Continental Congress's Grievances Against Parliament

So much taxes! Parliament is practically going to make everyone poor! All of these acts cause chaos with the colonists. The Continental Congress needs to help go against the British before things get way out of hand.

First of all, Parliament didn’t even have the colonies put their opinions on what acts were going to be given out. One of the acts is called the Navigation Acts. That’s one that needs to be completely abolished. Those Navigation Acts state that colonists cannot trade with anybody EXCEPT Great Britain! So they can’t trade goods with any other countries. That frustrates the colonists of course because that was a way that they could get revenue and now it was taken away from them. People should be free to trade with anyone that they want to trade with. But Parliament thinks otherwise. In fact, there’s not just one but MORE acts that were added to the Navigation Acts that made them stronger but didn’t agree with the colonists. But, this of course leads to people going against the law. Smugglers secretly trade with other countries and try their best not to get caught. Sometimes that could lead to success…But others, not so lucky.

But what we really need to stop is Parliament making more of these! That isn’t the only acts that are frustrating the colonists! There’s tons more. Like, the Molasses Act. This act involved a lot of tax. Parliament decided to tax on sugar, which of course is a common good that people use so for them, it’s a smart way to go. But, this wasn’t for just sugar in general. This was for sugar that was being imported from the French West Indies. So again, Parliament is forcing the colonists in America to get all their goods from Great Britain. Doesn’t this look a little similar to the Navigation Acts? I thought so. But that isn’t the end for taxing sugar since Parliament made another act called the Sugar Act! At first I thought it was a break since Parliament lowered the tax on the sugar. I was wrong though. They started enforcing strict rules and improved from the last act and tried to make it easier for them to receive their tax money. But throughout all this, they’re not even thinking about how the colonists feel about all this and that has to end.

The Currency Acts are another handful of acts that weren’t made for the colonists’ well-being. It was made for the British Merchants’ well-being. These acts protected the way that those merchants were getting paid. They were getting paid with colonial currency and that wasn’t really the best form of money around so these acts helped them out. But there was no plus side for the colonists yet again. Not one bit of all these acts worked in America’s favor. It basically helped Great Britain out a lot.

The Quartering Act is what is really frustrating me and we need to stop this so the colonists can stop being taken advantage of. Parliament is forcing colonists to provide a home and food to soldiers that are local. Colonists have their own family that they have to worry about and now they have to feed another body taking up their home? It just doesn’t seem right.

All of these acts need to end and the Continental Congress needs to step in and do something to help save the colonists from this disaster. Fast forwarding to this next act called the Tea Act. This had a lot of controversy. The colonists were actually outraged when this was put into place. This act put a large tax on tea. And of course, they drink a lot of tea so it was a great product to get revenue on.  But Boston MA had enough of this craziness with all the taxes. So, a small group of American Patriots got together and decided to create a plan. And throughout all this everyone refused to drink any tea or take any of it from the ships. So the group sneaked onto the ship that contained a lot of the tea that the colonists of Massachusetts refused to drink. So instead of having it sit there, they just simply threw it overboard into the water. This shows that Parliament isn’t getting anywhere with the colonists with all these acts.

This event is now called the Boston Tea Party. It really started an uprising with the colonists to go against Parliament. All of the colonists soon realized that New Britain wasn’t really acting and making all the decisions good for them.