A year before declaring independence, colonists offered ‘Olive Branch’ petition to King George III

New York – Alarmed by President Donald Trump’s policies, millions of people took place last month for demonstrations in the United States and abroad. Aware of the 250th anniversary of the American independence next year, the organizers called the “No Kings” movement.

If the same type of gatherings had been called in the summer of 1775, the answer would probably have been more cautious.

“It’s (” No Kings “) was probably a minority opinion in July 1775,” said HW Brands, scholar and president of the Texas Prize in Austin.

“There was a lot of passion for the Revolution in New England, but it was different from the rest of the country,” explains Joseph Ellis, historian winner of the Pulitzer Prize. “There were still people who did not want to shoot in what they feared to be a useless war.”

This month marks the 250th anniversary – the semi -printing – of a document promulgated almost exactly a year before the declaration of independence: “the olive branch petition”, ratified on July 5, 1775 by the continental congress. Its main author was John Dickinson, a Pennsylvanian whose writing skills led some to call him the “Penman of the Revolution” and present himself as a final plea and desperate to reconcile with Great Britain.

The notion of “no kings” is a foundation of democracy. But during the first half of 1775, Dickinson and others still hoped that King George III could be reasoned and would cancel the tax increases and the other alleged abuses that they blamed in the British Parliament and other civil servants. Ellis calls her “the clumsy interval”, when the Americans had fought the British in Lexington and Concord and around Bunker Hill, while holding a complete separation.

“Public opinion changes during this period, but it would still have been premature to publish a declaration of independence,” explains Ellis, whose books include “Brothers Brothers”, “the cause” and the “great contradiction” to come.

The Continental Congress projected unity into its official statements. But in private, like the colonies overall, the members differ. Jack Rakove, professor of history at the University of Stanford and author of the Pulitzer Prize, “original meanings”, noted that the delegates to the Congress went from “radical” such as Samuel Adams who were passionate for independence to “moderate” as Dickinson and John Jay of New York.

The resolution of Olivier’s branch has balanced the references to “delicitized contenders, unsuccessful terrors and unnecessary serious” administered by British officials with tributes devoted to shared links and “royal magnanimity and benevolence” of the king “.

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The American revolution did not occur in one moment, but through years of anxious step far from the country of the “mother” – a kind of withdrawal which sometimes suggested maturity, the end of a young person from home. In the letters and newspapers written in the months preceding July 1775, American leaders have often qualified as children, the British as parents and the conflict a family argument.

Edmund Pendleton, delegate of Virginia at the Continental Congress, urged “a reconciliation with our mother mother”. Jay, who would later help to negotiate the treaty formally putting at the end of the revolutionary war, proposed to inform King George that the “American subjects of your Majesty” are “linked to your majesty by the strongest links of allegiance and affection and attached to their parent country by all the links that can unite societies”.

In Olivier’s paper, Dickinson would pay tribute to “the union between our mother-country and these colonies”.

The congress, which had been formed the previous year, counted in the first half of 1775 on a double strategy which could now be called “peace by force”, a mixture of resolution and compromise. John Adams defined it as “to hold the sword in one hand, Olivier’s branch in the other”. Dickinson’s petition was a gesture of peace. A companion document, “the declaration of the causes and the need to take up arms” was a declaration of resolution.

The declaration of 1775 was written by Thomas Jefferson, who, a year later, would be the principal editor of the declaration of independence, revised by Dickinson and approved by the congress on July 6. The language provided for the declaration of independence with its condemnation of the British for “their bad cause”.

But while the declaration of independence ends with the 13 colonies “absolved from all allegiance to the British crown”, the authors in 1775 assured a nervous audience “that we want not to dissolve this union which has so long and so fortunately substituted between us, and which we sincerely want to see restored”.

“The necessity has not yet pushed us to this desperate measure, or encouraged us to excite another nation to the war against them,” they wrote.

John Adams and Benjamin Franklin were one of Dickinson’s peers who thought it was naive about the British, and were not imperturbable when the king even refused to look at the petition of the branches of Olivier and decided that the colonies were in a state of rebellion. About at the same time, Dickinson worked on his project, the Continental Congress has prepared for new conflicts. He appointed a newly formed continental army commander, a renowned Virginian that Adams congratulated as “modest and virtuous … Aimable, generous and courageous”.

His name: George Washington. His ascent, wrote Adams: “will have a great effect, cementing and securing the union of these colonies.”