The American Revolution
Overview
The American Revolution
The American Revolution can be seen as a succession of misunderstandings exacerbated by stubbornness on both sides. The 1763 Treaty of Paris, which ended the French and Indian War, set the stage for the Revolution by leaving the British empire with a large national debt, the price for obtaining New France and half of Louisiana, the French colonies in North America. Parliament proceeded to impose taxes indirectly on residents of British North America in order to reduce the debts from the British war effort. Many members of the Parliament saw these taxes as a reasonable recompence from the North American colonists for protection from the French by the British Army and Navy. The colonists came to see these taxes as violations of their rights as English subjects, specifically the right to not be taxed unless represented in Parliament. The Revolution inspired a succession of dissatisfied populations across the world through the twentieth century to initiate their own revolutions.
Learning Objective
- Analyze the causes, main events, and results of the American Revolution.
Key Terms / Key Concepts
1763 Treaty of Paris: treaty that ended the French and Indian War and paved the way for the disputes at the heart of the American Revolution
Stamp Act: indirect tax imposed on Thirteen Colonies, which helped to ignite the Revolution
Boston Massacre - 5 March 1770 confrontation between British soldiers and Bostonians, in which five Bostonians were killed, exacerbating tensions between the British government and colonists
Battles of Lexington and Concord - first battles of the Revolutionary War
George Washington - commander of the Continental Army
Common Sense - essay published in early 1776 arguing for the national independence of the Thirteen Colonies
Thomas Jefferson - author of the Declaration of Independence
Declaration of Independence: official declaration by the Second Continental Congress of the independence from the British empire of the thirteen colonies
In 1763 – 4 Parliament set the stage for the Revolution by enacting a series of taxes and regulations on the British North American colonists. The British government saw these taxes as necessary to reduce the British imperial debt, which included the cost of protecting the colonies. These acts angered a number of colonists. The Stamp Act, which imposed an indirect tax on the colonists, provoked the greatest rage. And this rage manifested itself in protests, attacks on British officials in the colonies, and economic boycotts. Parliament responded to the protests and attacks by sending more troops to restore order in the colonies, as well as to the economic boycotts by repealing the Stamp Act. Parliament’s repeal of the Stamp Act was a response to the pleas of British merchants, who were losing money as a result of the colonial boycotts. Many colonists who protested the Stamp Act mistakenly concluded that they had forced Parliament to repeal this act, which reinforced their belief that violence was the way to force Parliament to act. One group in particular, the Sons of Liberty, felt violence was the preferred reaction to British taxes and restrictions. They believed they could compel Parliament to bend to their collective will. However, violence by the Sons of Liberty, among other groups and individuals, hardened the resolve of many in Parliament to restore order in the colonies.
In 1767 Parliament imposed new indirect taxes on the colonists that would be collected outside of the colonies instead of in the colonies, thus not leaving British officials vulnerable to colonists’ attacks. Colonists renewed their protests, including more violence. The violence prompted the British government to send more troops to the Thirteen Colonies, which further enflamed the situation between the British Government and colonists angry about British government restrictions and taxes.
The presence of British troops in the colonies, there to preserve or restore order, provoked numerous incidents of violence between colonists and British soldiers. The most famous incident was the 5 March 1770 Boston Massacre, in which British soldiers fired into a group of Bostonians who had attacked the soldiers. This incident raised related issues, including where and how the soldiers involved in crimes against citizens should be tried. The results of the trials involving the British soldiers indicted for killing five Bostonians raised questions in the minds of many of colonists about being able to get justice in the British imperial court systems.
After several years of relative quiet another incident in Boston, the Boston Tea Party, ignited several events that eventually led to the outbreak of the Revolutionary War and then the Second Continental Congress’ declaration of independence for the Thirteen Colonies. Parliament responded to this protest of the 1773 Tea Act by imposing new restrictions on Massachusetts and Boston. These restrictions prompted colonial leaders to convene the First Continental Congress—the first intercolonial assembly to address the situation with the British government.
Colonists protested British actions in a variety of ways and through a variety of groups with no centralized leadership until 1774. In response to what they saw as British violations of their rights as English subjects colonists started organizing local militias and collecting arms in community arms depots. In April 1775 British troops from Boston marched on Concord, Massachusetts to confiscate the arms at a colonial arms depot; this led to fighting with Massachusetts colonial militia at Lexington and Concord, west of Boston. These Battles of Lexington and Concord mark the beginning of the Revolutionary War.
Ironically, the Revolutionary War prompted many colonists to consider national independence as the only way to protect their rights as English subjects. Support for national independence grew over the rest of 1775 and the first half of 1776, reinforced by the June 1775 Battle of Bunker Hill. The Second Continental Congress, the successor to the First Continental Congress, had convened in May 1775. Over the rest of 1775 this body created a Continental Army, named George Washington as its commander, and created a Continental Navy, before creating the U.S.
