American Revolution

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Causes
Military and Diplomatic Course
Domestic Course
Postwar Impact
Changing Interpretations

The process whereby colonists in North America broke free from the British Empire to found the United States.

Despite the political upheavals of the previous century, Britain itself in the middle of the eighteenth century remained a rigidly hierarchical society, still rooted in its feudal past. By contrast, on the other side of the Atlantic, Puritanism and the experience of frontier life had generated anti-authority, individualistic attitudes, while the absence of an aristocracy and the ease with which land could be acquired made possible a degree of social mobility unheard of in Europe. The original charters establishing the colonies had provided for self-government, and, subsequently, successive British administrations allowed the colonists great freedom to conduct their own affairs. By the mid-eighteenth century a large proportion of adult white males in the colonies possessed the suffrage while also enjoying the privileges of a free press and some freedom of religious worship. The colonies, in other words, had grown apart from the mother country, their inhabitants had begun to think of themselves as Americans, and, not surprisingly, they proved unreceptive to attempts to bring them to heel.

British politicians, for their part, with the ending of the Seven Years War (1756-63) turned their attention to the problems of administering an empire. In order to meet the large debt incurred by war with France and the continuing costs of protecting the western frontier and defending the colonists from the Indians the British government sought new sources of revenue. Believing, not unreasonably, that those same colonists should contribute to the funds necessary for their defence Parliament passed the Revenue Act, otherwise known as the ‘Sugar Act’, in 1764, and the Stamp Act in 1765. The latter required the affixing of a stamp, which had to be purchased, to a wide range of legal documents, newspapers, pamphlets, playing cards, and other items.

It was the fact that this and other legislation was introduced solely for the purpose of raising revenue that made it so offensive to Americans. As they saw it, this was to infringe one of the most hallowed principles of good government, the right of free people not to be taxed without their consent. Accordingly, the representatives of nine colonies at the Stamp Act Congress of 1765 agreed a number of resolutions, including one asserting, ‘That it is inseparably essential to the freedom of a people, and the undoubted rights of Englishmen, that no taxes should be imposed on them, but with their own consent, given personally, or by their representatives’. On the same occasion the Congress rejected categorically the claim of the British government that no basic rights had been violated because colonists enjoyed ‘virtual representation’ in the House of Commons.

The Stamp Act proved unenforceable and, a year after its passage, was repealed, but Parliament remained unwilling to forgo its claim to paramountcy and continued to pass legislation based on that assumption. The Quebec Act 1774 was the most threatening, empowering as it did the French Canadians and any Indian allies to settle in the Ohio and Mississippi valleys, thus potentially cutting off the expansion of the colonies to the west. Growing resentment in the colonies led to the convening of the First Continental Congress in 1774. This gathering claimed for the people of the colonies the right to enjoy without infringement ‘life, liberty and property’; rejected again the relevance of virtual representation in their case; and repeatedly asserted their entitlement to all the rights and immunities of freeborn Englishmen. The first shots in the Revolutionary War were fired at Lexington in April 1775 and the Declaration of Independence formally breaking the link between the colonies and Britain was signed on 4 July 1776.

The American Revolution was essentially a political revolution. Even though the revolutionaries in this case were motivated in part by a concern for property rights this was not a conflict primarily about economics, but about the values of democratic government. This was also, in several senses, a conservative revolution. Many of those prominent in the movement towards independence were most reluctant to break the link with Britain and only accepted the need to do so as a last resort. They also insisted that in resisting the British government they were merely asserting their rights as Englishmen—that it was the government in London that had first disrupted the status quo by enforcing illegitimate measures in the colonies. Furthermore, unlike subsequent revolutions in France and Russia the American version involved no fundamental reordering of existing economic or social structures.

— David Mervin

This entry includes 5 subentries:

Political History

Military History

Diplomatic Aspects

Financial Aspects

Profiteering

Political History

The American Revolution transformed thirteen British colonies into fourteen states (including Vermont) and bound them into one republic. It changed the identity of millions of people, and transformed their dominant political idea from unequal subjection to equal citizenship. It began with a parochial dispute about being British. Its debates escalated to fundamental questions of human existence. By creating the United States, the Revolution gained world-historical significance.

The Revolution also created a continent-spanning empire. To the victors every denizen was a subject, though not necessarily a citizen, of the United States. To Indians, nothing of the sort was true. They remained their own peoples. The Revolution helped begin the worldwide assault on slavery. It also let slavery spread across the Cotton Kingdom and gain enough strength that a southern republic nearly emerged out of the American republic's contradictions. Full of such contradictions, the Revolution was among the major modern transforming events.

British Power in the Colonies

At the end of the Seven Years' War in 1763, Great Britain stood triumphant among western European powers. But the war had been expensive, and the colonies had seemed insubordinate and uncooperative, even though colonials gloried in being Britons. Parliament's position, given formal statement in 1765 by Sir William Blackstone, was that it possessed power over all Britons. Vaunted British liberty merely meant that the Crown could not act without Parliament's consent.

