 1689. British imperial policy stiffened after the restoration of the monarchy in 1660. The Navigation Acts established a monopoly of the empire's commerce in England's favor. Admiralty courts and the Royal Navy with enlarged powers bore down on offenders. The rules of empire narrowed political freedom. New England, including New York and New Jersey, were consolidated into the Dominion of New England under a single governor, Sir Edmund Andros, vacating charters and eliminating representative assemblies. Marylanders struggled under a Catholic proprietary government that discriminated against the Protestant majority. The bishop of London, Henry Compton, encouraged Anglican churches even in dissenting colonies such as Massachusetts. The accession of James II in 1685 increased the threat of Catholicism, real and imagined. Between 1660 and 1689, the colonists’ economy, governments, and religion all experienced more stringent control from London.

When news of the accession of William III and Queen Mary to the British throne in 1689—the so‐called Glorious Revolution—reached America, it was welcomed as a release from James's arbitrary power, not just in England, but in the empire as well. The people of Massachusetts, hoping to reinstate their original charter, imprisoned Governor Andros and his close supporters. Rhode Island and Connecticut followed suit. In New York, Jacob Leisler, a merchant of German origin, led a rebellious group that brought down James's local government. Leisler's rebels carried on precariously under strong protest, hoping the new king would accept their rebellion. Led by John Coode, Maryland Protestants toppled the Catholic proprietary and begged King William to absorb Maryland as a royal colony. Throughout, these rebellions were both a struggle for equal rights and violent attempts to exploit England's constitutional and religious crisis for colonial purposes.

The success of the rebellions hung on skillful negotiation with the Crown. The agent, Increase Mather, Massachusetts's foremost Puritan, extracted a new charter guaranteeing many, but not all, of the colony's earlier privileges. Massachusetts became a royal colony but lacked protection against further royal or imperial regulation as well as the religious underpinnings of its original charter. Jacob Leisler's regime in New York was thwarted by a strong royalist faction that bested the colony's weak negotiators in London. When Leisler hesitated to recognize a new royal governor appointed by William III, he and his deputy were tried and hanged as traitors. Maryland's effort to shed the Catholic proprietor succeeded, although without the guarantees of Englishmen's rights the colony sought. As in New York, London repeatedly vetoed the attempts of Maryland's new assembly to attain such rights by legislation.

The Glorious Revolution in America laid bare two distinct interpretations of empire that had emerged after the Restoration. Despite differences among the colonies, they had all assumed the rights of Englishmen overseas were equal to the rights of those in England. The Glorious Revolution taught them differently: From London's perspective, colonies in America existed for the benefit of the realm; they were the king's dominions and would be dealt with accordingly. Despite the lesson of 1689, however, the American colonists in the early eighteenth century generally continued to assume equality of rights. When these assumptions were again challenged by the Crown and Parliament in the 1760s and 1770s, independence resulted.
See also Colonial Era; Mather, Increase and Cotton; Revolution and Constitution, Era of.

Bibliography

M.G. Hall, L.H. Leder, and M.G. Kammen, eds., The Glorious Revolution in America: Documents on the Colonial Crisis of 1689, 1964.
David S. Lovejoy , The Glorious Revolution in America, 1972; 2d ed., 1987.
Jack M. Sosin , English America and the Revolution of 1688, 1982.

David S. Lovejoy