The British Army’s employment of Hessian soldiers and the early 1776 publication of Common Sense by Thomas Paine attracted more colonists to the goal of national independence. In the spring of 1776, the Second Continental Congress commissioned a committee to write the Declaration of Independence. Thomas Jefferson agreed to write it. Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence as a synthesis of Enlightenment ideas and English political traditions, in which he asserted the right of a people to declare independence from a government that did not serve them well. In it, he listed colonists’ complaints against the British government, embodied in the person of King George III.
The Declaration of Independence is a declaration of national independence for the Thirteen Colonies. Although it subsequently inspired a succession of movements to abolish various forms of racial, ethnic, religious, and gender discrimination, it only explicitly addressed national sovereignty. Ironically, French government assistance to the U.S. in pursuit of French imperial and strategic interests, including retaking territory lost to Britain and Spain in the French and Indian War, gained the French empire nothing and exposed people in France to revolutionary ideas that contributed to the revolution that brought down the French monarchy a little over a decade later. The ancien regime monarchy of France had hoped to regain territory lost to Britain and Spain in the 1763 Treaty of Paris that ended the French and Indian War, the British name for the North American counterpart to the Seven Years. Instead the commitment of resources, men, and ships to the U.S. cause by the French government, much more like the British government than the republican government of the U.S., exacerbated the French debt, setting off a chain of events that led to the French Revolution and, eventually, the overthrow of the French monarchy. Ultimately, the 1763 Treaty of Paris that ended the French and Indian War was the catalyst for the American and the French Revolutions, and, by extension, subsequent revolutions in the Americas, Eurasia, and Africa, among numerous other movements to eliminate various forms of discrimination all the way to the present.
The American Revolution occurred in the context of new ideas about sovereignty articulated as part of the Enlightenment. The Declaration of Independence became a model for subsequent struggles for national independence in the Americas and for personal sovereignty and constitutional government in Europe into the twentieth century. The United States’ successful achievement of national independence inspired a succession of revolutions, both successful and unsuccessful, that continue to the present time. Ironically, the Declaration of Independence was written by a slaveholder and affirmed by the Second Continental Congress, the majority of whose members were also slaveholders.
Primary Sources: Declaration of Independence
Declaration of Independence, July 4, 1776
When in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and of nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.
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, laying its foundation on such principles, and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shown that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object, evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for their future security. Such has been the patient sufferance of these colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former systems of government. The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over these states. To prove this, let facts be submitted to a candid world.
He has refused his assent to laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.
He has forbidden his governors to pass laws of immediate and pressing importance, unless suspended in their operation till his assent should be obtained; and, when so suspended, he has utterly neglected to attend to them.
He has refused to pass other laws for the accommodation of large districts of people, unless those people would relinquish the right of representation in the legislature, a right inestimable to them, and formidable to tyrants only.
He has called together legislative bodies at places unusual uncomfortable, and distant from the depository of their public records, for the sole purpose of fatiguing them into compliance with his measures.
He has dissolved representative houses repeatedly, for opposing, with manly firmness, his invasions on the rights of the people.
He has refused for a long time, after such dissolutions, to cause others to be elected; whereby the legislative powers, incapable of annihilation, have returned to the people at large for their exercise; the state remaining, in the mean time, exposed to all the dangers of invasions from without and convulsions within.
He has endeavored to prevent the population of these states; for that purpose obstructing the laws for naturalization of foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migration hither, and raising the conditions of new appropriations of lands.
He has obstructed the administration of justice, by refusing his assent to laws for establishing judiciary powers.
He has made judges dependent on his will alone, for the tenure of their offices, and the amount and payment of their salaries.
He has erected a multitude of new offices, and sent hither swarms of officers to harass our people and eat out their substance.
He has kept among us, in times of peace, standing armies, without the consent of our legislatures.
He has affected to render the military independent of, and superior to, the civil power.
He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our Constitution and unacknowledged by our laws, giving his assent to their acts of pretended legislation:
For quartering large bodies of armed troops among us;
For protecting them, by a mock trial, from punishment for any murders which they should commit on the inhabitants of these states;
For cutting off our trade with all parts of the world;
For imposing taxes on us without our consent;
For depriving us, in many cases, of the benefits of trial by jury;
For transporting us beyond seas, to be tried for pretended offenses;
For abolishing the free system of English laws in a neighboring province, establishing therein an arbitrary government, and enlarging its boundaries, so as to render it at once an example and fit instrument for introducing the same absolute rule into these colonies;
For taking away our charters, abolishing our most valuable laws, and altering fundamentally the forms of our governments;
For suspending our own legislatures, and declaring themselves invested with power to legislate for us in all cases whatsoever.
