Several more things had to happen for the movement to independence to become unstoppable. First, the British government refused to consider any form of compromise. King George III summarily rejected a conciliatory appeal known as the Olive Branch Petition, written by Dickinson, refusing even to look at it, and choosing instead to label the colonists “open and avowed enemies.” Then the King began to recruit mercenary Hessian soldiers from Germany to fight the Americans, a gesture that the colonists regarded as both insulting and callous, a way of signaling that they were no longer fellow
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