The United States Constitution

The United States Constitution

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The United States Constitution

Introduction

The Revolutionary War had come to a satisfactory conclusion , and no particular cause of Convention , as they gathered in Philadelphia in the spring of 1787 . The Continental Congress conducted all functions of the central government since the commencement of its first session in September of 1774 , on the heals of the Boston Port Act . News of this latest move of the British Parliament , which ed the closing of Boston 's harbor pending the repatriation

of losses suffered by the East India Company on account of Boston 's infamous tea party , reached American shores in May of that year (Rakove 21

The rallying cry during the American Revolution was for American sovereignty to establish independence from Britain , while the major issues that motivated that cry centered on the protection of colonial property from the long arm of the British Parliament . Acts of Parliament in the 1760s and 1770s , such as the "disturbingly invasive " Stamp Act of 1765 , struck many colonists as overly demanding , and intolerable violations of local control (Keane 89 . While the Stamp Act was particularly inflammatory , Parliament passed numerous acts during this period , including the Sugar Act of 1764 , the Declaratory Act and Townshend Acts from 1767 to 1769 , and the Boston Port act of 1774 (Rakove 22

The predominant substance of these acts was taxation the mother country felt such taxes should be expected from the colonists to assure they contributed their share toward supporting the empire and preserving the benefits all English citizens enjoyed from this empire . The safeguarding of global trade provided a prominent example it augmented the wealth of the empire and her mercantile class . Parliament regulated this trade and protected its continuation by the provision of war ships . But the extractions of wealth Britain demanded from her American colonists to support the empire were not seen as justified by many in America Britain was embroiled in a long-standing war against France . The colonists believed they were being taxed excessively to support this war effort . Many colonists felt they paid their dues to the empire by suffering direct exposure to the French and Indians during recent conflicts , and resented the additional imposition of greater taxation (Keane 88 . They demanded greater local control over the levels of revenue to be submitted to Britain , and an exclusive right to determine the means of collecting that revenue

Many patriots , such as Samuel Adams , worked for years to pull together a more unified American resistance to British claims . On the heals of the Boston Port Act , Adams noted that American response to it "suddenly wrought a Union of the Colonies which could not be brought about by the Industry of years in reasoning on the necessity of it for the Common Safety (Rakove 40 " coordinate a response to recent onerous Parliamentary measures , and government under the First Continental Congress got underway . Within a year they shifted from evaluating diplomatic responses to coordinating the American military preparedness...