5. The American Revolution

In the 18th century, colonists had a society.

Rush was one of the British North American colonists who helped to win a world war.

The American Revolution would have seemed impossible had it been seen from 1763.

The language and ideas that define Americans' image of themselves were codified by the Revolution.

The Revolution was not predictable.
Slavery was allowed to persist because of a revolution.
Under new governments, resistance to centralized authority tied disparate colonies together.
The revolution created politicians who were eager to foster republican selflessness and protect the public good, but also encouraged individual self-interest and personal gain.
The Revolution was shaped by popular forces that were not welcomed by elite leaders.
The popular forces continued to shape the new nation and the rest of American history after they were unleashed.

The American Revolution had both long-term and short-term causes.

In this section, we will look at some of the long-term political, intellectual, cultural, and economic developments that took place in the 18th century.

Between the middle of the eigh teenth century and the end of the Glorious Revolution of 1688, Britain failed to define the colonies' relationship to the empire and institute a coherent program of imperial reform.

There were two factors that contributed to the failures.

The War of the Spanish Succession began at the start of the century and continued through the Seven Years' War.
Constant war was expensive and consuming.
British officials had differing visions of empire.
The Old Whigs and their supporters thought of an authoritarian empire based on conquering territory and taking resources.

They wanted to eliminate Britain's growing national debt by raising taxes and cutting spending.

The Whigs based their imperial vision on trade and manufacturing.
They said economic growth would solve the national debt.
"patriot Whigs" argued that the colonies should have the same status as the mother country.

Colonists understood how they fit into the empire.

The colonies experienced significant economic and demographic growth during the 18th century.
They believed that Britain's hands-off approach to the colonies resulted in this success.
Britain's hands-off policy was justified by the fact that colonists believed they held a special place in the empire.

The colonies developed their own political institutions.

Immediately after each colony's settlement, they created a colonial assembly.

The assembly assumed many of the same duties as the Commons in Britain, including taxing residents, managing the spending of the colonies' revenue, and granting salaries to royal officials.

In the early 1700s, colonial leaders tried to get the British government to define their legal prerogatives, but they were too busy with European wars.
The power of the assembly grew in the first half of the 18th century despite attempts by royal governors to limit it.
The jurisdiction of the assembly in the colonies was the same as that of Parliament in England.
They thought British inaction was justifying their tradition of local governance.
The political culture of the colonies was different from 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.
The country party in Britain inspired the colonial political culture.
The ideology of republicanism stressed the corrupting nature of power and the need for those involved in self-governing to be good citizens.
The rise of conspiracies, centralized control, and tyranny would require vigilance by the patriots.

The Great Awakening and the En lightenment combined in the colonies in the 1740s to challenge older ideas about authority.

John Locke had an impact on colonial thinking.
The aristocracy were wealthy or successful because they had more access to wealth, education, and patronage and not because they were innately superior.
Rational human beings would be produced by education if they were capable of thinking for themselves and questioning authority.
The colonies and the new nation were affected by these ideas.

The colonies experienced an unprecedented wave of evangelical Protestant revivalism at the same time that Locke's ideas about knowledge and education spread in North America.

George Whitefield preached Calvinist sermons to huge crowds.
His sermons were designed to appeal to his audience's emotions.

In order to find salvation, one needs to take personal responsibility for their relationship with God, a process that came to be known as a "conversion" experience.

He argued that the current Church hierarchy was a barrier between the individual and God.
New traveling preachers picked up his message after he died.
Locke and Whitefield gave individuals the power to question authority and take their own lives.

Anglicization is a process that eighteenth-century colonists were becoming more similar to Britons.

The market for British manufacturing exports became important as colonial economies grew.

Colonists with disposable income tried to mimic British culture.
By the middle of the 18th century, the colonists were able to afford items previously thought of as luxuries.
The desire to purchase British goods meshed with the desire to enjoy British liberties.

The American Revolution was caused by attempts to reform the British Empire after the Seven Years' War.

