History American Revolution Part 1 Traditional View

About the traditional view of the American Revolution.

THE OTHER SIDE OF HISTORY

The American Revolution As Seen by the British

The Traditional Version: "Taxation without representation is tyranny," British colonists protested when Parliament passed the Stamp Act in 1765. Two years earlier, eager settlers and land promoters had been provoked when expansion west of the Allegheny Mountains was blocked by the Proclamation of 1763. Then the Townshend Acts imposed duties on vital colonial imports in 1767. Even with the tax, British tea from India was still cheaper than inferior Dutch tea, but it was the principle involved that prompted the dumping of 342 cases of this disputed commodity into Boston Harbor in 1773. The British Parliament responded with the "Intolerable Acts," which closed the Boston port. When protest and reprisal escalated into armed conflict at Lexington, Concord, and Bunker Hill in 1775, the colonists chose "liberty or death" rather than indefinite "slavery" as a part of the British Empire. According to their Declaration of Independence (1776), they believed that men possessed "certain unalienable rights" and that a government derived its power from the "consent of the governed." These new "American" proceeded to secure their rights by force of arms in the modern world's first revolutionary war against a mother country.