He has abdicated government here, by declaring us out of his protection and waging war against us.
He has plundered our seas, ravaged our coasts, burned our towns, and destroyed the lives of our people.
He is at this time transporting large armies of foreign mercenaries to complete the works of death, desolation, and tyranny already begun with circumstances of cruelty and perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages, and totally unworthy the head of a civilized nation.
He has constrained our fellow-citizens, taken captive on the high seas, to bear arms against their country, to become the executioners of their friends and brethren, or to fall themselves by their hands.
He has excited domestic insurrection among us, and has endeavored to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers the merciless Indian savages, whose known rule of warfare is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes, and conditions.
In every stage of these oppressions we have petitioned for redress in the most humble terms; our repeated petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. A prince, whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.
Nor have we been wanting in our attentions to our British brethren. We have warned them, from time to time, of attempts by their legislature to extend an unwarrantable jurisdiction over us. We have reminded them of the circumstances of our emigration and settlement here. We have appealed to their native justice and magnanimity; and we have conjured them, by the ties of our common kindred, to disavow these usurpations which would inevitably interrupt our connections and correspondence. They too, have been deaf to the voice of justice and of consanguinity. We must, therefore, acquiesce in the necessity which denounces our separation, and hold them as we hold the rest of mankind, enemies in war, in peace friends.
We, therefore, the representatives of the United States of America, in General Congress assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions, do, in the name and by the authority of the good people of these colonies solemnly publish and declare, 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 connection between them and the state of Great Britain is, and ought to be, totally dissolved; and that, as free and independent states, they have full power to levy war, conclude peace, contract alliances, establish commerce, and do all other acts and things which independent states may of right do. And for the support of this declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor.
[Signed by] JOHN HANCOCK [President]
New Hampshire
JOSIAH BARTLETT,
WM. WHIPPLE,
MATTHEW THORNTON.
Massachusetts Bay
SAML. ADAMS,
JOHN ADAMS,
ROBT. TREAT PAINE,
ELBRIDGE GERRY
Rhode Island
STEP. HOPKINS,
WILLIAM ELLERY.
Connecticut
ROGER SHERMAN,
SAM'EL HUNTINGTON,
WM. WILLIAMS,
OLIVER WOLCOTT.
New York
WM. FLOYD,
PHIL. LIVINGSTON,
FRANS. LEWIS,
LEWIS MORRIS.
New Jersey
RICHD. STOCKTON,
JNO. WITHERSPOON,
FRAS. HOPKINSON,
JOHN HART,
ABRA. CLARK.
Pennsylvania
ROBT. MORRIS
BENJAMIN RUSH,
BENJA. FRANKLIN,
JOHN MORTON,
GEO. CLYMER,
JAS. SMITH,
GEO. TAYLOR,
JAMES WILSON,
GEO. ROSS.
Delaware
CAESAR RODNEY,
GEO. READ,
THO. M'KEAN.
Maryland
SAMUEL CHASE,
WM. PACA,
THOS. STONE,
CHARLES CARROLL of Carrollton.
Virginia
GEORGE WYTHE,
RICHARD HENRY LEE,
TH. JEFFERSON,
BENJA. HARRISON,
THS. NELSON, JR.,
FRANCIS LIGHTFOOT LEE,
CARTER BRAXTON.
North Carolina
WM. HOOPER,
JOSEPH HEWES,
JOHN PENN.
South Carolina
EDWARD RUTLEDGE,
THOS. HAYWARD, JUNR.,
THOMAS LYNCH, JUNR.,
ARTHUR MIDDLETON.
Georgia
BUTTON GWINNETT,
LYMAN HALL,
GEO. WALTON.
NOTE.-Mr. Ferdinand Jefferson, Keeper of the Rolls in the Department of State, at Washington, says: " The names of the signers are spelt above as in the facsimile of the original, but the punctuation of them is not always the same; neither do the names of the States appear in the facsimile of the original. The names of the signers of each State are grouped together in the facsimile of the original, except the name of Matthew Thornton, which follows that of Oliver Wolcott."-Revised Statutes of the United States, 2d edition, 1878, p. 6.
Source: From Yale Law School Lillian Goldman Law Library: The Avalon Project |
Attributions
Images courtesy of Wikipedia Commons
Title Image - 1819 painting of the signing of the Declaration of Independence by John Trumbull. Attribution: John Trumbull, Public Domain, via Wikipedia Commons. Provided by: Wikipedia. Location: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Declaration_of_Independence_(1819),_by_John_Trumbull.jpg#filehistory. License: CC BY-SA: Attribution-ShareAlike
Adapted from Boundless World History.
"North America"
https://www.coursehero.com/study-guides/boundless-worldhistory/north-america/