Another, more popular, example of nonviolent protest is the Boston Tea Party which was an event in which a group of colonists gathered to protest the taxation of tea by dumping it into the harbor. While these dramatic examples surely show the immense opposition that the colonists had, it can also be seen in less hands-on ways. Most of this opposition came in the form of boycotts. Many Americans refused to cooperate, economically, with Britain through the nonimport and nonconsumption of British goods. There was also a refusal to use royal legislation to determine politics and judicial proceedings, while continuing to use the colonial developments to deal with their own issues, as they felt they had been doing for so long. These methods of noncooperation coupled with the more proactive demonstrations worked wonders in moving the colonies toward a place of independence.
Eventually, these nonviolent forms of protest and noncooperation came to a very harsh end when the Revolutionary War broke out during a confrontation at Lexington and Concord, Massachusetts, in which the British troops fired shots at the local militia in what is now known as the "shot heard round the world." This breaking point of conflict turned the disagreement between Great Britain and the colonists into a genuine war. While there were still many loyalists living within the colonies at this time, there was also a large wave of nationalism which swept through the nation and resulted in the creation of the Declaration of Independence which declared that the colonies were thenceforth independent of England. This war was fought, in the case of the newly formed United States, by local militias and the Continental Army. For this reason, there was no real sense of unity in the war effort and despite having a home field advantage, the colonists were greatly outnumbered and largely outgunned. However, despite this sense of disunity, the general movement of nationalism brought the colonists closer to a sense of an individual national identity than ever before.
