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The Proclamation of 1763 gave all the Western territories between the Allegheny Mountains, Florida, the Mississippi River, and Quebec to the Native Americans in hopes of preventing an outbreak of wars between the Native American and the North American Colonists. An added bonus was the proclamation giving the British government more control over their current colonies by restricting movement and westward expansion. -
The Currency Act made it so that the paper money the colonists had created and were using to pay for everything within the colonies could not be used to pay for British goods. This made it much harder on the colonists to pay the taxes placed on imports because they did not have much British currency. -
The Sugar Act acted as a replacement for the Molasses Act, which placed a 6 pence tax on every gallon of molasses and taxed the importation of rum. Not only did the Sugar Act drop this tax down to 3 pence per gallon, it also made the importation of rum illegal and added taxes to wines, silks, coffees, and many other luxury goods. Parliament was hoping that by lowering the tax on molasses the colonists would be discouraged from smuggling it from other countries. -
The Quartering Act forced the colonists to house British soldiers in American barracks and public houses. If there were no more room in American barracks or public houses, the colonists had to allow the British soldiers to stay in inns, alehouses, barns, and other buildings. And, the British soldiers did not even have to pay rent. Every colony, except for Pennsylvania, refused to follow the rules of the Quartering Act, and it expired in 1767. -
The Stamp Act levied taxes on all “newspapers, broadsides, pamphlets, licenses, leases and other legal documents.” This act led to the formation of the “Sons of Liberty,” a group of colonists who protested against the Stamp Act. The “Stamp Act Congress” also formed as a result of this act, and together, those delegates adopted the term “no taxation without representation” and decided the Stamp Act violated the rights of the colonists. -
Even though Parliament seemed to give no mind to what the colonists wanted, the colonists were refusing to buy goods from the British, and the merchants and economy had begun to suffer. So, in 1776, Parliament repealed the Stamp Act as well as modifying the Sugar Act. Though that wasn’t all they did, they also put into place a new act, the Declaratory Act. This act allowed Parliament to pass any law it wanted without the consent of the colonists. -
The Townshend Act taxed even more goods that were imported to the colonies including china, glass, led, paint, paper, and tea. While the revenue from these taxes were initially supposed to be used for the protection of the North American colonies, the British government used the collected money to pay colonial governors and judges, ensuring that they were loyal to England. Despite these taxes, the colonists began making a lot of the taxed products themselves in order to avoid the extra taxation. -
On March 5, 1770, North American colonists in Boston decided to throw snowballs at armed soldiers. In retaliation, one of the soldiers gave the order to fire and, when the smoke had cleared, there were three dead civilians. The Boston Massacre led to the repeal of the Townshend Act taxes on everything but tea. To the colonists, this repeal signaled that they had won and a lot of the incompliance with the British began to disappear. -
By 1773, most of the tea the colonists drank was imported illegally to avoid the taxation. But, in Boston, agents decided to defy the colonists' wishes and decided to allow the tea shipments to land anyway. On the night of December 16, 1773, a group of men led by Samuel Adams disguised themselves as Mohawk Indians and boarded three different British ships and dumped the tea into the Boston harbor. Parliament condemned the Boston Tea Party as an act of vandalism. -
The Quebec Act, which is also sometimes known as the Canada Act, extended the area of Quebec south towards the Ohio River. This act also established the Catholic Church, a bad idea to the mainly Protestant colonists already living in North America, in that area because of the large number of French Catholics living there. Because there were so many French in that area, they allowed the French civil law to stay in place, meaning that there was no more trial by jury. -
The response to the Boston Tea Party was a new set of acts, the Intolerable/Coercive Acts. The first act was the Boston Port Bill which closed the port of Boston until they were able to pay for all the tea that had been dumped. Other bills would limit the power of local authority and limit town meetings that were held without the consent of the governor to once a year. The current leaders in the Massachusetts government would be replaced with leaders elected by the British government. -
The Quartering Act was the final Coercive Act and allowed any high ranking British soldier to demand better accommodations for British troops as well as being able to refuse any housing location that they deemed to be inconvenient on account of being too far away from where they were to work and be stationed.