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Colonial America Was a Wild and Difficult Place to Be

Khalid Elhassan October 27, 2021 35 min

The seizure and destruction of tea in colonial Boston. Encyclopedia Britannica

English Civil War Parliamentary soldiers, fighting while a Puritan preaches encourages them by reading from the Bible. Pinterest

The Boston Tea Party Was Not the First Time New Englanders Defied the King

In the 1640s, a dispute that had simmered for years between King Charles I and Parliament finally erupted into open warfare to determine once and for all whether the monarch or legislature was supreme. Puritans were a key Parliamentarian constituency, and Puritans happened to be particularly thick in the ground in colonial New England back then. So in 1644, Colonel Thomas Rainsborough sailed across the Atlantic with a regiment of New Englanders to fight against King Charles. A century and a half before the American Revolution, the Americans proved radical by contemporary standards.

In an augury of future events, in the midst of the fight between King and Parliament, the colonial Americans pushed for universal male suffrage three centuries before it was actually granted in England. As Rainsborough put it: “I think that the poorest he that is in England hath a life to live as the greatest he; and therefore truly, sir, I think it’s clear that every man that is to live under a government ought first by his own consent to put himself under that government“.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.