Question: Evaluate the relative importance of the following as factors prompting the Americans to rebel in 1776: Parliamentary taxation, British military measures, restriction of civil liberties, and the legacy of colonial religious and political ideas.
Thesis: The American colonists were provoked to rebel against the British because of the actions of taxation without representation, Britain sending troops to Boston and other parts of the colonies, restricting the colonists’ civil liberties such as the Writs of Assistance, and also the influence from republicanism and the radical Whigs.
Body:
Sub-Thesis: Taxations without representation was a major prompt to the colonists’ rebellion.
• Under Greenville’s program, there were several taxes applied to the colonists from the Sugar Act, Currency Act, and Stamp Act.
• Stamp Act – led to nonimportation agreements against British goods. Enraged colonists even though it was fair.
• Sons and Daughters of Liberty would feather and tar violators of the boycott of British goods.
• Navigation Acts
Sub-Thesis: The influence of republicanism and the radical Whigs also prompted the rebellion.
• The radical Whigs were a group who criticized the monarch and tried to expose the corruption of rampant King George III’s government
• Republicanism was the idea that the stability and the authority of the government depended on the virtue of the citizen, its capacity for selflessness, self-sufficiency, and desire o be civically
