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Mercantilism - Long term
Possessing colonies thus conferred distinct advantages because the colonies could both supply raw materials to the mother country (thereby reducing the need for foreign imports) and provide a guaranteed market for exports. Causes Navigation Law of 1650. -
Navigation Law of 1650 - Political/Economic/Social - Long term
Aimed at rival Dutch shippers trying to elbow their way into the American carrying trade and to insure all commerce flowing to and from the colonies could be transported only in British (including colonial) vessels. Other laws stipulated that American merchants must ship certain “enumerated” products, notably tobacco, exclusively to Britain, even though prices might be better elsewhere. Also the current shortage was caused by this. -
John Locke
An English philosopher and physician, widely regarded as one of the most influential of Enlightenment thinkers and commonly known as the "Father of Liberalism". -
Baron de Montesquieu
He was famous for his theory of separation of powers. Montesquieu's The Spirit of the Laws was "the first consistent attempt to survey the varieties of human society, to classify and compare them and, within society, to study the inter-functioning of institutions." In this book, Montesquieu described the various forms of distribution of political power among a legislature, an executive, and a judiciary. -
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Republicanism & Radical Whigs
Republicanism - Both the stability of society and the authority of government thus depended on the virtue of the citizenry—its capacity for selflessness, self-sufficiency, and courage, and especially its appetite for civic involve-ment.
Radical Whigs - The Whigs warned citizens to be on guard against corruption and to be eternally vigilant against possible conspiracies to denude them of their hard-won liberties. -
John Hancock
An American merchant, statesman, and prominent Patriot of the American Revolution. He served as president of the Second Continental Congress and was the first and third Governor of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. -
George Grenville
He was Prime Minister of British. He first aroused the resentment of the colonists in 1763 by ordering the British navy to begin strictly enforcing the Navigation Laws. He also secured from Parliament the so-called Sugar Act of 1764 and imposed Stamp Act in 1765. He was simply asking the Americans to pay a fair share of the costs for their own defense, through taxes that were already familiar in Britain. the basic rights of the colonists as English-men. -
Sugar Act - Political/Economic - Short term
The first law ever passed by that body for raising tax revenue in the colonies for the crown. Among various provisions, it increased the duty on foreign sugar imported from the West Indies. After bitter protests from the colonists, the duties were lowered substantially, and the agitation died down.It was both a political and economic cause, and it should be a short term cause since the agitation was soon died down. -
Stamp Act Congress - Social - Short term
Colonial outcries against the hated stamp tax took various forms. The most conspicuous assemblage was this Congress. It brought together in New York City twenty-seven distinguished delegates from nine colonies. The Stamp Act Congress, which was largely ignored in England, made little splash at the time in America. Its ripples, however, began to erode sectional suspicions, for it brought together around the same table leaders from the different and rival colonies. -
Quartering Act - Political/Social - Short term
This measure required certain colonies to provide food and quarters for British troops.t should be a long term and political/social cause since it instigates Americans to get together and rebel. -
Stamp Act - Political/Economic - Short term
It imposted by Grenville. It mandated the use of stamped paper or the affix- ing of stamps, certifying payment of tax. Stamps were required on bills of sale for about fifty trade items as well as on certain types of commercial and legal documents. And because of this, Americans started to sniff the strong scent of a conspiracy to strip them of their historic liberties and raised the cry:"No taxation without representation." -
Benjamin Franklin
One of the Founding Fathers of the United States
A master among diplomats -
No Taxation Without Representation - Social/Economic - Long term
The principle of no taxation without representation was supremely important, and the colonists clung to it with tenacious consistency. When the British replied that the sovereign power of government could not be divided between “legislative” authority in London and “taxing” authority in the colonies, they forced the Americans to deny the authority of Parliament altogether and to begin to consider their own political independence. -
Declaratory Act - Political - Short term
Having withdrawn the Stamp Act, Parliament in virtually the same breath provocatively passed the Declaratory Act, reaffirming Parliament’s right “to bind” the colonies “in all cases whatsoever.” The British government thereby drew its line in the sand. It defined the constitutional principle it would not yield: absolute and unqualified sovereignty over its North American colonies. -
