How martial law made the American Revolution

On this Fourth of July, with federal troops still on the ground in Los Angeles, our own American Revolution provides a surprising lesson on the perils of military overreach in domestic affairs. Notably, the nation’s political and military leaders should consider the British blunders of the 1770s as they weigh the prospect of militarizing American streets, now and in the future.

Parliament’s Stamp Act tax of the mid-1760s ignited the Anglo-American conflict. Yet, as historians broadly agree, it was escalating martial law in Boston under different legislation, the Coercive Acts of 1774, that transformed American resistance into full-scale revolution.

Let’s start by recalling what had happened four years earlier during protests over the Townshend duties, a series of taxes Parliament added to everyday goods, including tea, exported to the colonies. The British ministry responded to the unrest by stationing approximately 2,000 redcoats in Boston.

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On the night of March 5, 1770, in an accidental bloodbath set off by the pelting of soldiers with snowballs, the British opened fire on a crowd of unarmed civilians outside the Custom House, killing five and wounding others.

“Let me observe,” Sam Adams soon wrote about the Boston Massacre, “how fatal are the effects, the danger of which I long ago mentioned, of posting a standing army among a free people.”

The problem worsened after the Boston Tea Party. The hacking to pieces of 342 crates of tea owned by the East India Co. in late 1773 was, of course, criminal activity. As such, it warranted the full application of colonial and municipal law against the offenders.

Instead of leaving justice to the locals, however, Parliament passed the four draconian bills known as the Coercive Acts. To enforce them, in a fatal progression, King George III’s ministers dispatched a military governor and occupying army to Boston, in effect imposing martial law on the entire colony for the unlawful actions of a few.

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Each of the Coercive Acts struck at the heart of Massachusetts self-rule. The Boston Port Act shut down all trade through Boston Harbor and its surrounding waterways, while the Massachusetts Government Act dissolved the colony’s assembly, courts and town meetings. The remaining two acts allowed trials to be relocated overseas and forced residents to house British troops at the governor’s discretion.

Taken together, the Coercive Acts constituted an unprecedented assault on the rights and freedoms of the American people. Colonists decried them as “barbarous,” “diabolical” and “Tyrannic” — the work of a “Despotic power.”

What followed is familiar to many Americans. Massachusetts, under martial law, summoned the other colonies to a continental congress in Philadelphia. In reaction, the king and Parliament declared the colonies to be in a state of rebellion, ordering thousands of additional redcoats across the Atlantic to crush dissent and make arrests.

A conflict the British thought they could resolve with boots on the ground only escalated. On April 19, 1775, in another tragedy of unintended carnage — this time triggered by a stray bullet — the king’s troops gunned down eight colonials on Lexington Green, turning protest into civil war.

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Fifteen months later, as a remedy of last resort, the colonies declared independence, highlighting Britain’s regime of martial law as the first cause of the breach. The declaration pointedly charges King George with “abolishing our most valuable laws,” “suspending our own Legislatures” and “[keeping] among us, in times of peace, standing armies, without the consent of our legislatures.”

History doesn’t deliver road maps, but it does abound in examples of military overreach sparking unpredictable violence. In the case of the American Revolution, we are reminded that deploying an army on the streets where one’s own citizens live and work provokes tension, fear and anger — and sometimes, by the twin forces of accident and escalation, bloodshed and lasting civil discord.

Eli Merritt is a political historian at Vanderbilt University. He writes the Substack newsletter American Commonwealth and is the author of “Disunion Among Ourselves: The Perilous Politics of the American Revolution.”