american revolution term paper

Term Paper on the American Revolution | Independence | History

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Term Paper on the American Revolution

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• Term Paper on the Significance of the American Revolution

Term Paper # 1. Introduction to American Revolution :

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The American Revolution (1775-1783) is also known as the American Revolutionary War and the U.S. War of Independence. The conflict arose from growing tensions between residents of Great Britain’s 13 North American colonies and the colonial government, which represented the British crown.

Skirmishes between British troops and colonial militiamen in Lexington and Concord in April 1775 kicked off the armed conflict and by the following summer the rebels were waging a full-scale war for their independence. France entered the American Revolution on the side of the colonists in 1778, turning what had essentially been a civil war into an international conflict.

After French assistance helped the Continental Army force the British surrender at Yorktown, Virginia, in 1779, the Americans had effectively won their independence, though fighting would not formally end until 1783.

American Revolution dealt a deathblow to the divine right of monarchy and aristocratic privileges. The American Revolution carried the aspirations of common people to their logical conclusions. It exalted the parliamentary government, and much more pointedly it invoked the doctrine of popular sovereignty and national self-determination.

ADVERTISEMENTS: (adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({}); Term Paper # 2. Brief Background to the American Revolution:

In all there were 13th English colonies from Maine in the North of Georgia in the South. Between the periods from 1713 to 1763, the population of these colonies quadrupled but the area increased as large as three times because of the march of the colonies towards the West.

Between 1713 and 1763, numerous English, Scot, German and French immigrants settled in the colonies of America. It was the significant period of commercialism. The prices of all the American products like-wood, leather, tobacco, sugar, copper and fish increased rapidly in England and Europe, which made the Americans richer although the trade policies of England put obstacles.

The continuous prosperity that lasted for 50 years enhanced the status of Americans in the world. A voyage to England became a common thing now. Books were imported on large scale from overseas countries and a lot of journals and magazines were also published in America. The Americans became fond of journalism.

Some journals like the Gazette, The New York Reporter became popular in Europe and their demand increased there. Buildings built in Boston and Annapolis was more beautiful than those in England. Many famous universities like-Princeton, Yale, Dart-Mouth, Brown etc. had already been established before the revolution. The important American cities of the Revolution period were; Boston, New York, James Town, Charles Town, Savannah and Philadelphia. They played a key role in the Revolution.

In the colonies, landless peasants, people seeking religious freedom, traders and profiteers had settled there. The bulk of the population consisted of independent farmers. Infant industries had developed in such products as wool, flax, and leather. In the north there were fishing and shipbuilding.

In the south, large plantations like feudal manors had grown up where tobacco and cotton were grown with slave labour brought from Africa. Each colony had a local assembly elected by qualified voters. These assemblies enacted laws concerning local matter, and levied taxes.

However, they were under the rule of the mother country. By the 18th century, the colonists found the laws, which the English government imposed upon them more and more objectionable. The idea of being an independent nation grew and developed into the Revolutionary War in which the colonies gained their independence.

Term Paper # 3. Causes of American Revolution :

The major causes of the war of American Independence have been summarized below:

i. Colonial Policy of England :

The colonial policy of England in economic matters was the primary cause of resentment in the American colonies. England’s policies did not encourage the American colonies to develop an economy of their own. The English Parliament had forbidden them to use non-British ships in their trade.

Certain products, such as tobacco, cotton and sugar, could be exported only to England. Heavy duties were imposed on the import of goods in the colonies from other places. The colonies were also forbidden to start certain industries, for example, iron works and textiles. They were forced to import these goods from England. Thus, in every possible way, the growth of industry and trade in the colonies was impeded.

The English also angered the colonists by issuing a proclamation to prevent them from moving west into now lands. English aristocrats had bought lands in America and got rent from the farmers. They wanted to keep the colonists as renters.

As a result of continuous wars in Europe, the English government was burdened with debt. It needed money. In 1765, the English Parliament passed the Stamp Act which imposed stamp taxes on all business transactions in the American colonies. Revenue stamps upto 20 shillings were to be affixed to legal documents and other papers.

This Act aroused violent resentment among all sections of the colonists and led them to boycott English goods. There were uprisings in many towns and tax collectors were killed. The colonists claimed that, since English Parliament had no representatives from the colonies, it had no right to levy taxes on them. The revenue from these taxes, they said, was used not in the interests of the colonies but of English.

ii. Inspired by the Ideas of Philosophers :

The American revolutionaries were also inspired by the ideas of the English philosophers of the 17th century. These philosophers—Locke, Harrington, Milton believed that men had certain fundamental rights which no government had the right to infringe. American thinkers, especially Thomas Jefferson, were also inspired by what French philosophers were saying and writing at that time.

Jefferson asserted the colonists right to rebellion, and encouraged their increasing desire for independence. Thomas Paine, who detested the inequalities of English society, and had come to America, forcefully expressed support for independence. In a pamphlet entitled Common Sense, he wrote, ‘It was repugnant to reason to suppose that this continent can long remain subject to any external power … there is something absurd in supposing a Continent to be perpetually governed by an island’.

iii. Calling Together of Representatives :

The leaders in the Massachusetts colony called together representatives from their colonies to consider their common problems. They agreed and declared that the English Parliament had no right to levy taxes on them. ‘No taxation without representation’ was the slogan they adopted.

And they threatened to stop the import of British goods. The threat led the English to repeal the Stamp Act, but Parliament still insisted that it had the right to levy taxes. Then Parliament imposed a tax on consumer goods coming into the colonies, such as paper, glass, tea and paint.

Again the colonies objected saying that only their own assemblies had the right to raise money through taxes. In protest the colonies cut down the English withdrew the plan, leaving only the tax on tea to assert their right to levy taxes.

Term Paper # 4. The Boston Tea Party of America:

The representatives of the 13 American colonies then met as a group in what is called the First Continental Congress at Philadelphia in 1774. This Congress appealed to the English King to remove restrictions on industries and trade and not to impose any taxes without their consent.

The King declared their action a mutiny and ordered troops to be sent to suppress it. The colonies then planned for military defence with local troops or militia. In 1775, the first battle of the revolution was fought when a thousand soldiers met the colonial militia in Lexington, Massachusetts.

The tax on tea led to trouble. In 1773, several colonies refused to unload the tea coming in English ships. In Boston, when the governor ordered a ship to be unloaded, a group of citizens, dressed as American Indians, boarded the ship and dumped the crates of tea into the water. This incident is known as ‘the Boston Tea Party’. The English government then closed the port of Boston to all trade and precipitated the uprising of the colonies.

Term Paper # 5. Declaring Independence in America (1775-1776):

When the Second Continental Congress convened in Philadelphia, delegates-including new additions Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson voted to form a Continental Army, with Washington as its commander in chief. On June 17, in the Revolution’s first major battle, colonial forces inflicted heavy casualties on the British regiment of General William Howe at Breed’s Hill in Boston.

The engagement (known as the Battle of Bunker Hill) ended in British victory, but lent encouragement to the revolutionary cause. Throughout that fall and winter, Washington’s forces struggled to keep the British contained in Boston, but artillery captured at Fort Ticonderoga in New York helped shift the balance of that struggle in late winter. The British evacuated the city in March 1776, with Howe and his men retreating to Canada to prepare a major invasion of New York.

By June 1776, with the Revolutionary War in full swing, a growing majority of the colonists had come to favor independence from Britain. On July 4, the Continental Congress voted to adopt the Declaration of Independence, drafted by a five-man committee including Franklin and John Adams but written mainly by Jefferson.

That same month, determined to crush the rebellion, the British government sent a large fleet, along with more than 34,000 troops to New York. In August, Howe’s Redcoats routed the Continental Army on Long Island; Washington was forced to evacuate his troops from New York City by September.

Pushed across the Delaware River, Washington fought back with a surprise attack in Trenton, New Jersey, on Christmas night and won another victory at Princeton to revive the rebels’ flagging hopes before making winter quarters at Morristown.

Term Paper # 6. Saratoga: Revolutionary War Turning Point (1777-1778):

British strategy in 1777 involved two main prongs of attack, aimed at separating New England (where the rebellion enjoyed the most popular support) from the other colonies. To that end, General John Burgoyne’s army aimed to march south from Canada toward a planned meeting with Howe’s forces on the Hudson River.

Burgoyne’s men dealt a devastating loss to the Americans in July by retaking Fort Ticonderoga, while Howe decided to move his troops southward from New York to confront Washington’s army near the Chesapeake Bay. The British defeated the Americans at Brandywine Creek, Pennsylvania, on September 11 and entered Philadelphia on September 25. Washington rebounded to strike Germantown in early October before withdrawing to winter quarters near Valley Forge.

Howe’s move had left Burgoyne’s army exposed near Saratoga, New York, and the British suffered the consequences of this on September 19, when an American force under General Horatio Gates defeated them at Freeman’s Farm (known as the first Battle of Saratoga). After suffering another defeat on October 7 at Bemis Heights (the Second Battle of Saratoga), Burgoyne surrendered his remaining forces on October 17.

The American victory Saratoga would prove to be a turning point of the American Revolution, as it prompted France (which had been secretly aiding the rebels since 1776) to enter the war openly on the American side, though it would not formally declare war on Great Britain until June 1778. The American Revolution, which had begun as a civil conflict between Britain and its colonies, had become a world war.

Term Paper # 7. Stalemate in the North, Battle in the South (1778-1781):

During the long, hard winter at Valley Forge, Washington’s troops benefited from the training and discipline of the Prussian military officer Baron Friedrich von Steuben (sent by the French) and the leadership of the French aristocrat Marquis de Lafayette. On June 28, 1778, as British forces under Sir Henry Clinton (who had replaced Howe as supreme commander) attempted to withdraw from Philadelphia to New York, Washington’s army attacked them near Monmouth, New Jersey.

The battle effectively ended in a draw, as the Americans held their ground, but Clinton was able to get his army and supplies safely to New York. On July 8, a French fleet commanded by the Comte d’Estaing arrived off the Atlantic coast, ready to do battle with the British. A joint attack on the British at Newport, Rhode Island, in late July failed, and for the most part the war settled into a stalemate phase in the North.

The Americans suffered a number of setbacks from 1779 to 1781, including the defection of General Benedict Arnold to the British and the first serious mutinies within the Continental Army. In the South, the British occupied Georgia by early 1779 and captured Charleston, South Carolina in May 1780.

British forces under Lord Charles Cornwallis then began an offensive in the region, crushing Gates’ American troops at Camden in mid-August, though the Americans scored a victory over Loyalist forces at King’s Mountain in early October.

Nathanael Green replaced Gates as the American commander in the South that December. Under Green’s command, General Daniel Morgan scored a victory against a British force led by Colonel Banastre Tarleton at Cowpens, South Carolina, on January 17, 1781.

Term Paper # 8. End of American Revolution (1781-1783):

By the fall of 1781, Greene’s American forces had managed to force Cornwallis and his men to withdraw to Virginia’s Yorktown peninsula, near where the York River empties into Chesapeake Bay. Supported by a French army commanded by General Jean Baptiste de Rochambeau, Washington moved against Yorktown with a total of around 14,000 soldiers, while a fleet of 36 French warships offshore prevented British reinforcement or evacuation.

Trapped and overpowered, Cornwallis was forced to surrender his entire army on October 19. Claiming illness, the British general sent his deputy, Charles O’Hara, to surrender; after O’Hara approached Rochambeau to surrender his sword (the Frenchman deferred to Washington), Washington gave the nod to his own deputy, Benjamin Lincoln, who accepted it.

Though the movement for American independence effectively triumphed at Yorktown, contemporary observers did not see that as the decisive victory yet. British forces remained stationed around Charleston, and the powerful main army still resided in New York. Though neither side would take decisive action over the better part of the next two years, the British removal of their troops from Charleston and Savannah in late 1782 finally pointed to the end of the conflict.

British and American negotiators in Paris signed preliminary peace terms in Paris late that November, and on September 3, 1783, Great Britain formally recognized the independence of the United States in the Treaty of Paris. At the same time, Britain signed separate peace treaties with France and Spain (which had entered the conflict in 1779) bringing the American Revolution to a close after eight long years.

Term Paper # 9. The American Constitution :

After America achieved independence, with the settlement of Paris Pact, differences among the American states were sorted out. The newly drafted constitution containing four pages was signed by 55 persons on 17 September, 1787 and came into force on June 21, 1788. Democracy was established in America and the Federal system was adopted.

Under the Federal system, the separation of powers was maintained between the Federal and the State governments. The new constitution endowed the Americans with several rights. The significant rights were—the freedom of speech, press and religion and the right to get justice according to the law.

The new constitution guaranteed the security of life, property and freedom of every person except in the matters of judicial proceedings. According to the constitutional provisions a new government was formed in March 1789 and George Washington was elected the first President of America.

When the war of independence started, each of the 13 colonies was a separate state with its own army, boundaries, customs duties and finances. But they co-operated against a common enemy. In 1781, as states of the United States, they united through a plan for a national government.

A constitutional convention was called in Philadelphia to frame a new constitution, which came into effect in 1789. It established a republican form of government at a time when states in other parts of the world were governed by monarchies. The American Constitution set up a federal system under which powers were divided between a central or federal government and the state governments.

Jefferson, the author of the Declaration of Independence, and his followers campaigned for the addition of a Bill of Rights to the federal constitution.

This was done through 10 amendments which guaranteed many rights to the American people. The most noted of these are freedom of speech, press and religion, and justice under law.

Though, the Constitution of 1787, which was produced by the Philadelphia Convention has been regarded as a series of compromises—between free and slave states, large and small states, between Federalists and Anti-Federalists-at one level it was a victory for a strong national government. The Anti-Federalists had an ambivalent attitude towards the idea of a national government, which led to the victory of the Federalist group.

The American Constitution was based on the doctrine of the separation of powers in order to prevent any one branch of government-the executive, legislature or judiciary-from becoming dominant. It also combined a federal principle -with equal representation to each state in Senate-with the principle of a national government and a democratically elected House of Representatives.

The Supreme Court was given the power to interpret the Constitution. In the 18th century, the Constitution established the basis for a strong national government, which proved capable of dealing with the problems of a rapidly modernizing society in the early 19th century.

As the United States developed into a market-oriented society, which was witnessing the emergence of an industrial civilization, the nationalist orientation and values of the federalists like Madison helped to create was the basis for the programme of national development by Alexander Hamilton in the 1790s.

Hamilton strongly believed in the need for ‘a common directing power’ and did not share the Jeffersonian Republican view that the least government was the best government. As Secretary of the Treasury in the 1790s he tried to create a great fiscal military state but the waves of the rising commercial capitalism were ultimately irresistible.

The Federalist position of disintegrated enlightened leadership proved difficult to maintain both because the majority of Federalists found it hard to live up to that ideal and because of the growth of a vibrant market oriented commercial economy in America by the early 19th century. In fact in America the assault on the aristocracy was so successful as an ideal that idleness became a disgrace and industry an honour.

The American Constitution was a definite improvement on the Articles of Confederation but in fact the Virginia Plan of the nationalists was an aristocratic remedy to the problems posed by an excess of democracy, which alarmed men like George Washington and James Madison. The Constitution of America actually represented a ‘middle ground’ between a national and a federal government.

James Madison had been seeking ‘the practicable sphere of a republic’, which would be able to avoid the tyranny of unrestrained majorities and excessive localism as well as the concentration of power in the hands of unresponsive rulers.

Thus the constitution marked the emergence of the United States of America as a nation in world history. It was the first written republican constitution ever framed in history, which is still in operation.

Term Paper # 10. Significance of the American Revolution:

The words of the Declaration of Independence regarding the equality of all men and the ‘inalienable rights’ of man electrified the atmosphere in America and outside. Lafayette, the French general who fought on the side of American revolutionaries, was soon to become a hero of the French Revolution.

Thomas Paine also participated in the French Revolution. By its example, the American Revolution inspired many revolutionaries in Europe later in the 19th century. It encouraged Spanish and Portuguese colonies in Central and South America to rebel and gain their independence.

The main achievement of the American Revolution was the establishment of a republic. This republic was, however, not truly democratic. The right to vote was limited. Negroes-most of them still slaves-American, Indians, and women had no vote.

The revolution gave a new turn to the political life of the United States of America as well as rejuvenated her social, religious and cultural organisations. The revolution gave the American public social organisation in which equality of human beings got priority over conventions, money and special rights.

Democracy was promoted by curtailing successfully the three main directions of prerogatives, that is, the abolition of conventional property right, confiscation of immerse properties of possessed by the Tories and dissolution of the centers of the Anglican Church wherever they existed. The Virginia Statue for religious freedom was adopted in 1786.

Under the provisions of this statue, no one could be forced to attend Church. Everyone was given complete freedom of worship and prayer. No religious qualifications were prescribed for the federal employees under the federal constitution. But certain religious restrictions still existed in the constitution of many states.

France, not in the commercial loss of Holland and the decline of British Empire; but its real importance lies in the successful completion of American Revolution. American Revolution occupies an important place among the remarkable events of the world history. Its importance can be assessed from various angles. It is a turning point in human advancement.

As a result of this revolution, there emerged not only a new nation in the new world nut also a new era began for the human race. The American Revolution was a harmonious blend of two revolutions. At first it was an ‘External Revolution’ in the sense that a revolt broke out in colonies against England as a result of economic conflict brewing among the colonies and England. Secondly, it was an ‘Internal Revolution’ which aimed at chalking out an outline of America’s future development after independence.

The American society realized the great importance of education after the revolution. At the end of the revolution, a great demand rose for public schools and the education of the common people. It was soon realized that educated voters were a must for democracy.

The economic outcome of the American Revolution was also important like its social and political consequences. The revolution removed all obstacles that came in the way of capitalist economy and encouraged its growth. The end of the old system and the rites and practices related with it, boosted the growth of capitalism in American colonies.

American agriculture was greatly influenced by the Revolution. Big landlords left colonies during the revolution and settled in Canada and other countries and their large estates were fragmented into small pieces and handed over to the people of lower and middle classes. Revolution boosted the development of agriculture.

The revolution influenced industries more than agriculture. Industries were benefited in two ways— first American industries got rid of the mercantilistic restriction imposed by England, secondly, the development of colonial industries was boosted as imports from England had stopped during the war.

The demand for indigenous cloth increased too much due to the suspension of the import of woolen cloth from England. Spinning and weaving became household industries at the national level in which women played an important role.

The American Revolution had two effects on American navigation—first; the ports of the colonies were opened for world trade. America exported this increased trade with France, Spain and Holland and tobacco and rice in payment for them. Secondly, the private navigation was promoted by the revolution. Private companies made a valuable contribution in that field.

The American Revolution influenced France too. After their return from America, the French officers wrote down their experiences. Lafayette infused the spirit of the American Revolution among the French public. Franklin enjoyed a significant prestige in the French society as a renowned writer and philosopher of America.

His writings greatly influenced the French philosophers. The American Revolution paved the way for the French Revolution and played a great role not less than that of Diedero, Voltaire and Rousseau. The key concepts of French Revolution— liberty, equality and fraternity are inferred from the American struggle.

It is noteworthy that France, which was already facing an economic crises suffered heavy losses as a result of cooperating with America in the war of independence. These hardships made the French Revolution inevitable.

At the same time, the American Revolution infused a new vigour into the anti-colonial revolutionaries in entire Europe. Even in England, the Whigs openly supported the revolution and Horn Tooke persuaded the members of the British Parliament to extend support to the American Revolution for fear of losing their own freedom if Americans failed in their struggle. Getting inspiration from the American Revolution, the people of South America also gained success in redeeming themselves from the foreign rule of Spain and Portugal.

Ireland, which had been crushed for centuries, greeted the consequences of the American Revolution. At that time the Irish public was fighting against England to attain the economic and political independence. They wanted to put an end to the trade restrictions and build and independent parliament.

