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Britain eventually repealed the taxes it had imposed on the colonists except the tea tax. It wasn’t about to give up tax revenue on the nearly 1.2 million pounds of tea the colonists drank each year.

In protest, the colonists boycotted tea sold by British East India Company and smuggled in Dutch tea, leaving British East India Company with millions of pounds of surplus tea and facing bankruptcy.

In May 1773, British Parliament passed the Tea Act which allowed British East India Company to sell tea to the colonies duty-free and much cheaper than other tea companies – but still tax the tea when it reached colonial ports.

Tea smuggling in the colonies increased, although the cost of the smuggled tea soon surpassed that of tea from British East India Company with the added tea tax.

Still, with the help of prominent tea smugglers such as John Hancock and Samuel Adams – who protested taxation without representation but also wanted to protect their tea smuggling operations – colonists continued to rail against the tea tax and Britain’s control over their interests.

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The Sons of Liberty were a group of colonial merchants and tradesmen founded to protest the Stamp Act and other forms of taxation. The group of revolutionists included prominent patriots such as Benedict Arnold, Patrick Henry and Paul Revere, as well as Adams and Hancock.

Led by Adams, the Sons of Liberty held meetings rallying against British Parliament and protested the Griffin’s Wharf arrival of Dartmouth, a British East India Company ship carrying tea. By December 16, 1765, Dartmouth had been joined by her sister ships, Beaver and Eleanor; all three ships loaded with tea from China.

That morning, as thousands of colonists convened at the wharf and its surrounding streets, a meeting was held at the Old South Meeting House where a large group of colonists voted to refuse to pay taxes on the tea or allow the tea to be unloaded, stored, sold or used. (Ironically, the ships were built in America and owned by Americans.)

Governor Thomas Hutchison refused to allow the ships to return to Britain and ordered the tea tariff be paid and the tea unloaded. The colonists refused, and Hutchison never offered a satisfactory compromise.

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Boston Tea Party: "No taxation without representation"

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Boston Tea Party: "No taxation without representation"

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The Boston Tea Party was a political protest that occurred on December 16, 1773, at Griffin’s Wharf in Boston, Massachusetts. American colonists, frustrated and angry at Britain for imposing “taxation without representation,” dumped 342 chests of British tea into the harbor. The event was the first major act of defiance to British rule over the colonists. It showed Great Britain that Americans wouldn’t take taxation and tyranny sitting down, and rallied American patriots across the 13 colonies to fight for independence.

In the 1760s, Britain was deep in debt, so British Parliament imposed a series of taxes on American colonists to help pay those debts.

The Stamp Act of 1765 taxed colonists on virtually every piece of printed paper they used, from playing cards and business licenses to newspapers and legal documents. The Townshend Acts of 1767 went a step further, taxing essentials such as paint, paper, glass, lead and tea.

Britain felt the taxes were fair since much of its debt was earned fighting wars on the colonists’ behalf.  The colonists, however, disagreed. They were furious at being taxed without having any representation in Parliament, and felt it was wrong for Britain to impose taxes on them to gain revenue.

On March 5, 1770, a street brawl happened in Boston between American colonists and British soldiers.

Later known as the Boston Massacre, the fight began after an unruly group of colonists – frustrated with the presence of British soldiers in their streets – flung snowballs at a British sentinel guarding the Boston Customs House.

Reinforcements arrived and opened fire on the mob, killing five colonists and wounding six. The Boston Massacre and its fallout further incited the colonists’ rage towards Britain.

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The Daughters of Liberty was a group of political dissidents that formed in the North American British colonies during the early days of the American Revolution.

Much like the Sons of Liberty, the Daughters of Liberty was created in response to unfair British taxation in the colonies during the American Revolution, particularly the Townshend Acts of 1767 which were a series of measures that imposed customs duties on imported British goods such as glass, paints, lead, paper and tea.

Although some sources state that the Daughters of Liberty was an official group or society of women, other sources indicate it was more of a blanket term used to describe all women who supported the patriotic cause.

According to the book Household Manufacturers in the United States (which discusses how women’s crafting skills helped contribute to the American Revolution) the Daughters of Liberty was an actual society that had chapters in many sections of New England.