After 1763 successive British administrations tried to tax the colonies directly to pay for imperial defense and administration and to assert Parliament's power. The Revenue or "Sugar" Act (1764) taxed all sugar and molasses brought to the mainland colonies. Despite sporadic protests and a great deal of smuggling, it took force. The Stamp Act (1765) tried to tap colonial business by requiring official stamps on most transactions. Colonial resistance nullified it every where except Georgia, and it was repealed in 1766. The Declaratory Act (1766) announced that Parliament could legislate for the colonies "in all cases whatsoever." In 1767 the Townshend Acts taxed imported glass, lead, paint, paper, and tea. Resistance led to the repeal of all except the tea duty in 1770. All of the British taxes were to be paid in scarce coin rather than colonial paper money, which was denied the status of legal tender. Violators would be tried in vice-admiralty courts, where a royal judge would decide all matters.

After 1767 an American Board of Customs Commissioners was based in Boston. Troops were stationed there in 1768 to protect customs officials. In 1773 Parliament combined the tea tax with rescuing the bankrupt East India Company by letting it market tea directly to America. Most towns simply turned the tea ships around before they entered the port limits and had to declare their cargoes. But Boston could not. When intense negotiations about sending it back finally failed on 16 December 1773, "Mohawks" dumped the tea into the Harbor.

The "destruction of the tea" (not called the Boston Tea Party until decades later) changed the British position. The issue no longer was taxes; it was punishing Boston and Massachusetts. Early in 1774 Parliament passed four "Coercive" or "Intolerable" Acts, which closed the port of Boston, altered the Massachusetts government, allowed troops to be billeted on civilians, and permitted trials of British officials to be heard in Nova Scotia or Britain, because they supposedly could not get a fair trial in the original colony. This was despite the acquittal by a Massachusetts court of the soldiers involved in the Boston Massacre. General Thomas Gage, commander in chief in America, became governor of Massachusetts, and British headquarters moved from New York to Boston. Meanwhile the Quebec Act recognized Catholicism and French customs there and gave jurisdiction over the Ohio and Great Lakes country to the government in Montreal.

The Rise of Resistance

Resistance received a strong lead from notable provincials. They had become used to making laws, raising taxes, setting public officials' salaries, and debating high policy. They regarded their assemblies as local equivalents of Parliament. Now Parliament itself threatened their power and pride. Provincial assemblies passed resolutions, established Committees of Correspondence, and called for days of fasting. The sort of white men who sat in them started to work out the position that we know as "taxation without representation is tyranny." The phrase was coined by the fiery Boston lawyer James Otis, but it was not widely used. The elite's lead was important, but resolutions and pamphlets would not alone have altered even one British policy, let alone start to change the fundamental terms of American life. From the Stamp Act in 1765 to the dumping of the tea, the resistance movement's "punch" came from the port cities, thanks to both ordinary people's grievances and well-organized popular leadership.

"Ordinary people" is a broad term. In the port towns it covered seafarers, laborers, apprentices, journeymen artisans, master craftsmen, tavern keepers, and even small merchants. In the right circumstances it could cover slaves, though describing a crowd as comprising "sailors, Negroes, and boys" was a standard way to disown it. Crowd action was a normal part of eighteenth-century urban life. Some crowds amounted to a whole community defending itself when the militia, the sheriff's posse, or the volunteer fire company could not. Even gentlemen might be involved, perhaps disguised in costume or a workingman's long trousers.

Crowd action also could have a class content. Seafarers, rather than all "town-born," frustrated an attempt in 1747 to impress them off the Boston streets into the Royal Navy. Crowds could be rough, but they also could be sophisticated. Boston workingmen paraded with effigies each autumn on "Pope's Day" (5 November), which celebrated the unmasking of the seventeenth-century Gun-powder Plot to bomb Parliament. They were keeping alive their sense that to be British meant more than doing whatever Parliament said. It was to be Protestant and free, and on that day the crowd of Protestant freemen ruled Boston's streets.

For the most part these uprisings were traditional, aimed at restoring how things ought to be, but during the Stamp Act crisis of 1765–1766 a transformation began. An intercolonial network of Sons of Liberty emerged, combining militancy with political direction. For the most part they were men in the middle, not real plebeians but not gentry either. In Boston Samuel Adams was Harvard educated but very much a popular politician. Adams could (and often did) argue with the governor, but he also could talk to people like shoemaker Ebenezer Macintosh, who led one of the Pope's Day crowds. Macintosh brought out the crowds on 14 August 1765, in order to "convince" stamp distributor Andrew Oliver that he should resign before the Stamp Act even took force. Boston's depressed economy helps explain the crowd's intense anger.

