| Popis: |
"N EVER were a People more wrapped up in a King, than the Americans were in George the Third in the Year 1763," observed William Henry Drayton in October 1776. Certainly the state of colonial opinion regarding America's last monarch had changed remarkably by the time Drayton addressed this charge to the grand jury of Charleston, South Carolina. Yet, in his view, that revolution in American attitudes was a very recent development: "It was even so late as the latter end of the last Year [1775], before that Confidence" which had sustained the colonists' special faith in their sovereign "visibly declined." Moreover, in his opinion, many believed that King George III, "from Motives of Policy, if not from Inclination, would heal our Wounds, and thereby prevent the Separation" of the colonies from Great Britain until their hopes finally succumbed to the continuing accumulation of oppressive measures emanating from London. 1 Historians have not much troubled themselves with this sort of perspective on the timing and the circumstance of the American colonists' repudiation of George III and the institution of the British monarchy. The belated outburst of attacks upon the king that flowed from colonial presses in 1776 has more often than not been treated either as a pragmatic, propagandistic attempt to justify independence, or as the emergence of indigenous anti-monarchical sentiments gradually nurtured to maturity over the previous decade by the course of events and by skillful publicists. Except for the anxiety naturally associated with the decision to secede from the British empire, historians have often portrayed the colonists as proceeding smoothly, serenely and almost automatically from their denial of parliamentary authority to their ultimate denial of royal |