The Daughters of Liberty didn’t join in on the public protests and riots incited by the Sons of Liberty in 1765. Instead, they organized and participated in boycotts and helped manufacture goods when non-importation agreements caused shortages.

In August of 1768, when Boston merchants signed a non-importation agreement in which they pledged not to import or sell British goods, this caused a shortage in the colony of specific goods like textiles.

To help ease this shortage, the Daughters of Liberty organized spinning bees to spin yarn and wool into fabric, according to the book The American Revolution: A Concise History:

“Women took to their spinning wheels – what had been a chore for solitary women, spinning wool into yarn, weaving yarn into cloth, now became a public political act. Ninety-two ‘Daughters of Liberty’ brought their wheels to the meeting house in Newport, spending the day spinning together until they produced 170 skeins of yarn. Making and wearing homespun cloth became political acts of resistance.”

When the colonists also decided to boycott British goods, particularly British tea, women joined in on the boycott. Since women were the ones who purchased consumer goods for their households, and some of them also ran small shops themselves, their actions had a major impact on British merchants, according to the book Revolutionary Mothers:

“But when the call went out for a boycott of British goods, women became crucial participants in the first organized opposition to British policy. Thus, the first political act of American women was to say ‘No.’ In cities and small towns, women said no to merchants who continued to offer British goods and no to the consumption of those goods, despite their convenience or appeal. Their ‘no’s had an immediate and powerful effect, for women had become major consumers and purchasers by the mid-eighteenth century. And in American cities, widows, wives of sea captains and sailors, and unmarried women who ran their own shops had to make the decision to say no to selling British goods. In New York City a group of brides-to-be said no to their fiances, putting a public notice in the local newspaper that they would not marry men who applied for a stamped marriage license. Parliament could ignore the assemblies petitions. It could turn a deaf ear to soaring oratory and flights of rhetoric. But Parliament could not withstand the pressures placed on it by English merchants and manufacturers who saw their sales plummet and their warehouses overflow because of the boycott. In March 1766, the Stamp Act was repealed.”

In addition to boycotting the purchase of tea, women also signed agreements pledging that they would also not drink any tea offered to them. In Boston on January 31, 1770 the Boston Evening Post published the following agreement, reporting that over 300 Boston women had signed it:

“At a time when our invaluable rights and privileges are attacked in an unconstitutional and most alarming manner, and as we find we are reproached for not being so ready as could be desired, to lend our assistance, we think it our duty perfectly to concur with the true Friends of Liberty, in all the measures they have taken to save this abused country from ruin and slavery; And particularly, we join with the very respectable body of merchants, and other inhabitants of this town, who met at Faneuil Hall the 23d of this instant, in their resolutions, totally abstain from the use of tea: And as the greatest part of the revenue arising by virtue of the late acts, is produced from the duty paid upon tea, which revenue is wholly expanded to support the American Board of Commissioners, we the subscribers do strictly engage, that we will totally abstain from the use of that article (sickness expected) not only in our respective families; but that we will absolutely refuse it, if it should be offered to us upon any occasion whatsoever. This agreement we cheerfully come into, as we believe the very distressed situation of our country requires it, and we do hereby oblige ourselves religiously to observe it, till the late Revenue Acts are repealed.”

This same statement was also published on February 12 in the Boston Evening Post and similar statements were published on February 15 in the Boston Weekly News-letter and the Massachusetts Gazette.

To get around purchasing and drinking British tea, women found alternatives by making herbal teas from various plants like raspberry, mint and basil, which they referred to as Liberty Tea.

The Daughters of Liberty weren’t always so well-behaved though and sometimes took matters into their own hands when they deemed it necessary.

