4-3.1

It Is Essential For Students to Know:

• Political factors and economic factors that ultimately led to the American Revolution started with the French and Indian War and culminated with shots fired at Lexington and Concord.
• It is important that students understand the chronology of these events and how one event led to another.
• Students should understand that political factors included the question of whether the Parliament or the colonial assemblies had the right to impose taxes.
• Economic factors include the need for taxes as a result of the French and Indian War and the power of the colonists to boycott British goods and force British merchants to appeal to Parliament to repeal the Stamp Act.
• The French and Indian War was fought between France and England over lands in the Ohio River Valley which both the French and the English claimed. The British won the war and gained control of these lands but amassed a large debt as a result of the war.
• The British Parliament determined that this debt should be paid by the American colonists whose lands the British had been defending.
• The British government changed its colonial policy. Before the French and Indian War, the British government ignored what was happening in the colonies and let them govern and tax themselves.
• After the French and Indian War, the British Parliament began to pass a series of laws that changed the relationship between the colonial assemblies and the Parliament.
• Colonists believed it was the right of their colonial assemblies to impose taxes, not the right of the King or of Parliament and they resisted this changed policy.
• The Stamp Act placed a tax on all papers, such as legal documents and newspapers.
• The colonists would have paid this directly (taxes before this were indirect duties on imports included in the retail price of the goods and so invisible to the colonial consumer) and protested with the cry “No taxation without representation.”
• Colonists did not have a representative in Parliament and therefore had no say in laws made by Parliament.
• Colonists wanted to retain the right of their own colonial assemblies to tax to continue to be respected. They did not want representation in Parliament which was distant and in which they would be outvoted.
• Colonists organized a Stamp Act Congress, which sent a petition to the King, and declared a boycott on British goods that led to the repeal of the Stamp Act.
• Colonist organized the Sons and Daughters of Liberty in order to protest British taxes.
• The Tea Act was not a tax. This act gave the British East India Company exclusive rights [a monopoly] to sell tea in the colonies because the East India Tea Company had financial problems Parliament wanted to help the company avoid bankruptcy. Colonists were boycotting tea because of a tax imposed under the Townshend Acts. [Although most of the Townshend duties had been repealed as a result of a successful colonial boycott, the tax on tea remained.].
• The Sons of Liberty feared that the availability of cheap tea would threaten the effectiveness of the boycott.
• In Boston, they threw the tea overboard. The Boston Tea Party resulted in the Parliament passing what the colonists called the Intolerable Acts.

It Is Not Essential For Students To Know:

• Students do not need to know all of the battles of the French and Indian War.
• Students do not need to know the names of the Native American tribes that fought in the war.
• Students do not need to know all of the acts presented by parliament and their dates.
• Students do not need to know the names of the many Patriots who took part in these protests or the life story of Paul Revere.