In Order to Be Free (May 1754 – May 1775)

The American Revolution will become not just a local war for independence, but a war between great nations that stretches around the globe. It would also be a savage war that would pit brother against brother. Despite all of the bloodshed, the American Revolution would also be the founding event that would change the course of history.

To reduce debt suffered from the Seven Years' War, Britain levies several new taxes on American colonists. Unrest grows as colonists fear that giving into these new taxes will open the floodgates to even harsher taxes. Whipped up by pamphleteers and influential figures like Samuel Adams and Patrick Henry, mobs of American colonists take to the streets to intimidate tax collectors and troops.

On October 1st, 1768, General Gage and the British Army arrive in Boston to begin their occupation. Tensions continue to rise between Bostonians and the British until it erupts on March 5th, 1770 as British grenadiers respond to a quickly forming mob and fire into the crowd, leaving 5 dead. Although most of the soldiers are later exonerated, the event will come to be known as the Boston Massacre.

Committees of Correspondence form in hundreds of Massachusetts towns linking advocates of resistance and spreading the message and ideals of revolution. Eventually, the network spans into all colonies. While revolutionaries praise liberty, thousands suffer under the bondage of slavery including Phillis Wheatley, who becomes the first African American writer to publish a book while enslaved.

The British impose a new law on the colonies called the Tea Act, which is intended to stop smuggling and support the bankrupt East India Company. The act is deeply unpopular and prompts 50 to 60 Bostonians crudely dressed as Native Americans to dump 46 tons of British tea into the Boston Harbor. The British government responds by cracking down on Massachusetts, hoping to contain the rebellion.

The Patriots catch wind of a secret British plan to move troops from Boston into Concord and they dispatch William Dawes and Paul Revere to warn other Patriots that the British are coming. The British attack a Patriot force in Lexington, but they are overwhelmed by hundreds of militiamen pouring in from the countryside and forced to retreat to Boston. The American Revolution has begun.

In 1767, Parliament passed the Townshend Acts, which imposed new taxes on four items manufactured in England — glass, lead, paper, painter’s colors — along with tea, grown in China but re-exported from Britain. Women, who normally played a subordinate role in public life and had almost no legal rights, joined the resistance by the thousands as “Daughters of Liberty.”

Tensions were rising between England and the colonies, but new arrivals and American-born colonists were eager to carve out new lives within North America’s interior. Thousands of English, Scots-Irish, German, and a small number of Jewish immigrants poured down the Great Wagon Road, running from Philadelphia to the Carolinas.