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This newly conquered territory was four times the area of the colonies. To settle it now would spread the English settlements much too thin for their safety, so Parliament proclaimed that the crest of the Appalachians was the end of the line. The lands to the west were off-limits to new settlement. Somebody said that the young colonists had seen a vision through a door that they'd prized open and it was slammed in their faces. The colonials felt cheated out of an inheritance and the British reminded them that it was no inheritance but a vastly expanded frontier they would have to pay somebody to defend.

You know what caused the mischief, started the calamity? This. A revenue stamp, something that we don't think twice about today when we pay, through the manufacturer, the government tax on a bottle of liquor, a pack of cigarettes, playing cards. You see, London had given the colonists a choice. They could either raise their own troops to patrol the frontier, or they could pay for a force of 10,000 British soldiers. Well, the colonists didn't want to do either, and they offered no alternative, so Parliament passed a stamp tax to be stuck on every legal document, colonial newspaper, deed, ship's manifest, everything. And this was the first internal tax that London had ever imposed. That was in 1765.

This single act united the scattered colonies in a fury of indignation. The revenue agents appointed to sell the stamps were about as popular as lepers. And if they had any sense, they quit their jobs or were quickly persuaded to do so by mobs that sacked their homes, tarred and feathered them and rioted outside the houses of the Royal Governors. Good patriots rallied to boycott goods coming in from British ports. Well, Britain had never dreamed of such defiance. And a year later, a rather dazed Parliament repealed the Stamp Act. There was general rejoicing. Philadelphia delayed its celebration till the king's birthday when engraved invitations to a banquet made clear that he was good King George again, but not for long.

A tax may hurt a man's pride, but it doesn't wound his manhood. I suppose the thing that made the colonies feel for the first time that they were outcasts from English society was the arrival in Boston harbor of four British regiments as a permanent garrison. And something else. Not unlike the appearance on a college campus of the National Guard, the sight in the parks and on the streets of British troops. In 1770, there was a fatal innovation. The abrupt appointment of a soldier, the British military commander in America, as the Governor of Massachusetts. And here he is, General Gage. He is, by now, one of the regulation villains of the American Revolution. He was, in fact, an amiable and sympathetic soldier. Sympathetic, not least, to the Bostonians themselves, one of whom he'd married. When he was ordered by London to quarter troops in private houses, and set up tents in their grounds, he said, and this was five years before the war, "it is a great folly which I fear the people will resist to the death, and soon."