The happy ending, in 1763, of the war with France left the English colonies in America with little to disturb them, except the discontented red men beyond the Alleghany Mountains. The colonies grew larger; they did more business and they gathered more wealth. But as they prospered they became self-confident and with scarce an enemy at home they became involved in a quarrel with the motherland across the sea. England, they said, was taxing them unjustly and posting soldiers in their chief cities to carry out her will. They were by no means disposed to submit. As early as 1770 a mob in Boston attacked an English guard and drew upon themselves its fire, which caused bloodshed in the city's streets. This was the prelude of the American Revolution. A brief lull came in the storm. But as Britain still insisted on the right to tax the colonies and made an impost on tea the test of her right, rebels in Boston accepted the challenge and were inflamed to violence; they swarmed on a tea-ship which had entered the bay, dragged the packets from the hold, and cast them into the waters of the harbour. When news of this act of violence reached England, parliament passed a bill providing for the shutting up of the port of Boston and removing the seat of government to Salem. In 1774 General Gage, the recently appointed governor of Massachusetts, placed the colony under military rule, and it was cut off from the rest of the country. The signal for revolt was thus given, and a general revolution soon followed. The colonists immediately divided into two parties; on the one side were those who felt that they must obey what they thought to be the call of liberty; on the other were those who had no desire, and felt no need, to follow a summons to insurrection against His Majesty the King. The red man began to see clearly that the whites, the 'Long Knives,' brethren of the same race, would soon be at one another's throats, and that they, the natives, could not remain neutral when the war broke out.