The American Revolution

Although many think of the American Revolution as a conflict between the righteous colonists and the villainous British, the situation in the colonies escalated by the fault of both parties. Americans acquired much wealth during the period of salutary neglect from 1713 to 1763, but the British had accumulated a massive national debt during the Seven Years’ War at the end of this period. In order to reduce the national debt, Britain began taxing the prosperous Americans. Thus began the first of three Imperial Crises, during which British rule over the colonies became increasingly repressive due to the radicalization of colonists in response to fair taxation, and Britain finally dashed any hope of reconciliation with the passing of the Coercive
Later in 1766, Parliament issued the Declaratory Act, which officially gave Parliament to tax the colonies without actual representation. Additionally, in 1767, Parliament established new taxes on the American colonies known as the Townshend Acts. These new laws taxed British imports into the colonies, so Americans had to pay a tax on basically any imports. For obvious reasons, the colonists were livid about these new taxes, so they responded by ineffectively boycotting British goods in the case of the radicals and writing increasingly radical pamphlets in the case of the elites. Pamphlets written by elites attracted much attention from the British, and lead to the dissolution of the Massachusetts Assembly which threw the colony into chaos after the Royal Governor began to rule the former commonwealth. By closing the Massachusetts Assembly, Britain began to turn from reasonable to tyrannical in the face of an increasingly volatile colonial population. Furthermore, in March 1770, a group of British regulars that were being harassed by a mob in Boston fired into the crowd, killing five. Luckily for the British, John Adams, a conservative elite lawyer, stepped in to successfully defend the soldiers in court and prevent their execution (Hamel, “The Second Imperial Crisis”) From 1766 to 1770, the apparent fault of tension
Now Americans only paid a tax on tea to the East India Company, and after this tax was increased in 1773, the radical colonists reacted in the extreme with the hopes of drawing the British into a conflict. In December, 1773, a group of radicals dressed in Native American garb stormed a British tea ship and threw its cargo, worth an estimated three hundred million dollars in modern currency, overboard into the harbor in an act now known as the Boston Tea Party. As always, the radical colonists were attempting to provoke the British into open conflict. Their plan succeeded in 1774 with the publishing of the Coercive Acts, which closed the port in Boston, shut down the Massachusetts Assembly permanently, protected the right of British soldiers to be tried in Britain, forced the colonists to support the British military, and expanded the province of Quebec to oppose American westward expansion. The Coercive Acts, or Intolerable Acts as they were known in the colonies, mark the point where the British overreact to colonial rebelliousness, causing an irreparable rift. John Adams then wrote a document addressing Parliament that addressed eighteen grievances of the colonies. Colonists, both radical and elite together responded by forming Constitutional Associations, as a replacement for Nonimportation Associations, that emphasized public virtue in the form of patriotism to ensure unity