On April 19, local militiamen clashed with British soldiers in the Battles of Lexington and Concord in Massachusetts, marking the “shot heard round the world” that signified the start of the Revolutionary War.īy June 1776, with the Revolutionary War in full swing, a growing majority of the colonists had come to favor independence from Britain.
Paul Revere and other riders sounded the alarm, and colonial militiamen began mobilizing to intercept the Redcoats. On the night of April 18, 1775, hundreds of British troops marched from Boston to nearby Concord, Massachusetts in order to seize an arms cache. The Continental Congress voted to meet again in May 1775 to consider further action, but by that time violence had already broken out. It issued a declaration of the rights due every citizen, including life, liberty, property, assembly and trial by jury. This First Continental Congress did not go so far as to demand independence from Britain, but it denounced taxation without representation, as well as the maintenance of the British army in the colonies without their consent. In response, a group of colonial delegates (including George Washington of Virginia, John and Samuel Adams of Massachusetts, Patrick Henry of Virginia and John Jay of New York) met in Philadelphia in September 1774 to give voice to their grievances against the British crown. After December 1773, when a band of Bostonians altered their appearance to hide their identity boarded British ships and dumped 342 chests of tea into Boston Harbor during the Boston Tea Party, an outraged Parliament passed a series of measures (known as the Intolerable, or Coercive Acts) designed to reassert imperial authority in Massachusetts.ĭid you know? Now most famous as a traitor to the American cause, General Benedict Arnold began the Revolutionary War as one of its earliest heroes, helping lead rebel forces in the capture of Fort Ticonderoga in May 1775.
Attempts by the British government to raise revenue by taxing the colonies (notably the Stamp Act of 1765, the Townshend Acts of 1767 and the Tea Act of 1773) met with heated protest among many colonists, who resented their lack of representation in Parliament and demanded the same rights as other British subjects.Ĭolonial resistance led to violence in 1770, when British soldiers opened fire on a mob of colonists, killing five men in what was known as the Boston Massacre. The French and Indian War, or Seven Years’ War (1756-1763), brought new territories under the power of the crown, but the expensive conflict lead to new and unpopular taxes. For more than a decade before the outbreak of the American Revolution in 1775, tensions had been building between colonists and the British authorities.
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