It began as a refusal by the American colonies to pay their fair share of the cost of defending them from French invasion during the Seven Years' War.
It began with the settling of the US itself which was largely motivated by various kinds of discontent with Imperial/Royal policy, and the intellectual motivations of those who were most responsible for the origins and outcome of the American revolution borrowed heavily upon European thought (itself heavily dependent upon classical thought). It is undoubtedly true that the Seven Years War played an important (arguably essential) role in the dynamics that ended with revolution. To say that it was either the beginning of these dynamics, the original motivation for revolutionary thoughts, or anything other than some factors out of a large number that occurred both before and after the war is simply historically indefensible.
Have you ever wondered why Canada didn't join in the Revolution?
I don't know, maybe because Canada "was not constituted as a nation until more than 90 years after the American Declaration of Independence and more than 80 years after the Revolutionary War itself"
Grabb, E., Curtis, J., & Baer, D. (2000). Defining moments and recurring myths: Comparing canadians and americans after the american revolution.
The Canadian Review of Sociology and Anthropology, 37(4), 373-419.
From Lipset's initial work onward, the dynamics of Canadian Loyalism/Toryism have been rather thoroughly explored.
It wasn't because the people in Canada were any more free or any less interested in being free.
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In the Canadian accounts of the American Revolution and its aftermath, we also find examples of mythmaking. The most notable illustrations for the present paper are those involving "the Loyalist myth." Many researchers have pointed to the ways in which later observers, including Lipset, have mythologized the Loyalists, treating them as the stalwart bearers and defenders of traditional tory values when, as we have seen, the majority of them were not like this (e.g., Bell and Tepperman, 1979: 77-82; Thompson and Randall, 1994: 16; Gwyn, 1985: 17-19, 167; see also Upton, 1971: 52-53; Noel, 1990: 50; Craig, 1963: 7). Others have likewise discussed the related myths arising from the War of 1812, including the ways that later commentators seriously overstated the strength of support for this conflict in both the Canadian and the American populations (see, e.g., Errington, 1994: 92, 102; Stuart, 1988: 65-66; Clark, 1968: 223: Wilson, 1971: 128-29; Craig, 1963: 67, 70-75)."
It was because the economy in the 13 Colonies was based more around major private landowners and business owners who stood to benefit financially from separating from Britain.
"In the Canadian accounts of the American Revolution and its aftermath, we also find examples of mythmaking" (ibid.)
This is so ridiculously inadequate. The fact that Canadians have re-interpreted their own history so that they can define themselves as a national entity during the American revolution despite the fact that it took about a century for a Canadian nation to exist such that it could be defined in relation to a US nation notwithstanding, there was no "Canada" to participate in the American revolution. Whether Canadians lacked a sufficiently defined cultural/national identity, or the level of loyalist inclinations prevalent at the time, or any number of mainstream theories as to why Canada was incapable of achieving independence despite the fact that "the American Revolution could have marked the historical beginnings of both countries" (ibid.), the fact is that we have a rather extensive amount of literature attesting to Canadian mythmaking in order to explain their lack of involvement in the US revolution as well as the lack of any comparable movement within Canada itself.