Europe's imperial powers fought a war called the Seven Years' War.
It was a world war, fought on multiple continents.
The British Empire had never been larger.
British rule over the east of the Mississippi River includes French Canada.
It consolidated its control over India.
The responsibilities of the postwar empire were daunting.
It was costly to win war on such a scale.
Britain's national debt doubled to 13 times its revenue.
The western frontiers of the North American colonies are where Britain faced significant new costs to secure and defend.
In the 1760s, Britain tried to consolidate control over its North American colonies, which led to resistance.

After three decades of Whig rule, King George III brought the Conservatives into his government in 1760. colonies would be subordinate in an authoritarian vision of empire.

Britain's first major postwar imperial action was targeting North America.
The king wanted to limit wars with Native Americans.
Colonists demanded access to the territory they fought in with the British.

Parliament passed two more reforms in 1764.

The Sugar Act cut the duty in half in order to increase enforcement.
The smuggler would be tried by the courts.
The Currency Act restricted colonies from making paper money.

Gold and silver coins were hard to come by in the colonies.

The lack of currency was a problem for the colonies, but it was especially bad in 1764 because of the postwar recession.

Some colonists began to fear a pattern of increased taxation and restricted liberties after the Currency Act and the Sugar Act were repealed.

The Stamp Act was passed in March.

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 tax.
The colonists had never been directly taxed by parliament.
colonies contributed to the empire through indirect taxes, such as customs duties.
A right to impose an internal tax on the colonies without their consent for the single purpose of revenue is denied, and a right to regulate their trade without their consent is admitted.
The Stamp Act directly affected many groups throughout colonial society, including printers, lawyers, college graduates, and even sailors who played cards.
This led to more popular resistance.

Legislative resistance by elites, economic resistance by merchants, and popular protest by common colonists were all forms of resistance to the Stamp Act.

The elites passed resolutions in their assembly.
The Virginia Resolves, passed by the House of Burgesses on May 30, 1765, declared that the colonists were entitled to all the liberties, privileges, franchises, and immunities.

When the Virginia Resolves were printed throughout the colonies, they often included a few extra, far more radical resolutions not passed by the Virginia House of Burgesses.

Additional items spread throughout the colonies and helped radicalize responses in other colonial assemblies.
The Stamp Act Congress was called in New York City in October of 1755.

Men and women politicized the domestic sphere by buying and displaying items that revealed their positions on parliamentary actions.

The end of taxation on goods like tea is celebrated by this teapot, which makes clear the owner's perspective.

The right to be taxed only by their own elected representatives was one of those rights.

The principle of the English constitution is that the subject will not be taxed without his consent.
Benjamin Franklin said it was the "prime Maxim of all free Government".
The colonies didn'telect members to Parliament, so they couldn't be taxed by that body.
In response, Parliament and the Crown argued that the colonists were just like the residents of those boroughs or counties in England that didn't vote for members to Parliament.
The idea of virtual representation was rejected by the colonists.

The Stamp Act had two types of resistance.

Merchants in major port cities were hoping that their refusal to import British goods would lead to the repeal of the Stamp Act.
In New York City and Philadelphia, merchants agreed not to buy or sell goods from Great Britain.
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.
There were riots in Boston.
Andrew Oliver, the stamp distributor for Massachusetts, was burned in effigy and a building he owned was pulled down in five minutes.
Oliver resigned the position the next day.
The lieutenant governor's home was set upon by a crowd after he publicly argued for submission to the stamp tax.

Much of Hutchinson's home and belongings were destroyed before the evening was over.

The Sons of Liberty were formed in most colonies after the original twelve stamp distributors resigned.

Sending a message to Parliament and discouraging colonists from accepting appointments as stamp collector were both achieved by these tactics.

The act became meaningless because there was no one to distribute the stamps.

The Stamp Act was repealed in February 1766.

The Declaratory Act was passed in order to save face and to try to avoid this kind of problem in the future.
The repeal of the Stamp Act was celebrated by the colonists, but they didn't pay much attention to the Declaratory Act.
The inhabitants of New York City raised a statue of King George III in honor of the repeal of the Stamp Act.

The Sons of Liberty's violent protest caused quite a stir in the colonies and England.

The tarring and feathering of Boston's commissioner of customs in 1774 was considered a terrorist act by the British.
The British saw the Sons as brutal instigators with smiles on their faces as they punished the customs commissioner.

The Declaratory Act gave Parliament the right to impose taxes that the colonies had resisted.

