America the Beautiful: Rediscovering What Made This Nation Great Read Free Page B

statue of King George in New York.
    It wasn’t long, however, before the taxation monster raised its ugly head again, for in 1767, the Townshend Act was passed. This famously included taxes on tea, which the colonists had grown increasingly very fond of. Through trickery and parliamentary procedures, the Townshend Act allowed the British’s almost bankrupt East India Company to gain a virtual monopoly on tea sales, exacerbating tensions between the colonies and England. The colonists once again decided to boycott English imports, prompting an angry response from England, who sent four thousand British troops to quell the colonial protests. To sustain themselves in the New World, the British troops competed with the locals for jobs, which further inflamed tensions between the sides.
    In December of 1773, some of the colonists were so outraged with the taxes on tea that they disguised themselves as Native Americans, boarded British ships in Boston Harbor, and destroyed the tea by tossing it all into the harbor. This, of course, was the famous Boston Tea Party. The British were so outraged that they closed Boston Harbor and instilled a harsher governing structure. More taxes and regulations followed, many of which were quite punitive and became known by the colonists as the “Intolerable Acts.” There were frequent clashes between the locals and the soldiers without bloodshed, but this changed on March 5, 1770, when a crowd surrounded a group of redcoats in an angry confrontation and the British soldiers fired shots into the crowd. Five of the locals were killed, the first of whom was Crispus Attucks, an African-American and the first American to die in the Revolutionary War.
    The tensions between Great Britain and America continued to build and numerous skirmishes, some of which are well documented by historians, broke out. One of the most famous fights took place on June 17, 1775, at Breed’s Hill, 1 where approximately 2,500 British troops attacked an American installation defended by only about 1,400 troops. It was an intense battle and the British lost approximately 40 percent of their troops, while the Americans lost less than a third of theirs. Even though the British eventually won that battle, it was a Pyrrhic victory, with the devastating psychological impact of their heavy casualties impacting the rest of the war.
    The combination of heavy taxation, excessive regulations, and lack of representation in their governing structures irritated the colonists to the point that many of them began talking not only about ways to protest, but also about the desire to declare independence once and for all from the British Crown. With all of their backbreaking hard work, they felt it unfair to have such a significant portion of the fruits of their labors confiscated by a government that neither represented their interests nor respected their freedom. Nevertheless, many colonists (known as Tories or Loyalists) remained loyal to the British Crown and felt that the benefits of British citizenship — or at least of being a British colony — were too great to sacrifice for an uncertain future of independence.
W AKING U P TO S OME “COMMON SENSE”
    In 1776, as Washington’s ragtag army kept British forces engaged, public sentiment was growing in favor of independence. All the colonists needed was a spokesman to galvanize public opinion toward resistance from Great Britain — and an unlikely figure emerged in the form of Thomas Paine. Hehad only been in the country for a little over a year, “arriving as a failure in almost everything he attempted in life. He wrecked his first marriage, and his second wife paid him to leave. He destroyed two businesses and flopped as a tax collector. But Paine had fire in his blood and defiance in his pen,” 2 and America was and still is a country of fresh starts.
    An editor of a Philadelphia magazine, Paine published a fifty-page political pamphlet,
Common Sense
, in January of 1776, which