"We, your Majesty's faithful subjects…" began the petition beseeching reconciliation with King George from the Second Continental Congress on July 5, 1775.  That offering became known as the Olive Branch Petition.  The following day, Congress issued its  Declaration of the Causes and Necessity of Taking Up Arms, explaining why hostile British troops would henceforth be gunned down on the battlefields of America.

Were the petition and the Declaration on Taking Up Arms sent to England on the same ship?  If so, was a sticker attached to the Olive Branch petition saying,  "Open me first"?  The petitioners "entreat your Majesty's gracious attention to this our humble petition," stressed their "utmost deference for your Majesty," boasted that "our breasts retain too tender a regard for the kingdom from which we derive our origin," and stressed that they remained  "faithful subjects" to "our Mother country."

Even tying a red ribbon around that petition would not have helped. King George III refused to accept it or even to read it. The king's obstinacy helped spur the rarely remembered provision of the First Amendment of the Bill of Rights, the right "to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."

That Olive Branch petition was fiercely controversial within Congress. Virginia delegate Benjamin Harrison declared, "There is but one word in the paper of which I approve, and that is the word, 'Congress.'" Harrison was later elected governor of Virginia; his son and great grandson both became U.S. presidents. The Olive Branch petition passed as one last attempt at reconciliation with the British monarch in part because many Americans believed that the king had been misled by his corrupt or devious advisors. This was the 1700s version of the Russian folk saying "if only the Czar knew about all the starving peasants!"

King George's response to the petition was shaped in part by the British military disaster at Bunker Hill, when patriot sharpshooters killed or wounded every British officer on the battlefield amidst a vast carnage inflicted.  That Pyrrhic victory spooked the British generals but the lesson was not learned until far too late in London. Two days after the Olive Branch petition was delivered to British officials in London, the British government formally labeled the American colonies in a state of "open and avowed rebellion" and called for "utmost endeavours to withstand and suppress such rebellion." The subsequent vast increase in British aggression swayed hundreds of thousands of Americans' minds in favor of independence at any cost.