The right of Parliament to regulate colonial trade was explicitly acknowledged in the dispatches of the colonists.
The Townshend Acts created new customs duties on common items, like lead, glass, paint, and tea, instead of direct taxes.
A new American Board of Customs Commissioners and more vice-admiralty courts were created as a result of the acts.
Revenues from customs seizures would be used to pay customs officers and other royal officials in order to incentivize them to convict offenders.
These acts increased the British government's presence in the colonies and circumscribed the authority of the colonial assembly since they paid the governor's salary.
The colonists resisted again.

Even though they were duties, many colonial resistance authors still referred to them as taxes because they were designed to extract revenue from the colonies.

In new forms of resistance, the working-class and elite joined together.

Common colonists agreed not to consume the same products as merchants reinstituted nonimportation agreements.
The lists promised not to buy any British goods.
The lists were published in newspapers and bestowed recognition on those who signed and led to pressure on those who did not.

Women became involved in an unprecedented degree in the Townshend Acts.

They gathered signatures by circulating subscription lists.
The first political commentaries written by women appeared in newspapers.

Homespun clothing quickly became a marker of virtue and pa triotism, and women were an important part of this cultural shift.

British goods and luxuries became symbols of tyranny.
The cultural relationship with the mother country was changed by nonimportation and nonconsumption agreements.
Merchants and residents were monitored to make sure they did not break the agreements.
The names and offenses of offenders will be published in the newspaper and in broadsides.

Nonconsumption and nonimportation helped forge colonial unity.

Committees of correspondence were formed to keep each other informed of the resistance efforts throughout the colonies.

The AmeRIcAn RevOluTIOn 119 colonists had a sense that they were part of a larger political community.

The Boston massacre was the best example of this new "continental conversation".

In 1768, Britain sent troops to Boston to quell the resistance.

On the evening of March 5, 1770, a crowd gathered outside the Custom House and began throwing objects at the young sentry.
The crowd became hostile when a small number of soldiers came to the sentry's aid.
Five Bostonians, including one of the ringleaders, Crispus Attucks, died after the smoke cleared.

The soldiers were acquitted in Boston thanks to their defense attorney, John Adams.

The news of the Boston massacre spread quickly thanks to a famous engraving by Paul Revere, which depicted bloodthirsty British soldiers with smiles on their faces.
The engraving generated sympathy for Boston and anger with Britain.

Resistance led to the repeal.

In March 1770, Parliament repealed all of the new duties except the one on tea, which 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 play out as he pictured them, yet he intended to recount them.
The propaganda piece created by Revere lent credence to those demanding that the British rule be stopped.
The massacre took place in King Street Boston on March 5th.

To save face, the Act was left to assert that Parliament still had the right to tax the colonies.

Between 1765 and 1770 the character of colonial resistance changed.
During the Stamp Act resistance, violent mobs burned effigies and tore down houses, with little coordination between colonies.
The methods of resistance against the Townshend Acts became more coordinated.
Colonists who were excluded from political participation gathered signatures and joined the resistance by not buying British goods.

Britain's failed attempts at imperial reform in the 1760s created an increasingly vigilant and resistant colonial population and an enlarged political sphere far beyond anything anyone could have imagined a few years earlier.

A new sense of shared grievances began to join the colonists in their American political identity.

Tensions between the colonies and England subsided after the Boston massacre.

As the postwar recession ended, the colonial economy improved.
The repeal of the Townshend Acts did not stop the Sons of Liberty from continuing nonimportation.
In New York, a door-to-door poll of the population revealed that the majority wanted to end nonimportation.

In April 1773, Parliament passed two acts to help the failing East India Company.

Almost fifteen million pounds of tea was stored in warehouses from India to England, and the company was in debt.
The troubled company was put under government control after Parliament passed the regulating act.
The Tea Act allowed the company to sell its tea directly in the colonies without the usual import duties.
The cost of tea would be greatly reduced, but they resisted.

Merchants resented the East India Company's monopoly and resisted the Tea Act.

