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Florida and the American Southwest. Africans were first brought to
Virginia as slaves in 1619.
The settlers carried with them seeds for planting and tools to ply
their trades. They brought ideas shaped by the religious and dynastic
wars in Europe, the Magna Carta, the Renaissance and the Protestant
Reformation. They cleared the land for farms, built villages and
established local governing bodies. The Mayflower Compact, drawn
up by the Plymouth colony in New England in 1620, was the colonies'
first agreement to form "a civil body politic for better ordering and
preservation...to enact, constitute and frame such just and equal
laws...." Under the Compact, the Plymouth settlers were able to
conduct their affairs without outside interference.
By 1733 European settlers occupied 13 colonies along the Atlantic
Coast. The French controlled Canada, Louisiana and the entire
watershed of the Mississippi River. A series of conflicts between the
British and the French culminated in the French and Indian War
(1754-63) in which Britain, with its American colonial allies, emerged
victorious. France ceded Canada and the Ohio territories east of the
Mississippi River to Britain in the Peace of Paris of 1763.
In the following years, the British started imposing new taxes on
sugar, coffee, textiles and other imported goods. Under the Quartering
Act, the British required the colonists to house and feed British
soldiers; under the Stamp Act, they issued special tax stamps to be
attached to all newspapers, pamphlets, legal documents and licenses.
These measures seemed quite fair to British politicians, who had
spent large sums of money to defend their American colonies during
the French and Indian War. But the Americans feared that the new
taxes would make trading difficult, and that British troops stationed in
the colonies might be used to crush civil liberties which the colonists
had heretofore enjoyed. Speaking as freeborn Englishmen, colonial
Americans insisted that they could be taxed only by their own colonial
assemblies: "No taxation without representation" was their rallying
cry. Parliament heeded their protests and repealed the Stamp Act;
however, it enforced the Quartering Act, enacted taxes on tea and
other goods and sent customs officers to Boston to collect these tariffs.
When the colonists refused to obey, the British sent soldiers to
Boston.
Soon all British taxes were removed except for a tax on tea. In
protest, on December 16, 1773, a group of Americans disguised as
Indians boarded British merchant ships and tossed 342 crates of tea