In 1777, these women even had their own version of the Boston Tea Party, later dubbed the “Coffee Party,” during which they confronted and assaulted a local merchant who was hoarding coffee in his warehouse. Abigail Adams described the incident in a letter, dated July 31, 1777, to her husband John Adams:

“You must know that there is a great scarcity of sugar and coffee, articles which the female part of the state are very loathe to give up, especially whilst they consider the scarcity occasioned by the merchants having secreted a large quantity. There has been much rout and noise in the town for several weeks. Some stores had been opened by a number of people and the coffee and sugar carried into the market and dealt out by pounds. It was rumoured that an eminent, wealthy, stingy merchant (who is a bachelor) had a hogshead of coffee in his store which he refused to sell to the committee under 6 shillings per pound. A number of females some say a hundred, some say more assembled with a cart and trucks, marched down to the warehouse and demanded the keys, which he refused to deliver, upon which one of them seized him by his neck and tossed him into the cart. Upon his finding no quarter he delivered the keys, when they tipped up the cart and dischargedhim, then opened the warehouse, hoisted out the coffee themselves, put it into the trucks and drove off. It was reported that he had a spanking among them, but this I believe was not true. A large concourse of men stood amazed silent spectators of the whole transaction.”

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The colony of Massachusetts was seen by King George III and his ministers as the hotbed of disloyalty. After the Boston Tea Party(December 16, 1773), Parliament responded with the Intolerable Acts (1774), a series of punitive measures that were intended to cow the restive population into obedience. The 1691 charter of the Massachusetts Bay Colony was abrogated, and the colony’s elected ruling council was replaced with a military government under Gen. Thomas Gage, the commander of all British troops in North America. At Gage’s headquarters in Boston, he had four regiments—perhaps 4,000 men—under his command, and Parliament deemed that force sufficient to overawe the population in his vicinity. William Legge, 2nd earl of Dartmouth, secretary of state for the colonies, advised Gage that the violence committed by those, who have taken up arms in Massachusetts, have appeared to me as the acts of a rude rabble, without plan, without concert, without conduct.

From London, Dartmouth concluded that

a small force now, if put to the test, would be able to conquer them, with greater probability of success, than might be expected of a larger army, if the people should be suffered to form themselves upon a more regular plan.

Gage, for his part, felt that no fewer than 20,000 troops would be adequate for such an endeavour, but he acted with the forces he had at hand. Beginning in the late summer of 1774, Gage attempted to suppress the warlike preparations throughout New England by seizing stores of weapons and powder. Although the colonials were initially taken by surprise, they soon mobilized. Groups such as the Sons of Liberty uncovered advance details of British actions, and Committees of Correspondence aided in the organization of countermeasures. Learning of a British plan to secure the weapons cache at Fort William and Mary, an undermanned army outpost in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, Boston’s Committee of Correspondence dispatched Paul Revere on December 13, 1774, to issue a warning to local allies. The following day, several hundred men assembled and stormed the fort, capturing the six-man garrison, seizing a significant quantity of powder, and striking the British colours; a subsequent party removed the remaining cannons and small arms. That act of open violence against the crown infuriated British officials, but their attempts to deprive the incipient rebellion of vital war matériel over the following months were increasingly frustrated by colonial leaders who denuded British supply cachesand sequestered arms and ammunition in private homes. On April 14, 1775, Gage received a letter from Dartmouth informing him that Massachusetts had been declared to be in a state of open revolt and ordering him to “arrest and imprison the principal Actors and Abettors in the [Massachusetts] Provincial Congress.” Gage had received his orders, but the colonials were well aware of his intentions before he could act.

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One of the main reasons that the colonists rebelled against Great Britain is that they felt they were not represented in the British government. The British government was making new laws and taxes on the colonies, but they had no say. They wanted to have some say in the British government if they were going to pay high taxes and have to live by British law.

War didn't happen right away. First there were protests and arguments. Then some small skirmishes between the colonists and the local British army. Things just got worse and worse over the course of years until the colonies and Great Britain were at war.

The first shot fired in the American Revolution was on April 19, 1775 and is called the "shot heard round the world"

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The first battles of the American Revolutionary War were Lexington and Concord. One of the first major battles was the Battle of Bunker Hill in 1775. After that, the British controlled Boston. Around that time, the Second Continental Congress sent an Olive Branch Petition to King George III (which he rejected) and named George Washington head of the army. Early in 1776, Washington's army drove the British out of Boston.

A few months later the Continental Army and British troops under William Howe fought the New York and New Jersey Campaign. During the New York battles, the British started using Hessian troops, who were from Germany. Though the colonists lost New York (the British would hold it for the rest of the war), Washington was able to hold onto most of his army. Over Christmas, 1776-77, Washington crossed the Delaware River and defeated the Hessians at Trenton and the British at Princeton.