The specific demand of the American colonies that ‘we ourselves have the right to levy taxes’ greatly influenced the Irish public. The oppressed Irish public continued their struggle with more courage and zeal. Consequently, England conceded most of the demands of the Irish public.

The American Revolution struck a great blow to the absolute monarchy and aristocratic supremacy based on the doctrine of divine rights of the king. After the end of the war a strong demand for the curtailment of royal prerogatives rent the British Parliament. Consequently the powers of the king were restricted and the powers of the cabinet were revived.

The American Revolution further developed the principles enunciated during ‘The bloodless revolution’ of England. If the British Revolution gave the system of representative rule, the American Revolution gave birth to the democratic system that gave the public the right to vote for the first time.

American Revolution may be called the mother of federal government in modern age. Besides, the convention of written constitutions came into practice. An experiment was made for a federal government. American became the first country in the world to practise secularism. The American Revolution inflicted a defeat on imperialism for the first time and projected the concept of nationalism before the human society.

The American Revolution left an unfavourable effect on India. Circumstances in India caused a war between France and England when France entered the war of American independence. Seizing upon this good opportunity, the English officers crushed the power of France in India and paved the way for the expansion of imperialism. But it is true that the American Revolution ardently inspired the nationalists in India as well as other countries chained in slavery.

The significance of American Revolution is enshrined in the Declaration of Independence drafted before the revolution on 4 July 1776. The declaration of independence was not only the declaration of freedom of a nation but prepared ground for political philosophy and revolutionary ideas in the European history in 19th century.

Against the backdrop of this declaration, the foundation of French revolution was laid in 1789. Moreover, the nationalist movements which then started in several countries like Ireland, Finland, Italy, and Germany etc. bear the clear imprint of the Declaration. It was a maiden effort to put into practice the principle that—’In this world, everyone is completely free and equal and has a right to launch a struggle to secure his freedom and rights’.

Into existence and became the first country to drive out the hereditary monarchy and establish democracy. Whatever be the importance of the war of American Independence for England, it was a remarkable event in the history of the world.

A new era began in the New World and paved the way for a new epoch for the Old World. On the whole, it may be said that the war of American independence was an exemplary event in the world history. Through it the United States of America came.

Conclusion:

The significance of American Revolution is enshrined in the Declaration of Independence drafted before the revolution on 4 July 1776. The declaration of independence was not only the declaration of freedom of a nation but prepared ground for political ‘philosophy and revolutionary ideas in the European history in 19th century.

Against the backdrop of this declaration, the foundation of French revolution was laid in 1789. Moreover the nationalist movements which then started in several countries like Ireland, Finland, Italy, and Germany etc. bear the clear imprint of the Declaration. It was a maiden effort to put into practice the principle that —’In this world, everyone is completely free and equal and has a right to launch a struggle to secure his freedom and rights’.

On the whole, it may be said that the war of American Independence was an exemplary event in the world history. Through it the United States of America came into existence and became the first country to drive out the hereditary monarchy and establish democracy.

Whatever be the importance of the war of American Independence for England, it was a remarkable event in the history of the world. A new era began in the New World and paved the way for a new epoch for the Old World.

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THE AMERICAN YAWP

5. the american revolution.

Paul Revere, Landing of the Troops, c. 1770. Courtesy American Antiquarian Society . Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0.

*The American Yawp is an evolving, collaborative text. Please click  here  to improve this chapter.*

I. Introduction

Ii. the origins of the american revolution, iii. the causes of the american revolution, iv. independence, v. the war for independence, vi. the consequences of the american revolution, vii. conclusion, viii. primary sources, ix. reference material.

In the 1760s, Benjamin Rush, a native of Philadelphia, recounted a visit to Parliament. Upon seeing the king’s throne in the House of Lords, Rush said he “felt as if he walked on sacred ground” with “emotions that I cannot describe.” 1 Throughout the eighteenth century, colonists had developed significant emotional ties with both the British monarchy and the British constitution. The British North American colonists had just helped to win a world war and most, like Rush, had never been more proud to be British. And yet, in a little over a decade, those same colonists would declare their independence and break away from the British Empire. Seen from 1763, nothing would have seemed as improbable as the American Revolution.

The Revolution built institutions and codified the language and ideas that still define Americans’ image of themselves. Moreover, revolutionaries justified their new nation with radical new ideals that changed the course of history and sparked a global “age of revolution.” But the Revolution was as paradoxical as it was unpredictable. A revolution fought in the name of liberty allowed slavery to persist. Resistance to centralized authority tied disparate colonies ever closer together under new governments. The revolution created politicians eager to foster republican selflessness and protect the public good but also encouraged individual self-interest and personal gain. The “founding fathers” instigated and fought a revolution to secure independence from Britain, but they did not fight that revolution to create a “democracy.” To successfully rebel against Britain, however, required more than a few dozen “founding fathers.” Common colonists joined the fight, unleashing popular forces that shaped the Revolution itself, often in ways not welcomed by elite leaders. But once unleashed, these popular forces continued to shape the new nation and indeed the rest of American history.

The American Revolution had both long-term origins and short-term causes. In this section, we will look broadly at some of the long-term political, intellectual, cultural, and economic developments in the eighteenth century that set the context for the crisis of the 1760s and 1770s.

Between the Glorious Revolution of 1688 and the middle of the eighteenth century, Britain had largely failed to define the colonies’ relationship to the empire and institute a coherent program of imperial reform. Two factors contributed to these failures. First, Britain was at war from the War of the Spanish Succession at the start of the century through the Seven Years’ War in 1763. Constant war was politically consuming and economically expensive. Second, competing visions of empire divided British officials. Old Whigs and their Tory supporters envisioned an authoritarian empire, based on conquering territory and extracting resources. They sought to eliminate Britain’s growing national debt by raising taxes and cutting spending on the colonies. The radical (or patriot) Whigs based their imperial vision on trade and manufacturing instead of land and resources. They argued that economic growth, not raising taxes, would solve the national debt. Instead of an authoritarian empire, “patriot Whigs” argued that the colonies should have equal status with the mother country. There were occasional attempts to reform the administration of the colonies, but debate between the two sides prevented coherent reform. 2

Colonists developed their own understanding of how they fit into the empire. They saw themselves as British subjects “entitled to all the natural, essential, inherent, and inseparable rights of our fellow subjects in Great-Britain.” The eighteenth century brought significant economic and demographic growth in the colonies. This success, they believed, resulted partly from Britain’s hands-off approach to the colonies, an approach that has been called salutary neglect. By midcentury, colonists believed that they held a special place in the empire, which justified Britain’s hands-off policy. In 1764, James Otis Jr. wrote, “The colonists are entitled to as ample rights, liberties, and privileges as the subjects of the mother country are, and in some respects to more .” 3

In this same period, the colonies developed their own local political institutions. Samuel Adams, in the Boston Gazette , described the colonies as each being a “separate body politic” from Britain. Almost immediately upon each colony’s settlement, they created a colonial assembly. These assemblies assumed many of the same duties as the Commons exercised in Britain, including taxing residents, managing the spending of the colonies’ revenue, and granting salaries to royal officials. In the early 1700s, colonial leaders unsuccessfully lobbied the British government to define their assemblies’ legal prerogatives, but Britain was too occupied with European wars. In the first half of the eighteenth century, royal governors tasked by the Board of Trade attempted to limit the power of the assemblies, but the assemblies’ power only grew. Many colonists came to see their assemblies as having the same jurisdiction over them that Parliament exercised over those in England. They interpreted British inaction as justifying their tradition of local governance. The Crown and Parliament, however, disagreed. 4

Political culture in the colonies also developed differently than that of the mother country. In both Britain and the colonies, land was the key to political participation, but because land was more easily obtained in the colonies, a higher proportion of male colonists participated in politics. Colonial political culture drew inspiration from the “country” party in Britain. These ideas—generally referred to as the ideology of republicanism—stressed the corrupting nature of power and the need for those involved in self-governing to be virtuous (i.e., putting the “public good” over their own self-interest). Patriots would need to be ever vigilant against the rise of conspiracies, centralized control, and tyranny. Only a small fringe in Britain held these ideas, but in the colonies, they were widely accepted. 5

In the 1740s, two seemingly conflicting bodies of thought—the Enlightenment and the Great Awakening—began to combine in the colonies and challenge older ideas about authority. Perhaps no single philosopher had a greater impact on colonial thinking than John Locke. In his Essay Concerning Human Understanding , Locke argued that the mind was originally a tabula rasa (or blank slate) and that individuals were formed primarily by their environment. The aristocracy then were wealthy or successful because they had greater access to wealth, education, and patronage and not because they were innately superior. Locke followed this essay with Some Thoughts Concerning Education , which introduced radical new ideas about the importance of education. Education would produce rational human beings capable of thinking for themselves and questioning authority rather than tacitly accepting tradition. These ideas slowly came to have far-reaching effects in the colonies and, later, the new nation.

At the same time that Locke’s ideas about knowledge and education spread in North America, the colonies also experienced an unprecedented wave of evangelical Protestant revivalism. Between 1739 and 1740, the Rev. George Whitefield, an enigmatic, itinerant preacher, traveled the colonies preaching Calvinist sermons to huge crowds. Unlike the rationalism of Locke, his sermons were designed to appeal to his listeners’ emotions. Whitefield told his listeners that salvation could only be found by taking personal responsibility for one’s own unmediated relationship with God, a process that came to be known as a “conversion” experience. He also argued that the current Church hierarchies populated by “unconverted” ministers only stood as a barrier between the individual and God. In his wake, new traveling preachers picked up his message and many congregations split. Both Locke and Whitefield had empowered individuals to question authority and to take their lives into their own hands.

In other ways, eighteenth-century colonists were becoming more culturally similar to Britons, a process often referred to as Anglicization. As colonial economies grew, they quickly became an important market for British manufacturing exports. Colonists with disposable income and access to British markets attempted to mimic British culture. By the middle of the eighteenth century, middling-class colonists could also afford items previously thought of as luxuries like British fashions, dining wares, and more. The desire to purchase British goods meshed with the desire to enjoy British liberties. 6 These political, intellectual, cultural, and economic developments built tensions that rose to the surface when, after the Seven Years’ War, Britain finally began to implement a program of imperial reform that conflicted with colonists’ understanding of the empire and their place in it.

Most immediately, the American Revolution resulted directly from attempts to reform the British Empire after the Seven Years’ War. The Seven Years’ War culminated nearly a half century of war between Europe’s imperial powers. It was truly a world war, fought between multiple empires on multiple continents. At its conclusion, the British Empire had never been larger. Britain now controlled the North American continent east of the Mississippi River, including French Canada. It had also consolidated its control over India. But the realities and responsibilities of the postwar empire were daunting. War (let alone victory) on such a scale was costly. Britain doubled the national debt to 13.5 times its annual revenue. Britain faced significant new costs required to secure and defend its far-flung empire, especially the western frontiers of the North American colonies. These factors led Britain in the 1760s to attempt to consolidate control over its North American colonies, which, in turn, led to resistance.

King George III took the crown in 1760 and brought Tories into his government after three decades of Whig rule. They represented an authoritarian vision of empire in which colonies would be subordinate. The Royal Proclamation of 1763 was Britain’s first major postwar imperial action targeting North America. The king forbade settlement west of the Appalachian Mountains in an attempt to limit costly wars with Native Americans. Colonists, however, protested and demanded access to the territory for which they had fought alongside the British.

In 1764, Parliament passed two more reforms. The Sugar Act sought to combat widespread smuggling of molasses in New England by cutting the duty in half but increasing enforcement. Also, smugglers would be tried by vice-admiralty courts and not juries. Parliament also passed the Currency Act, which restricted colonies from producing paper money. Hard money, such as gold and silver coins, was scarce in the colonies. The lack of currency impeded the colonies’ increasingly sophisticated transatlantic economies, but it was especially damaging in 1764 because a postwar recession had already begun. Between the restrictions of the Proclamation of 1763, the Currency Act, and the Sugar Act’s canceling of trials-by-jury for smugglers, some colonists began to fear a pattern of increased taxation and restricted liberties.

In March 1765, Parliament passed the Stamp Act. The act required that many documents be printed on paper that had been stamped to show the duty had been paid, including newspapers, pamphlets, diplomas, legal documents, and even playing cards. The Sugar Act of 1764 was an attempt to get merchants to pay an already existing duty, but the Stamp Act created a new, direct (or “internal”) tax. Parliament had never before directly taxed the colonists. Instead, colonies contributed to the empire through the payment of indirect, “external” taxes, such as customs duties. In 1765, Daniel Dulany of Maryland wrote, “A right to impose an internal tax on the colonies, without their consent for the single purpose of revenue, is denied, a right to regulate their trade without their consent is, admitted.” 7 Also, unlike the Sugar Act, which primarily affected merchants, the Stamp Act directly affected numerous groups throughout colonial society, including printers, lawyers, college graduates, and even sailors who played cards. This led, in part, to broader, more popular resistance.

Resistance to the Stamp Act took three forms, distinguished largely by class: legislative resistance by elites, economic resistance by merchants, and popular protest by common colonists. Colonial elites responded by passing resolutions in their assemblies. The most famous of the anti-Stamp Act resolutions were the Virginia Resolves, passed by the House of Burgesses on May 30, 1765, which declared that the colonists were entitled to “all the liberties, privileges, franchises, and immunities . . . possessed by the people of Great Britain.” When the Virginia Resolves were printed throughout the colonies, however, they often included a few extra, far more radical resolutions not passed by the Virginia House of Burgesses, the last of which asserted that only “the general assembly of this colony have any right or power to impose or lay any taxation” and that anyone who argued differently “shall be deemed an enemy to this his majesty’s colony.” 8 These additional items spread throughout the colonies and helped radicalize subsequent responses in other colonial assemblies. These responses eventually led to the calling of the Stamp Act Congress in New York City in October 1765. Nine colonies sent delegates, who included Benjamin Franklin, John Dickinson, Thomas Hutchinson, Philip Livingston, and James Otis. 9

Men and women politicized the domestic sphere by buying and displaying items that conspicuously revealed their position for or against parliamentary actions. This witty teapot, which celebrates the end of taxation on goods like tea itself, makes clear the owner’s perspective on the egregious taxation. Teapot, Stamp Act Repeal’d, 1786, in Peabody Essex Museum. Salem State University .

The Stamp Act Congress issued a “Declaration of Rights and Grievances,” which, like the Virginia Resolves, declared allegiance to the king and “all due subordination” to Parliament but also reasserted the idea that colonists were entitled to the same rights as Britons. Those rights included trial by jury, which had been abridged by the Sugar Act, and the right to be taxed only by their own elected representatives. As Daniel Dulany wrote in 1765, “It is an essential principle of the English constitution, that the subject shall not be taxed without his consent.” 10 Benjamin Franklin called it the “prime Maxim of all free Government.” 11 Because the colonies did not elect members to Parliament, they believed that they were not represented and could not be taxed by that body. In response, Parliament and the Crown argued that the colonists were “virtually represented,” just like the residents of those boroughs or counties in England that did not elect members to Parliament. However, the colonists rejected the notion of virtual representation, with one pamphleteer calling it a “monstrous idea.” 12

The second type of resistance to the Stamp Act was economic. While the Stamp Act Congress deliberated, merchants in major port cities were preparing nonimportation agreements, hoping that their refusal to import British goods would lead British merchants to lobby for the repeal of the Stamp Act. In New York City, “upwards of two hundred principal merchants” agreed not to import, sell, or buy “any goods, wares, or merchandises” from Great Britain. 13 In Philadelphia, merchants gathered at “a general meeting” to agree that “they would not Import any Goods from Great-Britain until the Stamp-Act was Repealed.” 14 The plan worked. By January 1766, London merchants sent a letter to Parliament arguing that they had been “reduced to the necessity of pending ruin” by the Stamp Act and the subsequent boycotts. 15

The third, and perhaps, most crucial type of resistance was popular protest. Riots broke out in Boston. Crowds burned the appointed stamp distributor for Massachusetts, Andrew Oliver, in effigy and pulled a building he owned “down to the Ground in five minutes.” 16 Oliver resigned the position the next day. The following week, a crowd also set upon the home of his brother-in-law, Lieutenant Governor Thomas Hutchinson, who had publicly argued for submission to the stamp tax. Before the evening was over, much of Hutchinson’s home and belongings had been destroyed. 17

Popular violence and intimidation spread quickly throughout the colonies. In New York City, posted notices read:

PRO PATRIA, The first Man that either distributes or makes use of Stampt Paper, let him take care of his House, Person, & Effects. Vox Populi; We dare.” 18

By November 16, all of the original twelve stamp distributors had resigned, and by 1766, groups calling themselves the Sons of Liberty were formed in most colonies to direct and organize further resistance. These tactics had the dual effect of sending a message to Parliament and discouraging colonists from accepting appointments as stamp collectors. With no one to distribute the stamps, the act became unenforceable.

Violent protest by groups like the Sons of Liberty created quite a stir both in the colonies and in England itself. While extreme acts like the tarring and feathering of Boston’s Commissioner of Customs in 1774 propagated more protest against symbols of Parliament’s tyranny throughout the colonies, violent demonstrations were regarded as acts of terrorism by British officials. This print of the 1774 event was from the British perspective, picturing the Sons as brutal instigators with almost demonic smiles on their faces as they enacted this excruciating punishment on the Custom Commissioner. Philip Dawe (attributed), “The Bostonians Paying the Excise-man, or Tarring and Feathering,”  Wikimedia .

Pressure on Parliament grew until, in February 1766, it repealed the Stamp Act. But to save face and to try to avoid this kind of problem in the future, Parliament also passed the Declaratory Act, asserting that Parliament had the “full power and authority to make laws . . . to bind the colonies and people of America . . . in all cases whatsoever.” However, colonists were too busy celebrating the repeal of the Stamp Act to take much notice of the Declaratory Act. In New York City, the inhabitants raised a huge lead statue of King George III in honor of the Stamp Act’s repeal. It could be argued that there was no moment at which colonists felt more proud to be members of the free British Empire than 1766. But Britain still needed revenue from the colonies. 19

The colonies had resisted the implementation of direct taxes, but the Declaratory Act reserved Parliament’s right to impose them. And, in the colonists’ dispatches to Parliament and in numerous pamphlets, they had explicitly acknowledged the right of Parliament to regulate colonial trade. So Britain’s next attempt to draw revenues from the colonies, the Townshend Acts, were passed in June 1767, creating new customs duties on common items, like lead, glass, paint, and tea, instead of direct taxes. The acts also created and strengthened formal mechanisms to enforce compliance, including a new American Board of Customs Commissioners and more vice-admiralty courts to try smugglers. Revenues from customs seizures would be used to pay customs officers and other royal officials, including the governors, thereby incentivizing them to convict offenders. These acts increased the presence of the British government in the colonies and circumscribed the authority of the colonial assemblies, since paying the governor’s salary had long given the assemblies significant power over them. Unsurprisingly, colonists, once again, resisted.

Even though these were duties, many colonial resistance authors still referred to them as “taxes,” because they were designed primarily to extract revenues from the colonies not to regulate trade. John Dickinson, in his “Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania,” wrote, “That we may legally be bound to pay any general duties on these commodities, relative to the regulation of trade, is granted; but we being obliged by her laws to take them from Great Britain, any special duties imposed on their exportation to us only, with intention to raise a revenue from us only, are as much taxes upon us, as those imposed by the Stamp Act.” Hence, many authors asked: once the colonists assented to a tax in any form , what would stop the British from imposing ever more and greater taxes on the colonists? 20

New forms of resistance emerged in which elite, middling, and working-class colonists participated together. Merchants reinstituted nonimportation agreements, and common colonists agreed not to consume these same products. Lists were circulated with signatories promising not to buy any British goods. These lists were often published in newspapers, bestowing recognition on those who had signed and led to pressure on those who had not.

