Patriot militia, joined by the newly formed Continental Army, then put British forces in Boston under siege by land and their forces withdrew by sea. Open warfare erupted when British regulars sent to capture a cache of military supplies were confronted by local Patriot militia at Lexington and Concord on April 19, 1775. Opponents of Britain were known as "Patriots" or "Whigs", while colonists who retained their allegiance to the Crown were known as "Loyalists" or "Tories." The other colonies rallied behind Massachusetts, and twelve of the thirteen colonies sent delegates in late 1774 to form a Continental Congress for the coordination of their resistance to Britain. The British responded by closing Boston Harbor and enacting a series of punitive laws which effectively rescinded Massachusetts Bay Colony's privileges of self-government. The burning of the Gaspee in Rhode Island in 1772, the passage of the Tea Act of 1773 and the resulting Boston Tea Party in December 1773 led to a new escalation in tensions. The British government repealed most of the Townshend duties in 1770, but retained the tax on tea in order to symbolically assert Parliament's right to tax the colonies. The British government deployed troops to Boston in 1768 to quell unrest, leading to the Boston Massacre in 1770. Tensions relaxed with the British repeal of the Stamp Act, but flared again with the passage of the Townshend Acts in 1767. The passage of the Stamp Act of 1765 imposed internal taxes on official documents, newspapers and most things printed in the colonies, which led to colonial protest and the meeting of representatives from several colonies at the Stamp Act Congress. During the 1760s, however, the British Parliament passed a number of acts that were intended to bring the American colonies under more direct rule from the British metropole and increasingly intertwine the economies of the colonies with those of Britain. Before the 1760s, Britain's American colonies had enjoyed a high level of autonomy in their internal affairs, which were locally governed by colonial legislatures. Īmerican colonists objected to being taxed by the British Parliament, a body in which they had no direct representation.
The Americans in the Thirteen Colonies formed independent states that defeated the British in the American Revolutionary War (1775–1783), gaining independence from the British Crown, establishing the constitution that created the United States of America, the first modern constitutional liberal democracy.
The American Revolution was an ideological and political revolution that occurred in British America between 17.
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