For taking away our Charters, abolishing our most valuable Laws and altering fundamentally the Forms of our Governments:

A short while after the French no longer became a factor in America, trouble started brewing within the colonies. A British gentleman by the name of George Grenville noticed that Britains debt has doubled due to the wars in America and so decided that the Americans should become even more heavily taxed than they previously were. This would not seem to be to big a problem were it not for the fact that the British never let the colonies have any say in the matter. Soon, the British began not only taxing but passing laws without any regard for what the colonist thought. This was viewed as an infringement upon the Americans’ basic rights to govern themselves, thus they decided to succeed from Britain for, as it says in the Declaration of Independence, “taking away our charters, abolishing our most valuable Laws and altering fundamentally the Forms of our Governments.”
The Americans were already upset that they were being taxed without any representation back in Britain by the time the Declaratory Act was put into place by parliament. This act, meant to illustrate Britain’s power over the colonies, stated that Britain had the right to tax any of their interests in the colonies. This act later lead to the Townshend Acts which put a tariff on goods imported from Britain, which didn’t seem to make much sense to the colonist as it was trade within the same empire. Angry colonists with the most to loose from these increasing taxed began to join together in groups such as the Sons of Liberty. The British however began to notice how disgruntled the colonists were becoming so they attempted to tighten their grasp of the colonies by imposing what is known as the “Intolerable Acts.”
The first act that directly infringed upon the colonists rights was the Massachusetts Government Act which disallowed town meetings and changed the Massachusetts charter. The charters of each colony is what defined the people within each individual colony, acting as a document that illustrated their basic rights; so to alter in any way this document meant to take away the civil liberties of the people it represented. The British further insulted the Americans by passing the Administration of Justice Act which called for any British soldier to be tried and arraigned in Britain as opposed to the colonies, even were it to be for killing an innocent American. This allowed British thieves and murderers to bypass the American judicial system, taking away any power the colonies had over the British soldiers who were increasing in numbers frequently. The final act of the “Intolerable Acts” was the Quartering Act, which stated that British soldiers could be housed wherever the British deemed worthy. The British had now taken away the rights of the colonists to control what happened within their own household now, and there was seemingly nothing that could stop the British from further taking away the colonists’ freedoms. The strength and will of the American people however would prove that wrong as they began to fight the British for the ability to keep their laws and form the type of government that suited their lives, not the lives of people across an ocean. Although many Americans died, they were fighting for what will always be a just cause, freedom.