Women, too, became involved to an unprecedented degree in resistance to the Townshend Acts. They circulated subscription lists and gathered signatures. The first political commentaries in newspapers written by women appeared. 21 Also, without new imports of British clothes, colonists took to wearing simple, homespun clothing. Spinning clubs were formed, in which local women would gather at one of their homes and spin cloth for homespun clothing for their families and even for the community. 22

Homespun clothing quickly became a marker of one’s virtue and patriotism, and women were an important part of this cultural shift. At the same time, British goods and luxuries previously desired now became symbols of tyranny. Nonimportation and, especially, nonconsumption agreements changed colonists’ cultural relationship with the mother country. Committees of Inspection monitored merchants and residents to make sure that no one broke the agreements. Offenders could expect to be shamed by having their names and offenses published in the newspaper and in broadsides.

Nonimportation and nonconsumption helped forge colonial unity. Colonies formed Committees of Correspondence to keep each other informed of the resistance efforts throughout the colonies. Newspapers reprinted exploits of resistance, giving colonists a sense that they were part of a broader political community. The best example of this new “continental conversation” came in the wake of the Boston Massacre. Britain sent regiments to Boston in 1768 to help enforce the new acts and quell the resistance. On the evening of March 5, 1770, a crowd gathered outside the Custom House and began hurling insults, snowballs, and perhaps more at the young sentry. When a small number of soldiers came to the sentry’s aid, the crowd grew increasingly hostile until the soldiers fired. After the smoke cleared, five Bostonians were dead, including one of the ringleaders, Crispus Attucks, a formerly enslaved man turned free dockworker. The soldiers were tried in Boston and won acquittal, thanks, in part, to their defense attorney, John Adams. News of the Boston Massacre spread quickly through the new resistance communication networks, aided by a famous engraving initially circulated by Paul Revere, which depicted bloodthirsty British soldiers with grins on their faces firing into a peaceful crowd. The engraving was quickly circulated and reprinted throughout the colonies, generating sympathy for Boston and anger with Britain.

This iconic image of the Boston Massacre by Paul Revere sparked fury in both Americans and the British by portraying the redcoats as brutal slaughterers and the onlookers as helpless victims. The events of March 5, 1770 did not actually play out as Revere pictured them, yet his intention was not simply to recount the affair. Revere created an effective propaganda piece that lent credence to those demanding that the British authoritarian rule be stopped. Paul Revere (engraver), “The bloody massacre perpetrated in King Street Boston on March 5th 1770 by a party of the 29th Regt.,” 1770.  Library of Congress .

Resistance again led to repeal. In March 1770, Parliament repealed all of the new duties except the one on tea, which, like the Declaratory Act, was left, in part, to save face and assert that Parliament still retained the right to tax the colonies. The character of colonial resistance had changed between 1765 and 1770. During the Stamp Act resistance, elites wrote resolves and held congresses while violent, popular mobs burned effigies and tore down houses, with minimal coordination between colonies. But methods of resistance against the Townshend Acts became more inclusive and more coordinated. Colonists previously excluded from meaningful political participation now gathered signatures, and colonists of all ranks participated in the resistance by not buying British goods and monitoring and enforcing the boycotts.

Britain’s failed attempts at imperial reform in the 1760s created an increasingly vigilant and resistant colonial population and, most importantly, an enlarged political sphere—both on the colonial and continental levels—far beyond anything anyone could have imagined a few years earlier. A new sense of shared grievances began to join the colonists in a shared American political identity.

Tensions between the colonies and England eased for a time after the Boston Massacre. The colonial economy improved as the postwar recession receded. The Sons of Liberty in some colonies sought to continue nonimportation even after the repeal of the Townshend Acts. But in New York, a door-to-door poll of the population revealed that the majority wanted to end nonimportation. 23 Yet Britain’s desire and need to reform imperial administration remained.

In April 1773, Parliament passed two acts to aid the failing East India Company, which had fallen behind in the annual payments it owed Britain. But the company was not only drowning in debt; it was also drowning in tea, with almost fifteen million pounds of it stored in warehouses from India to England. In 1773, Parliament passed the Regulating Act, which effectively put the troubled company under government control. It then passed the Tea Act, which would allow the company to sell its tea in the colonies directly and without the company having to pay the usual export tax in London. Even though this would greatly lower the cost of tea for colonists, they resisted.

Merchants resisted the Tea Act because they resented the East India Company’s monopoly. But like the Sugar Act, the Tea Act affected only a small, specific group of people. The widespread support for resisting the Tea Act had more to do with principles. By buying tea, even though it was cheaper, colonists would be paying the duty and thereby implicitly acknowledging Parliament’s right to tax them. According to the Pennsylvania Chronicle , Prime Minister Lord North was a “great schemer” who sought “to out wit us, and to effectually establish that Act, which will forever after be pleaded as a precedent for every imposition the Parliament of Great-Britain shall think proper to saddle us with.” 24

The Tea Act stipulated that the duty had to be paid when the ship unloaded. Newspaper essays and letters throughout the summer of 1773 in the major port cities debated what to do upon the ships’ arrival. In November, the Boston Sons of Liberty, led by Samuel Adams and John Hancock, resolved to “prevent the landing and sale of the [tea], and the payment of any duty thereon” and to do so “at the risk of their lives and property.” 25 The meeting appointed men to guard the wharfs and make sure the tea remained on the ships until they returned to London. This worked and the tea did not reach the shore, but by December 16, the ships were still there. Hence, another town meeting was held at the Old South Meeting House, at the end of which dozens of men disguised as Mohawks made their way to the wharf. The Boston Gazette reported what happened next:

But, behold what followed! A number of brave & resolute men, determined to do all in their power to save their country from the ruin which their enemies had plotted, in less than four hours, emptied every chest of tea on board the three ships . . . amounting to 342 chests, into the sea ! ! without the least damage done to the ships or any other property . 26

As word spread throughout the colonies, patriots were emboldened to do the same to the tea sitting in their harbors. Tea was either dumped or seized in Charleston, Philadelphia, and New York, with numerous other smaller “tea parties” taking place throughout 1774.

Popular protest spread across the continent and down through all levels of colonial society. Fifty-one women in Edenton, North Carolina, for example, signed an agreement—published in numerous newspapers—in which they promised “to do every Thing as far as lies in our Power” to support the boycotts. 27 The ladies of Edenton were not alone in their desire to support the war effort by what means they could. Women across the thirteen colonies could most readily express their political sentiments as consumers and producers. Because women often made decisions regarding household purchases, their participation in consumer boycotts held particular weight. 28 Some women also took to the streets as part of more unruly mob actions, participating in grain riots, raids on the offices of royal officials, and demonstrations against the impressment of men into naval service. The agitation of so many helped elicit responses from both Britain and the colonial elites.

Britain’s response was swift. The following spring, Parliament passed four acts known collectively, by the British, as the Coercive Acts. Colonists, however, referred to them as the Intolerable Acts. First, the Boston Port Act shut down the harbor and cut off all trade to and from the city. The Massachusetts Government Act put the colonial government entirely under British control, dissolving the assembly and restricting town meetings. The Administration of Justice Act allowed any royal official accused of a crime to be tried in Britain rather than by Massachusetts courts and juries. Finally, the Quartering Act, passed for all colonies, allowed the British army to quarter newly arrived soldiers in colonists’ homes. Boston had been deemed in open rebellion, and the king, his advisors, and Parliament acted decisively to end the rebellion.

The Crown, however, did not anticipate the other colonies coming to the aid of Massachusetts. Colonists collected food to send to Boston. Virginia’s House of Burgesses called for a day of prayer and fasting to show their support. Rather than isolating Massachusetts, the Coercive Acts fostered the sense of shared identity created over the previous decade. After all, if the Crown and Parliament could dissolve Massachusetts’s government, nothing could stop them from doing the same to any of her sister colonies. In Massachusetts, patriots created the Provincial Congress, and, throughout 1774, they seized control of local and county governments and courts. 29 In New York, citizens elected committees to direct the colonies’ response to the Coercive Acts, including a Mechanics’ Committee of middling colonists. By early 1774, Committees of Correspondence and/or extralegal assemblies were established in all of the colonies except Georgia. And throughout the year, they followed Massachusetts’s example by seizing the powers of the royal governments.

Committees of Correspondence agreed to send delegates to a Continental Congress to coordinate an intercolonial response. The First Continental Congress convened on September 5, 1774. Over the next six weeks, elite delegates from every colony but Georgia issued a number of documents, including a “Declaration of Rights and Grievances.” This document repeated the arguments that colonists had been making since 1765: colonists retained all the rights of native Britons, including the right to be taxed only by their own elected representatives as well as the right to a trial by jury.

Most importantly, the Congress issued a document known as the “Continental Association.” The Association declared that “the present unhappy situation of our affairs is occasioned by a ruinous system of colony administration adopted by the British Ministry about the year 1763, evidently calculated for enslaving these Colonies, and, with them, the British Empire.” The Association recommended “that a committee be chosen in every county, city, and town . . . whose business it shall be attentively to observe the conduct of all persons touching this association.” These Committees of Inspection would consist largely of common colonists. They were effectively deputized to police their communities and instructed to publish the names of anyone who violated the Association so they “may be publicly known, and universally condemned as the enemies of American liberty.” The delegates also agreed to a continental nonimportation, nonconsumption, and nonexportation agreement and to “wholly discontinue the slave trade.” In all, the Continental Association was perhaps the most radical document of the period. It sought to unite and direct twelve revolutionary governments, establish economic and moral policies, and empower common colonists by giving them an important and unprecedented degree of on-the-ground political power. 30

But not all colonists were patriots. Indeed, many remained faithful to the king and Parliament, while a good number took a neutral stance. As the situation intensified throughout 1774 and early 1775, factions emerged within the resistance movements in many colonies. Elite merchants who traded primarily with Britain, Anglican clergy, and colonists holding royal offices depended on and received privileges directly from their relationship with Britain. Initially, they sought to exert a moderating influence on the resistance committees, but, following the Association, a number of these colonists began to worry that the resistance was too radical and aimed at independence. They, like most colonists in this period, still expected a peaceful conciliation with Britain and grew increasingly suspicious of the resistance movement.

However, by the time the Continental Congress met again in May 1775, war had already broken out in Massachusetts. On April 19, 1775, British regiments set out to seize local militias’ arms and powder stores in Lexington and Concord. The town militia met them at the Lexington Green. The British ordered the militia to disperse when someone fired, setting off a volley from the British. The battle continued all the way to the next town, Concord. News of the events at Lexington spread rapidly throughout the countryside. Militia members, known as minutemen, responded quickly and inflicted significant casualties on the British regiments as they chased them back to Boston. Approximately twenty thousand colonial militiamen laid siege to Boston, effectively trapping the British. In June, the militia set up fortifications on Breed’s Hill overlooking the city. In the misnamed “Battle of Bunker Hill,” the British attempted to dislodge them from the position with a frontal assault, and, despite eventually taking the hill, they suffered severe casualties at the hands of the colonists.

“The Battle of Lexington,” Published by John H. Daniels & Son, c1903.  Library of Congress .

While men in Boston fought and died, the Continental Congress struggled to organize a response. The radical Massachusetts delegates—including John Adams, Samuel Adams, and John Hancock—implored the Congress to support the Massachusetts militia, who without supplies were laying siege to Boston. Meanwhile, many delegates from the Middle Colonies—including New York, New Jersey, and Philadelphia—took a more moderate position, calling for renewed attempts at reconciliation. In the South, the Virginia delegation contained radicals such as Richard Henry Lee and Thomas Jefferson, while South Carolina’s delegation included moderates like John and Edward Rutledge. The moderates worried that supporting the Massachusetts militia would be akin to declaring war.

The Congress struck a compromise, agreeing to adopt the Massachusetts militia and form a Continental Army, naming Virginia delegate George Washington commander in chief. They also issued a “Declaration of the Causes of Necessity of Taking Up Arms” to justify the decision. At the same time, the moderates drafted an “Olive Branch Petition,” which assured the king that the colonists “most ardently desire[d] the former Harmony between [the mother country] and these Colonies.” Many understood that the opportunities for reconciliation were running out. After Congress had approved the document, Benjamin Franklin wrote to a friend saying, “The Congress will send one more Petition to the King which I suppose will be treated as the former was, and therefore will probably be the last.” 31 Congress was in the strange position of attempting reconciliation while publicly raising an army.

The petition arrived in England on August 13, 1775, but before it was delivered, the king issued his own “Proclamation for Suppressing Rebellion and Sedition.” He believed his subjects in North America were being “misled by dangerous and ill-designing men,” who were “traitorously preparing, ordering, and levying war against us.” In an October speech to Parliament, he dismissed the colonists’ petition. The king had no doubt that the resistance was “manifestly carried on for the purpose of establishing an independent empire.” 32 By the start of 1776, talk of independence was growing while the prospect of reconciliation dimmed.

In the opening months of 1776, independence, for the first time, became part of the popular debate. Town meetings approved resolutions in support of independence. Yet, with moderates still hanging on, it would take another seven months before the Continental Congress officially passed the independence resolution. A small forty-six-page pamphlet published in Philadelphia and written by a recent immigrant from England captured the American conversation. Thomas Paine’s Common Sense argued for independence by denouncing monarchy and challenging the logic behind the British Empire, saying, “There is something absurd, in supposing a continent to be perpetually governed by an island.” 33 His combination of easy language, biblical references, and fiery rhetoric proved potent, and the pamphlet was quickly published and dispersed. Arguments over political philosophy and rumors of battlefield developments filled taverns throughout the colonies.

George Washington had taken control of the army and after laying siege to Boston forced the British to retreat to Halifax. In Virginia, the royal governor, Lord Dunmore, issued a proclamation declaring martial law and offering freedom to “all indentured servants, Negros, and others” if they would leave their enslavers and join the British. Though only about five hundred to a thousand enslaved people joined Lord Dunmore’s “Ethiopian regiment,” thousands more flocked to the British later in the war, risking capture and punishment for a chance at freedom. Formerly enslaved people occasionally fought, but primarily served in companies called Black Pioneers as laborers, skilled workers, and spies. British motives for offering freedom were practical rather than humanitarian, but the proclamation was the first mass emancipation of enslaved people in American history. Enslaved people could now choose to run and risk their lives for possible freedom with the British army or hope that the United States would live up to its ideals of liberty. 34

Dunmore’s proclamation unnerved white southerners already suspicious of rising antislavery sentiments in the mother country. Four years earlier, English courts dealt a serious blow to slavery in the empire. In Somerset v Stewart , James Somerset sued for his freedom, and the court not only granted it but also undercut the very legality of slavery on the British mainland. Somerset and now Dunmore began to convince some enslavers that a new independent nation might offer a surer protection for slavery. Indeed, the proclamation laid the groundwork for the very unrest that loyal southerners had hoped to avoid. Consequently, enslavers often used violence to prevent their enslaved laborers from joining the British or rising against them. Virginia enacted regulations to prevent freedom-seeking, threatening to ship rebellious enslaved people to the West Indies or execute them. Many enslavers transported their enslaved people inland, away from the coastal temptation to join the British armies, sometimes separating families in the process.

On May 10, 1776, nearly two months before the Declaration of Independence, the Congress voted on a resolution calling on all colonies that had not already established revolutionary governments to do so and to wrest control from royal officials. 35 The Congress also recommended that the colonies should begin preparing new written constitutions. In many ways, this was the Congress’s first declaration of independence. A few weeks later, on June 7, Richard Henry Lee offered the following resolution:

Resolved, That these United Colonies are, and of right ought to be, Free and Independent States, that they are absolved from all allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connexion between them and the state of Great Britain is, and ought to be, totally dissolved . 36

Delegates went scurrying back to their assemblies for new instructions and nearly a month later, on July 2, the resolution finally came to a vote. It passed 12–0, with New York, under imminent threat of British invasion, abstaining.

The passage of Lee’s resolution was the official legal declaration of independence, but, between the proposal and vote, a committee had been named to draft a public declaration in case the resolution passed. Virginian Thomas Jefferson drafted the document, with edits being made by his fellow committee members John Adams and Benjamin Franklin, and then again by the Congress as a whole. The famous preamble went beyond the arguments about the rights of British subjects under the British Constitution, instead referring to “natural law”:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government. 37

The majority of the document outlined a list of specific grievances that the colonists had with British attempts to reform imperial administration during the 1760s and 1770s. An early draft blamed the British for the transatlantic slave trade and even for discouraging attempts by the colonists to promote abolition. Delegates from South Carolina and Georgia as well as those from northern states who profited from the trade all opposed this language, and it was removed. 38

Neither the grievances nor the rhetoric of the preamble were new. Instead, they were the culmination of both a decade of popular resistance to imperial reform and decades more of long-term developments that saw both sides develop incompatible understandings of the British Empire and the colonies’ place within it. The Congress approved the document on July 4, 1776. However, it was one thing to declare independence; it was quite another to win it on the battlefield.

The Declaration of Independence,  National Archives and Records Administration .

The war began at Lexington and Concord, more than a year before Congress declared independence. In 1775, the British believed that the mere threat of war and a few minor incursions to seize supplies would be enough to cow the colonial rebellion. Those minor incursions, however, turned into a full-out military conflict. Despite an early American victory at Boston, the new states faced the daunting task of taking on the world’s largest military.

In the summer of 1776, the British forces that had abandoned Boston arrived at New York. The largest expeditionary force in British history, including tens of thousands of German mercenaries known as Hessians, followed soon after. New York was the perfect location to launch expeditions aimed at seizing control of the Hudson River and isolating New England from the rest of the continent. Also, New York contained many loyalists, particularly among its merchant and Anglican communities. In October, the British finally launched an attack on Brooklyn and Manhattan. The Continental Army took severe losses before retreating through New Jersey. 39 With the onset of winter, Washington needed something to lift morale and encourage reenlistment. Therefore, he launched a successful surprise attack on the Hessian camp at Trenton on Christmas Day by ferrying the few thousand men he had left across the Delaware River under the cover of night. The victory won the Continental Army much-needed supplies and a morale boost following the disaster at New York. 40

An even greater success followed in upstate New York. In 1777, British general John Burgoyne led an army from Canada to secure the Hudson River. In upstate New York, he was to meet up with a detachment of General William Howe’s forces marching north from Manhattan. However, Howe abandoned the plan without telling Burgoyne and instead sailed to Philadelphia to capture the new nation’s capital. The Continental Army defeated Burgoyne’s men at Saratoga, New York. 41 This victory proved a major turning point in the war. Benjamin Franklin had been in Paris trying to secure a treaty of alliance with the French. However, the French were reluctant to back what seemed like an unlikely cause. News of the victory at Saratoga convinced the French that the cause might not have been as unlikely as they had thought. A Treaty of Amity and Commerce was signed on February 6, 1778. The treaty effectively turned a colonial rebellion into a global war as fighting between the British and French soon broke out in Europe and India. 42

In this 1782 cartoon, the British lion faces a spaniel (Spain), a rooster (France), a rattlesnake (America), and a pug dog (Netherlands). Though the caption predicts Britain’s success, it illustrates that Britain faced challenges—and therefore drains on their military and treasury—from more than just the American rebels. J. Barrow, The British Lion Engaging Four Powers, 1782. National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London .

Howe had taken Philadelphia in 1777 but returned to New York once winter ended. He slowly realized that European military tactics would not work in North America. In Europe, armies fought head-on battles in attempt to seize major cities. However, in 1777, the British had held Philadelphia and New York and yet still weakened their position. Meanwhile, Washington realized after New York that the largely untrained Continental Army could not win head-on battles with the professional British army. So he developed his own logic of warfare that involved smaller, more frequent skirmishes and avoided major engagements that would risk his entire army. As long as he kept the army intact, the war would continue, no matter how many cities the British captured.

