As usual, Congress wasn't the first to act to try to solve a problem. The Second Continental Congress in Summer 1776 was an outlaw gathering of colonial leaders, just like the first one in Fall 1774 had been. Neither was authorized by the King. But these Congresses of colonial leaders were driven to action by the Intolerable Acts which the King enacted through His Parliament to trample on the rights of His subjects in His American colonies and restore what He thought was good order and discipline. What led to this series of confrontations before the 1776 Declaration of Independence? While the colonies were restive all across the eastern seaboard of North America, the origins of our Revolution for a new nation founded on life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness truly began in one region....
Boston 1773-1776 - The Cradle Of Liberty
Act of Colonial Rebellion - On December 16, 1773, the Sons of Liberty and their friends destroyed 342 chests of tea, in protest of the British Parliament’s 1773 Tea Act. This Act granted the British East India Company a monopoly to set the price and control all the tea sales at a time when 86% of tea in the American colonies was much cheaper smuggled Dutch tea. The King and Parliament also added a tariff on this tea shipped to the colonies. That tariff, which had not been passed by their colonial legislatures, was also considered an affront by the colonists, direct taxation without representation in the British Parliament. There were other acts of rebellion, small skirmishes, confrontations, and burnings of boats, houses, farms, and other property as noted in our Declaration. The Boston Tea Party is the one among those many in the early 1770s which became legend.
Acts of Feudal Reprisal - The British Parliament acted in early 1774 to retaliate for the Boston Tea Party and other restive and rebellious actions with five laws which came to be known in the colonies as the Intolerable Acts, and would later be listed in 1776 among the 27 grievances in our Declaration of Independence:
Boston Port Act - closed the port of Boston until the colonists paid for the destroyed tea and the king was satisfied British authority had been restored.
Massachusetts Government Act - unilaterally took away Massachusetts' colonial government charter and brought nearly all activities under direct control of the British royal governor and Army. Limited town meetings, the primary governmental forum in many towns in the colonies, to one per year.
Administration of Justice Act - allowed Massachusetts royal governor to order trials of accused royal officials take place elsewhere within the Empire if the royal governor decided that the royal defendant would not get a fair trial.
Quartering Act - required all colonies to provide housing for British soldiers at their expense.
Quebec Act - expanded Quebec into the midwestern United States, which appeared to void existing land claims of powerful colonists in that region. It guaranteed the free practice of Catholicism, seen by colonists as a step toward an "establishment" of that specific faith in the colonies. American colonists were overwhelmingly Protestant, largely people who had fled or whose ancestors had fled, the religious persecution of Protestants by monarchs in Europe, many of whom were Catholic. (Source: paraphrased from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intolerable_Acts )
Those five Intolerable Acts led to further rebellion in the colonies, particularly around Boston, including nighttime raids by “terrorists” on British interests, arms stores, and fortifications. A cycle of reprisals by the British Army and the Patriots (otherwise known as terrorists) followed. Organized, open armed conflict began when hundreds of volunteer minutemen, warned by Paul Revere and others, faced off British regular Army troops at Lexington and Concord, Massachusetts on April 19, 1775.
Soon after those battles, the colonies organized their Second Continental Congress in Philadelphia in May 1775. This rebellious act was not authorized by the King or His Parliament. The Second Continental Congress created America’s Continental Army on June 14, 1775, with George Washington as its Commander.
As Washington would learn days after the fact, the Battle of Bunker Hill was fought on June 17, 1775, when the British crossed the 1000 foot wide Mystic River on the north side of Boston to quash the rebellious towns and countryside. They quickly encountered Patriot fortifications erected overnight on Bunker Hill and Breed’s Hill just across the river from Boston. The Patriots lost their positions to a shortage of ammunition later that day, but the British did not advance. The local Patriot militia then bottled up the British on the peninsula to begin the Siege of Boston.
Besieging Boston Freed The Cradle Of Liberty From British Oppression
General Washington traveled through New York City, in July 1775 to take command of the Siege of Boston from General (and Massachusetts Congressman) Artemas Ward. He established his headquarters in Cambridge, across the Charles River from Boston. Cambridge had been the home of Harvard College since 1636, founded just 16 years after the Pilgrims first arrived at Plymouth Rock, Massachusetts Bay Colony. Harvard taught many of the more prosperous among those rebellious colonists the philosophies of the Enlightenment. To this day, these Enlightenment philosophies form the core ideas of liberty, of self-governance by people collectively rather than by an absolute ruler, of the separation of government powers among three separate and co-equal branches with checks and balances on the other branches, of the separation of church and state, of free expression, free assembly, and free press, all held as the unalienable rights of free individuals.
These radical Enlightenment ideas spread rapidly in the King’s American colonies throughout the late 1600s and 1700s. Many colonists or their forebears had, like the Pilgrims in 1620, fled the injustices and prejudices of Kings in Europe. These rebellious Enlightenment ideas were written into essays and newspapers published by the Patriots from the 1750s. Some radicals, Patriot authors and publishers, were taken into custody or their publications were shut down by the British Army in the years leading to our Revolution. But those ideas place in our history is assured by their enshrinement as the core of our 1776 Declaration of Independence, of our 1788 Constitution, and of our 1791 Bill of Rights – all intended to be the basis of our liberty as a free people.
Washington and the Continental Army sustained the Siege of Boston through the winter of 1775-76, blocking the British Army’s attempted advances off the Boston peninsula. The British had intended to crush the armed rebellion which became our Revolution in its cradle – in the towns and farms around Boston from which the Continental Army was first organized. In March 1776, the British Army and Navy left Boston Harbor to sail for New York Harbor. The siege broken, Boston – the cradle of liberty where our American rebellion against a global superpower and colonizer, the British Crown with its Army and Navy had begun - was freed.
The Revolutionary Army Then Moved South – The Battles of New York and New Jersey
General Washington and his commanders then relocated with those soldiers who remained with the Continental Army to try to defend New York City and Long Island. There he commanded the Continental Army, its new volunteers from the mid-Atlantic region, and spies in the Sons of Liberty who remained among the British Loyalists in and around New York City, as our Revolution continued in Spring 1776.
