In July 1775, the Second Continental Congress begged King George III for peace just a week after authorizing an invasion of Canada. This episode explores the Olive Branch Petition, drafted by John Dickinson with a committee including Benjamin Franklin and John Jay, and why John Adams stepped aside and let the moderates make their doomed appeal.

The petition arrived in London alongside an intercepted letter from Adams calling it a waste of time, giving British hardliners proof that the colonists were stalling. Before the King ever saw the document, he had already issued his Proclamation of Rebellion following news of Bunker Hill. His refusal to even receive the petition erased the middle ground and helped turn the same Congress toward the Declaration of Independence within a year.

• The divide between Dickinson’s moderates and the radical faction led by John Adams
• Why moderates clung to the wicked ministers theory and believed the King could be reasoned with
• How Adams’s intercepted letter undermined the petition before it reached the Crown
• The August 23, 1775 Proclamation of Rebellion and King George III’s refusal to receive the petition
• How the rejection prepared colonists for Common Sense and the Declaration of Independence