In 1778, the British shifted their attentions to the South, where they believed they enjoyed more popular support. Campaigns from Virginia to South Carolina and Georgia captured major cities, but the British simply did not have the manpower to retain military control. And upon their departures, severe fighting ensued between local patriots and loyalists, often pitting family members against one another. The war in the South was truly a civil war. 43

By 1781, the British were also fighting France, Spain, and Holland. The British public’s support for the costly war in North America was quickly waning. The Americans took advantage of the British southern strategy with significant aid from the French army and navy. In October, Washington marched his troops from New York to Virginia in an effort to trap the British southern army under the command of General Charles Cornwallis. Cornwallis had dug his men in at Yorktown awaiting supplies and reinforcements from New York. However, the Continental and French armies arrived first, quickly followed by a French navy contingent, encircling Cornwallis’s forces and, after laying siege to the city, forcing his surrender. The capture of another army left the British without a new strategy and without public support to continue the war. Peace negotiations took place in France, and the war came to an official end on September 3, 1783. 44

Lord Cornwallis’s surrender signaled the victory of the American revolutionaries over what they considered to be the despotic rule of Britain. This moment would live on in American memory as a pivotal one in the nation’s origin story, prompting the United States government to commission artist John Trumbull to create this painting of the event in 1817. John Trumbull, Surrender of Lord Cornwallis, 1820.  Wikimedia .

Americans celebrated their victory, but it came at great cost. Soldiers suffered through brutal winters with inadequate resources. During the single winter at Valley Forge in 1777–1778, over 2,500 Americans died from disease and exposure. Life was not easy on the home front either. Women on both sides of the conflict were frequently left alone to care for their households. In addition to their existing duties, women took on roles usually assigned to men on farms and in shops and taverns. Abigail Adams addressed the difficulties she encountered while “minding family affairs” on their farm in Braintree, Massachusetts. Abigail managed the planting and harvesting of crops, in the midst of severe labor shortages and inflation, while dealing with several tenants on the Adams property, raising her children, and making clothing and other household goods. In order to support the family economically during John’s frequent absences and the uncertainties of war, Abigail also invested in several speculative schemes and sold imported goods. 45

While Abigail remained safely out of the fray, other women were not so fortunate. The Revolution was not only fought on distant battlefields. It was fought on women’s very doorsteps, in the fields next to their homes. There was no way for women to avoid the conflict or the disruptions and devastations it caused. As the leader of the state militia during the Revolution, Mary Silliman’s husband, Gold, was absent from their home for much of the conflict. On the morning of July 7, 1779, when a British fleet attacked nearby Fairfield, Connecticut, it was Mary who calmly evacuated her household, including her children and servants, to North Stratford. When Gold was captured by loyalists and held prisoner, Mary, six months pregnant with their second child, wrote letters to try to secure his release. When such appeals were ineffectual, Mary spearheaded an effort, along with Connecticut Governor, John Trumbull, to capture a prominent Tory leader to exchange for her husband’s freedom. 46

American soldiers came from a variety of backgrounds and had numerous reasons for fighting with the American army. Jean-Baptiste-Antoine DeVerger, a French sublieutenant at the Battle of Yorktown, painted this watercolor soon after that battle and chose to depict four men in men military dress: an African American soldier from the 2nd Rhode Island Regiment, a man in the homespun of the militia, another wearing the common “hunting shirt” of the frontier, and the French soldier on the end. Jean-Baptiste-Antoine DeVerger, “American soldiers at the siege of Yorktown,” 1781.  Wikimedia .

Black Americans, enslaved and free, also impacted (and were impacted by) the Revolution. The British were the first to recruit Black (or “Ethiopian”) regiments, as early as Dunmore’s Proclamation of 1775 in Virginia, which promised freedom to any enslaved person who would escape their enslavers and join the British cause. At first, Washington, an enslaver himself, resisted allowing Black men to join the Continental Army, but he eventually relented. In 1775, Peter Salem’s enslaver freed him to fight with the militia. Salem faced British Regulars in the battles at Lexington and Bunker Hill, where he fought valiantly with around three dozen other Black Americans. Salem not only contributed to the cause, he earned the ability to determine his own life after his enlistment ended. Salem was not alone, but many more enslaved people seized on the tumult of war to run away and secure their own freedom directly. Historians estimate that between thirty thousand and one hundred thousand formerly enslaved people deserted their enslavers during the war. 47

Men and women together struggled through years of war and hardship. For patriots (and those who remained neutral), victory brought new political, social, and economic opportunities, but it also brought new uncertainties. The war decimated entire communities, particularly in the South. Thousands of women throughout the nation had been widowed. The American economy, weighed down by war debt and depreciated currencies, would have to be rebuilt following the war. State constitutions had created governments, but now men would have to figure out how to govern. The opportunities created by the Revolution had come at great cost, in both lives and fortune, and it was left to the survivors to seize those opportunities and help forge and define the new nation-state.

Another John Trumbull piece commissioned for the Capitol in 1817, this painting depicts what would be remembered as the moment the new United States became a republic. On December 23, 1783, George Washington, widely considered the hero of the Revolution, resigned his position as the most powerful man in the former thirteen colonies. Giving up his role as Commander-in-Chief of the Army ensured that civilian rule would define the new nation and that a republic would be set in place rather than a dictatorship. John Trumbull, General George Washington Resigning His Commission, c. 1817-1824. From the  Architect of the Capitol .

Like the earlier distinction between “origins” and “causes,” the Revolution also had short- and long-term consequences. Perhaps the most important immediate consequence of declaring independence was the creation of state constitutions in 1776 and 1777. The Revolution also unleashed powerful political, social, and economic forces that would transform the new nation’s politics and society, including increased participation in politics and governance, the legal institutionalization of religious toleration, and the growth and diffusion of the population, particularly westward. The Revolution affected Native Americans by opening up western settlement and creating governments hostile to their territorial claims. Even more broadly, the Revolution ended the mercantilist economy, opening new opportunities in trade and manufacturing.

The new states drafted written constitutions, which, at the time, was an important innovation from the traditionally unwritten British Constitution. These new state constitutions were based on the idea of “popular sovereignty,” that is, that the power and authority of the government derived from the people. 48 Most created weak governors and strong legislatures with more regular elections and moderately increased the size of the electorate. A number of states followed the example of Virginia and included a declaration or “bill” of rights in their constitution designed to protect the rights of individuals and circumscribe the prerogative of the government. Pennsylvania’s first state constitution was the most radical and democratic. They created a unicameral legislature and an Executive Council but no genuine executive. All free men could vote, including those who did not own property. Massachusetts’s constitution, passed in 1780, was less democratic in structure but underwent a more popular process of ratification. In the fall of 1779, each town sent delegates—312 in all—to a constitutional convention in Cambridge. Town meetings debated the constitution draft and offered suggestions. Anticipating the later federal constitution, Massachusetts established a three-branch government based on checks and balances between the branches. Independence came in 1776, and so did an unprecedented period of constitution making and state building.

The Continental Congress ratified the Articles of Confederation in 1781. The articles allowed each state one vote in the Continental Congress. But the articles are perhaps most notable for what they did not allow. Congress was given no power to levy or collect taxes, regulate foreign or interstate commerce, or establish a federal judiciary. These shortcomings rendered the postwar Congress weak and largely ineffectual.

Political and social life changed drastically after independence. Political participation grew as more people gained the right to vote, leading to greater importance being placed on representation within government. 49 In addition, more common citizens (or “new men”) played increasingly important roles in local and state governance. Hierarchy within the states underwent significant changes. Society became less deferential and more egalitarian, less aristocratic and more meritocratic.

The Revolution’s most important long-term economic consequence was the end of mercantilism. The British Empire had imposed various restrictions on the colonial economies including limiting trade, settlement, and manufacturing. The Revolution opened new markets and new trade relationships. The Americans’ victory also opened the western territories for invasion and settlement, which created new domestic markets. Americans began to create their own manufactures, no longer content to rely on those in Britain.

Despite these important changes, the American Revolution had its limits. Following their unprecedented expansion into political affairs during the imperial resistance, women also served the patriot cause during the war. However, the Revolution did not result in civic equality for women. Instead, during the immediate postwar period, women became incorporated into the polity to some degree as “republican mothers.” Republican societies required virtuous citizens, and it became mothers’ responsibility to raise and educate future citizens. This opened opportunity for women regarding education, but they still remained largely on the peripheries of the new American polity.

In the thirteen colonies, boycotting women were seen as patriots. In British prints such as this, they were mocked as immoral harlots sticking their noses in the business of men. Philip Dawe, A Society of Patriotic Ladies at Edenton in North Carolina, March 1775. Metropolitan Museum of Art .

Approximately sixty thousand loyalists ended up leaving America because of the Revolution. Loyalists came from all ranks of American society, and many lived the rest of their lives in exile from their homeland. A clause in the Treaty of Paris was supposed to protect their property and require the Americans to compensate Loyalists who had lost property during the war because of their allegiance. The Americans, however, reneged on this promise and, throughout the 1780s, states continued seizing property held by Loyalists. Some colonists went to England, where they were strangers and outsiders in what they had thought of as their mother country. Many more, however, settled on the peripheries of the British Empire throughout the world, especially Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and Quebec. The Loyalists had come out on the losing side of a Revolution, and many lost everything they had and were forced to create new lives far from the land of their birth. 50

In 1783, thousands of formerly enslaved Loyalists fled with the British army. They hoped that the British government would uphold the promise of freedom and help them establish new homes elsewhere in the Empire. The Treaty of Paris, which ended the war, demanded that British troops leave formerly enslaved people behind, but the British military commanders upheld earlier promises and evacuated thousands of freedmen, transporting them to Canada, the Caribbean, or Great Britain. They would eventually play a role in settling Nova Scotia, and through the subsequent efforts of David George, a Black loyalist and Baptist preacher, some settled in Sierra Leone in Africa. Black loyalists, however, continued to face social and economic marginalization, including restrictions on land ownership within the British Empire. 51

Joseph Brandt as painted by George Romney. Brandt was a Mohawk leader who led Mohawk and British forces in western New York.  Wikimedia .

The fight for liberty led some Americans to manumit their enslaved laborers, and most of the new northern states soon passed gradual emancipation laws. Some manumissions also occurred in the Upper South, but in the Lower South, some enslavers revoked their offers of freedom for service, and other freedmen were forced back into bondage. The Revolution’s rhetoric of equality created a “revolutionary generation” of enslaved people and free Black Americans that would eventually encourage the antislavery movement. Slave revolts began to incorporate claims for freedom based on revolutionary ideals. In the long term, the Revolution failed to reconcile slavery with these new egalitarian republican societies, a tension that eventually boiled over in the 1830s and 1840s and effectively tore the nation in two in the 1850s and 1860s. 52

Native Americans, too, participated in and were affected by the Revolution. Many Native American groups, such as the Shawnee, Creek, Cherokee, and Iroquois, had sided with the British. They had hoped for a British victory that would continue to restrain the land-hungry colonial settlers from moving west beyond the Appalachian Mountains. Unfortunately, the Americans’ victory and Native Americans’ support for the British created a pretense for justifying rapid and often brutal expansion into the western territories. Native American peoples would continue to be displaced and pushed farther west throughout the nineteenth century. Ultimately, American independence marked the beginning of the end of what had remained of Native American independence.

The American Revolution freed colonists from British rule and offered the first blow in what historians have called “the age of democratic revolutions.” The American Revolution was a global event. 53 Revolutions followed in France, then Haiti, and then South America. The American Revolution meanwhile wrought significant changes to the British Empire. Many British historians even use the Revolution as a dividing point between a “first British Empire” and a “second British Empire.” At home, however, the Revolution created a new nation-state, the United States of America. By September 1783, independence had been won. What the new nation would look like, however, was still very much up for grabs. In the 1780s, Americans would shape and then reshape that nation-state, first with the Articles of Confederation, ratified in 1781, and then with the Constitution in 1787 and 1788.

Historians have long argued over the causes and character of the American Revolution. Was the Revolution caused by British imperial policy or by internal tensions within the colonies? Were colonists primarily motivated by constitutional principles, ideals of equality, or economic self-interest? Was the Revolution radical or conservative? But such questions are hardly limited to historians. From Abraham Lincoln’s use of the Declaration of Independence in the Gettysburg Address to twenty-first-century Tea Party members wearing knee breeches, the Revolution has remained at the center of American political culture. Indeed, how one understands the Revolution often dictates how one defines what it means to be American.

The Revolution was not won by a few founding fathers. Men and women of all ranks contributed to the colonies’ most improbable victory, from the commoners who protested the Stamp Act to the women who helped organize boycotts against the Townshend duties; from the men, Black and white, who fought in the army to the women who contributed to its support. The Revolution, however, did not aim to end all social and civic inequalities in the new nation, and, in the case of Native Americans, it created new inequalities. But over time, the Revolution’s rhetoric of equality, as encapsulated in the Declaration of Independence, helped highlight some of those inequalities and became a shared aspiration for future social and political movements, including, among others, the abolitionist and women’s rights movements of the nineteenth century, the suffragist and civil rights movements of the twentieth century, and the gay rights movement of the twenty-first century.

1. George R. T. Hewes, A retrospect of the Boston Tea-party, 1834

George R.T. Hewes wrote the following reminiscence of the Boston Tea Party almost 61 years after it occurred. It is likely that his memories included more than a few stories he picked up well after 1773. Nonetheless Hews provides a highly detailed account of this important event.

2. Thomas Paine calls for American independence ,  1776

Britons had long understood themselves as the freest people on earth, blessed with a limited monarchy and an enlightened parliament. Paine’s pamphlet offered a very different portrayal of the British government. His criticisms swept across the North American continent and generated widespread support for American independence. 

3. Declaration of Independence, 1776

It is hard to overstate the significance of the Declaration of Independence. Designed as a measured justification for the severing of ties with Britain, the document has also functioned as a transformative piece of political philosophy. Most of the conflicts of American history from this point forward emerged from attempts to understand and implement what it means to believe “all men are created equal.” 

4. Women in South Carolina experience occupation, 1780

The British faced the difficult task of fighting a war without pushing more colonists into the hands of the revolutionaries. As a result, the Revolutionary War included little direct attacks on civilians, but that does not mean that civilians did not suffer. The following account from Eliza Wilkinson describes the stress faced by non-combatants who had to face the British army. 

5. Oneida declaration of neutrality, 1775

The Oneida nation, one of the Six Nations of the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois), issued a formal declaration of neutrality on June 19, 1775 to the governor of Connecticut after the imperial crisis between Great Britain and their North American colonies erupted into violence. This declaration hints at the Oneida conceptions of their own sovereignty among the Six Nations confederacy, the independence of other Native American nations, and how the Oneida understand the conflict as a war “between two brothers.” Samuel Kirkland, a missionary living in Iroquois country, interpreted and transcribed the Oneida’s words and sent them to Governor Jonathan Trumbull of Connecticut.

6. Boston King recalls fighting for the British and securing his freedom, 1798

Boston King was born into slavery in South Carolina in 1760. He escaped to the British Army during their invasion of South Carolina in 1780. He served as a Loyalist in the British Army, and participated in several important battles. Although captured, and once again enslaved by the Americans, King was able to escape to the British again, who secured his freedom by sending him and other Black Loyalists to Canada. Many Black colonists sought freedom by joining with the British, with estimates as high as 5,000. King later became a missionary and one of the first Black Canadian settlers of Sierra Leone in West Africa.

7. Abigail and John Adams converse on women’s rights, 1776

The American Revolution invited a reconsideration of all social inequalities. Abigail Adams, in this letter to her husband John Adams, asked her husband to “remember the ladies” in any new laws he may create. In his reply, John Adams treated this sentiment as a joke, demonstrating the limits of revolutionary liberty.  

8. American Revolution cartoon, 1782

Political cartoons provide insight into public opinion and the decisions made by politicians. These cartoons became an important medium for voicing criticism and dissent during the American Revolution. In this 1782 cartoon, the British lion faces a spaniel (Spain), a rooster (France), a rattlesnake (America), and a pug dog (Netherlands). Though the caption predicts Britain’s success, it illustrates that Britain faced challenges –and therefore drains on their military and treasury—from more than just the American rebels.

9. Drawings of the uniforms of the American Revolution, 1781

American soldiers came from a variety of backgrounds and had numerous reasons for fighting with the American army. Jean-Baptiste-Antoine DeVerger, a French sublieutenant at the Battle of Yorktown, painted this watercolor soon after that battle and chose to depict four men in men military dress: an African American soldier from the 2nd Rhode Island Regiment, a man in the homespun of the militia, another wearing the common “hunting shirt” of the frontier, and the French soldier on the end.

This chapter was edited by Michael Hattem, with content contributions by James Ambuske, Alexander Burns, Joshua Beatty, Christina Carrick, Christopher Consolino, Michael Hattem, Timothy C. Hemmis, Joseph Moore, Emily Romeo, and Christopher Sparshott.

Recommended citation: James Ambuske et al., “The American Revolution,” Michael Hattem, ed., in The American Yawp , eds. Joseph Locke and Ben Wright (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2018).

