March 31, 1774, 250 years ago: In response to the Boston Tea Party, the British Parliament passes what the Patriot cause will label the Intolerable Acts. They were:
• The Boston Port Act, closing of the Port of Boston, effective until the destroyed tea was paid for.
• The Massachusetts Government Act, taking away the Colony’s charter and essentially putting it under British martial law.
• The Administration of Justice Act, which allowed the Royal Governor to order trials of accused royal officials to take place in Great Britain if he decided that the defendant could not get a fair trial in Massachusetts. George Washington called this the "Murder Act," because he believed that it allowed officials to harass colonists and then escape justice. And…
• The Quartering Act. While many sources claim that it allowed troops to be billeted in occupied private homes, a historian's 1974 study claimed that this is a myth, and that the act only permitted troops to be quartered in unoccupied buildings. It did, however, apply to all 13 Colonies, not just Massachusetts.
The Patriot cause labeled these new laws "the Intolerable Acts." Had the British government -- more the Prime Minister, Frederick, Lord North, than the man usually painted as the villain of the story, King George III -- only sought to arrest the men behind the Tea Party, John Hancock and Samuel Adams, and gone no further, things probably would not have escalated.
Instead of abusing British law, they would have been seen as upholding British law, which, for the most part, the people of "British America" had been fine with until now.
But North and Parliament did what tyrants tend to do: They overreacted, and colonists saw the government as betraying its ideals of freedom. And so, the American Revolution became inevitable.
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