Wrongs done by king george iii biography for kids

Share This Page. The king logically concluded that the North American colonists should help pay the debt incurred by the British Government during the North American war, and Prime Minister Lord North agreed, pursuing a policy of taxation on various items and practices for more than a decade or so after the war ended. The first of these was the Stamp Act , what amounted to a tax on paper used for official documents; that tax caused such a backlash in the North American colonies that Congress repealed the tax law several months after its introduction.

King george iii family tree

Still faced with debt, Britain introduced more and more taxes on more and more things that American colonists used regularly, like sugar and glass and paint and tea. The most famous act of civil disobedience to this series of taxes was the Boston Tea Party , in which American colonists dumped huge chests full of tea into Boston harbor as a protest against the Tea Act.

Several taxes, restrictive measures Townshend Acts and Intolerable Acts , and protests later, the British Army was at war with a hastily put together Continental Army, led by a veteran of the French and Indian War named George Washington. A large of American colonists called a colonies-wide meeting, the Continental Congress to discuss how to pursue meaningful change within an increasingly hostile environment.

The Congress met on and off for several years; out of the midst of one of those meetings came the Declaration of Independence , in which the colonists stated their intent to throw off the yoke of what they saw as British oppression. The document, largely written by Thomas Jefferson , borrowed heavily from the utilitarian ideals of John Locke, Jean Jacques Rousseau, and others; to emphasize that the Congress's objections were with King George III first and foremost, the document authors ascribed all of their complaints to things that the king had or hadn't done that created what the colonists saw as an untenable situation.

In a series of events that must have seemed incredible, if not impossible, to King George III and a succession of ministers, the Revolutionary War ended in the surrender of the forces of Lord Charles Cornwallis at Yorktown in and the Treaty of Paris in , which gave the newly created nation the United States official recognition by Great Britain, its onetime Mother Country and military adversary.

The king considered abdicating after the war but stayed on the throne.