Lord Dunmore…217

Joseph Plumb Martin…221

Thomas Paine…229

Eliza Wilkinson…235

Horace Walpole…241

George Washington…247

Ever since 1765, the British government (Parliament) had been trying to collect taxes in America to pay British bills. Americans protested right from the beginning that Parliament had no right to tax people who had no representation in Parliament. Some Americans voiced their objections to British taxation in newspapers and pamphlets. Others, like Samuel Adams (1722–1803) and his Sons of Liberty, protested violently and spoke early, openly, and illegally about independence from Great Britain. The last straw for the British was the Boston Tea Party of December 1773, when Boston patriots dumped 342 chests of British tea into Boston Harbor. To punish Boston, which was the center of the most violent protests, and to let Boston serve as an example to the other colonies, Parliament passed the Intolerable Acts in 1774. The Intolerable Acts...