In this episode, I cover the Battles of Lexington and Concord, truly the first military excursions in the patriot struggle for independence. Although Thomas Gage hoped not to provoke an aggressive response from patriot forces, he still attempted to shrewdly act seize military supplies and powder that had been secured in storage locations by the…
The First Continental Congress was a convention of delegates from the colonies to determine a concerted response to the Intolerable Acts.
As the British seek vengeance upon Boston, they hope that their policies would do much to isolate patriot sentiments in Boston from the other colonies, preventing interference from other places. However, this episode expresses why such a plan backfired in a monumental way.
While almost all histories of the timeframe concentrate on the Boston Tea Party, I felt it was important to cover how other colonies responded to the Tea Act as well.
The continual clashes with Britain had indeed created two incompatible constitutional doctrines – the colonial Whig interpretation on one hand, and the Tory interpretation on the other.
Tellingly, the event spurred patriots in the other colonies to sympathize with the plight of New Englanders.
While many of the histories of this time portray the antagonist against the British as a tax revolt, the open condemnation of standing armies reveals that there were other factors that created a schism between two different parts of the British Empire.
Taxation was the flashpoint between colonists and the British government, but a deeper issue was underneath - Parliament's power over the colonies and the rights of the colonists as Englishmen.
While sometimes the Stamp Act is the first source of conflict visited in traditional histories, it is clear that the Sugar Act played an important role in fomenting patriot attitudes toward taxation by Parliament.