Before the act of emancipation was approved in July 1776, the Thirteen Colonies and the Kingdom of Great Britain had been at war for more than a year. Relations between the two had deteriorated since 1763. The British Parliament enacted a series of measures to increase taxes in the colonies, such as the Stamp Act of 1765 and the Townshend Act of 1767. The Legislative Body considered that these regulations were a legitimate means for the colonies to pay a fair share for the costs of keeping them in the British Empire.
However, many settlers had developed a different concept of the empire. The colonies were not directly represented in the Parliament and the settlers argued that this legislative body had no right to assign taxes. This fiscal dispute was part of a greater divergence between the British and American interpretations of the Constitution of Great Britain and the scope of Parliament's authority in the colonies. The orthodox view of the British - dating back to the Glorious Revolution of 1688 - argued that Parliament had supreme authority throughout the empire and, by extension, everything that Parliament did was constitutional. However, in the colonies the idea had developed that the British Constitution recognized certain fundamental rights that the government could not violate, not even Parliament. After the laws of Townshend, some essayists even began to question whether the Parliament had any legitimate jurisdiction in the colonies. Anticipating the creation of the Commonwealth of Nations, in 1774 the American literati - among them Samuel Adams, James Wilson and Thomas Jefferson - discussed whether the authority of Parliament was limited only to Great Britain and that the colonies -which had their own legislatures- they should relate to the rest of the empire solely because of their loyalty to the Crown.
