The Problem of Empire Timeline

George Grenville had approval over the Sugar Act if 1764 to replace the Molasses Act of 1733 that was being ignored. The earlier Act had set a tax rate of six pence per gallon in French molasses. The rate was so high it made trade unprofitable. Colonial merchants bribed custom officials at the going rate of 1.5 pence per gallon, which merchants could pay and still turn a profit, and tightened customize enforcement so that it could actually be collected.

Leading to the Revolution

Government did not enforce the law and people started to ignore it. The colonists openly turned to smuggling, bringing in Sugar and molasses secretly to avoid paying taxes. By not enforcing its laws, British allowed the colonists to get used to running their own affairs.

The Currency Act banned the American colonies from using paper money as legal tender. Colonial shopkeepers, planters, and farmers had used local currency, which was worth less than British pounds sterling, to pay their debts to British merchants. The Currency Act ensured that merchants would no longer be paid to money printed in the colonies, boosting their profit.

Leading to the Revolution

The act took away the colonists money and made it where the only money they was allowed to spend was the British money. It gave British complete control over the colonies and America didn't like that because now they had no say so in their own money system.

The Stamp Act of 1765, sparked the first great imperial crisis. The new levy was to cover part of the cost of keeping British troops in America. Nine assemblies sent delegates to the Stamp Act Congress, which met in New York City in October 1765. The congress protested the kiss of American “rights and liberties,” especially the right to trial by jury. It challenged the constitutionality of the Stamp and Sugar Acts by declaring that only the colonists’ elected representatives could tax them. Still, moderate-minded delegates wanted compromise, not confrontation. They assured Parliament that Americans “glory in being subjects if the best of Kings” and humbly petitioned for repeal of the Stamp Act.

Leading to the Revolution

Americans were angry because they had no say in the fairness of this new form of taxation. They had no votes in the British Parliament. Patrick Henry outraged because he believed the power should be given to an elected assembly of people to create a more democratic form of government.

Earl of Rockingham, Grenville’s successor, forged a compromise. To mollify the colonists and help British merchants, he repealed the Stamp Act and reduced the duty in molasses imposed by the Sugar Act to a penny a gallon. Then he pacified imperial reformers and hard-liners with the Declaratory Act of 1766, which explicitly reaffirmed Parliament's “full power and authority to make laws and statutes … to bind the colonies and people of America… in all cases whatsoever”. By swiftly ending the Stamp Act crisis.

Leading to the Revolution

The Act particularly illustrated British insensitivity to the political maturity that had developed in the American provinces during the 18th century, in response to the Parliaments unwritten policy of salutary neglect toward the colonies. That the colonial assemblies did not have the right of imposing duties and taxes upon their colonial subjects.

In 1767, George III named William Pitt to head a new government. Pitt chronically ill and often absent from parliamentary debates, left chancellor if the exchequer Charles Townshend in command. The new tax legislation, The Townshend Act of 1767, had both fiscal and political goals. It imposed duties in colonial imports of paper, paints, glass, and tea that were expected to raise about £40,000 a year. Though Townshend did allocate some of the revenue if American military expenses, he earmarked most of it to pay the salaries of royal governors, judges, and other imperial officials.

Leading to the Revolution

Parliament repealed all the Townshend duties except the tax on tea, leading to a temporary truce between the two sides in the years before the American Revolution. Townshend hoped the acts would clear imperial expenses in the colonies, but many Americans viewed the radiation as an abuse of power. That then resulted in the passage of agreements to limit imports from Britain.

On the night of March 5,1770, a group of nine British redcoats fired into a crowd and killed five townspeople a subsequent trial exonerated the soldiers, but Boston’s Radical Whigs, convinced of a ministerial conspiracy against the liberty, labeled the incident a “massacre” and used it to rally sentiment against imperial power.

Leading to the Revolution

The Boston Massacre led to the deaths of five civilians at the hands of British redcoats on March 5,1770, the legal aftermath of which helped spark the rebellion in some of the British American colonies, which culminated in the American Revolutionary War. The Boston Massacre is remembered as a key event in helping to galvanize the colonial public to the Patriot cause.

The Sons of Liberty prevented East India Company ships from delivering their cargoes in New York, Philadelphia, and Charleston. In Massachusetts, Royal Governor Hutchinson was determined to land the tea and collect the tax. To foil the governor's place, artisans and labels disguised as Indians boarded three ships on December 16, 1773, broke open 342 chests of tea and threw them into the harbor.

Leading to the Revolution

The Boston Tea Party was the key event for the Revolutionary war. With this Act, the colonists started the violent part of the revolution. It was the first time the colonists tried to revel with violence against their own government. All the colonists realized they were being treated wrong by the British government. They all wanted to start a life in a new world, but the British government did not give them give them the possibility by controlling them. This resulted in the passage of the Coercive Acts in 177 and pushed both sides closer to war.

Early in 1774, Parliament passed four Coercive Acts to force Massachusetts finish for the tea and to submit to imperial authority. The Boston Port Bill closed Boston Harbor for shipping; the Massachusetts Governor Act annulled the colony’s charter and prohibited most town meetings.

Leading to the Revolution

This Act closed Boston to merchant shipping, established formal British military rule in Massachusetts, made British officials immune to criminal prosecution in America, and required colonists to quarter British troops. The colonists subsequently called the first Continental Congress to consider a united American resistance to the British.

When the First Continental Congress established the Continental Association in 1774 to enforce a third boycott of British goods, it quickly set up a rural network of committees to do its work. Delegates from the thirteen colonies except for Georgia met in Philadelphia as the First Constitutional Congress to organize Colonial resistance to Parliament’s Coercive Act.

Leading to the Revolution

As promised, Congress reconvened in Philadelphia as the Second Continental Congress on May 10, 1775–and by then the American Revolution had already begun. The British army in Boston had met with armed resistance on the morning of April 19, 1775, when it marched out to the towns of Lexington and Concord to seize a cache of weapons held by colonial Patriots who had ceased to recognize the authority of the royal government of Massachusetts. The Patriots drove the British expedition back to Boston and laid siege to the town. The Revolutionary War had begun.

It was book published in 1776 by Thomas Paine. He set forth his arguments in favor of American independence. Common Sense challenged the authority of the British government and the royal monarchy. The plain language that Paine used spoke to the common people of America and was the first work to openly ask for independence from Great Britain.

Leading to the Revolution

Common Sense displayed the want for independence the American colonies wanted from Britain. Common Sense played a role in transforming a colonial disagreement into the American Revolution.