Factors of Rebellion

In 1776, the American colonists were fed up with being ruled and controlled by the British Empire. Four major factors led the American colonists to rebel from the British Empire. The legacy of colonial religious and political ideas, parliamentary taxation, restriction of civil liberties, and unjust and forceful British military measures.

The colonists fled England in search of religious freedom, and a chance for their own land. The colonists who came to the new world were very different yet all were seeking religious freedom and a new start. Fortune hunters were attracted to Jamestown, Quakers settled in Pennsylvania, in New England Puritan & Pilgrim societies developed, and Georgia was inhabited by convicts seeking a second chance. The colonies had different economic, political, religious, and social systems, yet they all sought to make a fair wage in the New World.

As the colonists tried to make a living in the New World, they were taxed heavily and often unfairly. Seeking to recoup the costs of the Seven Years War, the British placed taxes on sugar, currency, a Stamp Act, and a Quartering Act - which forced colonists to house and feed British soldiers. Their right to make a living threatened, the colonists began protesting the unjust taxes. They organized, formed groups, wrote declarations and grievances against parliament, arguing that Parliament was taxing them unfairly. In 1767 the British Empire pushed the Townsend Acts through Parliament. The new taxes increased the price on almost all imports. Led by leaders like Samuel Adams, Benjamin Franklin, James Otis, and Thomas Jefferson, the Colonists beliefs were on a collision course with the demands of the ruling British Empire.

With their civil liberties restricted, the colonists became more and more rebellious. Colonial crowds begin taunting British officials and soldiers.

On March 5, 1770, after being pelted by snowballs and rocks in Boston, several British soldiers fired into an unarmed crowd of civilians. News of the “Boston Massacre” traveled fast. On December 16th 1773 the Bostonian Son’s of liberty, a group of radicals led by Samuel Adams disguised themselves as Mohawk Indians, and discarded an estimated forty-five tons of tea into the harbor, creating what came to be called “The Boston Tea Party.” Outraged, Parliament immediately passed what colonists called the “Intolerable Acts.” Boston Harbor was shut down until the city had repaid the East India Company for the damages caused. The Massachusetts Government Act prohibited elections and made public meeting illegal. Secretively, fifty five delegates from the twelve colonies formed the First Continental