Road to Rebellion

In April 1754, 22-year-old Lt. Col. George Washington was sent to deter French troops from challenging the British for control of the strategic Forks of the Ohio. The action had far-reaching consequences for Washington, transforming him from an inexperienced soldier into a battle-hardened leader.

Washington led 159 Virginia militiamen over the Appalachian Mountains and built a rough military road as far as western Pennsylvania. There he joined forces with a Seneca chief named Tanaghrisson, a pivotal figure whose loyalty to the British proved critical. Together, they surprised and routed a small party of French troops, killing a dozen of them and their commander.

Anticipating retaliation, Washington’s men hurriedly built Fort Necessity, where they were attacked in July by the French and their Indigenous allies.

After a battle that gave the French the upper hand, Washington signed a surrender document—not realizing that it charged him with assassinating the French commander and breaking the peace—and withdrew with his soldiers. His ill-fated foray helped spark the French and Indian War, part of the Seven Years’ War, a global conflict waged between Great Britain and France.

Washington continued to campaign against French and Indigenous forces on the contested colonial frontier, gaining experience that made him a more adept and self-assured officer—including surviving a harrowing attack in 1755 that claimed the life of the British general Edward Braddock and, three years later, successfully seizing Fort Duquesne (renamed Fort Pitt, after the British statesman William Pitt the Elder, and located at the site of the future city of Pittsburgh) from the French.

After a series of misfortunes, France admitted defeat in the 1763 Treaty of Paris and ceded Canada and all French land east of the Mississippi River (except for New Orleans) to Britain. Yet victory proved costly for the British, who emerged from the long war with a staggering national debt; to help ease it, the British government imposed numerous taxes, duties, and restrictions on colonists.

Though British troops were stationed in the American colonies, they could do little to stop colonists from ignoring King George III’s 1763 proclamation preserving land west of the Appalachians for Indigenous people. Washington viewed the proclamation as “a temporary expedient to quiet the minds of the Indians,” who must eventually consent “to our occupying the lands.”

More alarming to colonists than the king’s proclamation were the acts—like the Sugar Act and the Stamp Act—imposed on them by Parliament to raise revenue. Voting landowners resented taxes or customs duties exacted by a distant legislature in which they were not represented.

The Sugar Act increased duties on sugar and cracked down on smuggling. But a British customs inspector who tried to enforce it by seizing a ship engaged in smuggling was arrested in Massachusetts and hauled off to jail. At Newport, Rhode Island, harbor batteries fired on Royal Navy schooner H.M.S. St John for patrolling against smugglers.

Broader and more insistent protests greeted the Stamp Act of 1765, which required colonists to purchase stamps for official documents such as deeds as well as for newspapers, pamphlets, playing cards, and other printed matter. Like smugglers, those accused of violating the Stamp Act would be judged in vice-admiralty courts, without trial by jury. 

The act provoked attacks from radical groups like the Sons of Liberty, who hanged effigies of Stamp Act enforcers. Rioters sacked the house of Boston’s stamp distributor, Andrew Oliver, and another mob destroyed the home of his brother-in-law Thomas Hutchinson, the lieutenant governor of Massachusetts. Persistent threats persuaded stamp men to resign: One tax collector in Connecticut was seized, stuffed in a coffin, and nearly buried alive before he begged for mercy and vowed to quit.

The Stamp Act crisis brought to the fore several men who would lead the American Revolution...

Samuel Adams had faltered in Boston as a city tax collector and heir to a firm that produced malt for beer. He found his calling in his 40s, however, by railing against the Stamp Act and other impositions from Parliament. As persuasive in print as in oratory, he inspired younger men to join the protest movement, notably his cousin John Adams, an erudite lawyer.

In Williamsburg, Virginia, lawyer Patrick Henry introduced five resolutions against the Stamp Act in the general assembly and suggested that George III risked meeting the same fate as the assassinated Julius Caesar or the beheaded Charles I. When the shocked speaker of the House shouted that his words were “treason!” Henry reportedly declared: “If this be treason, make the most of it.”

The esteemed 60-year-old printer, publisher, inventor, and politician Benjamin Franklin, who was in London at the time, opposed the act but hoped to avoid conflict with Britain. In Parliament, he advised against using military force to suppress resistance in America, warning prophetically that troops sent to discourage a rebellion might instead provoke one. 

Parliament repealed the Stamp Act in March of 1766 but followed that concession by declaring that it was entitled to enact binding laws on the Colonies “in all cases whatsoever.” A year later, it passed controversial legislation—called the Townshend Acts, after the chancellor of the Exchequer.

The Townshend Acts prompted outrage, with the Massachusetts House of Commons issuing a defiant letter urging other colonial assemblies to oppose the duties because “what a man has honestly acquired is absolutely his own, which he may freely give, but cannot be taken from him without his consent.”

