Alarmed by the policies of President Donald Trump, millions turned out last month for protests around the United States and overseas. Mindful of next year’s 250th anniversary of American independence, organizers called the movement “No Kings.” Had the same kind of rallies been called for in the summer of 1775, the response likely would have been more cautious. “It (‘No Kings’) was probably a minority opinion in July 1775,” says H.W. Brands, a prize-winning scholar and chair of the history department at the University of Texas at Austin. “There was a lot of passion for revolution in New England, but that was different from the rest of the country,” says Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Joseph Ellis. “There were still people who don’t want to drawn into what they feared was an unnecessary war.” This month marks the 250th anniversary — the semiquincentennial — of a document enacted almost exactly a year before the Declaration of Independence: “The Olive Branch Petition,” ratified July 5, 1775 by the Continental Congress. Its primary author was John Dickinson, a Pennsylvanian whose writing skills led some to call him the “Penman of the Revolution,” and would stand as a final, desperate plea to reconcile with Britain. They put forth a pre-revolutionary argument The notion of “No Kings” is a foundation of democracy. But over the first half of 1775 Dickinson and others still hoped that King George III could be reasoned with and would undo the tax hikes and other alleged abuses they blamed on the British Parliament and other officials. Ellis calls it the “Awkward Interval,” when Americans had fought the British in Lexington and Concord and around Bunker Hill, while holding off from a full separation. “Public opinion is changing during this time, but it still would have been premature to issue a declaration of independence,” says Ellis, whose books include “Founding Brothers,” “The Cause” and the upcoming “The Great Contradiction.” The Continental Congress projected unity in its official statements. But privately, like the colonies overall, members differed. Jack Rakove, a professor of history at Stanford University and author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning “Original Meanings,” noted that delegates to Congress ranged from “radicals” such as Samuel Adams who were avid for independence to such “moderates” as Dickinson and New York’s John Jay. The Olive Branch resolution balanced references to “the delusive pretences, fruitless terrors, and unavailing severities” administered by British officials with dutiful tributes to shared ties and to the king’s “royal magnanimity and benevolence.” “(N)otwithstanding the sufferings of your loyal Colonists during the course of this present controversy, our Breasts retain too tender a regard for the Kingdom from which we derive our Origin to request such a Reconciliation as might in any manner be inconsistent with her Dignity or her welfare,” the sometimes obsequious petition reads in part. The American Revolution didn’t arise at a single moment but through years of anguished steps away from the “mother” country — a kind of weaning that at times suggested a coming of age, a young person’s final departure from home. In letters and diaries written in the months before July 1775, American leaders often referred to themselves as children, the British as parents and the conflict a family argument. Edmund Pendleton, a Virginia delegate to the Continental Congress, urged “a reconciliation with Our mother Country.” Jay, who would […]