Group Activity: Two-Factor Cross

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Lesson 3 Taking Up Arms Lesson Summary

Although most of the Townshend taxes had been repealed, the tax on tea remained. Then, in 1773, Parliament passed the Tea Act. It gave the British East India Company total control over all tea sold in the colonies. It allowed it to sell tea directly to colonists, cutting colonial tea merchants out of the trade completely. Colonists boycotted tea. On December 16, 1773, in an act of civil disobedience, men disguised as American Indians boarded three tea ships in Boston harbor, after dark. They threw the ships’ cargo of tea into the harbor. This event became known as the Boston Tea Party. In response to the Boston Tea Party, the enraged British government passed harsh laws that the colonists called the Intolerable Acts. The laws closed the port of Boston, prohibited colonists from holding more than one town meeting a year, allowed officials charged with major crimes to be tried in Britain or Canada, and strengthened the Quartering Act. Parliament also passed the Quebec Act, which set up new boundaries that blocked colonists from moving west. The closing of the port was meant to starve Boston, but other colonies quickly sent food to the city. A group of colonial delegates, the First Continental Congress, met in Philadelphia in 1774 to demand an end to the Intolerable Acts. When Britain rejected the demands of the First Continental Congress, the representatives agreed to back Massachusetts and urge colonies to form militias. Trouble was on the way. In and around Boston, citizen soldiers called minutemen gathered weapons and gunpowder as the number of British soldiers within the city increased. Hearing of a large stash of weapons, British General Thomas Gage decided to march to Concord and seize it. On April 18, 1775 British soldiers quietly crossed the Charles River and set out for Concord. The Sons of Liberty had been watching, and their riders raced ahead to warn the people. When the British reached Lexington, a small force of minutemen awaited them. Shots were fired and eight colonists fell. The British pushed on to Concord but found nothing, and so turned back. A larger force of minutemen waited for them; they forced the British to retreat. In July 1775, the Second Continental Congress sent a petition to King George. Called the Olive Branch Petition, it declared loyalty to the king and asked him to repeal the Intolerable Acts. Infuriated by what he saw as revolt, King George III sent 20,000 more soldiers to the colonies. Meanwhile, Ethan Allen and the Green Mountain Boys, a group of Vermonters, seized Fort Ticonderoga and its cannons. The Continental Congress set up an army led by George Washington. The American people were split in their loyalties. About a third, the Patriots, favored war against Britain. Another third, called Loyalists, supported the British monarchy; they were more numerous in the Middle Colonies and the South than in New England. The remaining third did not take either side. Although the Americans were poorly equipped and not well organized, they had an advantage over the better-trained British: the Americans were not 3,000 miles from home.