Outline of Delaware v1.2

Character background: Profession/class: Whitesmith, well off. Angry at only being able to trade with England.
Perspective: A man looking back on the American Revolution in the 1780s.
Thesis: The people of Delaware are ready to rule ourselves, because we have a stable economy and a system of government.
I. The Economy in the northern colonies was very established, and may not have been able to survive such a large switch from a local trade to one where England was taxing them.
A. Many Northern Colony farmers grew food primarily for their own families and neighborhoods
i. “Violating expectations of mutuality among neighbors may well have appeared oppressive, in part because it required a position of advantage to violate them with impunity. For most inhabitants of a locality, maintaining a reputation for probity and fairness mattered; those who outraged their neighbor’s ideas of equity might face private admonition from clergy or other notables or feel pressure to submit to the judgment of three respectable local men. Such institutions helped some Americans translate for fair dealings into assumed and even ordinary practice. One Delaware farmer used a revealing shorthand to denote the numerous exchanges carried on between to families: the households “neighborhood”. Narrow economic terms do not adequately describe their transactions.”
a. The British Parliament was trying to implement taxes that would have thrown off the accepted balance of trade in America. Tax collectors might have tried to get into the market of the more isolated communities, and that would have thrown off the balance, possibly to an unrecognizable level
ii. Stamp Act and the Navigation Acts
b. These were taxes designed to limit and control the colonists economy, even though Britain was a world away.
II. King George III had not done anything to help us when we sent petitions requesting the taxes that Parliament implemented be revoked, and what’s more, he seemed to completely ignore our pleas for peace when the British sent a military brigade to Boston.
A. Info from history book.
B. Text Analysis documents will be helpful.
i. Declaration of Independence
b.” He has forbidden his governors to pass laws of immediate and pressing importance, unless suspended in their operation till his assent should be obtained; and, when so suspended, he has utterly neglected to attend to them.”
ii. Thomas Paine’s Common Sense/The Crisis
c. “ I have heard it asserted by some, that as America hath flourished under her former connexion with Great-Britain, that the same connexion is necessary towards her future happiness, and will always have the same effect. Nothing can be more fallacious than this kind of argument. We may as well assert that because a child has thrived upon milk, that it is never to have meat, or that the first twenty years of our lives is to become a precedent for the next twenty. But even this is admitting more than is true, for I answer roundly, that America would have flourished as much, and probably much more, had no European power had any thing to do with her. The commerce, by which she hath enriched herself are the necessaries of life, and will always have a market while eating is the custom of Europe.”
III. I have heard that the British offered freedom to slaves that helped them fight in the South. Although I don’t agree with the practice of slavery, this is just another time where the British tried to take our goods.
A. History book reference.
IV. The people of Delaware have a governmental system already in place, and it was easily adapted to a system where Britain was out of the loop, proving that we did not in fact need Britain.
A. Constitution of Delaware
i.
B. Declaration of Independence
i. “We, therefore, the representatives of the United States of America, in General Congress assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions, do, in the name and by the authority of the good people of these colonies solemnly publish and declare, That these United Colonies are, and of right ought to be, FREE AND INDEPENDENT STATES; that they are absolved from all allegiance to the British crown and that all political connection between them and the state of Great Britain is, and ought to be, totally dissolved; and that, as free and independent states, they have full power to levy war, conclude peace, contract alliances, establish commerce, and do all other acts and things which independent states may of right do. And for the support of this declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor.”
b. Not only Delaware, but the colonies as a whole have a working system of government.