The Maritime Provinces of British North America and the American Revolution

1942 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
pp. 373
Author(s):  
Harold A. Davis ◽  
Wilfred Brenton Kerr
Keyword(s):  
North America ◽  
American Revolution ◽  
Maritime Provinces ◽  
British North America

REFASHIONING PURITAN NEW ENGLAND: THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND IN BRITISH NORTH AMERICA,c. 1680–c. 1770

2010 ◽  
Vol 20 ◽  
pp. 85-112 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeremy Gregory
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
North America ◽  
New England ◽  
American Revolution ◽  
Church Of England ◽  
Key Factors ◽  
Success Story ◽  
British North America ◽  
Colonial New England ◽  
The Church

ABSTRACTThe position of the Church of England in colonial New England has usually been seen through the lens of the ‘bishop controversy’ of the 1760s and early 1770s, where Congregational fears of the introduction of a Laudian style bishop to British North America have been viewed as one of the key factors leading to the American Revolution. By contrast, this paper explores some of the successes enjoyed by the Church of England in New England, particularly in the period from the 1730s to the early 1760s, and examines some of the reasons for the Church's growth in these years. It argues that in some respects the Church in New England was in fact becoming rather more popular, more indigenous and more integrated into New England life than both eighteenth-century Congregationalists or modern historians have wanted to believe, and that the Church was making headway both in the Puritan heartlands, and in the newer centres of population growth. Up until the early 1760s, the progress of the Church of England in New England was beginning to look like a success story rather than one with in-built failure.

Lord Howick and Colonial Church Establishment

1974 ◽  
Vol 25 (4) ◽  
pp. 381-405 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Burroughs
Keyword(s):  
North America ◽  
American Revolution ◽  
Church Of England ◽  
Religious Dissent ◽  
Special Position ◽  
British North America ◽  
Formed Part ◽  
The Church ◽  
Civil Government ◽  
Colonial Church

Because the Church of England traditionally formed part of the British constitution, Englishmen in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries often discussed the importance of extending the Established Church to settlements overseas. Yet nothing constructive was done in North America before the Revolution to complete the constitution of the colonial Church or reinforce its special position as the partner of the civil government. There were no bishops in America, and the remote bishop of London was left to supervise as best he could an institution that enjoyed few privileges and displayed an inveterate tendency towards independence. After the American Revolution, however, imperial administrators and colonial churchmen appreciated the need to buttress and reinvigorate the Church of England in British North America. In official circles at least, the loss of the Thirteen Colonies was attributed to the growth of a democratic spirit which a debilitated Church had been powerless to check. British administrators consequently agreed that the dangerous development of republicanism and religious dissent might be thwarted in the remaining colonies by strengthening the position of the Church as the ally of government in the task of preserving colonial loyalty.

“Good News From a Far Country”: A Note on Divine Providence and the Stamp Act Crisis

1976 ◽  
Vol 45 (3) ◽  
pp. 308-315 ◽  
Author(s):  
John F. Berens
Keyword(s):  
North America ◽  
American Revolution ◽  
Good News ◽  
Divine Providence ◽  
British North America ◽  
American Colonies ◽  
American Poet ◽  
American Thought ◽  
Stamp Act

November! gloomy Month! approaches fast,When Liberty was doom'd to brethe [sic] her last,All, all her Sons agree to fast that Day,To mourn, lament and sigh, and hope,—and prayThat the Almighty god of all below,Some Pity would to suffering Mortals show1.With these lines an anonymous American poet addressed the first day of November 1765, the date the Stamp Act was to take effect throughout British North America. The hopes of patriots and lovers of liberty, he argued, rested upon the interposition of God on behalf of the American colonies. If the Lord would look with mercy on his afflicted people and come to their aid, their freedoms could yet be preserved. In assigning the continuation of American liberty to the intervention and protection of divine providence, this patriotic poet employed one of the deepest and most popular strands of American thought expressed during the era of the American Revolution.

Early Modern Imperial Governance and the Origins of Canadian Political Culture

1999 ◽  
Vol 32 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-20 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elizabeth Mancke
Keyword(s):  
North America ◽  
Political Culture ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
American Revolution ◽  
The United States ◽  
The State ◽  
British North America ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Imperial State ◽  
Canadian Political Culture

AbstractFor the last three decades, scholars of Canadian political culture have favoured ideological explanations for state formation with the starting point being the American Revolution and Loyalist resettlement in British North America. This article challenges both the ideological bias and the late eighteenth-century chronology through a reassessment of early modern developments in the British imperial state. It shows that many of the institutional features associated with the state in British North America and later Canada—strong executives and weak assemblies, Crown control of land and natural resources, parliamentary funding of colonial development and accommodation of non-British subjects—were all institutionalized in the imperial state before the American Revolution and before the arrival of significant numbers of ethnically British settlers to Newfoundland, Nova Scotia and Quebec. Ideological discourses in the British North American colonies that became Canada, unlike those that became the United States, traditionally acknowledged the presence of a strong state in its imperial and colonial manifestations. Rather than challenging its legitimacy, as had Americans, British North Americans, whether liberals, republicans or tories, debated the function of the state and the distribution of power within it.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document