A Review of the Present Administration
- Anonymous Pamphleteer 1774 (author)
- Jack P. Greene (collection editor)
This essay is a political pamphlet engaging directly with what contemporaries called the “American Question” — the escalating constitutional and imperial crisis between Great Britain and its North American colonies.
The year of publication was particularly consequential: Lord North’s ministry had just passed the Coercive Acts in response to the Boston Tea Party, and the First Continental Congress was convening in Philadelphia. A pamphlet reviewing the “present administration” in this context would almost certainly have assessed whether the ministry’s hard-line colonial policy was constitutionally sound, politically prudent, or likely to drive the colonies toward open resistance.
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The text of these 18th century pamphlets has been converted by machine from scanned PDFs of the original microfilm copies. While the text has been machine-proofed, transcription errors may still remain. For example, the 18th-century long S, ſ , may be rendered as “f,” some words may be incorrectly transcribed, and there may be repeated words or phrases.