In 1777, the British attacked the city of Philadelphia, then the American capital. Two battles were fought over Philadelphia: Brandywine and Germantown. Again, the Americans lost a major city, but Washington was able to keep most of his army. Around this time, the Frenchman Lafayette joined the American Army. In 1778, the British left Philadelphia. Between 1778 and 1781, most battles between Washington and the British were inconclusive (they did not have any major effect militarily).

One of the most important battles was the Battle of Saratogain 1777. American soldiers under Horatio Gates forced a British surrender under John Burgoyne. This led to Franceand Spain joining the war on the side of Americans. These powerful countries fought the British around the world. From 1778 to 1780, there was fighting in the West.

The American commerce raider John Paul Jones also won several naval battles over the British, but the French navy did most of the fighting at sea. The Americans tried to capture Canada several times.

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In 1779 major fighting shifted to Georgia and South Carolina. As fighting spread northward, General Nathanael Greene led the Rebel campaign. He caused many people in the South to be Patriots instead of Loyalists, and won several battles against the British.

In 1781, Washington and French general Jean Rochambeau led an offensive against British troops in Yorktown, Virginia. This was called the Battle of Yorktown. When their soldiers lost this battle, the British surrendered.

The British continued to fight the French and Spanish for two years, winning in India, Gibraltar and elsewhere.

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The French government helped the American rebels almost from the beginning of the war

Some French politicians feared the example a successful colonial rebellion might offer to their own overseas possessions, but the dominant view in Paris was that France should take advantage of Britain’s difficulties. Less than a year after the fighting started, the French government decided to support the Americans.

The rebels first received French arms and ammunition; these vital supplies were followed by large injections of cash, which continued throughout the war.

When the French formally intervened in 1778, the war became a global struggle.
The French became belligerents in 1778, turning a war that had begun as a struggle in and for America into something much bigger. The British and French clashed in every area of the globe where they were in competition – in the West Indies, which became a major theatre of operations; West Africa, where each side tried to seize the other’s slave trading bases, and in India, where the rival East India Companies struggled for dominance.

Most importantly for the British, French intervention threatened the home territories with invasion. As the British redeployed their forces to meet the challenges of this wider war, their chances of recovering the rebel colonies diminished greatly.

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Spain was not a bystander to the American Revolutionary War, although that fact is rarely mentioned in cursory historical surveys. Spain's motivation to help the American colonists was driven by a desire to regain the land it had lost to Britain and, with other European powers, make incremental gains against British possessions in other parts of the world. Although some dreamers in Spain perhaps envisioned its eventual possession of the entire New World, I have found no evidence that such an idea guided its assistance to the American colonists.

France and Spain were at that time both under Bourbon kings, Louis XVI and Carlos III, respectively, whose American possessions had been significantly reduced by the 1763 Treaty of Paris that ended the Seven Years' (the French and Indian) War. At the beginning of the American War of Independence, American commissioners were sent to Europe by the Continental Congress to seek support for their cause. John Jay, American representative in Spain, found success. Americans promised both France and Spain the restoration of much of the land they had lost to the British in America. In April 1779, Spain committed to helping the Americans.

Financial Support

This help did not consist of Spanish troops to fight alongside Americans, but it was extensive nevertheless. The Spanish and French kings provided large loans and outright contributions of money to the Americans. Spain laundered this money, as we would say today, through a fictitious private trading company, Roderique Hortalez and Company, operating out of the Lesser Antilles, which sent both money and war material directly to the Americans. The money helped support the Americans' new currency, the Continental, and also made it possible for the Americans to bring in foreign military officers, such as Augustus von Steuben, Casimir Pulaski, and Thaddeus Kosciuszko, to fight for them.

Land Battles

Spain began a military campaign of its own against the British in Florida and Louisiana. From 1779 through 1782, the Spanish Governor of Louisiana, Don Bernardo de Gàlvez, conducted a series of military actions against the British to retake forts that Spain had earlier lost to the British, succeeding in the Mississippi River Valley, and at Baton Rouge, Natchez, Mobile, and Pensacola. In 1782, Spain also succeeded in wresting back the Bahamas from the British.

