The First American Army - Bruce Chadwick [21]
Yet the Crown had little use for the Americans’ treasured institutions and would not let the colonies enjoy any voting representation in Parliament. The colonists, given a little democracy by the Crown through self-governing assemblies and independent courts, constantly sought more and English leaders did not like that at all. Starting in the 1760s, Parliament passed harsh new laws to raise taxes, curtail colonial commerce, and curb political freedom to keep the Americans in line. The Stamp Act of 1765 required all newspapers and legal documents to be taxed via a stamp that had to be affixed to them. The Iron Act forbid American manufacturers from selling carriages, plows, and kitchen utensils in England. The Revenue Act of 1764, better known as the Sugar Act, placed a tax on molasses, rum, coffee, and wine. The Currency Act outlawed American paper money. The Townshend Acts of 1767 authorized taxes on tea, glass, paper, and other goods. Those acts also introduced a new tax to pay for the costs of the British army occupying America. There were even taxes on new doorknobs.
Some royal governors sneered at colonial assemblies and shut them down when they did not approve of their legislation, infuriating the colonists. The presence of British soldiers also annoyed the colonists, especially after a group of them shot and killed five Americans in Boston in 1770 in what the newspapers called the Boston Massacre.
The angry Americans felt that their economy was being crushed and their freedoms taken away—they were becoming slaves to England. They fought back. Thousands participated in boycotts of British goods and most newspapers refused to obey the Stamp Act, which had to be rescinded. The protests reached a crescendo one night in 1773 when a radical group, the Sons of Liberty, dressed as Mohawk Indians, boarded the Dartmouth, a cargo ship in Boston harbor, and tossed its more than three hundred crates of tea into the water in the Boston Tea Party.
British revenge was swift and harsh. Parliament passed the Intolerable Acts that further curbed freedoms and shut the port of Boston, a crippling blow to New England’s economy. Americans immediately denounced the Crown from the bustling cities to the small villages that dotted the country. People berated King George in small taverns and in large assembly halls. Some men, such as Virginia’s George Washington, took charge of armed militia companies and trained them for war. Others formed Committees of Safety, secret organizations that would aid any such rebellion.
In England, the king and parliamentary leaders insisted that their actions from 1763 to 1775 had been temporary and necessary, but the Americans saw them as the precursors of even more draconian steps to destroy the new, democratic social order they had spent so many years creating. They would not give it up. Many felt, too, that, geographically, more than three thousand miles from London, they were a separate country anyway. They believed that they were a religious people and that God wanted them to free themselves from the motherland. Americans insisted fervently that they were a virtuous people who could create a virtuous nation. The British, they charged, were immoral and corrupt and no longer had the right to rule them. Their economy was surging. Who really needed England anymore?
And, too, many of them believed that they were being borne along on the currents of history and that, as Thomas Paine put it with such elegance, “time hath found us.” If a war was needed to validate this virtuous land, many said, let it come. If families had to be shattered, businesses ruined, and even if lives had to be given up for American freedom, so be it. None said it better than the fiery red-haired Patrick Henry when he stood in a Virginia hall and shouted, “Give me liberty or give me death.”
The British never understood the anger that permeated America and the colonists did not understand the need for the Crown’s stranglehold on them. Both were headed for a showdown. It arrived on April 19, 1775. British