Two hundred fifty years ago today, our forefathers launched a revolution that swept the colonies and, eventually, the world. Two hundred thirty-two years ago Friday, some of those very same patriots ratified the first 10 amendments to the Constitution of the United States, which we’ve come to call the Bill of Rights. For both events, and for the war they fought, the privation they suffered, and the victories they achieved between December 1773 and December 1791, we, and the world, should be grateful.
On December 16, 1773, a band of patriots calling themselves the Sons of Liberty – angered by the British Parliament’s decision earlier that year to bail out the British East India Company by granting it a monopoly on tea sales in the American colonies, voted through by a parliament that included no representatives of those who were to be affected by the policy – dressed themselves as Mohawk Indians and boarded three ships harbored at Griffin’s Wharf, then dumped 342 chests of tea, worth millions of dollars in today’s currency, overboard.
King George III and the British Parliament responded by enacting the Coercive Acts (later known as the Intolerable Acts): Boston Harbor was ordered closed until the lost tea was paid for; the Massachusetts Constitution was abrogated, and Massachusetts lost its right, unique among the colonies, to elect its own executive council; martial law was instituted in the state, by moving judicial authority to Britain; and colonists all over America were required to quarter British troops on demand.
The King thought the new laws would quash the revolutionary fervor in the colonies.........