The western world has repeatedly employed non-violent coercion as a
political as well as an economic technique. Strangely enough, many
Americans who are apt to scoff at the methods of the Indian independence
movement today forget that the American colonists used much the same
methods in the early stages of their own revolt against England. When
England began to assert imperial control over the colonies after 1763,
the colonists answered with protests and refusals to cooperate. Against
both the Stamp Act of 1765 and the Townshend Duties of 1767, they
adopted non-importation agreements whereby they refused to import
British goods. To be sure, the more radical colonists did not eschew
violence on the basis of principle, and the direct action by which they
forced colonial merchants to respect the terms of the non-importation
agreements was not always non-violent. The loss of trade induced British
merchants to go to Parliament on both occasions and to insist
successfully upon the repeal of the Stamp Act in 1766 and the Townshend
Duties in 1770. In the face of non-cooperation practiced by the vast
majority of the colonists, the British government had been forced to
give way in order to serve its own best interests.[44]
In 1774, when the Continental Congress established the Continental
Association in order to use the same economic weapon again, the issues
in the conflict were more clearly drawn. Many of the moderate colonists
who had supported the earlier action, denounced this one as
revolutionary, and went over to the loyalist side. The radicals
themselves felt less secure in the use of their economic weapon, and
began to gather arms for a violent rebellion. The attempt of the British
to destroy these weapons led to Lexington and Concord.[45] What had been
non-violent opposition to British policy had become armed revolt and
civil war. It was a war which would probably have ended in the defeat of
the colonists if they had not been able to fish in the troubled waters
of international politics and win the active support of France, who
sought thus to avenge the loss of her own colonies to Great Britain in
1763. We have here an example of the way in which non-violent
resistance, when used merely on the basis of expediency, is apt to
intensify and sharpen the conflict, until it finally leads to war
itself.[46]