The House was suspended by the colony’s royal governor, as were other assemblies that joined the protest. Meanwhile, merchants came under pressure to stop importing British goods and colonists began boycotts. One group reportedly drank “nothing at their meetings but New England rum, as rum is the principal and almost only manufacture of this country.” The Daughters of Liberty, formed to protest the Stamp Act, helped promote the idea that boycotting imported goods was both frugal and patriotic.

In October 1768, about a thousand British troops disembarked in Boston—with more on the way—to quell unrest. A riot had broken out in June following the seizure of the sloop Liberty, owned by wealthy merchant John Hancock, an opponent of the Townshend Acts. But the presence of troops proved more disruptive than the protests they were meant to subdue. Before long, one observer wrote, Bostonians were showering soldiers with “all the abusive language they could invent.” 

A little over a year later, on the evening of March 5, 1770, a British sentry standing guard at the customhouse in Boston, where duties were collected, was confronted by youngsters who taunted him. The fracas drew an angry crowd, and Capt. Thomas Preston intervened with a handful of soldiers. They leveled their muskets at colonists who cursed and pelted them with oyster shells, snowballs, and stones, sending one soldier to the ground and drawing gunfire that killed five men in the crowd and wounded several others. Among the dead was Crispus Attucks, a sailor of African and Indigenous descent who may have fled enslavement in Framingham, Massachusetts.  An anonymous account published in the Boston-Gazette, a newspaper to which Samuel Adams often contributed, called the deadly incident a "horrid massacre" and described the fatal wounds inflicted on Attucks. 

John Adams defended Preston and his men in court—even as he shared his cousin’s outrage at the presence of troops in Boston—and won acquittal for all but two soldiers, who were convicted of manslaughter and branded on their right thumbs with the letter M. He called upholding the right of the defendants to legal counsel and trial by jury one of the best services “I ever rendered my country.”

The withdrawal of troops following the Boston Massacre—and Parliament’s decision around the same time to revoke all the Townshend duties except the one on tea—led to an uneasy truce between British authorities and American colonists. Neither side wanted war. But in June 1772, a Royal Navy schooner that pursued smugglers ran aground in Narragansett Bay and was boarded by armed protesters who wounded the captain and burned the ship.

A naval commission considered the attack an act of treason whose culprits should be tried in England—which colonists denounced as a violation of their right to trial by a jury of their peers. The case was dropped over a lack of evidence from witnesses, who sympathized with those responsible.

A more serious dispute arose in May 1773, when Parliament aided the financially troubled East India Company by passing the Tea Act.

The Tea Act enabled the company to sell directly to the Colonies, where it would have a monopoly on the tea trade. Sponsors of the Tea Act thought colonists would tolerate those provisions because there would be no increase in the existing Townshend duty on tea—and consumers might even pay less for it. But the company dealt exclusively with importers it favored, angering competitors—and consumers still resented being taxed without their consent. The new act revived widespread colonial resistance and boycotts of imported tea, and anyone dealing with the East India Company was declared “an enemy to his country.”

Boston, late 1773: Samuel Adams and his accomplices prevented three ships laden with East India Company tea from being unloaded at the city’s port. They hoped that the ships would return the tea unsold. But Hutchinson—the official whose home had been sacked by Stamp Act rioters and who now served as royal governor of Massachusetts—sought to thwart Adams’s obstruction of the Tea Act.

Hutchinson expected that the ships would eventually be unloaded by customs officers, who could possess the tea if importers were blocked from receiving it and paying the required duties within 20 days. As that deadline approached for the H.M.S. Dartmouth, the first of the ships that docked, Adams called for a mass meeting in Boston’s Old South Church on the night of December 16. When word reached the protesters that Hutchinson had denied a request by the ship’s owner to depart with the cargo, dozens of men slipped out in crude faux-Native American disguises and headed to the harbor.

Over 100 similarly disguised compatriots tossed all the tea, valued at nearly 10,000 pounds (about $1.7 million today), into the water.

The Boston Tea Party stunned and angered King George. He was alarmed by not only the protest but also what he called the “abuse and injury” suffered by Hutchinson, who left as governor in 1774 and sailed for England. The king viewed the destruction of the tea as a deliberate challenge to the authority of Parliament and the crown. “The die is now cast,” he concluded. “The colonies must either submit or triumph.”

In a further complication, Parliament passed four Coercive Acts, known to colonists as the Intolerable Acts, between March and June 1774, and several thousand British troops occupied Boston.

Sponsors of the Intolerable Acts hoped that cracking down on Massachusetts would suppress sedition there and keep it from spreading. But Americans from New Hampshire to Georgia were gradually coming to the conclusion that “united we stand, divided we fall.” That old saying inspired the First Continental Congress, which gathered in Philadelphia in September 1774 to respond to the Intolerable Acts.