What key events left the American Colonists to declare their independence?

The American colonists' breakup with the British Empire in 1776 wasn't a sudden, impetuous act. Instead, the banding together of the 13 colonies to fight and win a war of independence confronting the Crown was the culmination of a series of events, which had begun more than a decade earlier. Escalations began before long subsequently the finish of the French and Indian War—known elsewhere as the Seven Years State of war in 1763. Here are a few of the pivotal moments that led to the American Revolution.

i. The Stamp Act (March 1765)

Sheet of penny revenue stamps printed past Britain for the American colonies, after the Stamp Act of 1765.

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To compensate some of the massive debt left over from the state of war with French republic, Parliament passed laws such every bit the Postage Act, which for the first time taxed a broad range of transactions in the colonies.

"Up until then, each colony had its own government which decided which taxes they would have, and collected them," explains Willard Sterne Randall, a professor emeritus of history at Champlain Higher and author of numerous works on early American history, including Unshackling America: How the War of 1812 Truly Ended the American Revolution. "They felt that they'd spent a lot of blood and treasure to protect the colonists from the Indians, so they should pay their share."

The colonists didn't see it that way. They resented not simply having to buy goods from the British just pay tax on them as well. "The taxation never got nerveless, because at that place were riots all over the pace," Randall says. Ultimately, Benjamin Franklin convinced the British to rescind it, just that simply fabricated things worse. "That made the Americans think they could push back against annihilation the British wanted," Randall says.

READ MORE: The Postage stamp Act

2. The Townshend Acts (June-July 1767)

An American colonist reads with concern the imperial proclamation of a tax on tea in the colonies as a British soldier stands nearby with rifle and bayonet, Boston, 1767. The revenue enhancement on tea was one of the clauses of the Townshend Acts.

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Parliament once more tried to assert its authority by passing legislation to tax goods that the Americans imported from Great U.k.. The Crown established a board of customs commissioners to stop smuggling and corruption among local officials in the colonies, who were often in on the illicit trade.

Americans struck back by organizing a boycott of the British goods that were discipline to taxation, and began harassing the British customs commissioners. In an effort to quell the resistance, the British sent troops to occupy Boston, which only deepened the ill feeling.

READ MORE: The Townshend Acts

3. The Boston Massacre (March 1770)

A print of the Boston Massacre past Paul Revere, 1770.

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Simmering tensions betwixt the British occupiers and Boston residents boiled over ane belatedly afternoon, when a disagreement between an amateur wigmaker and a British soldier led to a crowd of 200 colonists surrounding seven British troops. When the Americans began taunting the British and throwing things at them, the soldiers apparently lost their cool and began firing into the crowd.

Equally the fume cleared, three men—including an African American sailor named Crispus Attucks—were expressionless, and two others were mortally wounded. The massacre became a useful propaganda tool for the colonists, especially after Paul Revere distributed an engraving that misleadingly depicted the British as the aggressors.

READ MORE: Did a Snowball Fight Start the American Revolution?

four. The Boston Tea Political party (December 1773)

The Boston Tea Party destroying tea in Boston Harbor on December 16, 1773.

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The British eventually withdrew their forces from Boston and repealed much of the onerous Townshend legislation. Simply they left in place the tax on tea, and in 1773 enacted a new police, the Tea Human action, to prop up the financially struggling British East India Company. The deed gave the visitor extended favorable treatment under taxation regulations, so that it could sell tea at a cost that undercut the American merchants who imported from Dutch traders.

That didn't sit well with Americans. "They didn't want the British telling them that they had to purchase their tea, simply information technology wasn't just nigh that," Randall explains. "The Americans wanted to be able to trade with any country they wanted."

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The Sons of Liberty, a radical group, decided to confront the British head-on. Thinly disguised as Mohawks, they boarded 3 ships in Boston harbor and destroyed more than than 92,000 pounds of British tea by dumping it into the harbor. To make the point that they were rebels rather than vandals, they avoided harming whatever of the crew or dissentious the ships themselves, and the next 24-hour interval even replaced a padlock that had been broken.