The Tea Act only affected a small group of people.
The support for resisting the Tea Act was due to principles.
Even though it was cheaper, colonists would be paying the duty and acknowledging Parliament's right to tax them.
The duty had to be paid when the ship unloaded.
In the summer of 1773, the major port cities debated what to do with the ships' arrival.
The Boston Sons of Liberty decided in November to prevent the landing and sale of the tea at the risk of their lives and property.
The meeting made sure the tea remained on the ships until they returned to London.

The tea did not reach the shore, but by December 16 the ships were still there.

At the end of the Old South Meeting House, a group of men dressed as Mohawk Indians made their way to the wharf.
A group of men who were determined to do all they could to save their country from ruin emptied every chest of tea on the three ships.

As word spread throughout the colonies, they were able to do the same to the tea sitting in their harbors.

In Charleston, Philadelphia, and New York, tea was either dumped or seized.

Fifty-one women in North Carolina signed an agreement in which they promised "to do every Thing as far as lies in our Power" to support the boycotts.

Women in the thirteen colonies could express their political views as consumers and producers.
Women often make decisions regarding household purchases, so their participation in consumer boycotts held particular weight.
The responses from both Britain and the colonial elites were elicited by the agitation of so many.

Britain's response was swift.

The Coercive Acts were passed by Parliament in the spring.
Colonists referred to them as the Intolerable Acts.
All trade to and from the city was cut off after the Boston Port Act was enacted.

The colonial government was put under British control by the Massachusetts Government Act.

The Administration of Justice Act allowed any royal official accused of a crime to be tried in Britain rather than in Massachusetts.
The Quartering Act allowed the British army to quarter newly arrived soldiers in colonies.
The king, his advisors, and Parliament acted to end the rebellion in Boston.

The other colonies came to the aid of Massachusetts.

Colonists sent food to Boston.

The House of Burgesses in Virginia called for a day of prayer and fast.

The sense of shared identity was fostered by the Coercive Acts.
The Crown and Parliament could do the same thing to any of her sister colonies.
In Massachusetts and New York, citizens elected committees to direct the colonies' response to the Coercive Acts.
Committees of correspondence and extralegal assembly were established in all of the colonies by the early 17th century.
They followed Massachusetts's example of seizing the powers of the royal governments.

The committees agreed to send delegates to the congress to coordinate the response.

On September 5, 1774, the First Continental Congress convened.
The document repeated the arguments made by the colonists that they retained 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.

The committee should be chosen in every county, city, and town.

Common colonists would make up the Committees of Inspection.
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.
A good number of people remained faithful to the king and Parliament.

The resistance movements in many colonies were formed as the situation got worse.

Privileges directly from their relationship with Britain were provided to elite merchants who traded with it.
Following the Association, a number of the colonists began to worry that the resistance was too radical and aimed at independence.
They were suspicious of the resistance movement and still expected a peaceful dialogue with Britain.

War broke out in Massachusetts when the Continental Congress met again in May.

Local militias' arms and powder stores were to be seized by the British.

The town militia met them.
When someone fired, the British ordered the militia to leave.
The battle continued all the way to Concord.
Militia members, known as minutemen, responded quickly and inflicted significant casualties on the British armies as they chased them back to Boston.
The British were trapped by twenty thousand militiamen who laid siege to Boston.
The militia set up fortifications on Breed's Hill.
In the Battle of Bunker Hill, the British attempted to remove them from the position with a frontal assault, but they were killed by the colonists.

The Continental Congress struggled to organize a response to the deaths of men in Boston.

The Massachusetts delegates, including John Adams, Samuel Adams, and John Hancock, wanted the Congress to support the Massachusetts militia.
Many delegates from the Middle Colonies, including New York, New Jersey, and Philadelphia, called for renewed attempts at reconciliation.

John H. worried the moderates.

The Congress agreed to adopt the Massa 1903.

The declaration of the causes of necessity of taking up arms was issued to justify the decision.

Many people were aware that the opportunities for reconciliation were ending.

After Congress approved the document, Benjamin Franklin wrote to a friend and said that the Congress would probably send one more petition to the King.

31 Congress was attempting reconciliation while publicly raising an army.

He dismissed the petition in October.

The king knew that the resistance was being carried on for the purpose of establishing an empire.
By the start of 1776, the idea of independence was gaining steam.

Independence was a part of the popular debate in the first months of 1776.

