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Boston tea party
On the evening of December 16th, thousands of Bostonians and farmers from the surrounding countryside packed into the Old South Meeting house to hear Samuel Adams. Adams denounced the Governor for denying clearance for vessels wishing to leave with tea still on board. After his speech the crowd headed for the waterfront. From the crowd, 50 individuals emerged dressed as Indians. They boarded three vessels docked in the harbor and threw 90,000 pounds of tea overboard. -
Proclamation of 1763
The end of the French and Indian War in 1763 was a cause for great celebration in the colonies, for it removed several ominous barriers and opened up a host of new opportunities for the colonists. The French had effectively hemmed in the British settlers and had, from the perspective of the settlers, played the "Indians" against them. The first thing on the minds of colonists was the great western frontier that had opened to them when the French ceded that contested territory to the British. -
Sugar Act
On April 5, 1764, Parliament passed a modified version of the Sugar and Molasses Act (1733), which was about to expire. Under the Molasses Act colonial merchants had been required to pay a tax of six pence per gallon on the importation of foreign molasses. But because of corruption, they mostly evaded the taxes and undercut the intention of the tax that the English product would be cheaper than that from the French West Indies. -
Stamp Act
The Stamp Act was passed by the British Parliament on March 22, 1765. The new tax was imposed on all American colonists and required them to pay a tax on every piece of printed paper they used. Ship's papers, legal documents, licenses, newspapers, other publications, and even playing cards were taxed. -
Quartering act
In 1765 the British further angered the colonist by passing the Quartering Act.Ê The act forced American colonist to house and feed British forces who were serving in North America.Ê The act further inflamed tensions between the colonist and the British.Ê The colonist were angered at having their homes forced open.Ê The subsequent close contact with British soldiers did not engender good feelings between the sides.from Britain dropped almost in half. -
The townshend acts
Taxes on glass, paint, oil, lead, paper, and tea were applied with the design of raising £40,000 a year for the administration of the colonies. The result was the resurrection of colonial hostilities created by the Stamp Act.
Reaction assumed revolutionary proportions in Boston, in the summer of 1768, when customs officials impounded a sloop owned by John Hancock, for violations of the trade regulations. Crowds mobbed the customs office, forcing the officials to retire to a British Warship in th -
Boston Massacre
The Boston Massacre was a street fight that occurred on March 5, 1770, between a "patriot" mob, throwing snowballs, stones, and sticks, and a squad of British soldiers. Several colonists were killed and this led to a campaign by speech-writers to rouse the ire of the citizenry. The presence of British troops in the city of Boston was increasingly unwelcome. The riot began when about 50 citizens attacked a British sentinel. A British officer, Captain Thomas Preston, called in additional soldiers -
2nd Continental Congress meets
On May 10, 1775, the members of the Second Continental Congress met at the State House in Philadelphia. There were several new delegates including: John Hancock from Massachusetts, Thomas Jefferson of Virginia, and Benjamin Franklin from Pennsylvania. -
Intolerable Acts
The government spent immense sums of money on troops and equipment in an attempt to subjugate Massachusetts. British merchants had lost huge sums of money on looted, spoiled, and destroyed goods shipped to the colonies. The revenue generated by the Townshend duties, in 1770, amounted to less than £21,000. On March 5, 1770, Parliament repealed the duties, except for the one on tea. That same day, the Boston massacre set a course that would lead the Royal Governor to evacuate the occupying army fr -
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1st Continental Congress meets
The first Continental Congress met in Carpenter's Hall in Philadelphia, from September 5, to October 26, 1774. Carpenter's Hall was also the seat of the Pennsylvania Congress. All of the colonies except Georgia sent delegates. These were elected by the people, by the colonial legislatures, or by the committees of correspondence of the respective colonies. The colonies presented there were united in a determination to show a combined authority to Great Britain, but their aims were not uniform at -
Battle of Lexington
The first shots starting the revolution were fired at Lexington, Massachusetts. On April 18, 1775, British General Thomas Gage sent 700 soldiers to destroy guns and ammunition the colonists had stored in the town of Concord, just outside of Boston. They also planned to arrest Samuel Adams and John Hancock, two of the key leaders of the patriot movement. -
Battle of Bunker Hill
With the outbreak of the war General Gage, the British commander in chief, found himself blockaded in Boston by the American Continental Army, occupying the hills to the West of the city. Gage resolved to seize the Charlestown peninsula across the harbour. Before he could act, on the night of 16th June 1775 around 1,500 American troops of the Massachusetts regiments and Putnam’s Connecticut regiment occupied Breed’s Hill and Bunker Hill on the peninsula. The American troops began to build a redo -
Olive Branch Petition
John Dickinson drafted the Olive Branch Petition, which was adopted by the Second Continental Congress on July 5 and submitted to King George on July 8, 1775. It was an attempt to assert the rights of the colonists while maintaining their loyalty to the British crown. King George refused to read the petition and on August 23 proclaimed that the colonists had "proceeded to open and avowed rebellion." -
Publication of Common Sense
In January 1776, political thought was impacted dramatically by the publication of Common Sense, hailed by historians as the most brilliant pamphlet ever written. Published by THOMAS PAINE, he prose forcefully reversed all presumptions that kept Americans clinging to England. Paine was the first to publicly question hereditary rule and also focus on the vast resources of America - "there is something absurd in supposing a continent to be perpetually governed by an island." Common Sense swept thr -
Signing of the Declaration of Independence
DECLARING INDEPENDENCE
The first draft of Jefferson's Declaration of Independence—already edited by John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Roger Sherman and Robert Livingston—was presented before Congress on June 28. 39 revisions were made on the text before it was adopted on the 4th of July, 1776. On that same day, the Declaration was sent to Philadelphia printer John Dunlap, who produced the first printed text of the document. President of the Continental Congress John Hancock immediately began to ha