The London Government after 1763 struggled to get the colonists to pay some of the debt to help pay off the debts of the colonial empire, which led to a emerging sense of American identity.

^^^ this helped spark the flame of the American revolution.

Republicanism was the concept of defining a just society as one in which all citizens willingly subordinated their interests to the common good. The stability of the government thus relied on the virtue of the citizenry.

By nature, republicanism was opposed to hierarchical and authoritarian institutions such as monarchies and aristocracies.

A second idea that shaped american thought was the political thought derived from a group of British political commentators called the Radical Whigs.

Basically, the Whigs feared the threat to liberty posed by the arbitrary power of the monarch and the ministers relative to the elected representatives of the parliament.

The Whigs attacked the use of patronage and bribes in the king’s ministers (corruption).

The Whigs warned the citizens to be on guard against corruption and to be vigilant against possible conspiracies to rid them of their hard-earned liberties, and together, Republican and Whig ideas made the Americans on extremely high guard against any threat to their rights.

Even though most of the colonies were not formally planted by the British government, (all except Georgia) the British monarchy embraced mercantilism, the concept that wealth was power and how much power a country had could be measured by the amount of gold and silver in their treasury.

Owning the colonies gave an advantage to the mother country because they could supply raw materials to the mother country and provide a guaranteed market for exports.

The London government looked upon the colonies as tenants; basically they were expected to provide goods to the mother country, to exclusively buy manufactured goods from Britain, and to never become self-dependent or self-governed.

Multiple laws were occasionally established to keep the colonies in line, the first being the Navigation Laws. Other subsequent laws made sure that European goods that were headed to America had to land in Britain first, where tariff duties could be collected and British middlemen could take a portion of the profits.

British policy also inflicted a currency shortage on the colonies.since the colonists regularly bought more from Britain than what they sold there, the difference had to be made up in cash. Every year gold and silver coins drained out of the colonies, creating a money shortage.

Britain emerged victorious from the seven year’s war, as well as emerging with over 140 million in debt. Prime Minister George Greenville first sparked the resentment of the colonists by strictly enforcing the navigation laws.

George Greenville also secured the first law ever for raising tax revenue in colonies for the Crown: The Sugar Act of 1764.

After protests from the colonists, the duties were lowered substantially, but the resentment was kept burning by the quartering act of 1765, which required certain colonies to provide food and shelter for the British troops.

In the same year, Greenville imposed one of the most widely hated measures of all: the stamp tax, to raise revenue to support the new military force.

The Stamp act mandated the use of stamped paper, or the affixing of stamps to provide evidence of paying taxes. They were required for about 50 trade items, as well as certain types of commercial and legal documents including playing cards, pamphlets, newspapers, diplomas, bills of lading, and marriage licenses.

Greenville thought all of these measures were fair and just, and was simply asking for the Americans to pay their share of the costs of their own protection. In fact, the British were already paying taxes much heavier than the ones passed in the colonies.

Americans saw this as a threat to their liberties, and thought it jeopardized their basic rights as colonists.

The admiralty courts were used to convict defendants of defying the stamp and sugar acts, and juries were not allowed. The burden of proof was on the defendants, who were guilty unless proven innocent. This went against the ancient privileges that American colonists held dear.

Americans began to believe that the government was trying to strip them of their rights, and lashed back violently, especially at the Stamp Act.

“No taxation without representation” became a cry in the Americas, in which the colonists challenged the parliament on its right to tax Americans, when there were no American representatives on the parliament, and when Americans didn’t get to vote for representatives either.

The colonists’ protests against the Stamp act took different forms, the most conspicuous being the Stamp Act Congress of 1765, which gathered together in New York City 27 distinguished delegates form 9 colonies. The members drew up a statement of their rights after dignified debate, and beseeched the king and the parliament to repeal the legislation.

More effective than the congress was the widespread adoption of the non-importation agreements against British goods. Homemade garments became popular, and many people who had been standing on the sidelines now signed petitions to uphold the boycotting of British goods. This further spread the resistance throughout American colonial society.

Sometimes violence broke out in the colonial protests. Groups such as the Sons of Liberty and the Daughters of Liberty enforced non-importation agreements against violators, often tarring and feathering them. Patriotic mobs ransacked the houses of unpopular officials, confiscated their money, and hanged effigies of stamp agents on liberty poles.

After a stormy debate, the parliament grudgingly repealed the stamp act. However, the parliament also passed the declaratory act, which was basically restating that the parliament had the right to “bind” the colonies in “all cases whatsoever”. In doing this, the British government defined the principle it would not yield: the absolute and unqualified sovereignty over its North American colonies.

The colonists had already drawn their own battle line by making it clear that they wanted sovereignty of their own and would undertake drastic action to secure it.

Charles Townshend persuaded the parliament to pass the Townshend acts of 1767. The most important of these new regulations was a light import duty on glass, white lead, paper, paint, and tea. He made it so the tax was an indirect customs duty payable at the American ports. To the restless colonists, this didn’t matter at all. For them, the real difficulty was taxes- in any form- without representation.

The ultra-suspicious Americans regarded the Townshend acts as another attempt to enchain them, and their fears were confirmed when the London government suspended the Legislature of New York in 1767 for failure to comply with the Quartering act.

Colonists took the new tax less seriously, and smugglers increased their activities, especially in Massachusetts. British officials landed two regiments in 1768. Colonists taunted them mercilessly, and a clash soon erupted.

On March 5, 1770, around 60 townspeople threw snowballs at a squad of redcoats, angry over the death of a 11-year old boy, who was killed after a protest against a merchant who defied the boycott of British goods.

Acting without order, the troops opened fire, and killed/wounded 11 citizens, an event that became known as the Boston Massacre.

Only 2 of the redcoats were found guilty of manslaughter, and were released after being branded on the hand.

Samuel Adams, John Adam’s cousin, organized the local Committees of Correspondence in Massachusetts. After he set up the first one in Boston around 1772, some other 80 towns in the colony were quick to follow suit. Their chief function was to keep the resistance alive by spreading letters and maintaining resistance to British policy.

The next step was to establish Inter-colonial committees of correspondence, with Virginia paving the way, establishing a body like the standing committee of the House of Burgesses. Within a short time, every colony had established a committee.

^^^ These evolved into the first american congresses.

The British East India company was granted full monopoly of American tea business, and was able to lower its prices significantly, but the Americans still protested this because they still had the tax. To Americans, principle was far more important than price.

Massachusetts governor Thomas Hutchinson decided to go against the protests of the crowd, and infuriated the Boston Radicals when he ordered the Tea Ships to not clear Boston’s harbor until they had unloaded their cargoes.

On December 16, 1773 around 100 Bostonians disguised themselves as Native Americans and boarded the docked ships, smashed open 342 chests of tea, and dumped their contents to the Atlantic, an action that later became known as the Boston Tea Party.

After this, the intolerable acts were passed. The Boston Port act closed the harbor until the damages were paid for. A new quartering act was passed, which gave the local authorities the power to lodge British soldiers anywhere, even in private homes.

The Quebec act unfortunately was passed around the same time as these acts, and was wrongfully grouped up in the intolerable acts. This act, however, was never meant to punish the colonists.

The most memorable of the responses to the Intolerable acts was the summoning of the First Continental Congress. it deliberated for 7 weeks, and was more of a convention than a congress. John Adams played a huge role in this, swaying his colleagues to revolutionary course, he helped defeat the narrowest of margins a proposal by the moderates for a species of American home rule under British jurisdiction.

The most significant action of the congress was the creation of The Association. It called for a complete boycott of British goods and planned to meet again in May 1775 if the taxes were not repealed.