Townshend Act - Political/Social - Short term
The most important of these new regulations was a light import duty on glass, white lead, paper, paint, and tea. Townshend, seizing on a dubious distinction between internal and external taxes, made this tax, unlike the stamp tax, an indirect customs duty payable at American ports. But to the increasingly restless colo- nists, this was a phantom distinction. -
Samuel Adams
An American statesman, political philosopher, and one of the Founding Fathers of the United States. He was a politician in colonial Massachusetts, a leader of the movement that became the American Revolution, and one of the architects of the principles of American republicanism that shaped the political culture of the United States. He was a second cousin to fellow Founding Father, President John Adams. -
Nonimportation Agreements - Social/Economic - Short term
A promising stride toward union, it spontaneously united the American people for the first time in common action. It was a boycott and a series of agreed upon commercial restrictions(especially woolen garments) the colonists put in place with regard to trade with the British. The decision was a way to protest and combat the 1767 Townshend Revenue Act. Sons of Liberty/Daughters of Liberty enforced the nonimportation agreements against violators, often with a generous coat of tar and feathers. -
King George III
By 1770 King George III, then only thirty-two years old, was strenuously attempting to assert the power of the British monarchy. He was a good man in his private morals, but he proved to be a bad ruler. Earnest, industrious, stubborn, and lustful for power, he surrounded himself with cooperative “yes men.” -
Boston Massacre - Social - Short term
A crowd of some sixty townspeople began taunting and throwing snowballs at a squad of ten redcoats. Acting apparently without orders, but nervous and provoked by the jeering crowd, the troops opened fire and killed or wounded eleven. Acting apparently without orders, but nervous and provoked by the jeering crowd, the troops opened fire and killed or wounded eleven citizens, an event that became known as the Boston Massacre. This should be a short term and social cause. -
Thomas Jefferson
An American statesman, one of the Founding Fathers of the United States and the principal author of the Declaration of Independence. He later served as the third President of the United States from 1801 to 1809. -
the House of Burgesses
Next step of the local committees of correspondence
The Virginia House of Burgesses was the first legislative assembly of elected representatives in North America. The House was established by the Virginia Company, which created the body as part of an effort to encourage English craftsmen to settle in North America, and to make conditions in the colony more agreeable for its current inhabitants. They evolved directly into the first American congresses. -
Boston Tea Party - Political - Sort term
The powerful British East India Company was facing bankruptcy in 1773, so the British tricked Americans, with much cheaper tea price, into swallowing the principle of the detested tax. And the British enforced the law. Many cities showed their furiousness to the law. On December 16, 1773, roughly a hundred Bos-tonians smashed open 342 chests of tea, and dumped their contents into the Atlantic.The conflicts were inevitable between the colonists and the British. -
Intolerable Acts - Political/Economic - Short term
By huge majorities in 1774, it passed a series of acts designed to chastise Boston in particular and Massachusetts in general in response to the Boston Tea Party. Many of the chartered rights of colonial Massachusetts were swept away. Especially the Quebec Act, it had a wider range. -
First Continental Congress - Political - Short term
It was to meet in Philadelphia to consider ways of redressing colonial grievances ---- the Intolerable Act. The most significant action of the Congress was the creation of The Association ---- it called for a complete boycott of British goods: nonimporta-tion, nonexportation, and nonconsumption. If colonial grievances were redressed, well and good; if not, the Congress was to meet again in May 1775. -
Lexington Massacre - Social - Short term
In April 1775 the British commander in Boston sent a detachment of troops to nearby Lexington and Concord. They were to seize stores of colonial gunpowder and also to bag the “rebel” ringleaders, Samuel Adams and John Hancock. The colonial “Minute Men” refused to disperse rapidly enough, and shots were fired that killed eight Americans and wounded several more. -
George Washington
An American statesman and soldier who served as the first President of the United States from 1789 to 1797 and was one of the Founding Fathers of the United States. He served as Commander-in-Chief of the Continental Army during the American Revolutionary War, and later presided over the 1787 convention that drafted the United States Constitution. -
Thomas Paine
An English-born American political activist, philosopher, political theorist, and revolutionary. One of the Founding Fathers of the United States, he authored the two most influential pamphlets at the start of the American Revolution, and he inspired the rebels in 1776 to declare independence from Britain.