section_path: Marriage, civilian, and political life (1755–1775)/Opposition to the British Parliament and Crown
section_name: Opposition to the British Parliament and Crown
paragraph_text: Opposition to the British Parliament and Crown
  
  Washington played a central role before and during the American Revolution. His distrust of the British military had begun when he was passed over for promotion into the Regular Army. Opposed to taxes imposed by the British Parliament on the Colonies without proper representation, he and other colonists were also angered by the Royal Proclamation of 1763 which banned American settlement west of the Allegheny Mountains and protected the British fur trade.
  
  Washington believed the Stamp Act 1765 was an "Act of Oppression" and celebrated its repeal the following year. In March 1766, Parliament passed the Declaratory Act asserting that Parliamentary law superseded colonial law. In the late 1760s, the interference of the British Crown in American lucrative western land speculation spurred the American Revolution. Washington was a prosperous land speculator, and in 1767, he encouraged "adventures" to acquire backcountry western lands. Washington helped lead widespread protests against the Townshend Acts passed by Parliament in 1767, and he introduced a proposal in May 1769 which urged Virginians to boycott British goods; the Acts were mostly repealed in 1770.
  
  Parliament sought to punish Massachusetts colonists for their role in the Boston Tea Party in 1774 by passing the Coercive Acts, which Washington saw as "an invasion of our rights and privileges". He said Americans must not submit to acts of tyranny since "custom and use shall make us as tame and abject slaves, as the blacks we rule over with such arbitrary sway". That July, he and George Mason drafted a list of resolutions for the Fairfax County committee, including a call to end the Atlantic slave trade, which were adopted.
  
  On August 1, Washington attended the First Virginia Convention. There, he was selected as a delegate to the First Continental Congress. As tensions rose in 1774, he helped train militias in Virginia and organized enforcement of the Continental Association boycott of British goods instituted by the Congress.
  
  The American Revolutionary War broke out on April 19, 1775, with the Battles of Lexington and Concord and the Siege of Boston. Upon hearing the news, Washington was "sobered and dismayed", and he hastily departed Mount Vernon on May 4, 1775, to join the Second Continental Congress in Philadelphia.