In the 1700’s, America was not its own country. We belonged to England. The King of England, King George III teamed up with the American colonists against the French and Native Americans in a war called The Seven Years War, or more widely known as the French and Indian War. The British won the war. While you might think this is great for the British, winning the war was in fact putting Great Britain into more debt than the debt they were already in. See, there’s a saying “The sun never sets on the British empire.” That means the British claimed so much land, that the places they claimed were never all dark. Anyway, they fell into great debt for taking over all these parts of the world. Therefore when the French and Indian War ended, they fell into even more debt.

This war tied the British and the colonists really close together. When the British fell into all this debt, they were practically leaning on the colonists to help them out of it. The British passed “Acts” or laws on the colonists. The very first act they passed was called the Sugar Act. In this act, they taxed the colonists on things like sugar, molasses, and other goods.

I’m sure you’re wondering what effects this had on the colonists. They were angry about all this taxing the British lay on them. They also felt under pressure because they had a big struggle to feed their own families. To have to pay extra to the British was just not fair. So they formed a committee to protest the Sugar Act Britain passed on the colonists until the King no longer taxed them on sugar.

Life was tough if you lived in the life of John Adams, or Thomas Jefferson, or George Washington. But somehow, just somehow, we ended up winning the revolution against one of the most powerful empires  possibly in all the world.