The Causes of the American Revolution

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 The Causes of the American Revolution

By Curt Smothers


The immediate causes of the American Revolutionary war were the skirmish at Lexington and the battle Concord, Massachusetts. 


A force of about 700 British soldiers was headed for Concord on April 19, 1775, and they intended to confiscate the weapons stores held by rebellious colonists.


The British officer in charge shouted, "Disperse, ye rebels!"  Instead, the rebels resisted and the Revolutionary War had begun.

 

A short skirmish and Lexington (on the way to Concord) followed by a pitched battle where 300-400 minutemen took on and routed a larger force of British regulars began what would be a six-year struggle for independence.

 

Underlying tensions between colonials and the mother country

The not-so-immediate causes of the American Revolution, however, date back two years before "the shot that was heard around the world."The final plunge into revolution began when the British Parliament passed the hated Tea Act in early 1773. 


After the relative calm of 1770-1772 when passions had cooled somewhat over the Boston Massacre and the equally hated Townshend revenue acts (that were repealed coincidentally on the same day of the Boston Massacre), things began to heat up.

 

The Boston Tea Party and British retaliation

In what amounted to an 18th Century government bailout, the British Parliament authorized the East India Company to ship its tea direct to the colonies and exempted the company from the taxes that American middle men had to pay. 


What followed was the so-called Boston Tea Party, and what followed were the (again so-called) "coercive acts" (colonists called them the "intolerable acts") by an aroused and punitive Parliament.

 

The acts:


  • closed the port of Boston to all shipping unless and until the colony paid for the destroyed tea. 

  • barred local courts from trying British soldiers and officials locally

  • amended the Massachusetts charter to make half the Massachusetts legislature subject to appointment by the royal governor.

  • took away the legislature’s power to veto the governor's decisions

  • crippled the local governments by authorizing the governor to ban all town meetings except the annual election for local officers. 


Then, to rub salt in the wound, the British appointed General Thomas Gage, the commander of British troops in America, as new governor of Massachusetts, effectively making the colony a military dictatorship.

 

The Quebec Act also infuriated colonists

Then there was Britain's Quebec Act of 1774 which joined the British colony of Quebec - which at that time included the present-day states of Illinois, Michigan, Wisconsin, Indiana and Ohio - with the Indian territories west of the Appalachians from northern Florida to western Maine.

 

The Quebec act was viewed by the colonies as a "new model" for British colonial rule. Not only would colonists continue to be cut off from settling in western lands, but French Catholics would be allowed to practice their religion freely. The latter provision was particularly offensive to the Protestant Puritans in Massachusetts.

 

Lexington and Concord was the boil-over point

So just about the time when Captain Parker said to his troops at Lexington, "Stand your ground; don't fire unless fired upon, but if they mean to have a war, let it begin here," American colonists were by and large fed up with what they perceived as British political and economic oppression. 


The British, on the other hand, could not fathom why a bunch of colonial ingrates were so reluctant to pay their share of the costs for British protection.  Both sides were at an impasse, and the irreconcilable differences would lead to divorce and the American War of Independence.


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