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