Recommended Reading

• Bailyn, Bernard. The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1967.
• Berkin, Carol. Revolutionary Mothers: Women in the Struggle for America’s Independence. New York: Knopf, 2005.
• Breen, T. H. The Marketplace of Revolution: How Consumer Politics Shaped American Independence. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004.
• Carp, Benjamin L. Rebels Rising: Cities and the American Revolution. New York: Oxford University Press, 2007.
• DuVal, Kathleen. Independence Lost: Lives on the Edge of the American Revolution. New York: Random House, 2015.
• Egerton, Douglas R. Death or Liberty: African Americans and Revolutionary America. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008.
• Eustace, Nicole. Passion Is the Gale: Emotion, Power, and the Coming of the American Revolution. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008.
• Fliegelman, Jay. Prodigals and Pilgrims: The American Revolution Against Patriarchal Authority 1750–1800 . New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985.
• Gould, Eliga. Among the Powers of the Earth: The American Revolution and the Making of a New World Empire. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012.
• Greene, Jack P. The Constitutional Origins of the American Revolution . New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010.
• Holton, Woody. Forced Founders: Indians, Debtors, Slaves, and the Making of the American Revolution in Virginia. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999.
• Jasanoff, Maya. Liberty’s Exiles: American Loyalists in the Revolutionary World. New York: Knopf, 2011.
• Kamensky, Jane. A Revolution in Color: The World of John Singleton Copley. New York: Norton, 2016.
• Kerber, Linda K. Women of the Republic: Intellect and Ideology in Revolutionary America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980.
• Knott, Sarah. Sensibility and the American Revolution. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009.
• Landers, Jane G. Atlantic Creoles in the Age of Revolutions. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010.
• Maier, Pauline. American Scripture: Making the Declaration of Independence. New York: Knopf, 1997.
• ———. From Resistance to Revolution: Colonial Radicals and the Development of American Opposition to Britain, 1765–1776. New York: Vintage Books, 1974.
• Nash, Gary B. The Unknown American Revolution: The Unruly Birth of Democracy and the Struggle to Create America. New York: Viking, 2005.
• Norton, Mary Beth. Liberty’s Daughters: The Revolutionary Experience of American Women, 1750–1800. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1980.
• O’Shaughnessy, Andrew Jackson. The Men Who Lost America: British Leadership, the American Revolution, and the Fate of the Empire. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013.
• Schiff, Stacy. A Great Improvisation: Franklin, France, and the Birth of America. New York: Thorndike Press, 2005.
• Waldstreicher, David. Slavery’s Constitution: From Revolution to Ratification. New York: Hill and Wang, 2009.
• Wood, Gordon S. The Radicalism of the American Revolution. New York: Vintage Books, 1992.
• Young, Alfred F., and Gregory Nobles. Whose American Revolution Was It? Historians Interpret the Founding. New York: New York University Press, 2011.
• Benjamin Rush to Ebenezer Hazard, October 22, 1768, in L. H. Butterfield, ed., Letters of Benjamin Rush , 2 vols. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1951), vol. 1, 68. [ ↩ ]
• Jack P. Greene, The Constitutional Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, UK: New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010). [ ↩ ]
• James Otis, The Rights of the Colonies Asserted and Proved (Boston: Edes and Gill, 1764), 52, 38. [ ↩ ]
• Greene, Constitutional Origins of the American Revolution , 118. [ ↩ ]
• Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1967). [ ↩ ]
• Jack P. Greene, Pursuits of Happiness: The Social Development of Early Modern British Colonies and the Formation of American Culture (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988), 170–171. Also see John Murrin, “Anglicizing an American Colony: The Transformation of Provincial Massachusetts,” PhD diss., Yale University, 1966. [ ↩ ]
• Daniel Dulany, Considerations on the Propriety of Imposing Taxes in the British Colonies, for the Purpose of Raising a Revenue, by Act of Parliament. The Second Edition (Annapolis, MD: Jonas Green, 1765), 34. For a 1766 London reprint, see https://archive.org/details/cihm_20394 , accessed April 24, 2018. [ ↩ ]
• Newport Mercury , June 24, 1765. This version was also reprinted in newspapers in New York, Boston, Philadelphia, and Maryland. [ ↩ ]
• Proceedings of the Congress at New-York (Annapolis, MD: Jonas Green, 1766). [ ↩ ]
• Dulany,  Considerations on the Propriety of imposing Taxes in the British Colonies , 8. [ ↩ ]
• “The Colonist’s Advocate: III, 11 January 1770,” Founders Online, National Archives. http://founders.archives.gov/documents/Franklin/01-17-02-0009 , last modified June 29, 2017. [ ↩ ]
• George Canning, A Letter to the Right Honourable Wills Earl of Hillsborough, on the Connection Between Great Britain and Her American Colonies (London: T. Becket, 1768), 9. [ ↩ ]
• “New York, October 31, 1765,” New-York Gazette, or Weekly Mercury , November 7, 1765. [ ↩ ]
• “Resolution of Non-Importation made by the Citizens of Philadelphia,” October 25, 1765, mss., Historical Society of Pennsylvania. http://digitalhistory.hsp.org/pafrm/doc/resolution-non-importation-made-citizens-philadelphia-october-25-1765 . For the published notice of the resolution, see “Philadelphia, November 7, 1765,” broadside, “Pennsylvania Stamp Act and Non-Importation Resolutions Collection,” American Philosophical Society, Philadelphia, PA. [ ↩ ]
• “The Petition of the London Merchants to the House of Commons,” in Prologue to Revolution: Sources and Documents on the Stamp Act Crisis, 1764–1766 , ed. Edmund S. Morgan (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1959), 130–131. [ ↩ ]
• Governor Francis Bernard to Lord Halifax, August 15, 1765, in ibid., 107. [ ↩ ]
• For Hutchinson’s own account of the events, see Thomas Hutchinson to Richard Jackson, August 30, 1765, in The Correspondence of Thomas Hutchinson, Volume 1: 1740–1766 , ed. John W. Tyler (Boston: Colonial Society of Massachusetts, 2014), 291–294. [ ↩ ]
• Documents Relative to the Colonial History of the State of New-York, procured in Holland, England, and France , 13 vols., ed. Edmund O’Callaghan (Albany, NY: Weed, Parsons, 1856), vol. 7, 770. https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Btm5M84IMAA4MCY.png:large , accessed April 24, 2018. [ ↩ ]
• “The Declaratory Act,” The Avalon Project: Documents in Law, History, and Diplomacy. http://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/declaratory_act_1766.asp , accessed April 24, 2018. [ ↩ ]
• “Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania, to the Inhabitants of the British Colonies. Letter II,” Pennsylvania Gazette , December 10, 1767. [ ↩ ]
• “Address to the Ladies,” Boston Post-Boy , November 16, 1767; Boston Evening-Post , February 12, 1770. Many female contributions to political commentary took the form of poems and drama, as in the poetry of Hannah Griffitts and satirical plays by Mercy Otis Warren. [ ↩ ]
• Carol Berkin, Revolutionary Mothers: Women in the Struggle for America’s Independence (New York: Knopf, 2005), 17–18. [ ↩ ]
• New York Gazette, or Weekly Post-Boy , June 18, July 9, 16, 1770. [ ↩ ]
• Pennsylvania Chronicle , September 27, 1773. For an example of how fast news and propaganda was spreading throughout the colonies, this piece was reprinted in Massachusetts Gazette , October 4, 1773; New-Hampshire Gazette, and Historical Chronicle , October 15, 1773; and Virginia Gazette , October 21, 1773. [ ↩ ]
• Massachusetts Gazette, and Boston Post-Boy , November 29, 1773. [ ↩ ]
• Boston Gazette , December 20, 1773. [ ↩ ]
• Virginia Gazette , November 3, 1774; Cynthia A. Kierner, “The Edenton Ladies: Women, Tea, and Politics in Revolutionary North Carolina,” in North Carolina Women: Their Lives and Times , ed. Michele Gillespie and Sally G. McMillen (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2014), 12–33. [ ↩ ]
• Ellen Hartigan-O’Connor, The Ties That Buy: Women and Commerce in Revolutionary America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009), 178–184. [ ↩ ]
• Ray Raphael, The First American Revolution: Before Lexington and Concord (New York: New Press, 2002), 59–168. [ ↩ ]
• American Archives: Fourth Series Containing a Documentary History of the English Colonies in North America , ed. Peter Force (Washington, D.C.: Clarke and Force, 1837), vol. 1, 913–916. https://archive.org/stream/AmericanArchives-FourthSeriesVolume1-ContainingADocumentaryHistory/AaSeries4VolumeI#page/n455/mode/2up , accessed April 24, 2018. [ ↩ ]
• “From Benjamin Franklin to Jonathan Shipley, 7 July 1775,” Founders Online, National Archives. http://founders.archives.gov/documents/Franklin/01-22-02-0057 , last modified June 29, 2017. [ ↩ ]
• Gt. Brit. Soveriengs, Etc., “His Majesty’s Most Gracious Speech to Both Houses of Parliament, on Friday, October 27, 1775 . . . New York? 1775].” https://www.loc.gov/item/rbpe.10803800/ , accessed April 24, 2018. [ ↩ ]
• Thomas Paine, Common Sense (Philadelphia: W. T. and Bradford, 1776). https://www.gutenberg.org/files/147/147-h/147-h.htm , accessed April 24, 2018. [ ↩ ]
• Pennsylvania Evening Post , September 21, 1776. [ ↩ ]
• Journals of the Continental Congress, 1774–1789 , 34 vols. (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1904–1937), vol. 4, 342. http://memory.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/r?ammem/hlaw:@field(DOCID+@lit(jc004109 . [ ↩ ]
• “Report & the Resolution for Independancy Agreed to July 2d. 1776,” Papers of the Continental Congress, No. 23, folio 17, National Archives, Washington, DC. http://www.archives.gov/exhibits/american_originals/declarat.html . [ ↩ ]
• Journals of the Continental Congress 5: 510–516. [ ↩ ]
• For more on the process of writing the Declaration of Independence, see Pauline Maier, American Scripture: Making the Declaration of Independence (New York: Knopf, 1997). [ ↩ ]
• Barnet Schecter, The Battle for New York: The City at the Heart of the American Revolution (New York: Walker, 2002). [ ↩ ]
• David Hackett Fischer, Washington’s Crossing (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004). [ ↩ ]
• Richard M. Ketchum, Saratoga: Turning Point of America’s Revolutionary War (New York: Holt, 1997). [ ↩ ]
• For more on Franklin’s diplomacy in France, see Stacy Schiff, A Great Improvisation: Franklin, France, and the Birth of America (New York: Thorndike Press, 2005). [ ↩ ]
• David K. Wilson, The Southern Strategy: Britain’s Conquest of South Carolina and Georgia, 1775–1780 (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2005). [ ↩ ]
• Richard M. Ketchum, Victory at Yorktown: The Campaign That Won the Revolution (New York: Holt, 2004). [ ↩ ]
• Woody Holton, Abigail Adams (New York: Free Press, 2009), 208–217. [ ↩ ]
• Joy Day Buel and Richard Buel, The Way of Duty: A Woman and Her Family in Revolutionary America (New York: Norton, 1995), 145–170. [ ↩ ]
• For discussion of these numerical estimates, see Gary Nash’s introduction to Benjamin Quarles, The Negro in the American Revolution (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, Press, 1996), xxiii. [ ↩ ]
• Willi Paul Adams, The First American Constitutions: Republican Ideology and the Making of the State Constitutions in the Revolutionary Era (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2001), 126–146. [ ↩ ]
• Gordon S. Wood, The Creation of the American Republic, 1776–1787 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1969). [ ↩ ]
• Maya Jasanoff, Liberty’s Exiles: American Loyalists in the Revolutionary World (New York: Knopf, 2011). [ ↩ ]
• Alan Gilbert, Black Patriots and Loyalists: Fighting for Emancipation in the War of Independence (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012). [ ↩ ]
• Ira Berlin, Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 217–289. [ ↩ ]
• For a summary of the global aspects of the Revolution, see Ted Brackemyre, “The American Revolution: A Very European Ordeal,” U.S. History Scene , http://ushistoryscene.com/article/am-rev-european-ordeal , accessed April 24, 2018. [ ↩ ]

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Introduction: American Revolutions

Edward G. Gray is professor of history at Florida State University. He is the author of New World Babel: Languages and Nations in Early America (1999) and The Making of John Ledyard: Empire and Ambition in the Life of an Early American Traveler (2007). He is presently writing a book about the Atlantic radical Thomas Paine and his quest to build an iron bridge.

Jane Kamensky is Harry S. Truman Professor of American Civilization and chair of the history department at Brandeis University. Her books include The Exchange Artist: A Tale of High-Flying Speculation and America’s First Banking Collapse (2008) and Governing the Tongue: The Politics of Speech in Early New England (1997). She is also the coauthor of the novel Blindspot, written jointly with Jill Lepore (2008); and of the forthcoming tenth edition of A People and a Nation (2014). She is currently at work on a book about American artists in London during the age of revolution.

• Published: 28 December 2012
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The American Revolution is a significant event in the history of the United States, yet has generated little interest among academic historians. This stems from two seemingly irreconcilable interpretations of the formation of the United States. Some view the Revolution as an intellectual event, while many social historians see it as a fundamentally popular and even populist revolt in which self-interested elites were challenged by ordinary people. This book explores what the American Revolution means at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Readers in the United States consider the histories of the war between Britain and her mainland North American colonies as origins stories. America's Revolution was Britain's American War, an episode in the entangled history of a vast and growing empire. It offers a continental perspective on the Revolution, focusing on contested North American frontiers. The book suggests a major shift in the core narrative of the Revolution, showing how the familiar tale of money and politics—taxation and representation—is joined and made more complex by stories focused on territorial sovereignty and native dispossession.

Few events in American history attract as much attention as the Revolution. Politicians routinely quote Thomas Paine, Thomas Jefferson, and Patrick Henry. Schools, museums, the press, and the public commemorate significant Revolutionary-era dates. The best-seller list seems never to be without at least one title that references America’s founding and its “fathers.”

Among academic historians, however, the Revolution has come to occupy a distinctly less prominent place than it held a generation ago. Fewer courses are framed around the subject; fewer journal articles and monographs engage it; fewer dissertations plumb its depths. There are a number of explanations for this apparent shift in interest. In recent years, for instance, students of premodern North America have moved away from questions about the origins of the United States and toward explorations of larger Atlantic or continental arenas. 1 There is another cause as well, a much older one. At least since the 1960s, and arguably long before, scholars of the period have struggled to reconcile two seemingly irreconcilable interpretations of the formation of the United States. Some insist that the Revolution is best understood as an intellectual event, driven by ideas about liberty, property, and tyranny articulated by a select group of elite founders. By contrast, many social historians see the Revolution not as the work of remote thinkers and theorists, but as a fundamentally popular and even populist revolt in which ordinary people challenged self-interested elites. For decades, a pitched battle between these two interpretive camps yielded ever-more Manichean and absolute postures. For some, as the intellectual historian Daniel Rodgers has written, the terms of scholarly debate became “reflexively dualistic: ideas versus behavior; rhetoric versus ‘the concrete realities of life’; propaganda and mystification on the one hand, the real stuff on the other.” 2 No wonder many young scholars turned toward less highly charged subject matter as they sought to enter the profession.

The tension between a revolution of cultural elites and one of ordinary people lingers. But in recent years, historians have identified new angles of vision that transcend that tension. With new frameworks to test and refine, scholars have returned to the Revolution that remade America, remaking the Revolution in turn. Cultural historians have begun to find meaning in language, sentiment, and the material world that transcends the elite-plebeian dichotomy. 3 Institutional historians—historians of law, of business, of the military, of government, of the household, and others—have likewise found compelling ways to capture the full social and intellectual spectrum in one revolutionary story. 4 Atlantic and imperial historians place the American founding in a broader transnational context, considering its place among a series of transformations that shaped life in the Atlantic littoral. 5 In place of a singular event, directed solely at the formation of the United States, and thus subject to monocausal explanations of its origins and results, we confront a series of complex and interlinked historical processes: the triumph of one empire over its European rivals, followed by a series of rebellions within that empire, some of which converged in the creation of a new United States.

Drawing on this new work, assembling scholars from several generations, trained in multiple disciplines, with varying national and regional specializations, the Oxford Handbook of the American Revolution seeks to capture the fullest sense of what the American Revolution means at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Methodologically pluralist, even promiscuous, this Handbook is crowded with unfamiliar as well as better-known characters, male and female, native and Anglo, “British” and “American,” leaders and ordinary people. Elites come down to earth through explorations of their material lives. “The people” wrestle with lofty ideas as well as pressing economic interests. Revolutions are waged among sometimes-reluctant patriots and often-ambivalent loyalists, with many neutrals occupying a spectrum of positions in between. The walls between the shifting sides are thin, even permeable. Many of the combatants emerge as hesitant creatures of empire rather than zealous progenitors of a nation.

Looking West, Looking East

For readers in the United States, histories of the war between Britain and her mainland North American colonies are, at their deepest level, origins stories, which is one reason so many books about the Revolution have the word birth in their titles. 6 The story of the Revolution is our book of Genesis. Taking a god’s-eye view from blockaded Boston harbor or Carpenters’ Hall in Philadelphia, we wait for the United States to emerge from dark and formless void. Dawn breaks, and a string of glorious begats follows; Washington, Hamilton, Madison, and Adams stride through our pages like gods in tricorn hats.

This view from America’s port cities may be stirring, but it is necessarily incomplete—provincial by definition. The chapters that make up this volume often look toward an emerging United States from the vantage point of the thirteen rebellious colonies. But they take a range of other views as well, facing west from London, north from the West Indies, and east from Indian country. Touching down in places as far-flung as France and Poland, Jamaica and Sierra Leone, the country of the Six Nations and Bengal, this volume returns the American Revolution to the world and the world to the American Revolution.

America’s Revolution was Britain’s American War: a series of fateful moves in the high-stakes chess game of the European great powers, and a chapter in the entangled history of a vast and growing empire. In crucial respects, London looked first to Paris and Madrid, then to Brussels, Amsterdam, and Vienna. “The history of eighteenth-century Britain was in Europe,” the English historian Brendan Simms proclaims. “Foreign policy, rather than taxation, popular unrest, religion, elections or colonial expansion, was the central political preoccupation” of the realm. 7 However difficult to govern, America—especially continental America—was something of a sideshow. The American War—like the French and Indian War before it, and King George’s War before that—was the far western front in the centuries-long battle for political and military supremacy on the European continent. In the regular course of human events, Whitehall was far more anxious about Versailles than about Virginia.

Of course, the view from London did not end in Europe, but extended east and farther south as well as west, following the sinews of power to the ragged edges of empire. As Maya Jasanoff has argued, Clive’s victory over the nawab of Bengal in 1757, not Wolfe’s victory over Montcalm’s forces at Quebec two years later, “may well have been the defining imperial battle” of the Seven Years’ War. 8 After its stunning victory in that global conflict, Britain’s territorial claims stretched from Fort Bute on the Mississippi River to Fort William at Calcutta. By 1770, the first voyage of Captain James Cook had pushed the imperial frontier all the way to Botany Bay. An empire so vast came at a steep cost. The British government struggled to govern polities as diverse as the “natives of Hindostan and those of Virginia ,” as Edmund Burke noted in the 1770s. 9 One size fit few. Efforts to reform the empire in the 1760s—through taxes and trade prohibitions—were understood by American patriots to be exceptional and punitive. In fact, they were acts of inclusion : attempts to bring the Americans into an increasingly well-fenced and carefully tended imperial fold. “For all their cocksure certainty,” Eliga Gould has written, “the British saw their actions toward the colonies as fundamentally pacific.” 10 Their purpose, at least in the eyes of imperial reformers, was to bring greater harmony to the full, vast range of British imperial possessions, and greater security to the British subjects who lived in them. The view from North America was different, and often opposed; one nation’s pacifism was another’s bellicosity. The war came, and shockingly, the Continentals won it. But many British officials understood the loss of the rebellious North American colonies less as a fatal blow than as the high price of success, an object lesson that would prove instructive in South Asia, the Antipodes, and Africa.

Britain lost only parts of America—thirteen of twenty-six colonies on the western side of the Atlantic. 11 The Union Jack continued to fly over great swaths of the North American mainland, from Halifax to the upper Mississippi. For decades, the continent simmered with tension between those who professed fealty to King George and those who declared themselves independent citizens of the American republic. In 1812, those tensions boiled over in a second Anglo-American civil war. 12

Britain also retained the islands of the West Indies, the glittering jewels in the empire’s crown. Long before the Revolution, the price fetched by Caribbean sugar dwarfed the value of all other streams of colonial tribute: tobacco, rice, and indigo from Virginia and the Carolinas; wheat and naval stores from the mid-Atlantic; lumber and salted fish from New England and the Maritime provinces. Losing the colonies from New Hampshire to Georgia was, in part, the cost of defending the Greater and Lesser Antilles—a cost the British government was willing to bear. 13

The strategic and economic importance of Jamaica, Barbados, and Britain’s other Caribbean possessions was proportional not only to the sugar they produced, but to the African men and women they consumed. The Crown’s commitment to holding the West Indies reminds us of the centrality of the Atlantic slave system to the metropolis and its colonies. What David Brion Davis decades ago labeled “the problem of slavery in the Age of Revolution” became the central moral dilemma of the age, on both sides of the Atlantic. 14 “How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?” Samuel Johnson pondered in 1775. Slavery, not taxation, was the real tyranny, he insisted. 15 The pervasive language of liberty, along with the disruptions of wartime, energized the freedom struggle of Africans and their descendants in the New World. A vocal minority of men and women of European descent—particularly in the former colonies that depended least upon slave labor—likewise became troubled by the existence of slavery in a land where nature’s god had created all men equal. Meanwhile, invoking their rights to property, slaveholders in the plantation colonies redoubled their commitment to a system of forced labor that had once seemed natural, but now required an increasingly elaborate legal and intellectual defense.

