Ohio was, in the 18th century, the American West, and it changed flags, at least on paper, many times while whites argued with words and guns over its ownership, disregarding, of course, the fact that many Indian tribes called the land west of the Appalachians and north of the Ohio River home and believed the land could not be owned but was granted them for their careful use by the Great Spirit, Moneto. Ohio was claimed by both England and France but for a short time was, on British Crown documents, a part of Canada under a parliamentary act that was one of several acts designed to punish the intractable colonists.
The acts were Britain’s response to the damage inflicted by the Boston Tea Party, when Massachusetts men thinly disguised as Indians on Dec. 16, 1773, broke open and dumped 342 chests of tea into Boston harbor in a response to Britain’s granting of a tea monopoly to the East India Co. Those laws became known as the Intolerable or Coercive Acts.
The Boston Port Bill, effective on June 1, 1774, closed the port of Boston, even including the shortest ferry runs, and was meant to remain in place until Bostonians paid for the tea and the customs duty they would have paid had the tea landed. The city could be supplied only across a narrow neck of land that connected it to the mainland. (Boston no longer has that narrow neck because much of the harbor was filled in.) The royal government was moved from Boston to Salem and customs to Marblehead. An extension of the Quartering Act called for additional regiments of infantry to be stationed in Boston to reinforce the 14th and 29th regiments, backed by the Royal Navy in the harbor. Residents of Boston were forced to house and feed royal troops in their homes, and this greatly grated on them.
The Administration of Justice Act, May 20, 1774, declared that any Crown official charged with a capital offense in quelling a riot or collecting revenue would be sent to England for trial. Colonists believed that the act gave officers free hand to use violence without reprisal. The Massachusetts Government Act, May 20, 1774, virtually canceled the Massachusetts charter, almost eliminating self-government. A governor’s council was to be Crown appointed and responsible only to the Crown. The governor would name higher officials, and a Crown-appointed sheriff named juries. Town meetings could be held only by written consent of the governor and upon his approval of the agenda.
The law affecting what later became the Ohio country was the Quebec Act of May 20, 1774. Besides confirming French Canadians’ ancient rights and customs, including their right to practice Catholicism, it extended the boundaries of Canada south to the Ohio River. Many Protestant colonists read in this act an implication of the union of church and state, an abhorrent notion, although that was not the act’s intention. Much of the Ohio land had been marked for veterans of old wars, Virginia, Massachusetts and Connecticut having held claims to lands in Ohio under their original charters, so the colonists felt cheated out of land. As usual, the white people failed to recognize the Indians’ ancient rights to the land in question.
One historian said that Canadians have always regarded the Quebec Act as their Magna Carta, and it kept them loyal or at least neutral during the Revolution, many of those Canadians being of French extraction and not feeling particularly loyal to Great Britain, which only 11 years earlier had taken control of Quebec at the conclusion of the French and Indian War.
These measures became known as the Intolerable Acts and upset all the colonies, not just Massachusetts, uniting them and leading to the First Continental Congress. New York and Philadelphia promised to support Boston, followed by Charleston, Wilmington and Baltimore. Charleston sent money and rice, New York guaranteed a 10-year supply of food and sent sheep, and Connecticut sent sheep.
The Crown, against the counsel of a few wise advisers, consistently tried to coerce colonists into following its edicts, but, as usual, it instead drove the colonists to rebellion. The First Continental Congress met in September 1774 and the Second from May 1775 to March 1781, that second assemblage responsible for independence from the nation that had once been the mother  country but that through coercion drove its children to separation.