Naval Support

A very substantial form of Spain's support for the Americans involved a strategy of joining Britain's other European competitors in tying up British naval resources by engaging them elsewhere than in Britain's American colonies. Spain did this, for example, against Gibraltar and Minorca, and together with France sent a fleet into the English Channel to menace the British coast and tie up more British ships. Most of the European maritime powers, including Spain, united against Britain's effort to interrupt their trade with America. With both France and Spain (and Holland) indirectly in the fray, Britain's navy was outmatched and could not effectively concentrate its military force in America. Spanish ships joined with French ships in the naval blockade of the British army at Yorktown in 1781, preventing General Cornwallis's resupply by the British navy, resulting in his surrender.

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For enslaved people, the British, not the Americans, represented freedom

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For enslaved people, the British, not the Americans, represented freedom

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The rhetoric of the revolution presented the Americans as staunch defenders of liberty and the British as a threat to that liberty. But for enslaved people in the colonies, it was the British who represented liberty, not the white Americans.

Slavery, though it was established long before the Revolutionary War broke out, was affected like everything else when the war began. Slave-owners were afraid to leave for war in case the slaves rose up and slaughtered their families in their absence. They didn't want to give slaves weapons to fight for the same reason, in case they used them against their owners.

The slaves wanted to fight for their freedom. Some of the officers in the army, namely Alexander Hamilton and John Laurens wanted to give them that chance and create several battalions of Negroes who would fight with the Patriots in exchange for their freedom. They warned the Patriots that if they didn't offer the slaves their freedom, Britain would.

In November 1775, Lord Dunmore, the last royal governor of Virginia, offered freedom to enslaved people who helped him put down the rebellion. Thereafter, thousands of slaves flocked to the British lines throughout the war. Many were to be disappointed, but at least some secured their freedom.

Dunmore’s actions may well have helped the revolutionary cause in the south, where many conservative plantation-owners reacted badly to his undermining the slave system.

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Charles Cornwallis did not himself surrender at Yorktown; rather, claiming illness, he sent his deputy, Charles O'Hara.

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Charles Cornwallis did not himself surrender at Yorktown; rather, claiming illness, he sent his deputy, Charles O'Hara.

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A significant number of white Americans remained loyal to the British crown

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A significant number of white Americans remained loyal to the British crown

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The conflict was more of a civil war than a conventional international contest. Estimates vary, but probably somewhere around a fifth of white colonists refused to accept a complete break with Britain.

Many of them had supported resistance to the claims of the British parliament to tax the colonies, but they could not stomach a rejection of the link with the British crown. Some of these loyalists took up arms on the British side, and many of them migrated to Canada at the end of the war, providing the basis for its Anglophone population.

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On 3 September 1783, the Peace of Paris was signed and the American War for Independence officially ended. The following excerpt from John Ferling’s Almost a Miracle: The American Victory in the War of Independence recounts the war’s final moments, when Washington bid farewell to his troops.

The war was truly over. It had lasted well over eight years, 104 blood-drenched months to be exact. As is often the habit of wars, it had gone on far longer than its architects of either side had foreseen in 1775. More than 100,000 American men had borne arms in the Continental army. Countless thousands more had seen active service in militia units, some for only a few days, some for a few weeks, some repeatedly, if their outﬁt was called to duty time and again.

The war exacted a ghastly toll. The estimate accepted by most scholars is that 25,000 American soldiers perished, although nearly all historians regard that ﬁgure as too low. Not only were the casualty ﬁgures reported by American leaders, like those set forth by British generals, almost always inaccurately low, but one is left to guess the fate of the 9,871 men—once again, likely a ﬁgure that is wanting—who were listed as wounded or missing in action. No one can know with precision the number of militiamen who were lost in the war, as record keeping in militia units was neither as good as that in the Continental army nor as likely to survive. While something of a handle may be had on the number of soldiers that died in battle, or of camp disease, or while in captivity, the totals for those who died from other causes can only be a matter of conjecture. In all wars, things happen. In this war, men were struck by lightning or hit by falling trees in storms.  Men were crushed beneath heavy wagons and ﬁeld pieces that overturned. Men accidentally shot themselves and their comrades. Men were killed in falls from horses and drowned while crossing rivers. Sailors fell from the rigging and slipped overboard. As in every war, some soldiers and sailors committed suicide. If it is assumed that 30,000 Americans died while bearing arms—and that is a very conservative estimate—then about one man in sixteen of military age died during the Revolutionary War. In contrast, one man in ten of military age died in the Civil War and one American male in seventy-ﬁve in World War II. Of those who served in the Continental army, one in four died during the war. In the Civil War, one regular in ﬁve died and in World War II one in forty American servicemen perished.

