The French and Indian War was very expensive for the British.
Britain decided to require the American colonies to help bear the financial burden of the war.
The British government thought this was reasonable because:
The American colonies belonged to them politically.
The colonists were British citizens.
The war had won the colonists massive amounts of land east of the Appalachians.
Salutary Neglect
Britain had political sovereignty over the American colonies but practically, they left many of the day-to-day political decisions to the colonists themselves.
Due to the distance between Britain and the colonies.
The colonists often engaged in smuggling and illegal trade with other nations, despite the Navigation Acts, which restricted trade to British ships and merchants.
The British did not enforce these laws strongly, which is known as salutary neglect.
Led the colonists to believe they were more independent than the British believed.
British Clampdown
Prime Minister George Grenville implemented a three-pronged plan to regain control of the colonies and acquire cash:
Stricter enforcement of existing laws like the Navigation Acts.
Extension of wartime provisions into peacetime: Quartering Act of 1765
Kept British soldiers stationed in the colonies.
Required colonists to provide food and housing for the soldiers.
Sugar Act: imposed taxes on coffee, wine, and other luxury items, and enforced existing taxes on molasses.
Stamp Act of 1765: tax on all paper items produced in the colonies (newspapers, playing cards, legal contracts, etc.).
Currency Act: prohibited colonial assemblies from printing their own paper currency.
Restricted the supply of money while demanding more tax revenue.
Colonial Response
The colonists felt suffocated by the new demands and restrictions as the era of salutary neglect ended.
Americans were experiencing declining wages and rising unemployment.
This sparked the debate about the justice and right to impose taxes on colonists without representation in Parliament, leading to the slogan "no taxation without representation."
Colonists believed they had a social contract with their government and natural rights that could not be violated, influenced by the Enlightenment thinkers like John Locke, Rousseau, Voltaire, and Kant.
Virtual Representation
British argued that the colonists had virtual representation in Parliament: members of Parliament represented the interests of all British classes, not necessarily locations.
Colonial leaders argued that only people from the colonies could truly represent their interests.
There was a discrepancy between the British understanding of representation (by classes of people) and the American understanding (by location).
Colonial Resistance
Organized groups like the Sons of Liberty, the Daughters of Liberty, and Vox Populi gave voice to the protests.
These groups consisted of merchants, traders, artisans, and others.
The Stamp Act Congress was gathered in 1765, including 27 delegates from nine colonies.
The goal was to petition the British Parliament to repeal the Stamp Act because taxation without representation amounted to tyranny.
The Congress acknowledged that the colonists were loyal subjects of the king and country.
Repeal and Declaratory Act
Parliament repealed both the Stamp and Sugar Act in 1766.
They passed the Declaratory Act: affirmed that Parliament had the right to pass whatever laws they wanted in the colonies.
Townsend Acts
In 1767, the passage of the Townsend Acts levied taxes on items like paper, tea, and glass that were imported into the colonies.
Colonists organized protests to boycott all these goods, uniting colonists from all classes.
Women spun clothes by hand instead of buying manufactured cloth from England
They concocted their own herbal teas instead of purchasing British tea.
The Boston Massacre
In 1770, a group of colonists began harassing British soldiers in Boston by throwing snowballs and stones.
The soldiers fired into the crowd, killing four and wounding seven colonists.
The soldiers were put on trial and defended by John Adams, who successfully acquitted six out of eight soldiers.
Colonists judged it a miscarriage of justice and further evidence of increasing British tyranny.
Boston Tea Party
In 1773, Parliament passed the Tea Act, which was a tax on tea and provided exclusive rights to the British East India Company to buy and ship tea in the colonies.
About 50 members of the Sons of Liberty disguised themselves as American Indians and dumped 45 tons of British tea into the Boston Harbor, worth approximately 2,000,000 in today's currency.
Coercive Acts
In response to the Boston Tea Party, Parliament passed the Coercive Acts in 1774.
These acts closed down the Boston Harbor until all the tea was paid for.
They also passed another Quartering Act.
Taken together, these pieces of legislation became known in the colonies as the Intolerable Acts.
Colonial leaders spread news throughout the colonies, and many colonists began to arm themselves and gather into militias to protect themselves from further British tyranny.