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British Action: Sugar Act
British placed duties on certain luxuries including foreign sugar and more stricitly enforced Navigation Acts to stop smuggling -
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British Actions and Colonial Reactions
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British Action: Stamp Act
Parliament enacted revenue stamps to be placed on paper including documents and newspapers, to tax colonists directly in order to raise funds for the British military. -
British Action; Quartering Act
Colonists were forced to provide housing and food for British soldiers stationed in the colonies -
Colonial Reaction:Stamp Act Congress
Representatives from nine colonies met in New York to act against taxation without representation by concluding only their own elected representattives had legal authority to approve taxes. -
*Colonial Reaction: Sons and Daughters of Liberty
Secret society organized to intimidate tax agents, sometimes by tarring and feathering. Also destroyed revenue stamps. -
British Action: Declarataroy Act
Parliament repealed Stamp Act, but also declared they had the right to make laws and tax colonies in all cases whatsoever. -
British Action: Townshend Acts
Enacted by Parliament, duties were put on glass, tea, and paper. The revenue raised was used to pay crown officials within the colonies. It also stated an official needed only a writ of assistance to search anywhere, opposed to individual search warrants. -
*Colonial Reaction: Massachusetts Circular Letter
Written by James Otis and Samuel Adams, it urged colonists to petition Parliament to repeal the Townshend Acts -
*Colonial Action: Repeal of Townshend Acts
Lord Fredereick North repealed the Townshend Acts because it damaged trade, but a small tax on tea was retained as a symbol of Parliament's power over the colonies -
Colonial Reaction:Boston Massacre
Bitter towards the government for taxing them, colonists threw snowballs at guards stationed in Boston, and the soldiers fired out into the crowd killing five people. -
*Colonial Reaction: Committees of Correspondence
Committee initiated by Sam Adams that organized committees and exhcanged letters about suspicious British behavior -
Colonial Reaction: Gaspee
Harboring resentment over the British capture of smugglers, multiplying synergistically with their hate towards the British over taxes, colonists disguised as Native Americans boarded the Gaspee ship and set it on fire. -
British Action: Tea Act
Parliament taxed tea, which however, made it cheaper (including the tax) than foreign tea, in order to resolve British East India Company's fincancial problems -
Colonial Reaction: Boston Tea Party
Refusing to buy cheaper British tea because it would support Parliament's right to tax the colonies, colonists dressed as Native Americans dumped 342 chests of tea in the Bston harbor. -
*British Action:Intolerable Acts
British set forth the Coercive Acts (enforcing strict rules on Boston, allowing royal officials in court to be tried in England, and expanding the Quartering Act) and the Quebec Act (establishing Roman Catholicism as official religion of Quebec and expanding its border to the boundary of the Ohio River)