In support of independence, town meetings throughout the colonies approved resolutions.
It would take another seven months before the Continental Congress passed the independence resolution.
The American conversation was captured by a small pamphlet published in Philadelphia.
His combination of easy language, biblical references, and fiery rhetoric proved potent, and the pamphlet was quickly published throughout the colonies.
The taverns were filled with arguments over political philosophy and rumors of battlefield developments.

George Washington forced the British to retreat after taking control of the army.

The governor of Virginia declared martial law and offered freedom to all indentured servants if they left their masters and joined the British.
Thousands of slaves defected to the British later in the war in order to have a chance at freedom.
Black Pioneers are companies that mostly employed former slaves as laborers, skilled workers, and spies.
The first mass emancipation of enslaved people in American history was the result of the British's motives for offering freedom.
Slaves could now choose to run and risk their lives for freedom with the British army or hope that the United States would live up to its ideals of liberty.
The English courts dealt a blow to slavery in the empire.
Dunmore began to convince slave owners that a new independent nation might offer better protection for them.
The unrest that loyal southerners had hoped to avoid was laid down by the proclamation.
Slaveholders used violence to prevent their slaves from joining the British.
Virginia enacted regulations to prevent slave defection, threatening to ship slaves to the West Indies or execute them.
Many masters transported their enslaved people inland, away from the coastal temptation to join the British armies.

The Congress voted on May 10, 1776, to call on all colonies that had not already established revolutionary governments to do so and to wrest control from royal officials.

This was the Congress's first declaration of independence.

Resolved, that the United Colonies are free and independent States, and should not be associated with the state of Great Britain.

It passed with New York under imminent threat of British invasion.

Lee's resolution was the official legal declaration of independence, but before the vote, a committee had been named to draft a public declaration.

The document was drafted by a Virginian, Thomas Jefferson, with edits being made by his fellow committee members John Adams and Benjamin Franklin.

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, and that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

It is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish any form of Government that is destructive of these ends.
The British were blamed for the slave trade in the early draft.

The rhetoric of the preamble was not new.

They were the culmination of 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 document was approved by Congress.
It was one thing to declare independence, but another to win it on the battlefield.

The British believed that a few small incursions to seize supplies would be enough to stop the colonial rebellion.

The minor incursions turned into a full-out military conflict.
The new states faced the daunting task of taking on the world's largest military despite an early American victory.

The British forces that had left Boston arrived in New York in the summer of 1776.

The largest force in British history, including tens of thousands of German mercenaries, followed.
New York was the ideal location to begin expeditions to take control of the Hudson River and separate New England from the rest of the country.
New York has many loyalists, particularly among the merchant and Anglican communities.
The British launched an attack on Brooklyn and Manhattan in October.
The Continental Army took heavy losses before retreating through New Jersey.
He launched a surprise attack on the Hessian camp on Christmas Day by ferrying a few thousand men across the Delaware River.

There was even more success in upstate New York.

John Burgoyne led an army from Canada to secure the Hudson River in 1777.
General William Howe's forces were to meet up with him in upstate New York.
Howe sailed to Philadelphia to capture the capital of the new nation.

The AmeRIcAn RevOluTIOn 129 was a turning point in the war.

Benjamin Franklin was in Paris trying to get a treaty with the French.
The French were reluctant to back the cause.
The French were convinced by the news that the cause might not have been as crazy as they had thought.
The Treaty of Amity and Commerce was signed in February.
The treaty turned a colonial rebellion into a global war as fighting between the British and French soon broke out in Europe and India.
He realized that European military tactics wouldn't work in North America.
armies tried to seize major cities in Europe.
Philadelphia and New York were held by the British in 1777.
Washington realized after New York that the largely untrained Continental Army could not win battles with the professional British army.
He came up with his own logic of warfare that involved smaller skirmishes and avoided major engagements that would endanger his entire army.
No matter how many cities the British captured, the war would continue if he kept the army intact.

The British shifted their attention to the South because they believed they had more popular support.

The British simply didn't have the manpower to retain military control after they captured major cities from Virginia to South Carolina and Georgia.
In this 1782 cartoon, the British lion faces a spaniel, a rooster, a rattlesnake, and a pug dog.
Though the caption predicts Britain's success, it shows that Britain faced more challenges than just the American rebels.

