Essay on My Gatherfather´s History and Key Events in...

My grandfather turned 100 years old in 1875. On the night of his birthday he pulled me aside and told me about his life; and significant moments in history which he found worth telling. He was born in Pennsylvania in 1775, â€Å"on the eve of the American Revolution†. His father was from Britain and his mother was from Ireland. They both came to the colonies because they saw opportunities here. Their form of transportation was by boat. When they arrived they had no money and had to become indentured slaves. They ended up working together, his mother said it was love at first sight, and when his father had the chance to pick who his woman would be, when he finished his contract with the owner, he chose her. They moved to a cottage and had a†¦show more content†¦He also believed that the reason Britain wanted the colonies to be under their power was so that Britain could make money off of the colonies by taxing them. Not too long before my grandfather was born, patriots â€Å"force[d] merchants to sign agreements prohibiting the importation of British goods†, if they refused they were probably tarred and feathered as punishment, (Hollitz 72). (This helped explain why he saw buckets of tar and bags of feathers here and there.) They did this because of the Townshend Act, which were taxes put on a few British goods that were imported. The colonies now had almost all the goods they needed and didn’t need to rely on the British anymore, further proving their independence. A few months before he was born, people from the colonies saw their independence approaching and thought it was time to start â€Å"drafting a new framework for a national government† (Hollitz 79). John Adams was a â€Å"member of the Second Continental Congress†, which meant that he participated in drafting the Articles of Confederation (Hollitz 79). So Abigail Adams (his wife) wrote to him about including women rights in the Confederation. Even though she took this seriously, he didn’t and saw it as a good sense of humor. This was important to my grandfather, because it was important to his mother. He believed that even though women aren’t capable of doing of the same duties as men (such as hard labor), they do have other things they could