North's Plan for Reconciliation
North's Plan for Reconciliation
NORTH'S PLAN FOR RECONCILIATION. 1775. With the grudging consent of George III, Lord North presented a plan for reconciliation, often called the "olive branch," that was received by the House of Lords on 20 February 1775, endorsed by the House of Commons on 27 February, and rejected by the Continental Congress on 31 July 1775. The plan prescribed that the British would deal with individual colonies and thereby avoided tacit recognition of the Continental Congress. By its terms, Parliament had royal approval to "forbear to any further duty, tax or assessment," though it could still lay regulatory ("external") taxes on any American colony whose own assembly passed "internal" taxes to support the civil government and judiciary and to provide for the common defense. Though North hoped to deal with individual colonies, their legislatures also rejected the proposal. "This was merely a repetition of the gesture that Grenville had made in advance of the stamp act, and it was still as vague and undefined, still as unacceptable, as it had been then," the historian Edmund Morgan has commented. (Birth, p. 69).
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Morgan, Edmund. The Birth of the Republic, 1763–1789. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966.
revised by Michael Bellesiles