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The Rights Of The British Colonies Asserted And Proved Summary

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After reading the document "The Rights of the British Colonies Asserted and Proved" wrote by James Otis, I agree with the contemporaries of Otis that the document was written to challenge the authority of the king and parliament. In the document, Otis argued in favor of the natural rights. He believed that each individual should carry his or her own judgments; these judgments should be valued regardless of the physical power, wealth or property the individual possesses. He questioned the king and parliament by raising the discussion about the relationship between authority and property; since authority confers property, as he believed, the government should give independence to its people to earn respect and to avoid future conflict. Otis believed that British colonies should have the rights to rule their own land and to protect its people from forced slavery. …show more content…

The government has responsibilities to protect the natural rights of its people. In the document, Otis states that the "absolute slavery" is opposing natural rights since it takes away one's freedom and liberty without one's consent. The natural rights each individual carries since birth should protected by the British government; if the government failed to protect its people, war and conflicts will be unpreventable. Otis believed that there is no way to justify forced slavery; freedom and liberty is essential to human being and no government should be able to take away people's natural rights without

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In Part One of American Colonies, author Alan Taylor accentuates the natural disharmonies that transpired due to humanity, throughout the colonization of the New World. Taylor attributes humans as the most endangering species to the environment, both Native Americans and the settlers. Prior to and during the settlement of the North American colonies, all of humanity’s survival depended on the environment and how they used it. If the Natives or the settlers did not use their surrounding to the fullest advantage, themselves or others potentially could die. The first example of environmental demise that Taylor illustrated was the “…the extinction [of] two-thirds of all New World species…including the giant beaver, mammoth…” and others,” (Taylor 8).

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This act ended up threatening to destabilize the whole colonial economy of the industrial north and the agricultural south. This helped to unite the colonists against it. James Otis, at a town meeting in Boston, brought up the issue of taxation without representation, and pushed for a united response to the new acts passed by England. In July, he published, “The Rights of the British Colonies Asserted and Proved.” Later in August, Boston merchants began to boycott British goods.

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In 1774 he wrote a treatise called the “Considerations on the Nature and Extent of the Legislative Authority of the British Parliament”. In this work he set out a scheme of empire in which the British colonies would have the equivalent of dominion status. He used this treatise to set out a scheme of empire in which the British colonies would have the equivalent of dominion status. One of its paragraphs says "All men are by nature, equal and free. No one has a right to any authority over another without his consent…

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The Tea Act of 1773 reinstated the issue of Britain’s right to tax the colonies. The Parliament and the colonies disagreed on a system of government in which the colonies would share the same rights and control as Parliament over their colonial affairs. Between 1773 and 1776, enormous amounts of tension between the center and the peripheries regarding the right to control the colonies led to the disintegration of the empire. The colonies and Parliament continued their dispute about the supremacy of the colonies that began with the Stamp Act of 1765.

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Document 3 takes a radical stance in favor of self-government and republican ideas, and shows colonial desire for such a form of government within the colonies. The Rights of the Colonists authored by Samuel Adams is clearly directed towards the King and British Parliament, and is given from the perspective of the colonist who came to the Americas to escape any form of oppression and feel they are still oppressed. Adams argues for the natural liberty of men which can be traced back to Enlightenment thinker John Locke. Document 4, which is addressing the Pennsylvania colonial assembly that consisted of upper class white men that held social and political power, is from the view of Quaker Leaders and argues for loyalty to the King by the colonies and the people within them in order to maintain peace. These ideas stand in opposition to the widespread ideas of independence and rule by the peoples, and they seemingly stem from not only religious background but also from enlightenment period thinker Thomas Hobbes who believed in the protection of the absolute power of a king within his Social Contract Theory.

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Long after King Charles II’s reign, King George III, followed in his footsteps, which drove a wedge between England and the colonists (“King George and His Parliament”). That wedge caused the colonists to draft a proclamation of their grievances’, and to define their inalienable

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The Act’s Colonial Land Rights angered the Americans due to; The Quebec Act also granted land rights to French Canadians who lived in the newly expanded Province of Quebec. This move threatened the land claims of American colonists, who believed that they had a right to the land. As an example, the Virginia Declaration of Rights, adapted in June 1776, claimed that “all men are by nature equally free and independent and have certain inherent rights, of which, when they enter into a state of society, they cannot by any compact deprive or divest their posterity.” This principle of natural rights was key to the American colonists' argument against British rule, and the Quebec Act was seen as a breach of these rights. The perception of British intentions angered many Americans.

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Imagine of your friend used you to copy off of your homework, and you feel like you are not getting anything in return. How would you feel? That is exactly how the colonists felt with Britain. The angry colonists wanted to start a revolution against Britain because their unalienable rights were being intruded in their own country. They were used to salutary neglect, but the tight control the British had over them angered the colonists.

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Otis believed that every human had the right to be comfortable in their own home, and that every person’s house was their own personal domain, their small kingdom that they ruled, and that penetrating that kingdom without probable cause should be illegal. By allowing British officials to enter the homes of colonists for any arbitrary reason the British government was annihilating this privilege. Therefore, the British government was dismissing the basic human rights of the colonists in order to promote their own

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This was the start of a long journey for the colonist as well as for Britain because the colonists were no longer just following rules, they were thinking for themselves and King George was not happy. Immanuel Kant stated, “Dare to know! Have the courage to use your own understanding” (Shi & Tindall, 2015, p. 98). Not only was Kant a pioneer, others like Isaac Newton, Nicolaus Copernicus, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson and John Locke called for “a government resting on the consent of the governed and respecting the “natural Rights” of all” (Shi & Tindall, 2015, p. 98).

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The main point of this article that John Adams is trying to let the reader understand is that everyone should have equal rights under the law of the Declaration of Independence. Adams is saying that whoever holds the power has the freedom, and he wants the people not in power fight to get the same power that those in charge have. In “Liberty and Knowledge”, Adams writes “Let the bar proclaim the laws, the rights, the generous plan of power delivered down from remote antiquity-inform the world of the might struggles and numberless sacrifices made by our ancestors in defense of freedom.” This quote is saying that the rights that people hold in the United States was given to them was not just handed to them. Their ancestors fought for those equal

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For the rest of the colonists, they believed they had natural rights: rights they were born with. The three main natural rights thought to have were life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness; these were included in the Declaration of Independence. Personal rights were very important to the colonists and they were determined to display how they felt to the government. Overall, this period of time brought dramatic changes to the way of living. All of these changes were necessary for our country to function in the needs of both the government and the

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