Nevertheless, the act of defiance "really ticked off the British government," Randall explains. "Many of the E India Company'due south shareholders were members of Parliament. They each had paid 1,000 pounds sterling—that would probably exist well-nigh a million dollars now—for a share of the visitor, to get a slice of the action from all this tea that they were going to force downwardly the colonists' throats. So when these lesser-of-the-rung people in Boston destroyed their tea, that was a serious thing to them."

READ More: The Boston Tea Party

v. The Coercive Acts (March-June 1774)

The first Continental Congress, held in Carpenter's Hall, Philadelphia, met to ascertain American rights and organize a plan of resistance to the Coercive Acts imposed by the British Parliament as penalty for the Boston Tea Political party.

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In response to the Boston Tea Party, the British government decided that it had to tame the rebellious colonists in Massachusetts. In the spring of 1774, Parliament passed a series of laws, the Coercive Acts, which airtight Boston Harbor until restitution was paid for the destroyed tea, replaced the colony's elected council with ane appointed by the British, gave sweeping powers to the British military governor General Thomas Gage, and forbade town meetings without approving.

Yet another provision protected British colonial officials who were charged with capital offenses from being tried in Massachusetts, instead requiring that they be sent to another colony or back to Great Britain for trial.

But perhaps the near provocative provision was the Quartering Act, which immune British military officials to demand accommodations for their troops in unoccupied houses and buildings in towns, rather than having to stay out in the countryside. While it didn't force the colonists to lath troops in their ain homes, they had to pay for the expense of housing and feeding the soldiers. The quartering of troops eventually became 1 of the grievances cited in the Proclamation of Independence.

6. Lexington and Concord (April 1775)

The Battle of Lexington broke out on April 19, 1775.

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British General Thomas Cuff led a force of British soldiers from Boston to Lexington, where he planned to capture colonial radical leaders Sam Adams and John Hancock, and so caput to Concur and seize their gunpowder. But American spies got wind of the plan, and with the help of riders such as Paul Revere, word spread to be fix for the British.

On the Lexington Common, the British force was confronted by 77 American militiamen, and they began shooting at each other. 7 Americans died, but other militiamen managed to stop the British at Concur, and continued to harass them on their retreat back to Boston.

The British lost 73 dead, with another 174 wounded and 26 missing in action. The encarmine encounter proved to the British that the colonists were fearsome foes who had to be taken seriously. It was the outset of America'southward war of independence.

READ More: The Battles of Lexington and Concord

7. British attacks on coastal towns (Oct 1775-January 1776)

Though the Revolutionary State of war'south hostilities started with Lexington and Hold, Randall says that at the first, it was unclear whether the southern colonies, whose interests didn't necessarily marshal with the northern colonies, would be all in for a war of independence.

"The southerners were totally dependent upon the English language to purchase their crops, and they didn't trust the Yankees," he explains. "And in New England, the Puritans thought the southerners were lazy."

But that was before the brutal British naval bombardments and called-for of the coastal towns of Falmouth, Massachusetts and Norfolk, Virginia helped to unify the colonies. In Falmouth, where townspeople had to catch their possessions and abscond for their lives, northerners had to face to "the fear that the British would do any they wanted to them," Randall says.

As historian Holger Hoock has written, the burning of Falmouth shocked General George Washington, who denounced it as "exceeding in barbarity & cruelty every hostile human activity good among civilized nations."

Similarly, in Norfolk, the horror of the town's wooden buildings going up in flames after a vii-hour naval bombardment shocked the southerners, who too knew that the British were offering African Americans their freedom if they took up arms on the loyalist side. "Norfolk stirred upward fears of a slave insurrection in the Due south," Randall says.

Leaders of the rebellion seized the burnings of the two ports to make the argument that the colonists needed to ring together for survival against a ruthless enemy and comprehend the demand for independence—a spirit that ultimately would lead to their victory.

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Source: https://www.history.com/news/american-revolution-causes

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