But there is this difference. Our people were quite willing to buy these stamps, but they were not willing to buy the stamps which the British government sent them in 1765. Why? Well, they had a good reason for it, and this was that they had nothing to do with making the law. The English would not pay any taxes except those made by the people whom they elected to Parliament, and the Americans said they had the same right. They were not allowed to send any members to Parliament, so they said that Parliament had no right to tax them. Their own legislatures might vote to send the king money, but the English Parliament had no right to vote for them.
When the king found that the Americans would not use his stamps he tried another plan. He laid a tax on tea and some other goods. He thought that our people could not do without tea, so he sent several shiploads across the ocean, expecting them to buy it and pay the tax. But he soon found that the colonists had no more use for taxed tea than for stamps. They would not even let the captains bring their tea on shore, except at Charleston, and there it was packed in damp cellars, where it soon rotted. A ship sent to Annapolis was set on fire and burned to the water's edge with the tea in it.
But the most stirring event took place at Boston. There one night, while the tea-ship lay at a wharf in the harbor, a number of young men dressed like Indians rushed on board with a loud war-whoop and began to break open the tea-chests with their hatchets and pour the tea into the harbor. This was the famous "Boston tea-party."
Americans liked tea, but not tea with an English tax on it. They boiled leaves and roots and made some sort of tea out of them. It was poor stuff, but they did not pay any tax. And they would not buy any cloth or other goods brought from England. If the king was angry and stubborn they were angry and stubborn, too, and every day they grew more angry, until many of them began to think that they would be better off without a king. They were not the kind of people to be made slaves of easily by King George or any other king.
When the king heard of the "Boston tea-party" he was in a fury. He would make Boston pay well for its tea, he said. So he sent soldiers there, and he gave orders that no ships should go into or out of Boston harbor. This stopped most of the business of the town, and soon the poor people had no work to do and very little to eat. But they had crowded meetings at Faneuil Hall, where Samuel Adams and John Hancock and other patriots talked to them of their rights and wrongs. It began to look as if war would soon come.
The time had come at last for a union of the colonies. What Franklin had failed to do at Albany in 1754 was done at Philadelphia in 1774. A meeting was held there which was called a Congress, and was made up of some of the best men of the country sent from the colonies. One of these was George Washington, who had lived on his farm at Mount Vernon since the end of the French War.
Congress sent a letter to the king, asking him to give the people of this country the same rights that the people of England had. There was no harm in this, I am sure, but it made the king more obstinate still. I have said he was not a wise man. Most people say he was a very foolish one, or he would have known that the people of the colonies would fight for their rights if they could not get them in peace.
All around Boston the farmers and villagers began to collect guns and powder and to drill men into soldiers. These were called "minute men," which meant that they would be ready to fight at a minute's notice, if they were asked to. When people begin to get ready in this way, war is usually not far off.
One night at Boston a man named Paul Revere stood watching a distant steeple till he saw a light suddenly flash out through the darkness. Then he leaped on his horse and rode at full speed away. That light was a signal telling him that British soldiers were on the march to Concord twenty miles away, to destroy some powder and guns which had been gathered there for the use of these "minute men."
Away rode Revere through the night, rousing up the people and shouting to them that the British soldiers were coming. He was far ahead of the soldiers, so that when they reached the village of Lexington, ten miles from Boston, the people were wide awake, and a party of minute men was drawn up on the village green. The soldiers were ordered to fire on these men, and some of them fell dead. Those were the first shots in a great war. It was the 19th of April, 1775.