king george III?

Question

imagine King George III has accepted the Olive Branch Petition and tried a diplomatic resolution with the Second continental Congress. Do you think colonists would still have pressed for independence? why or why not?

Answer 1

Even if King George III had accepted it, my suspicion is that the colonists were racing down a hill towards the revolution and they had no brakes on their cart. They would just have demanded more and more and more. One of the issues that is not often discussed is that the colonists owed tremendous amounts of money to the British and the only way they could effectively get out from under this debt was to break away. In addition, after the First Great Awakening the colonists had begun to see themselves as a country and not as 13 separate colonies. There was no stopping the momentum that was building. Patrick Henry would have found some other issue to scream "Give me liberty or give me death" about ... of course he didn't say that to or about the slaves that he owned.

Answer 2

George III (George William Frederick; 4 June 1738 – 29 January 1820) was King of Great Britain and King of Ireland from 25 October 1760 until 1 January 1801, and thereafter United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland until his death. He was concurrently Duke of Brunswick-Lüneburg, and thus Elector (and later King) of Hanover. The Electorate became the Kingdom of Hanover on 12 October 1814. He was the third British monarch of the House of Hanover, and the first to be born in Britain and speak English as his first language. In fact, he never visited Germany.

It was during George III's reign that Great Britain lost many of its colonies in North America in the wake of the American Revolution. These colonies would eventually become the United States. Also during his reign the realms of Great Britain and Ireland were joined together to form the United Kingdom.

Later in his reign George III suffered from recurrent and, eventually, permanent mental illness. This baffled medical science at the time, although it is now generally thought that he suffered from the blood disease porphyria. Recently, owing to studies showing high levels of the poison arsenic in King George's hair, arsenic is also thought to be a possible cause of King George's insanity and health problems. After a final relapse in 1810, George's eldest son, George, Prince of Wales ruled as Prince Regent. Upon George's death, the Prince of Wales succeeded his father as George IV.
The rest of the 1700s were marked by bureaucratic bungling, which led to denunciations of George III by the Whigs as an autocrat in the manner of Charles I. Lord Bute (who had probably been appointed only because of his agreement with George's views on royal power) resigned in 1763, allowing the Whigs to return to power. Later that year, the British government under George III issued the Royal Proclamation of 1763 that placed a boundary upon the westward expansion of the American colonies. The Proclamation's goal was to force colonists to negotiate with the Native Americans for the lawful purchase of the land and, therefore, to reduce the costly frontier warfare that had erupted over land conflicts. The Proclamation Line, as it came to be known, was incredibly unpopular with the Americans and ultimately became another wedge between the colonists and the British government, which would eventually lead to war. With the American colonists generally unburdened by British taxes, it was becoming increasingly difficult for the crown to pay for its military excursions and the defense of the American colonies from native uprisings. So, after George Grenville became Prime Minister, he introduced the Stamp Act, which levied a stamp duty on all printed paper in the British colonies in North America. Grenville attempted to reduce George III to a mere puppet. The King requested William Pitt the Elder to accept the office of Prime Minister, but was unsuccessful. George then settled on Lord Rockingham, and dismissed Grenville in 1765.Lord Rockingham repealed Grenville's unpopular Stamp Act. He faced considerable internal dissent, and was replaced in 1766 by Pitt, whom George created Earl of Chatham. Lord Chatham proved to be pro-American, criticising his colleagues' harsh attitudes towards the American colonists. George III, however, deemed that the chief duty of the colonists was to submit to him and to Great Britain and he resented the Americans' rebellious attitude. Lord Chatham fell ill in 1767, allowing the Duke of Grafton to take over government, although he did not formally become Prime Minister until 1768. Political attacks led him to leave office in 1770, once again allowing the Tories to return to power.

The government of the new Prime Minister, Lord North, was chiefly concerned with the American Revolution. The Americans grew increasingly hostile to British attempts to levy taxes in the colonies. During the Boston Tea Party in 1773, a Boston mob threw 342 crates of tea into Boston Harbour as a political protest, costing approximately 10,000 Pounds. In response, Lord North introduced the Punitive Acts, known as the Coercive Acts or the Intolerable Acts by the colonists. The Port of Boston was shut down and legislative elections in the Colony of Massachusetts Bay were suspended.
The American Revolutionary War began when armed conflict between British regulars and colonial militiamen broke out in New England in April 1775. A month later, thirteen of the British colonies sent delegates to the Second Continental Congress, which had been called to meet in May by the First Continental Congress the previous October. With the fighting already underway when Congress convened, the delegates drafted a peace proposal known as the Olive Branch Petition. The proposal was quickly rejected in London because fighting had already erupted. A year later, on July 4, 1776 (American Independence Day), the provinces declared their independence from the Crown and became a new nation, the "United States of America". The Declaration of Independence was a long list of grievances against the British King, legislature, and populace. Amongst George's other offences, the Declaration charged, "He has abdicated Government here... He has plundered our seas, ravaged our Coasts, burnt our towns, and destroyed the lives of our people." On the same day, George III wrote "Nothing important happened today" in his diary.[2] While itself not indicative of George III's opinion of the Declaration, as communication at the time was not instantaneous, this statement has been used by fiction writers as a comment on historical irony.

George III was indignant when he learned of the opinions of the colonists. In the war the British captured New York City in 1776, but the grand strategic plan of invading from Canada became a great American victory with the surrender of the British Lieutenant-General John Burgoyne at the Battle of Saratoga. In 1778, France signed a treaty of friendship with the new United States. Lord North asked to transfer power to Lord Chatham, whom he thought more capable. George III, however, would hear nothing of such suggestions; he suggested that Chatham serve as a subordinate minister in Lord North's administration. Chatham refused to cooperate, and died later in the same year. Great Britain was then at war with France, and in 1779 it was also at war with Spain.

George III obstinately tried to keep Great Britain at war with the rebels in America, despite the opinions of his own ministers. Lord Gower and Lord Weymouth both resigned rather than suffer the indignity of being associated with the war. Lord North advised George III that his opinion matched that of his ministerial colleagues, but stayed in office.

George III did give up hope of subduing America by more armies. "It was a joke," he said, "to think of keeping Pennsylvania". There was no hope of ever recovering New England. But the King was determined "never to acknowledge the independence of the Americans, and to punish their contumacy by the indefinite prolongation of a war which promised to be eternal."[3] His plan was to keep the 30,000 men garrisoned in New York, Rhode Island, in Canada, and in Florida; other forces would attack the French and Spanish in the West Indies. To punish the Americans the King planned to destroy their coasting-trade, bombard their ports; sack and burn towns along the coast (like New London, Connecticut), and turn loose the Indians to attack civilians in frontier settlements. These operations, the King felt, would inspire the Loyalists; would splinter the Congress; and "would keep the rebels harassed, anxious, and poor, until the day when, by a natural and inevitable process, discontent and disappointment were converted into penitence and remorse" and they would beg to return to his authority.[4] The plan meant destruction for the Loyalists and loyal Indians, and indefinite prolongation of a costly war, as well as the risk of disaster as the French and Spanish were assembling an armada to invade the British isles and seize London.

In 1781, the news of Lord Cornwallis's surrender at the Siege of Yorktown reached London; the Tory Lord North subsequently resigned in 1782. George III finally accepted the defeat in North America, and authorised the negotiation of a peace. The Treaty of Paris and the associated Treaty of Versailles were ratified in 1783. The former treaty provided for the recognition of the United States by Great Britain. The latter required Great Britain to give up Florida to Spain and to grant access to the waters of Newfoundland to France.