What Led To The American Revolution

In 1779 the British ship Serapis absolutely decimated a Revolutionary ship, the Bonhomme Richard. A British officer called out and asked the rebels if they had surrendered. John Paul Jones yelled out in response, “I have not yet begun to fight!” and soon turned the tides and won the battle. Had this response come a few years earlier, it might have described the entire state of events in the colonies. The American Revolution could have been prevented almost entirely, given the situation by 1776. However, this peace only could have occurred if the colonists and the British managed to work together to accomplish reunion to some degree. Primarily, the colonists would have been satisfied with the status quo, had their requests been granted. Secondly, …show more content…
Hence, the British government flaunted the rights of the colonists as Englishmen to have representation and consent to their own taxes. Instead, they prioritized potential profit from the colonies. On another note, while the French and Indian War did toll serious financial expenditure from Britain, the taxes imposed on the American people were unnecessary and could have been removed without much harm. The real reason England pressed taxes on the colonies was so Britain could keep an army stationed there. Actually, Parliament was not so much concerned with the army as with the fifteen hundred officers stationed in America. Many of these prominent men either sat in Parliament themselves or had numerous friends and relatives who did. Nevertheless, these officers needed an army, so Britain elected to keep forty thousand troops stationed in America, at the price of 225,000 pounds per year. King George III himself found a deceitful way to raise these funds: he stationed troops overseas, especially in America and Ireland, and forced the people there to pay for their protection. Thus, he and Parliament would not have to levy any more taxes on true Britons, who would have rioted if the government imposed new taxes, as they did when the government recently enacted a cider tax. John Adams, who – although a patriot – obeyed justice above all, as seen in his defense of the British soldiers in the Boston Massacre, pronounced, “revenue is still demanded from America, and appropriated to… swarms of officers and pensioners in idleness and luxury.” Thus, the taxation upon the American colonists was neither a necessity nor the natural result of war expenditures – rather, it was a feudal solution devised by corruption within Parliament. Hence, controversy over both representation as well as taxation was not unavoidable; these matters only