Causes Of The Road To Revolution

The Road to Revolution

Before the American Revolution, the British bossed around Americans by making them pay taxes to the British King,who thought he was great,until Americans got angry with him and started fighting.The British did not have any taxes or rules. It started with smugglers who did not sell their trade to the British,but to other places so they did not have to pay taxes. The four most important events that lead to the Road to Revolution are the Navigation Act, Stamp Act, Boston Tea Party, and the Coercive Act. These events lead to the American Revolution mainly because the colonists disagreed with the acts and rebelled.

Laws the regulated trade between Great Britain, its colonies, and the other parts of the world were known
as the Navigation Acts. The Navigation Acts were passed in 1660 which stated that the colonists must use English-built ships for all their trade and could only buy English-made goods. The Navigation Acts did not allow certain colonial products including tobacco, cotton, and indigo to be shipped from the English colonies to anywhere but England or its colonies. The act was created to make mercantilism work. Colonists rebelled the act because it limited their trade with nations other than England. This act made the colonists start to rebel and this was one of the causes of the American Revolution.

The British Parliament passed the Stamp Act in 1765 to tax certain transactions and printed items in the American colonies. The act required that stamps purchased from British government be affixed to items of everyday use by people such as newspapers, playing cards, and legal documents. Virginians were the first to publicly protest the Stamp Act. In Virginia’s House of Burgesses Patrick Henry proposed resolutions that the people of Virginia could only be taxed by themselves or their representatives. The Stamp Act interfered with the idea of no taxation no representation. Colonist were outraged by the Stamp Act and defended their rights and eventually causing its repeal. This was the first in a series of crises that led to the Revolutionary War.

Another crises the colonists was the faced was the disagreement of tax on tea.
When Lord North had most of the Townshend Acts repealed the tax on tea was not removed. By not removing the tax on tea was their way of telling the colonists they had the right to place taxes on merchandise being shipped to America. Merchants were not satisfied and protested against the taxation without representation. American pot cities were still being sent tea by the British but the Americans were buying most of their tea from smugglers. Merchants had come to an agreement not to sell the tea and it began to pile up in the warehouses. To keep down financial issues the British East India Company , that produced the tea, influenced Parliament to pass the Tea Act in 1773 which allowed the British to sell the tea at a cheaper price than the smugglers in spite of the tax. The colonists still refused to purchase the tea from the East India Company even though it was cheaper than the tea that was smuggled into the colonies. Merchants and Samuel Adams protested the act. In 1773 the East India Company had ships to carry 500,000 pounds of tea to Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and Charlestown. In Boston, colonists tried to send the ships away but the governor of Massachusetts who wanted to see the 300 chest unloaded. A group of people disguised as Mohawks boarded the ship while it was in the harbor and dumped the tea into the Boston harbor. The Mohawks were recognizable under their disguises as the Boston’s Sons of Liberty. This incident became known as the Boston Tea Party which upset the Parliament, and their response ended in war. The British government thought this action deserved swift and severe punishment. In 1774 Parliament passed the Coercive Acts to punish
Boston.

In 1774 of March a series of laws passed by Parliament known as the Coercive Acts to punish Boston and Massachusetts for their tea party. The Coercive Acts were a series of four acts. One part of the acts closed the port of the Boston until damages from the Boston Tea Party were paid. In another act it stated that British officials who were accused of a crime had to be tried in English rather than American courts. Still another act stated that in any town of Massachusetts British troops could be quartered and even in private homes. Finally, most town meetings were banned if they were held without the governor’s consent and local authority had restrictions. The result of the Coercive Acts was that Boston and the colonies of Massachusetts were to suffer for the actions of the few unknown people who had staged the protest. The Coercive Acts were so harsh they were called Intolerable Acts. The Coercive Acts made many colonists angry and want to fight back.
In conclusion the American Revolution began in 1775 with a conflict between the thirteen colonies and Great Britain. The colonies had won their independence while not one event can be the actual cause of the revolution. The war began with a disagreement between the way Great Britian treated the colonists and how the colonists felt they should be treated. Americans felt they should have the rights of all Englishmen, but the British, on the other hand, thought the colonies were created to be used in a way that best suited Parliament. This conflict is one of the crises of the American Revolution: “No Taxation No Representation.”