ABSTRACT
The author’s aim, however, was to be much more reassuring to Britons about the rightness of Parliament’s cause and the prospects of victory. While adopting a Burkean opening line that the ‘constitution of most of the Colonies was formed by accident, and not by forethought, he nevertheless notes that it ‘hardly could enter into breasts of the legislature, when they granted [colonies] charters for their security and protection in trade, that these colonies, entirely dependent on them, should, in a future period, aim at independency’. The colonists ‘have not a single fortified town, he writes, and ‘no standing army no navy nor any fund upon which monied men would lend them month’s expence of an armament. In August, as fighting spread north and south, the King proclaimed the colonies to be ‘in open and avowed rebellion: Its Olive Branch Petition rejected, the second Continental Congress appointed an army with George Washington as Commander-in-Chief and printed money to pay for war.