The British were fighting France, Spain, and Holland during the War in the South.

The war in North America was costing the British public a lot of money.

The French army and navy helped the Americans take advantage of the British southern strategy.
Washington sent his troops from New York to Virginia in order to trap the British army.
Cornwallis' men were waiting for supplies and reinforcements from New York.
After laying siege to the city, the French navy encircled Cornwallis's forces and forced his surrender.
The British didn't have a new strategy or public support to continue the war after the capture of another army.

Americans celebrated their victory, but it cost a lot.

Soldiers were not provided with enough resources during the brutal winters.
The victory of the American revolutionaries over the rule of Britain was signaled by the Lord Cornwallis's surrender.
This painting of the event in 1817 was commissioned by the U.S. government and will live on in American memory as a pivotal moment in the nation's origin story.

Over 2,500 Americans died from disease and exposure during a single winter at Valley Forge.

On the home front, life was not easy.

Both sides of the conflict left women 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.

Adams talked about the difficulties she encountered on their farm.

In the midst of severe labor shortages and inflation, she managed the planting and harvesting of crops, as well as 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 invested in several speculative schemes and sold imported goods.
The Revolution was fought all over the world.
It was fought on women's doorsteps in the fields next to their homes.
There was no way for women to avoid the conflict.
During the Revolution, Mary Silliman's husband, Gold, was absent from their home for most of the conflict.
Mary calmly evacuated her household, including her children and servants, from the area when the British attacked on July 7, 1779.
When Gold was captured by loyalists and held prisoner, American soldiers came from a variety of background and had many reasons to fight with the American army.
An African American soldier from the 2nd Rhode Island Regiment, a man in the homespun of the militia, and a French sublieutenant were depicted in this watercolor by Jean-Baptiste-Antoine DeVerger.

Mary is six months pregnant with their second child.

Mary spearheaded an effort to capture a prominent leader in the Conservative Party in exchange for her husband's freedom.
Dunmore's Proclamation of 1775 in Virginia promised freedom to any slaves who would escape their masters and join the British cause.
Washington resisted allowing black men to join the Continental Army, but eventually relented.
Peter Salem was freed to fight with the militia.
He fought with many other black Americans in the battles at Bunker Hill.
Salem was able to determine his own life after his enlistment ended because he contributed to the cause.
Salem was not alone, but many more slaves seized on the tumult of war to run away, and this painting depicts what would be remembered as the moment the new United States became a republic.
George Washington resigned as the most powerful man in the former thirteen colonies on December 23, 1783.
He gave up his position as commander-in-chief of the army so that civilian rule would define the new nation and that a republic would be set in place rather than a dictatorship.

The AmeRIcAn RevOluTIOn 133 is to secure their own freedom.

Between thirty thousand and one hundred thousand slaves deserted their masters during the war, according to historians.
New political, social, and economic opportunities were brought by victory, but it also brought new uncertainties.
In the South, the war decimated entire communities.
Thousands of women were widowed.

After the war, the American economy would have to be rebuilt.

Men would have to figure out how to govern now that state constitutions have created governments.
It was left to the survivors to seize the opportunities created by the Revolution, in both lives and fortune, and to help forge and define the new nation-state.

The Revolution had both short- and long-term consequences.

The creation of state constitutions was the most important consequence of independence.
The Revolution 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 dispersal of the population.

The Revolution made governments hostile to Native Americans' territorial claims.

The Revolution ended the mercantilist economy, opening new opportunities in trade and manufacturing.

At the time, the new states drafted constitutions, which was an innovation from the British Constitution.

The 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.
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.

The first state constitution of Pennsylvania was radical and democratic.

They created a unicameral legislature but no genuine executive.

Men who did not own property could vote.
Massachusetts's constitution was less democratic in structure and underwent a more popular process of ratification.

Each town sent delegates to the constitutional convention in Cambridge in the fall of 1779.

The constitution draft was debated by the town meetings.
Massachusetts established a three-branch government based on checks and balances.
The period of constitution making and state building after independence was unprecedented.

The Articles of Confederation were approved by the Continental Congress.

