Patriot Resistance on the Path to Revolution

Hear from Dr Megan King as she recounts the decade leading up to the American War of Independence, as ideological resistance became the first battleground.

Between the years 1764 and 1774, North American colonists defensively mobilised against imperial authority. In urban hubs like Boston, even ordinary residents were employing a variety of non-violent conventions to promote American independence. Yet popular narratives of the pre-Revolutionary era focus on accounts of physical violence, vandalism and material destruction. This ignores the formal resolves, petitions and everyday acts of non-cooperation that colonial activists used during a decade of peaceable resistance that preceded the Battles of Lexington and Concord (1775).

Sporadic incidents of property damage and physical abuse have been well documented in the historiography. But by making 'terror' the focal point of American resistance, we overlook important non-violent nuances that challenge preconceptions about America’s violent origins.

These examples of non-violent civil resistance crystallised the ideological grounds of American dissent across different communities, and it demonstrates the ways in which active and intentional non-violent resistance fortified patriot rhetoric, enabled the development of new mobilising structures, and ultimately helped colonists see themselves as distinctly American.

About the speaker

Dr Megan King is an early career researcher specialising in practices of civil resistance in Revolutionary America. Megan is the project coordinator for the Age of Revolution Educational Legacy Project, which is graciously supported by Waterloo200 and based at the University of Kent. She also serves as a manager at Benjamin Franklin House.