Dbq Revolutionary War

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1Q. Analyze the road to the Revolutionary war by examining the following themes: What rights did colonists historically believe they possessed? Why? What factors led the British government to encroach on those rights? Explain. Finally, what major factors/events led to the eventual escalation from a dispute to an all-out war? 1A. Some of the rights that the colonists believed they possessed were rights to life, liberty, and property. They believed that these rights were undeniably theirs due to the fact that these were considered the natural state of man and these were the rights granted to the British subjects. Being British colonists, obviously, the colonists would want the same rights granted themselves as were granted to the …show more content…

This outraged the colonists because part of the rights they held to be irrevocable was that they could not be deprived of their property unwillingly. And also they could not be deprived of liberty. The colonists genuinely considered the taxation by the crown to be theft, in no uncertain terms. One can be quite sure that there were, of course, exceptions to this generalization, but as a whole Americans were not happy. To ensure that the massive war debts could be paid, the taxes were raised several times until it was necessary to send soldiers to start enforcing the taxation. These soldiers were unwelcome visitors that caused the colonists to be infuriated and gradually the murmuring of the people against the crown became an audible groan of a country struggling to rise into the ranks of legitimacy as a self-governing, established, power. “Growing pains” if you will. These taxes grew increasingly harsh starting with the sugar tax and then continuing on with the stamp act, the Townshend Acts, the tea act, and eventually culminating in the intolerable acts. So named because after the colonists threw what was basically a massive temper tantrum, Great Britain put the colonists in the proverbial …show more content…

The evolution of slavery in the new world was one that rather took me by surprise. There were originally very few slaves that were a part of the new world. But the indigenous peoples, dubbed Indians by an unfortunate misunderstanding of their origin, of the new world were very quickly found to be a cheap source of labor and were early on exploited for their labor. The Indians were proselytized militantly by the Catholics and used as a labor force that had little value and was fully expendable. As a result, the Indians developed a mistrust of the newcomers and revolted, winning by the strength of numbers, driving out the newcomers. But the damage had been done, diseases that the Indians had no immunity to were released in their ranks, and thousands upon thousands of Indians died. There was not enough fight left in the Indians to keep control of the situation and so they were brutally mistreated again and remained a cheap labor force for a very long time. Around this same time period, the “triangle trade” was established and the Spaniards needs for labor weren’t being met by the Indians. Enter the Africans. The Spanish hunger for labor continued to drive the importation of slaves into the thousands. The English didn’t truly begin to employ the use of slavery until the indentured servants (basically slaves for a specified time) began to reach the ends of their servitude. They were then given lands and money as they went free according to the law. Soon it became apparent

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