Each state was allowed to vote in the Continental Congress.
The articles are notable for what they did not allow.
Congress did not have the power to impose taxes, regulate foreign or interstate commerce, or establish a federal judiciary.
The postwar Congress was weak and ineffectual.

After independence, political and social life changed a lot.

More common citizens played important roles in local and state governance.

Society became more meritocratic and less deferential.

The end of mercantilism was the most important long-term economic consequence of the Revolution.

Limits on trade, settlement, and manufacturing were imposed by the British Empire.
New markets and trade relationships were opened by the Revolution.
The western territories were opened to invasion and settlement by the Americans.

Americans began to create their own manufacturers, no longer content to rely on those in Britain.

The American Revolution had its limits.

During the war, women also served the cause, following their expansion into political affairs.
The Revolution did not result in civic equality for women.

Republican societies required good citizens and mothers were responsible for raising them.

Women still remained largely on the peripheries of the new American polity, even though this opened opportunity for them regarding education.

In the thirteen colonies, boycotting women were seen as liberators.

In British prints such as this, they were derided as immoral harlots for sticking their noses in the business of men.

Sixty thousand loyalists left America to cause the Revolution.

Many Loyalists lived the rest of their lives in exile from their homeland, because they came from all ranks of American society.
The Treaty of Paris required the Americans to compensate Loyalists who lost their property because of their loyalty.
Throughout the 1780s, states continued seizing property held by Loyalists after the Americans failed to honor their promise.
They went to England because they thought of it as their mother country.
Many more settled on the peripheries of the British Empire throughout the world.
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.

They hoped that the British government would help them establish new homes in other parts of the Empire.

George Romney painted Joseph Brandt.

Mohawk and British forces were led by Brandt.

David George, a black loyalist and Baptist preacher, eventually settled in Sierra Leone with some of his followers.

In the Lower South, freedmen were forced back into bondage after some masters revoked their offers of freedom for service.

The antislavery movement would eventually be encouraged by the Revolution's rhetoric of equality because it created a "revolutionary generation" of slaves and free black Americans.
Slave revolts incorporated 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 boiled over in the 1830s and 1840s and effectively tore the nation in two in the 1850s and 1860s.
Many Native American groups sided with the British.
They were hoping for a British victory that would keep the settlers from moving west.
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 were pushed farther west in the 19th century.

The end of Native American independence was marked by American independence.

The American Revolution was followed by revolutions in France, Haiti, and South America.

Significant changes to the British Empire were made during the American Revolution.

The United States of America was created by the Revolution.

By September 1783, independence had been achieved.
The new nation was still up for grabs.

The Articles of Confederation and the Constitution of 1787 and 1788 were the first things the Americans would do with that nation-state in the 1780s.

Historians argue over the causes and character of the American Revolution.

Such questions are not limited to historians.
The Revolution has been at the center of American political culture from Abraham Lincoln's use of the Declaration of Independence in the Gettysburg Address to twenty-first century Tea Party members wearing knee breeches.
One's definition of what it means to be American depends on how one understands the Revolution.

The Revolution was not won by a few people.

From the commoners who protested the Stamp Act to the women who helped organize boycotts against the Townshend duties, men and women of all ranks contributed to the colonies' most unlikely victory.
In the case of Native Americans, the Revolution did not aim to end all social and civic inequalities, but to create new inequalities.
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.

James Ambuske, Alexander Burns, Joshua Beatty, Christina Carrick, Christopher Consolino, Michael Hattem, Timothy C. Hemmis, Joseph Moore, and Christopher Sparshott contributed to this chapter.

John Murrin wrote "Anglicizing an American Colony: The Transformation of Provincial Massachusetts" in 1966.

The purpose of the British Colonies is to raise a revenue.

See the archive for details on a 1766 London reprint.

In New York, Boston, Philadelphia, and Maryland, this version was also published.

"Resolution of Non-Importation made by the Citizens of Philadelphia," October 25, 1765, mss., Historical Society of November 7, 1765, broadside, "Pennsylvania Stamp Act and Non-Importation Resolutions Collection," American Philosophical Society, Philadelphia, PA.

Poems and drama were some of the female contributions to political commentary.

Cities and the American Revolution are some of the topics covered in Rebels Rising.

The Declaration of Independence was made in America.