In addition to national, imperial, and Atlantic views, many of the chapters in this Handbook offer what we might call a continental perspective on the Revolution, placing contests over the lands of the North American interior front and center. These struggles were not new in the 1770s. Britain, France, and their native allies and enemies had warred over the heart of the continent numerous times, most spectacularly in the great war for empire that concluded in 1763. So, too, indigenous Americans, settler-colonists, and speculators had skirmished over land claims in the backcountry for generations, and did so with increasing frequency after the Peace of Paris transferred control of all lands east of the Mississippi to Britain. In what Daniel Richter calls “the shared Euro-Indian transatlantic imperial world” before 1763, the balance of power in inland North America had been complex, shifting, and multisided. 16 Native leaders held many trump cards in the game. After 1763, the game grew simpler and starker. In Indian country as in the colonies, positions hardened and new lines were drawn. A new generation of indigenous prophets called for pan-Indian solidarity among the continent’s “red” men, while a new generation of settler-speculators rallied “whites” against Indians. For some Euro-Americans, anti-Indian hatred and the rejection of the British monarch came to be one and the same. The Declaration of Independence thus spoke in soaring terms of the equality of all humanity, yet also accused George III of having “endeavored to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers…merciless Indian savages.” 17

By focusing on contested North American frontiers, several of the Handbook chapters suggest a significant shift in the core narrative of the Revolution. The familiar tale of money and politics—taxation and representation—is joined and made more complex by stories focused on territorial sovereignty and native dispossession. At a treaty conference in Easton, Pennsylvania, in 1757, Teedyuscung, a leader of the eastern Delaware, summarized this facet of the conflict succinctly: “The Land is the Cause of our Differences,” he explained—“that is our being unhappily turned out of the land is the cause.” That year the Delaware won concessions by pitting the interests of the “Great King across the Water” against those of colonial governors nearer at hand. After the Seven Years’ War, room for such negotiations diminished sharply. British settlers poured into the backcountry. Teedyuscung was murdered in 1763, in an arson attack on his cabin that spread to consume twenty other buildings in the town of Wyoming, on the banks of the Susquehanna River, in Pennsylvania’s northeastern corner. Warriors from the Iroquois Confederacy were blamed for the killing, but historians now think the likelier culprits were agents of Connecticut’s Susquehanna Land Company, who less than two weeks after Teedyuscung’s death began settling the acres on which his village had stood. 18 In the years ahead, the war between natives, settlers, and rulers over their competing claims to American territory would overspread much of the continent.

American origins stories need new settings, then, and new narratives as well. A focus on the worlds beyond what came, in the nineteenth century, to be called “the original thirteen colonies” reminds us that there was far more pluribus than unum in colonial North America, even in British North America. The struggle to craft a nation from this fluid, polyglot, bumptious multitude was protracted and violent, a bloody civil war that raged from Halifax to Havana and embroiled much of Europe from 1775 through 1782.

The Long Revolution

If the where of the Revolution has become increasingly ambiguous, the when likewise presents new challenges. Although there are some very clear turning points—the end of the Seven Years’ War (1763), the Stamp Act (1765), the fighting at Lexington and Concord (1775), the formal declaring of independence (1776), the Peace of Paris (1783), the ratification of a federal constitution (1789)—the time line for the Revolutionary era remains elusive. But one impulse seems clear: contemporary scholars are inclined to see the American Revolution less in terms of a series of discreet, momentous turning points and more in terms of the longue durée : a swath of historical time, lasting half a century or more, characterized by many of the phenomena and processes commonly attributed to a much narrower Revolutionary time line. Many of the changes scholars once made synonymous with the Revolution started much earlier, or were completed much later, or both.

Take American independence, for example. For decades before the Seven Years’ War, many imperial thinkers had argued that the combined forces of economy, geography, and demography made the eventual independence of the American colonies inevitable. Yet for even the most rebellious British colonists in the 1770s, prospect of independence seemed terrifying. As late as March 1776, John Adams called “Independency…an Hobgoblin, of so frightful Mein, that it would throw a delicate Person into Fits to look it in the Face.” 19 The congeries of men and women who mustered the courage to stare that hobgoblin down were shifting and fluid in their composition and their interests; their unity was sometimes opportunistic and often illusory.

In sum, the patriots’ “glorious cause” comprised many causes, which only sometimes intersected. The declaration in July 1776 that “these United Colonies” were and ought to be “Free and Independent States” was far more surprising than it was predestined.

For people of color, women, and white men without property, it was perhaps less surprising than disappointing. For these Americans, independence remained an abstraction for decades—and in some cases centuries—after the Revolution’s end. Relatively few of them came away from the Revolutionary years with all that republican citizenship promised. Many lacked the right to vote or to hold property; a substantial minority continued to be considered as property, human chattel in an empire for liberty, as Jefferson called it. Indeed, in some respects there seemed to be two distinct revolutions—one democratic, plural, and plebeian; the second, controlled, uniform, and elite. In many spheres of life, from law and public policy to marriage and sexuality, the new nation experienced what Rosemarie Zagarri has called a “Revolutionary backlash” in the 1780s and 1790s. 20

For the United States as a nation among nations, independence was similarly fraught. America came into being in part because it was recognized as such by powerful European states. But what exactly did this recognition mean? Did the United States in fact conclude its Revolution a free and independent member of the community of Atlantic nations? As with so many other cherished chestnuts of national memory, upon close examination this one turns out to be only partly true. The United States may have been independent of the legislative authority of Parliament or the sovereign authority of the monarch, but they were not ultimately free from the British Empire.

Perhaps the most profound indication of just how tenuous American independence was comes from the framers of the Constitution. Although they agreed on very little, one thing was clear to virtually all the participants in the laborious process of reform that began in the spring of 1787: under the Articles of Confederation, the Continental Congress would be unable to insure the security of the new American republic. Much like the small, weak states that preceded them, the United States would have to form a much stronger union. As James Madison observed, throughout history “feeble communities, independent of each other, have resorted to Union…for the common safety ag[ain]st powerful neighbors, and for the preservation of peace and justice among themselves.” 21 The very foundation of America’s federal republic, that is, was partly driven by the tenuousness of American independence.

If many scholars now approach American independence with a certain amount of caution, they insist upon similar complexity when it comes to the matter of the era’s politics and government. Here, too, contemporary historians find continuity where a generation ago historians more often tended to find rupture. To be sure, the state and federal republics the Americans created rested on a profound redistribution of political authority. Yet the shift in power from the king-in-Parliament to the people had begun well before the Revolution’s first battles. In Massachusetts, for instance, that story is a long one—beginning decades before the Revolution and culminating in the kind of direct democracy that came to be practiced there as the colony became a state. In Virginia, new patterns of popular political participation emerged in the 1760s in response to local events, and shaped the political process that ultimately led to independence. In these and other colonial locales, much that is revolutionary about the American Revolution—the transfer of governing authority from an imperial regime to the people themselves—had begun years before independence was actually declared.

When it comes to political change, exactly what can be attributed to the events that unfolded between 1775 and 1789? The question becomes even more pressing when we recognize, as Bernard Bailyn, Gordon Wood, and others began to do in the 1960s, that the ideologies and conceptual frames through which many Americans interpreted Revolutionary events had their origins in late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century Britain. 22 From the English Civil War through the early years of the Hanoverian dynasty, Britons in the home islands plumbed the shortcomings of monarchy as thoroughly as did British subjects in the distant American colonies—indeed, more so. As the eighteenth-century Scottish philosopher David Hume observed in 1742, well before the first stirrings of revolution in America, “the mere name of King commands little respect; and to talk of a king as God’s vice regent upon earth, or to give him any of these magnificent titles which formerly dazzled mankind, would but excite laughter in any one.” Few carried such thinking to the extreme of imagining a world without kings. But for the Americans, that leap was made possible, at least in part, by a transatlantic political culture that saw monarchs as no more sacred or divinely ordained than any other element of England’s mixed constitution. 23

If the republic Americans created emerged from the fertile soil of pre-Revolutionary Anglo-American political thought, how novel was the United States? Did its creation, as Thomas Paine famously hoped, in fact “begin the world over again?” 24 For many observers, Paine included, the answer suggests historical continuity as much as revolutionary rupture. The Americans may not have created a constitutional monarchy built upon the economic foundation of overseas colonies. But they did create an empire—not a colonizing, oceanic empire like its British counterpart, but an empire nonetheless. Through war, settlement, and trade, the new nation slowly extended its territorial claims across North America. To the chagrin of many Americans, the Continental Congress and the union that replaced it only seemed to encourage this empire building. As one opponent of the Constitution warned, “It is the opinion of the ablest writers on the subject, that no extensive empire can be governed upon republican principles, and that such a government will degenerate to a despotism.” 25

In the immediate aftermath of the war, such fears were compounded by the simple fact that American empire faced an imperial arena populated by old hands. Britain, in particular, would come out of the Revolution with its imperial ambitions almost fully intact. The “American War” had little enduring impact on politics in Britain. 26 With the help of the French Revolution and America’s former friend, Edmund Burke, the British government was able to quash most reformist sentiment at home and freely pursue imperial ambitions abroad. Indeed, the British Empire may actually have emerged from the American War a stronger, more nimble entity. For a succession of American administrations, struggling to fend off British intrusions in the far West and at sea, it may at times have seemed as if the American colonies’ subordinate status as colonies had been only nominally challenged. As Eliga Gould has suggested, Britain retained in America “an informal empire, one based on the commercial supremacy of British ships and goods, on regional networks of British satellites and tributary allies, and on Britain’s ability to impose its own conceptions of international law and order on other governments and peoples.” 27 American independence remained incomplete independence for decades, if not for centuries. Novus ordo seclorum ? Yes and no.

An Ongoing Revolution

“The American Revolution was not a common event,” John Adams wrote to the Baltimore printer Hezekiah Niles in February 1818. “Its effects and consequences have been awful over a great part of the globe,” and rippled still. “But what do we mean by the American Revolution?” he asked. “Do we mean the American War?” Certainly not; “the Revolution was effected before the war commenced.” The Revolution was not won on the battlefield, or cemented in the halls of Congress. No, Adams argued, a “ radical change in the principles, opinions, sentiments, and affections of the people, was the real American Revolution. ” In place of the old hierarchical bonds that constituted British society, Americans had created new fraternal ones, linking human beings in a common polity.

Understanding this slow and subtle reformation “in the minds and hearts of the people” would be, Adams explained, the obligation of American historians. “By what means this great and important alteration in the religious, moral, political, and social character of the people of thirteen colonies, all distinct, unconnected, and independent of each other, was begun, pursued, and accomplished, it is surely interesting to humanity to investigate, and perpetuate to posterity.” Adams could imagine no better occupation for the “young gentlemen of letters in all the states, especially in the thirteen original states,” than “to undertake the laborious, but certainly interesting and amusing, task of searching and collecting all the records, pamphlets, newspapers, and even handbills which in any way contributed to change the temper and views of the people and compose them into an independent nation.” 28

At the end of Adams’s long and eventful life, fifty years to the day after the Declaration was signed, that labor had barely begun. Nearly two centuries later, ladies as well as gentlemen pursue it, in the original thirteen colonies, across the United States, and around the globe. Readers will find in this volume grounds for continued debate and discussion, as well as wide-ranging expertise and a healthy dose of good old-fashioned storytelling. Together and separately, these thirty-three chapters demonstrate that the American Revolution remains as vibrant and inviting a subject of scholarly inquiry as it was in John Adams’s day. In this Handbook and beyond, the work continues.

1. For examples of oceanic and hemispheric perspectives on the history of the Americas during the Revolutionary era see J. H. Elliott , Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in America, 1492–1830 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006), pt. 3 ; Kären Wigen et al. , “ Forum : Oceans of History,” American Historical Review 111, no. 3 (June 2006): 717–780 ; Eliga H. Gould , “Entangled Histories, Entangled Worlds: The English-Speaking Atlantic as a Spanish Periphery,” American Historical Review 112, no. 3 (2007): 764–786 ; and David Armitage , “Three Concepts of Atlantic History,” in The British Atlantic World, 1500–1800, ed. David Armitage and Michael J. Braddick (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 11–27 . The continental perspective is well represented in Alan Taylor , American Colonies: The Settling of North America (New York: Viking/Penguin, 2001), esp. pt. 3 ; and Daniel K. Richter , Before the Revolution: America’s Ancient Pasts (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011) .

2. Daniel T. Rodgers , “Republicanism: The Career of a Concept,” Journal of American History 79, no. 1 (June 1992): 25 . For evidence that little changed in the ensuing decade and a half see Thomas Slaughter , “Plus Ça Change…,” Reviews in American History 34, no. 3 (September 2007): 291–506 ; and Staunton Lynd et al. , “ Forum: Economics and American Independence,” William and Mary Quarterly , 3rd ser., vol. 68, no. 4 (October 2011): 597–656 .

3. For an exploration of recent developments in eighteenth-century American cultural history see Michael Meranze , “Culture and Governance: Reflections on the Cultural History of Eighteenth-Century British America,” William and Mary Quarterly , 3rd ser., vol. 65, no. 4 (October 2008): 713–744 .

4. Important implications of this return to institutional history are explored in William J. Novak , “The Myth of the ‘Weak’ American State,” American Historical Review 113, no. 3 (June 2008): 752–772 .

5. See, for examples, Eliga H. Gould and Peter Onuf , eds., Empire and Nation: The American Revolution in the Atlantic World (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005) ; David Armitage , The Declaration of Independence: A Global History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007) ; Wim Klooster , Revolutions in the Atlantic World: A Comparative History (New York: NYU Press, 2009) ; and David Armitage and Sanjay Subrahmanyam , eds., The Age of Revolutions in a Global Context (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010) .

6. The classic example is Edmund S. Morgan , The Birth of the Republic (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1956) ; but see also, more recently, works as different in their interpretations of the Revolution as Gordon S. Wood , The Idea of America: Reflections on the Birth of the United States (New York: Penguin, 2011) ; and Gary B. Nash , The Unknown American Revolution: The Unruly Birth of Democracy and the Struggle to Create America (New York: Viking/Penguin, 2005) . Many other titles contain the word “origins,” including, famously, Bernard Bailyn , The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967) ; and, more recently and ideologically opposed, Woody Holton , Unruly Americans and the Origins of the Constitution (New York: Hill & Wang, 2007) .

7. Brendan Simms , Three Victories and a Defeat: The Rise and Fall of the First British Empire, 1714–1783 (New York: Basic Books, 2009) , 1. See also H. T. Dickinson , ed., Britain and the American Revolution (New York: Longman, 1998) ; and Stephen Conway , The British Isles and the War of American Independence (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000) .

8. Maya Jasanoff , Edge of Empire: Lives, Culture, and Conquest in the East, 1750–1850 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2005), 20 .

9. Burke quoted in P. J. Marshall , The Making and Unmaking of Empires: Britain, India, and America c. 1750–1783 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 204 .

10. Eliga H. Gould, “Fears of War, Fantasies of Peace: British Politics and the Coming of the American Revolution,” in Gould and Onuf, Empire and Nation , 19–35, quotation at 20; see also Gould , The Persistence of Empire: British Political Culture in the Age of the American Revolution (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000) ; and Jack P. Greene , The Constitutional Origins of the American Revolution (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011) .

11. Andrew Jackson O’Shaughnessy , An Empire Divided: The American Revolution and the British Caribbean (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000) .

12. Alan Taylor , The Civil War of 1812 : American Citizens, British Subjects, Irish Rebels, and Indian Allies (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2010) ; Maya Jasanoff , Liberty’s Exiles: American Loyalists in the Revolutionary World (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2011) .

O’Shaughnessy, Empire Divided ; and David Geggus, “The Caribbean in the Age of Revolution,” in Armitage and Subrahmanyam, Age of Revolution , 83–100.

14. David Brion Davis , The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 1770–1823 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1975) . See also Christopher Leslie Brown , Moral Capital: The Foundations of British Abolitionism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006) . The classic statement of the vexed relationship between slavery and freedom in American history remains Edmund S. Morgan , American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia (New York: W. W. Norton, 1975) .

15.   Samuel Johnson , Taxation No Tyranny; An Answer to the Resolutions and Address of the American Congress (London: printed for T. Cadell, 1775), 89 .

16. Daniel K. Richter , Facing East from Indian Country: A Native History of North America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 188 .

17. Peter Silver , Our Savage Neighbors: How Indian War Transformed Early America (New York: W. W. Norton, 2007) ; and Nancy Shoemaker , A Strange Likeness: Becoming Red and White in Eighteenth-Century North America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004) . See also Colin G. Calloway , The Scratch of a Pen: 1763 and the Transformation of North America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006) .

18. Teedyuscung quoted in E. B. O’Callaghan , ed., Documents Relative to the Colonial History of the State of New-York: Procured in Holland, England, and France , vol. 7 (Albany, NY: Weed, Parsons and Co., Printers, 1856), 300–301 . On his death see Anthony F. C. Wallace , King of the Delawares: Teedyuscung, 1700–1763 (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1990), esp. 258–263 .

19. John Adams to Horatio Gates, Philadelphia, 23 March 1776, in Letters of Delegates to Congress, 1774–1789 , 26 vols. (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1976–2000), ed. Paul H. Smith , vol. 3, 429–432 . See also Benjamin H. Irvin, “Independence before and during the Revolution,” chapter 8, this volume.

20. Rosemarie Zagarri , Revolutionary Backlash: Women and Politics in the Early American Republic (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007) .

21. “Preface to the Debates in the Convention,” in James Madison , Notes of Debates in the Federal Convention of 1787 Reported by James Madison (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1966), 3 . See also Max M. Edling, “A More Perfect Union: The Framing and Ratification of the Constitution,” chapter 21, this volume.

22. Bailyn, Ideological Origins ; Gordon S. Wood , The Creation of the American Republic, 1776–1787 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1969) ; and Jack P. Greene , ed., The Reinterpretation of the American Revolution, 1763–1789 (New York: Harper & Row, 1968) .

23. Quoted in Hannah Arendt , On Revolution (1963; paperback ed., New York: Viking, 1965), 113 .

24. Common Sense , in Thomas Paine: Collected Writings, ed. Eric Foner (New York: Library of America, 1995), 52 .

25. James Winthrop , “The Agrippa Letters,” letter 4, December 3, 1787, excerpted in Colonies to Nation, 1763–1789: A Documentary History of the American Revolution , ed. Jack P. Greene (New York: W. W. Norton, 1975), 560 .

Dickinson, Britain and the American Revolution , esp. 20–22.

Eliga H. Gould, “The Empire That Britain Kept,” chapter 25, this volume.

Adams to Hezekiah Niles, February 13, 1818, in Works of John Adams , ed. Charles Francis Adams (1856), 10:282–283, emphasis in original. Available in the Online Library of Liberty, at http://oll.libertyfund.org/?option=com_staticxt&staticfile=show.php%3Ftitle=2127&chapter=193604&layout=html&Itemid=27 .

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Overview of the American Revolutionary War

John Trumball’s famous painting “The Surrender of General Burgoyne” at Saratoga resides at the U.S. Capitol.

For the better part of the 17th and 18th centuries, the relationship between Great Britain and her North American colonies was firm, robust, and peaceable. The colonies enjoyed a period of “salutary neglect”; meaning that the colonial governments were more or less able to self-govern without intervention from Parliament. This laissez-faire approach allowed the colonies to flourish financially, which in turn proved profitable for the mother country as well. However, this period of tranquility and prosperity would not last.

Great Britain had amassed an enormous debt following the French and Indian War; so, as a means to help alleviate at least some of the financial burden, they expected the American colonies to shoulder their share. Beginning in 1763, Great Britain instituted a series of parliamentary acts for taxing the American colonies. Though seemingly a reasonable course of action – considering the British had come to the defense of the colonies in the French and Indian War – many colonials were livid at the levying of taxes. From 1763 to 1776, Parliament, King George III , royal governors, and colonists clashed over regulations of trade, representation, and taxation. Despite the growing unrest, many Americans perceived war and independence as a last resort.

By 1775, however, tensions reached a boiling point. Both sides prepared for war as negotiations continued to falter. Fighting began outside of Boston in the spring of 1775 during a British raid to seize munitions at Lexington and Concord . British regulars arrived on the Lexington Green early on the morning of April 19 and discovered the town’s militia awaiting their arrival. The “minutemen” intended only a show of force, and were dispersing, when a shot rang out. The American War of Independence had officially begun.

