The situation tragically culminated in the Boston Massacre in 1770, where British soldiers fired into a crowd, killing five civilians. The Townshend Acts of 1767 imposed duties on imported goods such as glass, lead, paint, and tea.
How Seven Years War Debt Set the Stage for the Revolutionary War
The Stamp Act Congress convened in New York, where representatives from several colonies drafted a formal petition declaring that only their own colonial assemblies could tax them. Again, colonists organized boycotts, but the presence of British troops to enforce the new laws turned the streets of Boston into a powder keg.
Tensions in the American colonies did not erupt into open warfare overnight; instead, a sequence of escalating events created an environment where revolution became an increasingly plausible outcome. Across the colonies, ordinary citizens joined the Sons of Liberty in protesting the measure through mob violence, boycotts of British goods, and the rallying cry of "No taxation without representation.
How Seven Years War Debt Sparked the Revolutionary War
When the British government eventually repealed the Stamp Act in 1766, it simultaneously passed the Declaratory Act, asserting its absolute authority to legislate for the colonies "in all cases whatsoever. This law allowed the company to sell its surplus tea directly to the colonies, bypassing colonial merchants and undercutting the price, but it still maintained the hated tax on tea.
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