Posted on Apr 27, 2015
1SG Signal Support Systems Specialist
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Tea
1773 – The British Parliament passes the Tea Act, a bill designed to save the faltering East India Company by greatly lowering its tea tax and thus granting it a monopoly on the American tea trade.

The low tax allowed the East India Company to undercut even tea smuggled into America by Dutch traders, and many colonists viewed the act as another example of taxation tyranny, what we would refer to today as cronyism.
When three tea ships, the Dartmouth, the Eleanor, and the Beaver, arrived in Boston Harbor, the colonists demanded that the tea be returned to England. After Massachusetts Governor Thomas Hutchinson refused, Patriot leader Samuel Adams organized the so-called Boston Tea Party with about 60 members of the radical Sons of Liberty. On December 16, 1773, the Patriots boarded the British ships disguised as Mohawk Indians and dumped the tea chests, valued at ₤18,000, into the water. Parliament, outraged by the Boston Tea Party and other blatant acts of destruction of British property, enacted the Coercive Acts, also known as the Intolerable Acts, in the following year.
The Coercive Acts closed Boston to merchant shipping, established formal British military rule in Massachusetts, made British officials immune to criminal prosecution in America, and required colonists to quarter British troops. The colonists subsequently called the first Continental Congress to consider a united American resistance to the British.

https://thisdayinusmilhist.wordpress.com/2014/04/27/april-27/
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Responses: 5
MAJ Ken Landgren
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The printing press was the internet back then as Americans in the colonies kept abreast of the oppression borne from England. It helped to create an ideology that would successfully create an insurgency.
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SGT Lawrence Corser
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how long after the revolution did taxes become law?
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1SG Signal Support Systems Specialist
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The federal government had no authority to levy taxes under the Articles. The states were the taxing authorities and were supposed to surrender a sum to a federal treasury annually based on land valuations, but there was also no provision for enforcement.

Direct taxes were later prohibited by the Constitution, but the federal government could levy their own indirect taxes. These were the root of the grievance with the Whiskey Rebellion in 1791--so, almost immediately, would be the short answer, after they were allowed.

Of course the big difference between federal and British taxation was to do with representation when the decisions to tax were made.
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PO1 Disaster Survivor Assistance Specialist
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Soooooo, I'm headed to Boston for a cup of tea. Anyone with me?
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