Episode Details

In the spring of 1774, Parliament set out to break one rebellious town. After the Boston Tea Party, the King’s ministers closed Boston’s harbor with the Royal Navy, tore up the Massachusetts charter, stripped the colony of its courts and its town meetings, and sent a general to govern it at the point of a bayonet. The plan was to isolate Boston and frighten the other colonies into obedience.

It did the opposite. This is the story of the Coercive Acts, the laws America would remember as the Intolerable Acts, and of the punishment that backfired. Food poured into the sealed town from colonies hundreds of miles away. Virginia’s legislature was dissolved for standing with Boston, and kept meeting anyway. And from New England to the Carolinas, colonists who had never loved Boston began to see, with cold clarity, that what had been done to it could be done to them. The cause of Boston had become the cause of America, and the colonies were riding toward Philadelphia.