e boycotts and oppose British rule. The British now targeted the two people that had begun the revolution, Samuel Adams and John Hancock. These two were of the first to represent the two classes fighting this war. Samuel Adams was the leader of a common protest group called the Sons of Liberty. Adams represented the poor and common people who were fighting the British system of mercantilism, which was starving them because of a lack of goods and crops. He followed the profound thought of Adam Smith, the "Father of Modern Economics" also attacked mercantilism in 1766. Smith, "To prohibit a great people, however, from making all that they can of every part of their own produce, or from employing their stock and industry in a way that they judge most advantages to themselves, is a manifest violation of the most sacred rights of mankind." While John Hancock, who was a smuggler in Boston represented the rich, who opposed the British because of the annoying taxation. Who wrote such things as the Declaration of Independence and "Common Sense", being a pamphlet written by Thomas Paine that advocated America's complete independence from Britain. It followed the natural rights tenets of the British philosopher John Locke, whose writings had justified independence as the will of the people and revolution as a device for bringing happiness. Although the arguments were not original with Paine, Paine's passionate language and direct appeal to the people prepared them for the ideas expressed in the Declaration of Independence. Fighting with Britain had been under way for some nine months before publication of the pamphlet, but the political direction of the revolution was not yet clear. For many, "Common Sense" crystallized the revolution's goals.Even with all of this, the major point in the road to the Revolutionary War is when the colonies united for the first and second Continental Congresses. On September 5, 1774, every colony but Georgia sent rep...
