Protection Against Quartering Essay

583 Words3 Pages

Protection against quartering is the third Amendment in the Bill of Rights. In simplest terms, it is saying that soldiers do not have the right to take over your home to stay there, no matter what state our country is in. It addresses a time in our society when the right to our own homes, and the right to privacy were not automatically given to us. This was a time when we didn’t have any rights, and we had to earn them. Something like privacy would seem like an unalienable right, wouldn’t you think so? You’d be wrong in just assuming that. Colonists were not considered equal to actual citizens of britain, even though they were. Colonists were not represented in British government, so they got no say in anything that happened. They were treated …show more content…

It doesn’t really seem very important at first glance. During the revolutionary war however, the quartering of British soldiers in colonist’s homes was a very big problem. The whole point of the revolution was that colonists were not being given equal representation to British government, were not being treated fairly and equally in a general sense, and wanted to separate from Britain. They felt that they were being unfairly treated by the British for no apparent reason. It started with taxes on things like paper. Then when the Stamp Act was overthrown, the tea tax was put in place by the British, for no beneficial financial reason, just because they could. The colonists needed to revolt and break away, but the British refused to understand that, which is what caused them to go to war. During the war, the British were still taking advantage of the fact that they had control over the colonists. One of the ways they would show this is by quartering the colonists homes. British soldiers would come into a town and need a place to stay. So they would have complete disregard for the people who currently lived there. The British soldiers would go into colonist’s homes and treat the current residents as their servants. The soldiers would eat their food, sleep in their beds, use their dishes, and in some cases, take their possessions. This happened in almost all of the colonies