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The treaty of Paris
Early in 1783 France and Spain gave up on Gibraltar and reached an armistice with Britain. The British further granted the Americans the " liberty" of fishing off Newfoundland and in the Gulf of St. Lawerence and the right to dry their catch on the unsettled Atlantic coast of Canada. The best the British could get was a promise that their merchant should" meet with no legal impediment" in seeking to collect money owed to them by Americans. -
"No Taxation without Represtation"
that reflected the resentment of American colonists at being taxed by a British Parliament to which they elected no representativeswas coined by Reverend Jonathan Mayhew in a sermon in BostonThe American colonists might have agreed, but they wanted to have a say in the decision. They wanted the right to vote on their own taxes. But no colonists were permitted to serve in the British Parliament. So they protested that they were being taxed without being represented. -
The Stamp Act
Parliament created revenue stamps and required that they are purchased and fixed to printed matter and legal documents of all kinds in America. The Stamp Act burden all colonists who did any kind of business and it affected most of all of the articulate elements in the community: merchants, planters, lawyers, printer-editors all strategically placed to influnce public opinion. -
The Boston Masacre
The impact of colonial boycotts on English commerce had persuaded Lord North to modify the Townshend Acts just in time to halt a perilous escalation of tension. On March 5, 1770, in the square before the custom house, a group of rowdies began tauting and hurling icicles at the britsh sentry on duty. His call for help brought reinforcements. -
The Tea Act
(1773), in British American colonial history, legislative maneuver by the British ministry of Lord North to make English tea marketable in America. At the same time, the North administration hoped to reassert Parliament’s right to levy direct revenue taxes on the Colonies. The shipments became a symbol of taxation tyranny to the colonists, reopening the door to unknown future tax abuses. Colonial resistance culminated in the Boston Tea Party (December 1773). -
Battle of lexington and Concord
On the night of April 18, Lieutenant Colonel Francis Smith and Major Pitcairn gathered 700 redcoats on Boston Common set out by way of Lexington. A British patrol intercepted the trio, but slipped through and delivered the warning. During the fighting along the road leading to Lexington from Concord, a British solider was searching a house for rebel snipers when he ran into James Hayward of the Acton militia. -
The revolutionary War
Colonial resistance led to violence in 1770, when British soldiers opened fire on a mob of colonists, killing five men in what was known as the Boston Massacre. After December 1773, when a band of Bostonians dressed as Mohawk Indians boarded British ships and dumped 342 chests of tea into Boston Harbor, an outraged Parliament passed a series of measures (known as the Intolerable, or Coercive Acts) designed to reassert imperial authority in Massachusetts.
