American Revolution

The 1770s witnessed the first dramatic experience and one of the major conflicts ever fought on American soil. The Revolution was much more than fighting between British army and colonial militiamen – it destroyed colonial structure and economy, uprooted thousands of civilian families and finally united the colonies into a whole.

In July 1776, the thirteen colonies had, out of desperation, to declare independence and join together into a confederation of states, but it took years of further fighting to cease hostility and to begin to accept each other as fellow citizens. The Revolution not only led Americans to develop new conceptions of politics, but also gave northerners and southerners the first real chance to learn what they had in common, and to favor centralization of power at the national level.

The Boston Tea Party and the First Continental Congress

By 1773, all the Townshend duties were abolished, only the tax on tea was still in effect. It deprived thousands of colonists of their favorite drink that was an important component of Anglo-American life and traditions. But still it was an only heavily dutied product, so many were reducing the protests and only few radicals as Samuel Adams with his supporters continued protesting. The other reason for keeping order was that illegal trade was flourishing, and most tea in the colonies was of foreign origin, imported illegally by smugglers.

In May 1773, British Parliament gave the right to sell tea in colonies to the East India Company – that decision made any other selling of tea unprofitable, and what Samuel Adams considered even more dangerous – it could make many colonists to admit Parliament's right to tax them and to establish an East India Company monopoly of all colonial trade.

The first ships with tea were perceived as a new threat to colonial freedom, so four major American cities protested against them – in New York City the ships failed to arrive on schedule, in Philadelphia citizens persuaded the captain to sail back to England. The only confortation occurred in Boston, where a new crisis called the Boston Tea Party started. The royal governor did not want to send the tea back to England, so at night Bostonian radicals led by Samuel Adams boarded three ships with tea, as Indians, and dumped the cargo into the harbor; they were mainly representatives of Bostonian white citizens, who opposed British taxation.

The result of the Tea Party was expressed by British Parliament in such punitive measures as the "Coersive Acts" that prevented Bostonians from having access to the sea and banned town meetings and the "Quebec Act" that granted religious freedom to Catholics and thus alarmed the Protestant colonists. For colonial radicals the Acts, which were already collectively called the "Intolerable Acts" proved that Britain had made a new plan to oppress them. So the colonies agreed to send their delegates to Philadelphia in September 1774.

The first meeting of colonial delegates hosted 55 representatives from each colony except Georgia and became known as the First Continental Congress. The congressmen had three important tasks to accomplish – to define American grievances, to develop a plan for resistance, and, finally, to outline a theory of their constitutional relationship with Britain. The delegates agreed on the list of laws that had to be repealed, chose boycott as their method of economic resistance, but could not reach a consensus on constitutional relationship. Finally they ended with a resolution that all the colonists had the right to "life, liberty and property", and that provincial legislatures could set "taxation and internal polity". The most radical colonists declared that colonies owed allegiance only to British King George III, but legitimate authority had to be exercises by colonial assemblies, which had historically governed them.

Now the colonists were divided into those, who called for action – "the Colonies must either submit or triumph" – and the Loyalists, who had no intention to be independent from Britain.

Task 1. Comment on the extract from the pamphlet by Thomas Paine "Common Sense" published in 1776. What feelings did it evoke in American colonists? Why?

"O ye that love mankind! Ye that dare oppose not only the tyranny, but the tyrant, stand forth! Every spot of the Old World is overrun with oppression. Freedom hath been hunted around the globe... O receive the fugitive, and prepare in time an asylum for mankind."

Task 2. Fill in the table and speak about the steps of the British Government that led to American Revolution.

Year	The law providing the tax	The consequences of the law
1763	Proclamation	Restricted the rights of the colonists to settle new lands
	Sugar Act
	Currency Act
	Stamp Act
	Townshend Acts
1774	Coersive Acts
1774	Quebec Act