The militia harassed the British all the way from Concord to Boston, and then surrounded the city. In an attempt to drive the colonials away from the city, British forces attacked the Americans at Breed’s Hill on June 17th, resulting in heavy casualties for the redcoats in the war’s first major battle. George Washington arrived that July to assume command of the American forces, organized as the Continental Army. Washington then forced 11,000 British soldiers to evacuate Boston the following March, when Henry Knox successfully led 12 artillery pieces from Fort Ticonderoga to Dorchester Heights overlooking the city below.

By the early spring of 1776, the war had expanded to other regions. At Moore’s Creek in North Carolina and Sullivan’s Island at Charleston, American forces stopped British invasions. After initial successes, particularly the capture of Fort Ticonderoga in upstate New York, an American invasion of Canada stalled and ended in failure at the end of the year. As 1775 rolled into 1776, the British rapidly built up forces in New York and Canada to strike back.

After a series of five consecutive defeats for Washington’s army at Long Island , Harlem Heights, White Plains , Fort Lee, and Fort Washington , the British captured New York City in the summer of 1776. Following the capture of the city, the British drove Washington’s army across New Jersey, winning several additional battles along their advance. That winter, however, Washington revived the American cause by winning spirited victories at Trenton and Princeton , New Jersey.

In 1777, the British launched two major offensives. In September, General William Howe captured Philadelphia, winning battles at Brandywine and Germantown . Despite the losses, the inexperienced soldiers of the Continental Army performed well and gained a measure of confidence, believing that they could very well stand up to the British. Then, in October, British General John Burgoyne invaded upstate New York via Canada, winning several initial victories. Later, however, his army became bogged down thanks in part to efforts of American militia units at Oriskany , Fort Stanwix , and Bennington. Then, after a stunning defeat in an open battle, Burgoyne surrendered his entire field army at Saratoga , New York.

The American victory at Saratoga was a turning point of the war, for it convinced the French monarchy that the Americans could actually defeat the British in battle. As a result, a formal military alliance was signed between the French and American governments in 1778, which entailed increased financial and military support. The alliance had even more positive implications for the Continental Army, because it forced the Parliament to funnel manpower and resources to fight the French across the globe, rather than sending them to North America.

That same winter, a few months prior to the formal signing of the alliance, Washington’s army retired to Valley Forge, not far from the British garrison in Philadelphia. While arriving rather disheveled, disheartened, and largely undisciplined, the army underwent a rigorous training program under the direction of Baron von Steuben . He instilled in the soldiers a sense of pride, resilience, and discipline, which transformed the army into a force that was capable of standing toe-to-toe with the British.

In 1778, the British consolidated their forces in New York and Canada and prepared to launch an invasion of the South. In the meantime, in the west, American forces under George Rogers Clark captured several British posts, culminating with a victory at Vincennes , Indiana, and the surrender of a much larger British force.

To the North, the British abandoned Philadelphia for New York with Washington hot on their heels. His army caught up to the redcoats at Monmouth , New Jersey, where an intense battle ensued. After arriving late to the battle and rallying his wavering troops, Washington made several defenses and counterattacks against the surging British force. Though inconclusive with no clear victor, the battle demonstrated the growing effectiveness of the Continental Army. Upon finally reaching New York, British forces never again ventured far from their secure base there.

In 1779, with fighting on a global scale and a stalemate developing in the North, the British began to focus their efforts on conquering the South, in hopes of quelling the rebellion once and for all. That autumn, British forces captured Savannah and Charleston and smashed General Gates’ army in Camden , South Carolina, forcing his army’s surrender. However, the Continental Army won battles at King’s Mountain and Cowpens , stemming the tide of British advance. Undeterred, the British army under General Charles Lord Cornwallis then moved across North Carolina before fighting its way into Virginia.

While General Cornwallis fought his way into Virginia, a brutal civil war erupted among the civilian population of the Carolinas. General Nathanael Greene recaptured most of South Carolina, fighting battles at Ninety Six , Hobkirk’s Hill , and Eutaw Springs . While Greene lost most of the battles in which he fought, he skillfully used his mixed force of militia and Continental regulars to maneuver the British out of the Carolinas' interior, forcing them toward the coastal cities and towns.

By the summer of 1781, Virginia was ablaze with battles along the colony’s coast and across its center. As General Marquis de Lafayette doggedly forced Cornwallis toward the coastal defenses around Yorktown , Virginia, he persuaded Washington to move the Continental Army from Connecticut to Virginia. Washington, along with a French fleet and army commanded by General Rochambeau, arrived in Virginia on September 19th, 1781, effectively sealing shut any escape route for Cornwallis. Following a siege and a series of attacks on the British position, Cornwallis surrendered his army to Washington.

Following Yorktown, both sides consolidated their forces and waited while peace negotiations took place in Paris. There were many small actions near New York City, in western Pennsylvania, and along the Carolina coast, but large-scale fighting had ended. At the time that the Treaty of Paris was signed in 1783, ending the war in favor of the American colonists, the British still controlled Savannah, Charleston, New York, and Canada.

The War of Independence is forever ingrained within our American identity and provides all Americans a sense of who we are, or, at the very least, who we should be. Our forefathers fought for liberty, freedom, and republican ideals the likes of which had never before been seen in any style of organized government preceding them. In many ways then, the American Revolution was an experiment: an experiment which overthrew the rule of a foreign power; an experiment which defeated the world’s most powerful military; and an experiment which laid the groundwork for a nation attempting to create itself. The low din of battle, fought all those years ago, continues to echo the hearts and minds of Americans to this very day.

Further Reading:

• The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution   By: Bernard Bailyn.
• 1776   By: David McCullough.
• The Glorious Cause: The American Revolution, 1763-1789  By: Robert Middlekauff.
• The American Revolution: A History  By: Gordon S. Wood.

Southern Governors' Responses to Independence and Invasion

History of Fort Moultrie

Charleston in the revolutionary war, related battles, you may also like.

Module 5: The American Revolution (1775-1783)

The impact of revolution, learning objectives.

• Summarize short and long-term consequences of the American Revolution
• Explain Loyalist and Patriot sentiments and responses to the Revolutionary War

The American Revolution has many short and long-term consequences. Perhaps the most important immediate consequence of declaring independence was the creation of state constitutions in 1776 and 1777. The Revolution also unleashed powerful political, social, and economic forces that would transform the new nation’s politics and society, including increased participation in politics and governance, the legal institutionalization of religious toleration, and the growth and diffusion of the population, particularly westward. The Revolution affected Native Americans by opening up western settlement and creating governments hostile to their territorial claims. Even more broadly, the Revolution ended the mercantilist economy, opening new opportunities in trade and manufacturing.

State Constitutions

The new states drafted written constitutions, which at the time was an important innovation from the traditionally unwritten British Constitution. These new state constitutions were based on the idea of “popular sovereignty,” the idea that the power and authority of the government derived from the people. Most created weak governors and strong legislatures with more regular elections and moderately increased the size of the electorate.

A number of states followed the example of Virginia and included a declaration or “bill” of rights in their constitution designed to protect the rights of individuals and circumscribe the prerogative of the government. Pennsylvania’s first state constitution was the most radical and democratic. They created a unicameral legislature and an Executive Council but no genuine executive. All free men could vote, including those who did not own property. Massachusetts’s constitution, passed in 1780, was less democratic in structure but underwent a more popular process of ratification. In the fall of 1779, each town sent delegates—312 in all—to a constitutional convention in Cambridge. Town meetings debated the constitution draft and offered suggestions. Anticipating the later federal constitution, Massachusetts established a three-branch government based on checks and balances between the branches. Independence came in 1776, and so did an unprecedented period of constitution-making and state-building.

The Continental Congress ratified the Articles of Confederation  in 1781. The articles allowed each state one vote in the Continental Congress. But the articles are perhaps most notable for what they did not allow. Congress was given no power to levy or collect taxes, regulate foreign or interstate commerce, or establish a federal judiciary. These shortcomings rendered the postwar Congress weak and largely ineffectual.

Political and social life changed drastically after independence. Political participation grew as more people gained the right to vote, leading to greater importance being placed on representation within government. In addition, more common citizens (or “new men”) played increasingly important roles in local and state governance. Hierarchy within the states underwent significant changes. Society became less deferential and more egalitarian, less aristocratic, and more meritocratic.

The Revolution’s most important long-term economic consequence was the end of mercantilism . The British Empire had imposed various restrictions on the colonial economies including limiting trade, settlement, and manufacturing. The Revolution opened new markets and new trade relationships. The Americans’ victory also opened the western territories for invasion and settlement, which created new domestic markets. Americans began to create their own manufactures, no longer content to rely on those in Britain.

Despite these important changes, the American Revolution had its limits. Following their unprecedented expansion into political affairs during the imperial resistance, women, enslaved laborers, and Native Americans also served in various capacities during the war. However, the Revolution did not result in civic equality for these groups.

The American Revolution in effect created multiple civil wars. Many of the resentments and antagonisms that fed these conflicts predated the Revolution, and the outbreak of war acted as the catalyst they needed to burst forth. In particular, the middle colonies of New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania had deeply divided populations. Loyalty to Great Britain came in many forms, from wealthy elites who enjoyed the prewar status quo to escaped enslaved laborers who desired the freedom that the British offered.

Figure 1 . The Coming of the Loyalists , a ca. 1880 work that artist Henry Sandham created at least a century after the Revolution, shows Anglo-American colonists arriving by ship in New Brunswick, Canada.

Historians disagree on what percentage of colonists were Loyalists; estimates range from 20 percent to over 30 percent. In general, however, of British America’s population of 2.5 million, roughly one-third remained loyal to Great Britain, while another third committed themselves to the cause of independence. The remaining third remained apathetic, content to continue with their daily lives as best they could and preferring not to engage in the struggle.

Many Loyalists were royal officials and merchants with extensive business ties to Great Britain, who viewed themselves as the rightful and just defenders of the British constitution. Others simply resented local business and political rivals who supported the Revolution, viewing the rebels as hypocrites and schemers who selfishly used the break with the Empire to increase their fortunes. In New York’s Hudson Valley, animosity among the tenants of estates owned by Revolutionary leaders turned them to the cause of King and Empire.

During the war, all the states passed confiscation acts , which gave the new revolutionary governments in the former colonies the right to seize Loyalist land and property. To ferret out Loyalists, revolutionary governments also passed laws requiring the male population to take oaths of allegiance to the new states. Those who refused lost their property and were often imprisoned or made to work for the new local revolutionary order.

William Franklin, Benjamin Franklin’s only surviving son, remained loyal to Crown and Empire and served as royal governor of New Jersey, a post he secured with his father’s help. During the war, revolutionaries imprisoned William in Connecticut; however, he remained steadfast in his allegiance to Great Britain and moved to England after the Revolution. He and his father never reconciled.

As many as nineteen thousand colonists served the British in the effort to put down the rebellion, and after the Revolution, as many as 100,000 colonists left, moving to England or north to Canada rather than staying in the new United States. Eight thousand Whites and five thousand free Blacks went to Britain. Over thirty thousand went to Canada, transforming that nation from predominately French to predominantly British. Another sizable group of Loyalists went to the British West Indies, taking their enslaved people with them.

Hannah Ingraham on moving to Nova Scotia

Hannah Ingraham was eleven years old in 1783, when her Loyalist family left New York for St. Anne’s Point in the colony of Nova Scotia. Later in life, she compiled her memories of that time.

[Father] said we were to go to Nova Scotia, that a ship was ready to take us there, so we made all haste to get ready. . . . Then on Tuesday, suddenly the house was surrounded by rebels and father was taken prisoner and carried away. . . . When morning came, they said he was free to go. We had five wagon loads carried down the Hudson in a sloop and then we went on board the transport that was to bring us to Saint John. I was just eleven years old when we left our farm to come here. It was the last transport of the season and had on board all those who could not come sooner. The first transports had come in May so the people had all the summer before them to get settled. . . . We lived in a tent at St. Anne’s until father got a house ready. . . . There was no floor laid, no windows, no chimney, no door, but we had a roof at least. A good fire was blazing and mother had a big loaf of bread and she boiled a kettle of water and put a good piece of butter in a pewter bowl. We toasted the bread and all sat around the bowl and ate our breakfast that morning and mother said: “Thank God we are no longer in dread of having shots fired through our house. This is the sweetest meal I ever tasted for many a day.”

What does this excerpt tell you about life as a Loyalist in New York or as a transplant to Canada?

The American revolutionaries came from many different backgrounds and included merchants, shoemakers, farmers, and sailors. What is extraordinary is the way in which the struggle for independence brought a vast cross-section of society together, animated by a common cause.

During the war, the revolutionaries faced great difficulties, including massive supply problems; clothing, ammunition, tents, and equipment were all hard to come by. After an initial burst of enthusiasm in 1775 and 1776, the shortage of supplies became acute in 1777 through 1779, as Washington’s difficult winter at Valley Forge demonstrates.

Funding the war effort also proved very difficult. As military technology improved over time, the cost of equipping soldiers only increased. The Continental Congress resisted taxing the citizens to pay for the war effort especially because questions about the right to tax contributed to the desire for independence. While Congress relied on the states for some assistance, lack of funds forced it to print $200 million during the war. That amount did not factor in how much the states printed and how much counterfeit money the British spread in an effort to destabilize the American financing effort. Therefore, the value of the “ continental ,” as the currency was known, depreciated rather quickly. Congress also borrowed money from other nations and from wealthy patriots through interest-bearing loan certificates. In dire times, both the British and the American armies simply took what they needed from the civilian population. They entered homes to confiscate food and clothing, and even furniture they could burn to keep warm. Military leaders on both sides tried to stop such looting, but they did not always succeed.

The cost of supporting the patriot cause did not just come in the form of public debt. Economically speaking, the war impacted the combatants and their families. The government’s decision to print money caused inflation, especially as goods became scarce in British-occupied cities. According to historian Harry M. Ward, goods imported from the West Indies like rum and sugar increased over 500 percent. Even worse, beef cost $.04 a pound in 1777 and $1.69 a pound in 1780, which amounted to about a 4,000 percent increase in the price. Because so many men left home to serve in the army, wages also went up for farmhands and laborers, however, wages did not keep pace with prices. Moreover, those serving in the military often did not receive their pay on time and sometimes not at all. Thus, all people on the home front struggled to get by, but the poor suffered most. Congress as well as the individual states experimented with wage and price controls, but that did little to improve the situation for most Americans. Frustration led to at least forty food and price riots during the conflict, led mostly by women. For example, in 1777, Boston’s women assaulted wealthy merchant Thomas Boylston for refusing to sell coffee at a fair price. To deal with the worst of the war’s economic consequences, private organizations and sometimes local governments coordinated relief efforts because the Continental Congress seemed unwilling to help.

In 1783, when the war finally ended, the public debt was approximately $43 million and the new government had difficulty in paying all of its obligations, including those to the very men who had fought in the war. Many veterans were not fully compensated for their service. Some were promised grants of land in lieu of payment during the conflict, only to lose their grants due to mishandling, unwieldy government regulations, and speculator’s schemes. Many veterans applied for pensions in the years following the wars, tracking down former comrades to certify that they had indeed served, only to be denied their pension on a technicality, such as not proving six month’s continuous service, or for no clear reason at all. For many veterans who had suffered economically by neglecting their farms and businesses to serve, and then who were never properly paid for their trouble, being denied their rightful pensions was a painful loss—one that would cause problems for the new American government by the end of the 1780s.

Would you have joined the Revolution?

While many people today say that they would have quickly joined the cause of the patriots during the Revolutionary War, whether or not you would have actually done so would have been strongly influenced by your location, your race, your gender, your level of political involvement and awareness, and a plethora of other things, like your family, occupation, and personal opinions. This video from the Origin of Everything examines the question, “Would You Have Joined the American Revolution?”

Critical Thinking Questions

• Describe the backgrounds and philosophies of Patriots and Loyalists. Why did colonists with such diverse individual interests unite in support of their respective causes? What might different groups of Patriots and Loyalists, depending upon their circumstances, have hoped to achieve by winning the war?
• How did the colonists manage to triumph in their battle for independence despite Great Britain’s military might? If any of these factors had been different, how might it have affected the outcome of the war?

Articles  of  Confederation: the initial governing document of the United States, ratified by the Continental Congress in 1781

confiscation acts:  state-wide acts that made it legal for state governments to seize Loyalists’ property

Continental currency:  the paper currency that the Continental government printed to fund the Revolution

mercantilism : Mercantilism, a state-assisted manufacturing and trading system, created and maintained markets, and ensured the subordination of the colony to the mother country

• US History. Authored by : P. Scott Corbett, Volker Janssen, John M. Lund, Todd Pfannestiel, Paul Vickery, and Sylvie Waskiewicz. Provided by : OpenStax College. Located at : https://openstax.org/books/us-history/pages/6-4-identity-during-the-american-revolution . License : CC BY: Attribution . License Terms : Download for free at http://cnx.org/content/col11740/latest/
• The Consequences of the American Revolution. Provided by : The American Yawp. Located at : http://www.americanyawp.com/text/05-the-american-revolution/#VI_The_Consequences_of_the_American_Revolution . License : CC BY-SA: Attribution-ShareAlike

American Revolution

The American Revolutionary War took place from 1775-1783, although the revolt against British colonial rule began years before war was formally declared. The English Enlightenment influenced the thoughts of many of the colonists.

Social Studies, U.S. History

• Revolution on Paper
• Lesson Plans

Interpreting Primary Source Documents

The aim of Revolution on Paper is to teach students how to interpret primary source documents, acquaint them with the nature of documentary evidence, and to introduce them to some of the most important and interesting documents of the American Revolution. Some lessons address great state papers, while other focus on private documents, including letters and diaries. Others present inconsistent and even contradictory versions of the same event and asks students to consider how the historian can make use of them to reconstruct the event as accurately as possible.  Revolutions on Paper challenges students to consider how we can know about the past as well as the limits on our knowledge imposed by the nature of the sources available to us.

The Essay of “Vox Africanorum”

In May 1783 the Maryland Gazette published a plea to end slavery signed with the pseudonym “Vox Africanorum”—Latin for ‘Voice of the Africans.’ In this lesson, students are challenged to interpret the essay, and in the process consider the relationship between opposition to slavery and the ideals expressed in the Declaration of Independence. Who was “Vox Africanorum”? How did the writer connect opposition to slavery to the highest ideals of the American Revolution?

George Washington’s Vision for the United States

During their winter encampment two years after the storied American victory at Yorktown, General Washington’s officers found their patience with Congress wearing dangerously thin. By the ides of March, as they awaited a formal end to the War and for financial promises to the military to be honored, their frustration threatened to overtake their allegiance to America’s new civilian government. Their passions were heroically reined in by George Washington wielding two unexpected weapons—his unfailing integrity, and his new reading glasses. This lesson explores the events at Newburgh and how Washington’s vision for the United States and the ideals of republican sacrifice and civic virtue triumphed during a crisis that could have fundamentally altered the American experiment.

Steuben’s “Blue Book”

Friedrich Wilhelm Ludolf Gerhard Augustin Steuben of Prussia, otherwise known as Baron von Steuben, was an aide to Frederick the Great. During the American Revolution, he was appointed inspector general of the Continental Army. George Washington asked Steuben to create a manual of drill instruction for the Continental Army, and in 1779, Congress adopted the Regulations for the Order and Discipline of the Troops of the United States . Largely printed on blue paper-covered boards, Regulations became informally known as the “Blue Book”. This lesson examines von Steuben’s role in the development of the Continental Army.

