Lead: In the 1700s the United States broke from England. No colony in history had done that before. This series examines America’s Revolution.
Intro: A Moment in Time with Dan Roberts
Content: On October 1, 1768 soldiers of the 14th and 29th British regiments debarked from transports and landed in Boston, Massachusetts, guarded by British naval ships of the line. Responding to the request of Governor Bernard who had clearly lost control of the streets of Boston, the government in London had stationed a standing army in the colony to collect taxes and keep order. In the previous century, during the English Civil War and the Protectorate of Oliver Cromwell, Englishmen had endured the indignity and coercion of military occupation under the Parliamentary Army. There was nothing an Englishman hated more than a standing army and the royal government had chosen to inflict one on the colony most primed to despise such a move. Massachusetts was a Commonwealth whose governmental institutions, commercial society, and ordinary citizens, in the view of the royal Governor, were seditiously teetering on the edge of open rebellion.

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