Unlike subsequent wars when numerous soldiers came home with disabilities, relatively few impaired veterans lived in post-Revolutionary America. Those who were seriously wounded in the War of Independence seldom came home. They died, usually of shock, blood loss, or infection. Some survived, of course, and for the remainder of their lives coped with a partial, or total, loss of vision, a gimpy leg, a handless or footless extremity, or emotional scars that never healed.

It was not only soldiers that died or were wounded. Civilians perished from diseases that were spread unwittingly by soldiers and not a few on the homefront died violent deaths in the course of coastal raids, Indian attacks, partisan warfare, and siege operations. There is no way to know how many civilians died as a direct result of this war, but it was well into the thousands.

The British also paid a steep price in blood in this war, one that was proportionately equal to the losses among the American forces. The British sent about

42,000 men to North America, of which some 25 percent, or roughly 10,000 men, are believed to have died. About 7,500 Germans, from a total of some 29,000 sent to Canada and the United States, also died in this war in the North American theater. From a paucity of surviving records, casualties among the Loyalists who served with the British army have never been established. However, 21,000 men are believed to have served in those provincial units. The most complete surviving records are those for the New Jersey Volunteers, which suffered a 20 percent death toll. If its death toll, which was below that of regulars and Germans, is typical, some four thousand provincials who fought for Great Britain would have died of all causes. Thus, it seems likely that about 85,000 men served the British in North America in the course of this war, of which approximately 21,000 perished. As was true of American soldiers, the great majority—roughly 65 percent—died of diseases. A bit over 2 percent of men in the British army succumbed to disease annually, while somewhat over 3 percent of German soldiers died each year of disease. Up to eight thousand additional redcoats are believed to have died in the West Indies, and another two thousand may have died in transit to the Caribbean. Through 1780, the Royal Navy reported losses of 1,243 men killed in action and 18,541 to disease. Serious ﬁghting raged on the high seas for another two years, making it likely that well over 50,000 men who bore arms for Great Britain perished in this war.

The French army lost several hundred men during its nearly two years in the United  States, mostly to disease, but the French  navy suffered losses of nearly 20,000 men in battle, captivity, and from illnesses. Spanish losses pushed the total death toll among those who fought in this war to in excess of 100,000 men.

Washington was anxious to get home, it now having been more than two years since he had last seen Mount Vernon.  It must at times have seemed that New York would not let him go. He remained for ten days after the British sailed away, looking after the ﬁnal business of his command, but mostly attending a seemingly endless cycle of dinners and ceremonies.  At last, on December 4, he was ready to depart.  Only one thing remained.  At noon that day Washington hosted a dinner at Fraunces Tavern for the ofﬁcers. Not many were still with the army. Of seventy-three generals yet on the Continental army rolls, only four were present, and three of those were from New York or planned to live there. Not much should be made of the paltry turnout. Men had been going home since June. Like the enlisted men, the ofﬁcers were anxious to see their families and put their lives together for the long years that lay ahead. All who attended the dinner knew that the function was less for dining than for saying farewell, and it soon became an emotional meeting. At some level, each man knew that the great epoch of his life was ending.  Each knew that he would never again savor the warm pleasures of camaraderie, the pulsating thrill of danger, the rare exhilaration of military victory that had come from serving the infant nation in its quest for independence. Each knew that he was leaving all this for an uncertain future. No man was more moved than Washington, who, if he had planned to give a speech, discarded the idea. He merely asked each man to come forward to say goodbye. With tears streaming down his face, he embraced every man, and they in turn clasped him. Henry Knox grabbed his commander in chief and kissed him.

When the last man had bidden him farewell, Washington, too moved to talk, hurried to the door and to his horse that awaited him on the street. He swung into the saddle and sped away for Virginia, and home.