Washington Takes Command

When George Washington attended the Second Continental Congress in 1775 as a Virginia delegate, he brought with him both the military reputation he had established during the French and Indian War as well as his militia uniform. As the Congress searched for a commander in chief of the army, some favored former British officer Charles Lee, but Samuel Adams argued the southern colonies would only support the cause if a Virginian led the army . . . and he promptly nominated George Washington.

washington takes command

Between Commanders in Chief

The commander in chief of the Continental Army, George Washington, and the commander in chief of British forces in the New World, Thomas Gage, served together during the French and Indian War. They were among the few survivors of what became known as Braddock’s Defeat, a 1755 battle in the Ohio Valley where 977 of the 1,459 British and American soldiers were killed or wounded. Letters composed and exchanged between Washington and Gage in August 1775 shed light on their complicated relationship following the outbreak of hostilities in Massachusetts that propelled the United States and Great Britain into war.

between commanders in chief

George Washington’s Great Challenge

George Washington’s great challenge was to bring discipline, order and unity to an army comprised of volunteers divided by region, class and culture. His troops came from many parts of America, which at the time was like coming together from distant countries; different customs and manners sometimes caused misunderstandings and conflict. These volunteers joined the common cause but understood the meaning of that common cause in very different ways.

george washington's great challenge

The American Cincinnatus

George Washington’s willingness to resign his power for the good of the republic earned him the title of “American Cincinnatus.” The American painter Benjamin West liked to tell the story of his conversation with King George III during the war. Asked what General Washington would do if he prevailed, West said he thought he would return to his farm. “If he does that,” said the King, “he will be the greatest man in the world.”

the american cincinnatus

The Diary of William Judd

William Judd served as a captain in the Connecticut Continental Line during the Revolutionary War. In the months before he joined the Continental Army, he was personally involved in an armed confrontation between Connecticut colonists seeking to settle in the Susquehanna River Valley on land they claimed for Connecticut, and Pennsylvania officials who claimed the land was part of Pennsylvania.  His dramatic, never-before-published diary of these events offers students a unique opportunity to examine how competition between colonists and disputes between colonies threatened colonial unity at the beginning of the Revolution.

COMING SOON

The Declaration of Independence

The aim of Revolution on Paper is to teach students how to interpret primary source documents, acquaint them with the nature of documentary evidence, and to introduce them to some of the most important documents of the American Revolution. Some lessons address great state papers, while other focus on private documents, including letters and diaries.

A List of Goods belonging to Anthony Morris

Anthony Morris was a junior officer of the Pennsylvania Associators—a privately organized militia—who fought at the Battle of Princeton on January dk, 1777.

The Pennsylvania Act for the Gradual Abolition of Slavery

In 1780 Pennsylvania adopted the first law in history providing for the abolition of slavery. In this lesson, students are challenged to interpret the law, asking and answering important questions about the relationship between antislavery ideas and the American Revolution.  Why did the Pennsylvania legislature adopt this law? Why did it provide for the gradual end of slavery rather than free the enslaved people of Pennsylvania at once?

The Virginia Statute of Religious Freedom

In January 1786 the Virginia legislature adopted a law ending state support for the Anglican church and ensuring Virginians the right to worship according to their own beliefs. Thomas Jefferson, who drafted the bill, considered it one of the most important achievements of the Revolution, as did James Madison, who maneuvered the bill through the legislature. This lesson challenges students to consider the different sides in a complex and important question—the arguments for and against state support of religion, the political dynamics involved in securing a majority for the bill, and the enduring importance of the law.

The Pension Application of Deborah Sampson

Deborah Sampson disguised herself as a man to enlist in the Massachusetts Continental Line, and managed to hide her identity as a woman for seventeen months, during which she was assigned to an elite light infantry and was wounded in battle. Why did she do it? What did the American cause mean to her? How did others respond when they learned she was a woman? How did her service shape the remainder of her life? This lesson asks students to evaluate the layers of evidence we have about her remarkable life.

Thomas Jefferson’s Final Public Statement

On June 24, 1826, Thomas Jefferson wrote a letter to the mayor of Washington, D.C., declining an invitation to come to the nation’s capitol to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of American independence.  Jefferson was terminally ill and unable to travel. Realizing that he had only a short time to live, Jefferson used his letter to Mayor Roger Weightman to make a final statement about the American Revolution and the cause of freedom to which he had given so much of his life. In this lesson, students are challenged to explore the complex meaning of this short, eloquent letter.

149 American Revolution Essay Topics & Examples

If you’re looking for American Revolution topics for research paper or essay, you’re in the right place. This article contains everything you might need to write an essay on Revolutionary war

🗽 Top 7 American Revolution Research Topics

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American Revolution, also known as Revolutionary War, occurred in the second half of the 18th century. Among its causes was a series of acts established by the Crown. These acts placed taxes on paint, tea, glass, and paper imported to the colonies. As a result of the war, the thirteen American colonies gained independence from the British Crown, thereby creating the United States of America. Whether you need to write an argumentative, persuasive, or discussion paper on the Revolutionary War, this article will be helpful. It contains American Revolution essay examples, titles, and questions for discussion. Boost your critical thinking with us!

• Townshend Acts and the Tea Act as the causes of the American Revolution
• Ideological roots of the American Revolution
• English government and the American colonies before the Revolutionary war
• Revolutionary War: the main participants
• The American Revolution: creating the new constitutions
• Causes and effects of the American Revolution
• Revolutionary War: the key battles

Signifying a cornerstone moment for British colonial politics and the creation of a new, fully sovereign nation, the events from 1765 to 1783 were unusual for the 18th century. Thus, reflecting all the crucial moments within a single American Revolution Essay becomes troublesome to achieve. However, if you keep in mind certain historical events, then you may affect the quality of your paper for the better.

All American Revolution essay topics confine themselves to the situation and its effects. Make sure that you understand the chronology by searching for a timeline, or even create one yourself! Doing so should help you easily trace what date is relevant to which event and, thus, allow you to stay in touch with historical occurrences. Furthermore, understand the continuity of the topic, from the creation of the American colony until the Declaration of Independence. Creating a smooth flowing narrative that takes into consideration both the road to revolution and its aftereffects will demonstrate your comprehensive understanding of the issue.

When writing about the pre-history of the Revolution, pay special attention to ongoing background mechanisms of the time. The surge of patriotism, a strong desire for self-governed democracy, and “Identity American” all did not come into existence at the Boston Tea Party but merely demonstrated themselves most clearly at that time. Linking events together will become more manageable if you can understand the central motivation behind them.

Your structure is another essential aspect of essay writing, with a traditional outline following the events in chronological order, appropriately overviewing them when necessary. Thus, an excellent structure requires that your introduction should include:

• An American Revolution essay hook, which will pique your readers’ interest and make them want to read your work further. Writing in unexpected facts or giving a quote from a contemporary actor of the events, such as one of the founding fathers, are good hook examples because they grab your readers’ attention.
• A brief overview of the circumstances. It should be both in-depth enough to get your readers on the same level of knowledge as you, the writer, and short enough to engage them in your presented ideas.
• An American Revolution essay thesis that will guide your paper from introduction to conclusion. Between overviewing historical information and interest-piquing hooks, your thesis statement should be on-point and summarize the goal of your essay. When writing, you should often return to it, assessing whether the topics you are addressing are reflective of your paper’s goals.

Whatever issues you raise in your introduction and develop in your main body, you should bring them all together in your conclusion. Summarize your findings and compare them against your thesis statement. Doing so will help you carry out a proper verdict regarding the problem and its implications.

The research you have carried out and the resulting compiled bibliography titles will help you build your essay’s credibility. However, apart from reading up on the problem you are addressing, you should think about reading other sample essays. These may not only help you get inspired but also give excellent American Revolution essay titles and structure lessons. Nevertheless, remember that plagiarizing from these papers, or anywhere else, is not advisable! Avoid committing academic crimes and let your own ideas be representative of your academism.

Want to sample some essays to get your essay started? Kick-start your writing process with IvyPanda and its ideas!

• The Shoemaker and the Tea Party: Memory and the American Revolution: Book Analysis Even these facts from the author’s biography make “The Shoemaker and the Tea Party” a reliable source of the knowledge on the American past.”The Shoemaker and the Tea Party” is based on the story of […]
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• Figures of the American Revolution in «The Shoemaker and the Tea Party» The book The Shoemaker and the Tea Party by Alfred Young is a biographical essay describing events of the 18th century and life one of the most prominent figures of the American Revolution, George Robert […]
• Sex During the American Revolution American Revolution is one of the most prominent and groundbreaking events in the history of the United States of America. One of the most interesting facts from the video was the usage of clothing and […]
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• The Unknown American Revolution: Book Review In his book, Gary unveiled that the American Revolution’s chaos was through the power of Native Americans, enslaved people, and African Americans, not the people in power. The book boldly explains the origins of the […]
• Changes Leading to the Colonies to Work Together During the American Revolution Ideally, the two settlements formed the basis of the significant social, political, and economic differences between the northern and southern colonies in British North America.
• American Revolution: Principles and Consequences One expanded the number of lands of the young country due to the confiscation of territories that were under the possession of the English government and loyalists, that is, people supporting the crown.
• The American Revolution’s Goals and Achievements The Patriots’ goals in the War, as well as the achievements of the revolution and the first Constitution in relation to different groups of population will be discussed in this essay.
• Haudenosaunee’s Role in the American Revolution They also signed treaties in relation to the support needed by the Americans and the Indians to avoid the conflicts that arose between the nations.
• Causes and Foundations of the American Revolution Speaking about what led to the revolution in the United States – the Boston Massacre, the Tea Party, or the Stamp Act – the most rational reason seems to be the result of all these […]
• The American Revolution: Role of the French The revolutionary war became the fundamental event in the history of the USA. For this reason, the rebellion in America became a chance to undermine the power of the British Empire and restore the balance […]
• Causes of the American Revolution: Proclamation & Declaration Acts The Proclamation was initially well-received among the American colonists because of the emancipation of the land and the cessation of hostilities.
• The American Revolution and Its Leading Causes Two acts passed by the British Parliament on British North America include the Stamp Act and the Townshend Act, which caused the Boston Massacre.
• A Woman’s Role During the American Revolution Doing so, in the opinion of the author, is a form of retribution to the people long gone, the ones who sacrificed their lives in honor of the ideals that, in their lifetime, promised a […]
• The Battles of the American Revolution The initial cause of the battle is the desire of the British to take over the harbors in Massachusetts. The battle of Bunker Hill marked the end of the peaceful rebellions and protests and became […]
• American Revolution’s Domestic and Worldwide Effects The American Revolution was a world war against one of the world’s most powerful empires, Great Britain, and a civil war between the American Patriots and the pro-British Loyalists. The main domestic effects of the […]
• The Heroes of the American Revolution However, their role was forgotten by the emergence of heroes such as Washington and Adams, white men who reformed the country.
• American Revolution: Seven Years War in 1763 As a result of the passing the Tea Act in 1773 British East India company was allowed to sell tea directly to the colonist, by passing the colonists middlemen.
• The History of American Revolution and Slavery At the same time, the elites became wary of indentured servants’ claim to the land. The American colonies were dissatisfied with the Royal Proclamation of 1763 it limited their ability to invade new territories and […]
• The Experience of the American Revolution One of such events was the American Revolution, which lasted from 1775 to 1783; it created the independent country of the United States, changed the lives of thousands of people, and gave them the real […]
• Causes of the American Revolution Whereas we cannot point to one particular action as the real cause of the American Revolution, the war was ignited by the way Great Britain treated the thirteen united colonies in comparison to the treatment […]
• American Revolution Rise: Utopian Views Therefore, the problem is that “the dedication to human liberty and dignity exhibited by the leaders of the American Revolution” was impossible because American society “…developed and maintained a system of labor that denied human […]
• Impact of American Revolution on the French One After the success of the American Revolution, there was a lot of literature both in praise and criticism of the war which found its way to the French people.
• The Leadership in Book ‘Towards an American Revolution’ by J. Fresia It’s an indication of the misuse of the people by the leaders in a bid to bar them from enlightenment and also keep them in manipulative positions.
• American Revolution Information People in the colonies were enslaved in tyranny of churches as well as monarchies, and Benjamin, believed that with proper undertaking of education, the colonies would arise to their freedom and Independence.
• American Revolution: An Impact on the Nation The American Revolution can be characterized as one of the milestone events in American history which led to the formation of the state and the nation.
• Benjamin Franklin and the American Revolution Radical interpretations of the Revolution were refracted through a unique understanding of American society and its location in the imperial community.
• The American Revolution U.S. History But at the end the pride of the English King as well as the desperation of the English monarchy forced the hand of the settlers to draw the sword.
• The American Revolution From 1763 to 1777 In America 1763 marked the end of a seven-year war which was known as the India and French war and also marked the beginning of the strained as well as acrimonious relations between the Americans […]
• The History of American Revolution The American Revolution refers to a period between1763 and 1784 when the events in the 13th American colonies culminated in independence from the British colonial rule.
• American Revolution: Causes and Conservative Movement To ease workplace stress, managers must be able to recognize the effects of stress on employees and to determine the cause.
• The American Revolution Causes: English and American Views The American Revolution was brought about by the transformations in the American government and society. The taxes were not welcome at all since they brought about a lot of losses to the colonies.
• American Revolution and Its Historical Stages The following paragraphs are devoted to the description of the stages that contributed to a rise of the revolution against British rule.
• The American Revolution and Political Legitimacy Evolution At the beginning of the article, the Anderson highlights Forbes magazine comments where they stated that the businesses that would continue to feature in the future Forbes directory are the ones that head the activists’ […]
• American Revolution: Perspective of a Soldier Revolution became the event that radically changed the American society of that period and, at the same time, contributed to its unification.
• American Revolution and the Current Issues: Course The understanding of the critical issues in the history of the American Revolution will make the students intellectually understand the subsequent wars in American History and the events that may occur later.
• American Revolution in the United States’ History Americans had a very strong desire to be free and form their own government that would offer the kind of governance they wanted.
• Vietnam War and American Revolution Comparison Consequently, the presence of these matters explains the linkage of the United States’ war in Vietnam and the American Revolution to Mao’s stages of the insurgency.
• American Revolution in Historical Misrepresentation Narrating the good side of history at the expense of the bad side passes the wrong information to the students of history.
• American Revolution Against British Power They considered the fashions and customs of the British to be the best in the world; they sent their children to London for education, and they were very proud of the constitutional monarchy that governed […]
• The American Revolution as a People’s Revolution An idealized conception of a revolution leads to the conclusion that the American Revolution was not a representation of a “people’s revolution”.
• Battle of Brandywine in the American Revolution The Squad’s mission is to reconnoiter the location of the enemy during the night before the battle and prevent the possible unexpected attack of the enemy by enhancing the Principles of War.
• African Americans in the American Revolution Both the slave masters and the British colonizers sought the help of the African Americans during the American Revolution. The revolutionary nature of the American Revolution did not resonate with both the free and enslaved […]
• Post American Revolution Period: Washington Presidency The formation of the National Government during the years of 1789-1815 was associated with many challenging situations, and it was characterized by the opposition of the Federalists and Republicans, among which the important roles were […]
• American Revolution: Reclaiming Rights and Powers As a result, British Government Pursued policies of the kind embodied in the proclamation of the 1763 and the Quebec act that gave Quebec the right to many Indian lands claimed by the American colonists […]
• Women Status after the American Revolution This revolution enabled women to show men that females could participate in the social life of the society. Clearly, in the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth century women were given only […]
• American Revolution of 1774 First of all, one of the main causes of the conflict and the following confrontation between the British power and the colonies was the disagreement about the way these colonies should be treated and viewed.
• Impact of Rebellion on the American Revolution The rebellion was retrogressive to the cause of the American Revolution because it facilitated the spread of the ruling class and further hardened the position of the ruling class regarding the hierarchical arrangement of slavery.
• Liberty! The American Revolution The thirteen colonies were not strangers to the oppressions and intolerable acts of the British parliament. The oppressions of the colonies by the British became a regular occurrence and the people sought a solution.
• Was the American Revolution Really Revolutionary? The nature of the American Revolution is considered to be better understandable relying on the ideas offered by Wood because one of the main purposes which should be achieved are connected with an idea of […]
• The American Struggle for Rights and Equal Treatment To begin with, the Americans had been under the rule of the British for a very long time. On the same note, the British concentrated on taxing various establishments and forgot to read the mood […]
• African American Soldier in American Revolution It was revealed that the blacks were behind the American’s liberation from the British colonial rule, and this was witnessed with Ned Hector’s brevity to salvage his army at the battle of Brandywine.
• The Revolutionary War Changes in American Society The Revolution was started by the breakaway of the 13 American Colonies from the British Crown. A significant consequence of the American Revolution is that it led to the drafting of the Declaration of Independence […]
• American Revolution and the Crisis of the Constitution of the USA In whole, the American people paving the way to independence have to face challenges in the form of restricted provisions of Constitution, wrong interpretation and understanding of the American Revolution, and false representation of conservative […]
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• Effects of the American Revolution on Society In order for the women to fulfill, the role they needed to be educated first thus the emphasis of education for them in what came to be known as Republican Motherhood. Women faced limitations in […]
• The Ideas of Freedom and Slavery in Relation to the American Revolution Although many Founders discussed the phenomenon of slavery as violating the appeals for freedom and liberty for the Americans, the concepts of slavery and freedom could develop side by side because the Founders did not […]
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• Was the American Revolution a Conservative Movement?
• How Inevitable Was the American Revolution?
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• Was the American Civil War and Reconstruction a Second American Revolution?
• How did the French and Indian War shape the American Revolution?
• What Were the Origins of the American Revolution?
• Why Did Tensions Between Great Britain and their North American Colonies Escalate so Quickly in the Wake of the French and Indian War?
• How the American Revolution Changed American Society?
• Was the American Revolution About Freedom and Political Liberty, or Just About Paying Fewer Taxes?
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• How England Instigated the American Revolution?
• Who Benefited Most from the American Revolution?
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Great American History

Research paper idea: Was the American Revolutionary War really necessary?

We tend to take the American Revolution for granted.  It was inevitable.  It was a good thing.  But here is an interesting research project: Was the American Revolution really necessary? 

Americans believed that, as British subjects, they deserved a voice in the decisions of their government.   The “rights of Englishmen” had been assured by various British constitutional documents, including the Magna Carta of 1215 and Britain’s Bill of Rights of 1689.  This fact, when combined with the influence of European philosophers such as John Locke and Voltaire (who had espoused republican and liberalistic ideals of democratic government), caused Americans to become increasingly outraged by the British government, who they considered “tyrannical.”

The political unrest caused by Parliament’s new taxes has been described as either the cause or the excuse for the Rebellion, depending on the viewpoint of the historian.

So the obvious question becomes: “If the American Colonists’ outrage over their lack of representation in Parliament was causing a rebellion, why didn’t the British government diffuse the situation by granting the American Colonies some degree of representation?”

Good question! After all, Britain’s interest in America was immense.  The American Colonies, with almost 3 million people at the time of the Revolutionary War, represented nearly a third of the British Empire’s total population. Fifty percent of British shipping was involved in trade with the Americas.  At least one fourth of Great Britain’s manufactured goods were exported to America.  The American Colonies’ land mass was over four times larger than that of the British Isles—and the North American continent many times that.

Parliament never gave serious consideration to granting her American Colonies representation.   If it had, they could have significantly weakened the colonist’s “taxation without representation” argument—and may have delayed or prevented the Revolution.  But instead of trying to prevent war by treating the colonists as people with the rights of Englishmen, both Parliament and the King considered them second class citizens, and once the fighting began—mere rebels.

Topics that could be researched in the answer to the question are: British Navigation Acts, British-American trade before the Revolutionary War, Acts of Parliament regarding American Colonies, William Pitt the Elder, King George III and the American colonies, Taxation without representation, rights of Englishmen.  A starting point is the Outline of the American Revolution.

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