Why the Colonists came Together | Julie Silverbrook | BRI’s Constitutional Conversations

0:00 so with all that diversity and with among the colonists what would you say were the factors that best contributed to them coming together for the Constitutional Congress yeah so I one thing to say is although they were diverse and that they settled here for different reasons there was religious variation and economic and variation and

0:21 differences in their social structures they’re all European of some variety so that’s important to keep in mind when they start to really unite the incentives are first and foremost economic right so they understand they are each exploiting various resources that are in their colonial region i and

0:42 that the best and most efficient way to exploit the various strengths of the different regions is to allow for specialization within the regional colonies and so they start trading together working together to you know manufacture off of things that are harvested in the middle colonies or the

1:02 south they’re using the ships that are being built in New England so they have an economic reason to start working together in a way and gain familiarity with these colonies going sort of up and down the eastern seaboard of the United States then some things happen with England right so first is that during

1:25 the early colonial period England’s not super involved in the governance of the colonies because of this the colonists start getting used to this idea of self-government I in cases where either the company which is typically a British company I therefore enrolled by British law starts to try to

1:45 assert themselves over the colonists the colonists push back I in 1619 the Virginia company which is based in London actually allows for the first time for Virginians to have a say in the governance of the Virginia colonies and so what ends up happening is I they

2:08 continue to assert themselves and they say your pay colonial governor is going to be based on our votes so you better do the things that we want or we’re out of here right and this basically takes off in the other colonies this idea of having representation having that tied to

2:28 decisions over taxation and pay etc so there tends to be this common seed of self-governance that’s spreading throughout the colonies this is during what is known as a period of salutary neglect British aren’t really all that involved any time the British tried to get a little bit more involved the colonists kind of bulk at that after the

2:50 French and Indian War the British decide well it’s time to you know really kind of figure out what we want to do with these American colonies and so they’d become much more involved largely because they need to pay for the French and Indian War so they start to impose some tariffs on the colonists set some

3:12 non importation laws in place and the colonists collectively really bulk at this and when once you have the coercive acts in place where you actually have British soldiers I you know staying in being quartered in the homes involuntarily quartered in the homes of

3:33 American colonists there starts to be a sense that I we need to really share our grievances with Britain but still at this point we’re not at that revolutionary moment so there’s kind of three groups of people at this moment in time right so they’re people who are like I really would like to stay British we are British we have the rights of

3:54 Englishmen all of those sorts of things but I’d like the king to kind of back off and go back to the way things were there are other people like Sam and John Adams who are like no and Thomas Paine no we need to totally rebel and have independence and there are other people

4:14 who just don’t have a problem with what the British are doing this is totally rational they pay they defended us in this war we should pay right and so as things start to heat up I so you have the Boston Massacre you have some other actions that make news

4:35 coverage across the colonies there is a decision to start thinking about talking with each other about a common defense and that’s why the first content continental congress is called