History of the United States represented in it? Crying "No taxation without representation", the colonists refused to pay the taxes as tensions escalated in the late 1760s and early 1770s. The Boston Tea Party in 1773 was a direct action by activists in the town of Boston to protest against the new tax on tea. Parliament quickly responded the next year with the Coercive Acts, stripping Massachusetts of its historic right of self-government and putting it under army rule, which sparked outrage and resistance in all thirteen colonies. Patriot leaders from all 13 colonies convened the First Continental Congress to coordinate their resistance to the
No taxation without representation with Great Britain, or a federally representative British Parliament with powers of taxation that was to consist of American, West Indian, Irish and British Members of Parliament. Despite the fact that these ideas were considered and discussed seriously on both sides of the Atlantic, it appears that neither the American Congress, nor the colonial Assemblies, nor the British Government in Westminster, at least prior to the Carlisle Peace Commission of 1778, officially proposed such constitutional developments. It must be noted, however, that Governor Thomas Hutchinson apparently referred to a colonial representational proposal when he wrote that, The Assembly of Massachusetts