1774
First Continental Congress Convenes
In response to the British Parliament’s enactment of the
Coercive Acts in the American colonies, the first session of the Continental
Congress convenes at Carpenter’s Hall in Philadelphia. Fifty-six delegates from
all the colonies except Georgia drafted a declaration of rights and grievances
and elected Virginian Peyton Randolph as the first president of Congress.
Patrick Henry, George Washington, John Adams, and John Jay were among the
delegates.
The first major American opposition to British policy came in
1765 after Parliament passed the Stamp Act, a taxation measure designed to
raise revenues for a standing British army in America. Under the argument of
“no taxation without representation,” colonists convened the Stamp Act Congress
in October 1765 to vocalize their opposition to the tax. With its enactment in
November, most colonists called for a boycott of British goods, and some
organized attacks on the customhouses and homes of tax collectors. After months
of protest in the colonies, Parliament voted to repeal the Stamp Act in March
1766.
Most colonists continued to quietly accept British rule until
Parliament’s enactment of the Tea Act in 1773, a bill designed to save the
faltering East India Company by greatly lowering its tea tax and granting it a
monopoly on the American tea trade. The low tax allowed the East India Company
to undercut even tea smuggled into America by Dutch traders, and many colonists
viewed the act as another example of taxation tyranny. In response, militant
Patriots in Massachusetts organized the “Boston Tea Party,” which saw British
tea valued at some Ý18,000 dumped into Boston harbor.
Parliament, outraged by the Boston Tea Party and other blatant
acts of destruction of British property, enacted the Coercive Acts, also known
as the Intolerable Acts, in 1774. The Coercive Acts closed Boston to merchant
shipping, established formal British military rule in Massachusetts, made
British officials immune to criminal prosecution in America, and required
colonists to quarter British troops. The colonists subsequently called the
first Continental Congress to consider a united American resistance to the
British.
With the other colonies watching intently, Massachusetts led the
resistance to the British, forming a shadow revolutionary government and
establishing militias to resist the increasing British military presence across
the colony. In April 1775, Thomas Gage, the British governor of Massachusetts,
ordered British troops to march to Concord, Massachusetts, where a Patriot
arsenal was known to be located. On April 19, 1775, the British regulars
encountered a group of American militiamen at Lexington, and the first shots of
the American Revolution were fired.
More than a year later, on July 4, 1776, the Second Continental
Congress officially adopted the Declaration of Independence. Five years later,
in October 1781, British General Charles Lord Cornwallis surrendered to
American and French forces at Yorktown, Virginia, bringing to an end the last
major battle of the Revolution. With the signing of the Treaty of Paris with
Britain in 1783, the United States formally became a free and independent nation.