Sovereign Rights

The Green Mountain Boys  invaded Fort Ticonderoga in New York and under the leadership of Ethan Allen captured the fort from the British. They demanded the surrender of the sleeping British soldiers "in the name of the great Jehovah and the Continental Congress." With the fort they captured cannons and mortars that were sent to New England where they were used on the heights of Boston Harbor. These ...

At Lexington Green, MA, the British were met by approximately seventy American Minute Men led by John Parker in a British attempt to confiscate American arms. At the North Bridge in Concord, the British were confronted again, this time by 300-400 armed colonists, and were forced to march back to Boston with the Americans firing on them all the way. By the end of the day, ...

On March 23, 1775, less than a month before the beginning of the Revolutionary War, Patrick Henry addressed the House of Burgesses in Richmond, Virginia. He gave a speech that has been remembered popularly as the “Give Me Liberty or Give Me Death” speech. Although Henry’s discourse was not recorded at the time (partially because Henry delivered it extemporaneously), Henry’s biographer, William Wirt, later gathered testimony ...

When Loyalist writings began to appear in New York newspapers in 1775, nineteen-year-old Hamilton responded with an essay defending the colonists' right of revolution. Still a student at King's College, he followed up with this second pamphlet, expanding his argument on the purpose of legitimate government. The sacred rights of mankind are not to be rummaged for, among old parchments, or musty records. They are written, as ...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PbGDKitNf04 On September 5, 1774, every colony but Georgia sent representatives to what is now called the First Continental Congress. They met in secret because they did not want the British to know that the colonies were uniting. At first there were 44 delegates who met in Carpenter's Hall in Philadelphia. Twelve other delegates reported late. Some of those who came were George Washington, Patrick Henry, ...

Governor Thomas Gage, British general over Massachusetts, directed the Redcoats to begin  warrant-less searches for arms and ammunition. According to the Boston Gazette, of all General Gage’s offenses, “what most irritated the People” was “seizing their Arms and Ammunition". (Source) ...

The British became concerned that Massachusetts towns had been withdrawing their gunpowder from the powder houses, so before dawn on September 1, 1774, 260 Redcoats acting on General Gage‘s order sailed up the Mystic River and seized hundreds of barrels of powder from the Charlestown powder house (next to the present site of Tufts University, in what is now Somerville). The only powder that was left ...

A South Carolina newspaper essay, reprinted in Virginia, urged that any law that had to be enforced by the military was necessarily illegitimate: When an Army is sent to enforce Laws, it is always an Evidence that either the Law makers are conscious that they had no clear and indisputable right to make those Laws, or that they are bad [and] oppressive. Wherever the People themselves ...

The purpose of the Quartering Act of 1774 of the Intolerable Acts was to extend the provisions of the previous 1765 Quartering Act giving the governor, rather than the assembly, the authority to enforce arrangements to ensure that the colonists supplied billeting for the troops. The 1765 Quartering Act had required colonial governments to absorb the costs associated with quartering British troops which included food, shelter, ...

The Massachusetts Government Act was passed by the Parliament of Great Britain on May 20, 1774. The Massachusetts Government Act revoked the colony's 1691 charter effectively ended the constitution of Massachusetts and  and restricted the number of town meetings that a community might hold and prohibited the election of town officials. The Massachusetts Government Act: Put an end to the constitution of Massachusetts Only one town meeting ...