On March 5, 1770, a heavy British military presence in Boston led to a tense situation that boiled over into incitement of brawls between soldiers and civilians and eventually led to troops discharging their muskets after being threatened by a rioting crowd. Three civilians were killed at the scene of the shooting, eleven were injured, and two died after the incident. One person, an African-American man named Crispus Attacks, was killed. Nearly every part of the story is disputed by both sides. Did the colonists have weapons? The British say rocks, snowballs, and other such weapons were hurled at them. But the British had guns, and they did open fire. The Boston Massacre deepened American distrust of the British military presence in the colonies.

Angry and frustrated at a new tax on tea from the Townshend Acts, American colonists calling themselves the Sons of Liberty and disguised as Mohawk Native Americans boarded three British ships (the Dartmouth, the Eleanor, and the Beaver) and dumped 342 whole crates of British tea into Boston harbor on December 16, 1773. Similar incidents occurred in Maryland, New York, and New Jersey in the next few months, and tea was eventually boycotted throughout the colonies.

The Intolerable acts were a series of laws sponsored by British Prime Minister Lord North and enacted in 1774 in response to the Boston Tea Party. Some of these laws included:

1. More troops would be sent to Boston to enforce the new laws

2. All town meetings in colonies that didn't have approval of the royal governor would be banned

3. The port of Boston was closed until the price of the dumped tea was recovered, moved the capital of Massachusetts to Salem, and made Marblehead the official port of entry for the Massachusetts colony.

4. British soldiers accused of killing colonists in the Boston Massacre would be put on trial in England, no the colonies

These Acts were the harshest so far of all the Acts passed by Parliament. The closing of Boston's port alone would cost the colony (and the American colonies as a whole) a ton of money. Banning town meeting prevented colonists from planning any form of rebellion. Rather than keep the colonists down, the Intolerable Acts was the boiling point for the colonists.

Causes of the American Revolution•Laptops Up: Go to Mr. M’s Website, Download The Classwork under Today’s BLOG•Your task(s) with those at your table right now:1.Examine Each Event, & Record Information about event on today’s Handout2.On a Scale of 1-8, Decide what score it would receive (1 meaning that it would cause little unrest, 8 a lot of unrest amongst the colonists & the British)3.Explain why you gave it that rating4.Record what recent “TBA Event” it reminds you of