American Revolution Dbq

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The American Revolution was a gradual and inevitable departure from which the colonists felt they could not avoid. American colonists took many preliminary acts of rebellion and warning, such as boycotting taxed goods and the “Petition to the King”, before any major fighting had occurred. Following the French and Indian War, English citizens felt American colonists should have been held accountable to pay off the debts of the war. Instead of raising colonist’s taxes, England decided to lower the taxes and enforce the taxes that the colonists had not been paying at the time. This enraged the colonists, due to the fact that they had no say in the taxes they had to pay. From there, James Otis coined the slogan “No taxation without representation,” which ignited a revolt that would plague England for over three decades. Colonists felt the only way they could keep England from enforcing these taxes was to boycott the goods that England had placed a tax on. …show more content…

While the Stamp Act was probably more vital to the colonists’ every-day lives, the Sons of Liberty orchestrated yet another embargo on a taxed item that would force England’s hand to withdraw the tax. England would later create an act called the Townshend Act which taxed a plethora of goods, but the attempt once again seemed futile, as colonists simply refused to buy the goods that were taxed. The final straw for Great Britain was the disobedient act colonists coined “The Boston Tea Party.” This act entailed the colonists discarding all the tea on an English merchant ship following England’s ambitions to bail a company out by lowering the tax exclusively for this company. The repercussions for this was known as the Coercive Acts,” stating that colonists must pay off the debts for this act of rebellion before docks were to be

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