Newport, New York City, and other places followed Boston's lead. Virginia's House of Burgesses passed powerful (if ambiguous) resolutions. These inspired more resolutions from other assemblies and from a congress of nine colonies that assembled in New York. Mary land pamphleteer Daniel Dulany demolished the British argument that the colonies were "virtually" represented in Parliament. Henceforth the British assertion would be simply that Parliament could do what it chose. Separate but coordinated nonimportation campaigns in the ports frustrated the Townshend Acts between 1768 and 1770, not completely but enough to bring repeal of all but the tax on tea.

Parallel to the tax problem, the issue of British soldiers became an irritant. Only New York had a longstanding garrison, and it was small until the Seven Years' War. When peace returned, the garrison remained so large that two separate barrack areas were needed to house the troops. Their off-duty competition for scarce jobs made them immensely unpopular, which also applied to the four-regiment garrison posted to Boston in 1768. Street brawls between soldiers seeking work and civilians broke out in New York in January 1770, and five Bostonians died when soldiers on guard duty at the customs house opened fire on a snowball-throwing crowd in Boston in March. Work was an issue there also, but Boston's bloodshed began when a customs informer fired into a hostile crowd, killing eleven-year-old Christopher Seider. Calm returned after the "Boston Massacre," but in 1772 Rhode Islanders captured and burned the revenue cutter Gaspée when it ran aground.

Resistance Becomes Revolution

The same year Boston named a committee to rouse awareness in backcountry towns. Initially the committee met with suspicion, but after the passage of the Coercive Acts country people reorganized their militias, closed the royal courts, and shut down the new government outside occupied Boston. This was the moment when ordinary country people first became directly involved. By shutting down the government rather than just resisting one law or policy, it also was the moment when resistance began turning into revolution. Committees of correspondence began to form outside Massachusetts, partly to exchange information and partly to rally support. The First Continental Congress met in Philadelphia at summer's end. It worked out the position that all colonials would support Massachusetts by direct aid and by boycotting British commerce, and it called for committees of association to guarantee compliance. During the autumn tense New Englanders gathered supplies, conducted militia drills, and set up lines of quick communication.

They showed their temper by rallying quickly after a rumor of fighting at Boston spread through eastern New England in October. They showed their organization and their full readiness on 19 April 1775, when real fighting broke out at the towns of Lexington and Concord after a British expedition tried to seize supplies and capture leaders. Massachusetts men drove the troops back with heavy losses, gathered into an impromptu army, and besieged Boston, which the British army controlled. In June they inflicted massive injuries on another British force at Breed's (Bunker) Hill. Massachusetts had been in revolution since the closure of the courts the previous summer. Now it was at war.

When war broke out General and Governor Gage was under orders from London to act, even though he knew his troops were too few for the task. Each side knew the other's plans, and townsmen were ready for the alarm that Paul Revere spread as the troops prepared to move. Whoever fired first, the colonial militia gave the redcoats a terrible drubbing, besieged Boston, and gave British regulars another drubbing before they yielded Breed's (Bunker) Hill in June. Shortly after that, George Washington, who had appeared at the Second Continental Congress in uniform, arrived to take command. A stalemate followed until artillery captured from Fort Ticonderoga on Lake Champlain could be placed on Dorchester Heights. That made Boston untenable, and the British withdrew in March 1776.

Outside New England the news of fighting changed the mood from disquiet and support to angry solidarity. Committees of Safety took form and began to drain power away from regular governments. The elite New Yorker Gouverneur Morris described one meeting to elect a committee as "the mob" beginning "to think and to reason." He likened the plebeians to "poor reptiles" and predicted that "'ere noon they will bite." When the news arrived from Lexington, a real mob broke open the city arsenal and seized the weapons stored there. Small farmers outside New England began to ponder their own interests. Slaves in Virginia quietly approached the royal governor and offered their services. They knew at least vaguely about Somerset's Case (1772), which seemed to outlaw slavery within Britain. As early as 1768 Ohio country Indians had been exploring the idea of unity. Now they and most others began considering which side to choose.

The Debate Over Independence

Throughout the quarter-century from 1764, when the first protests against the Sugar Act appeared, until the end of the great debate about ratifying the federal Constitution in 1789, American writers argued. Until 1774 their debate was about the problem of being British while not dwelling in Britain. London set the terms of the argument even though writers like Daniel Dulany (Maryland) and John Dickinson (Delaware and Pennsylvania) wrote with great power and usually won their points.

Thomas Jefferson's A Summary View of the Rights of British America (1774) broke free of that agenda. He, Thomas Paine, John Adams (Thoughts on Government, 1776) and others were declaring intellectual independence and beginning to address the problems that Americans would face as a separate people. The first result would be justifying independence in 1776. The second would be state-level arguments about how to be republican. The third would be the creation of the republic over a dozen intensely conflict-ridden but very creative years.

Paine's Common Sense (1776) made the argument for independence and republicanism, calling for the simplest of political institutions to replace the old order. Not everybody was ready, and some people were moving to the king's side. Others dreaded Paine's call for extreme political simplicity, particularly Adams, whose Thoughts on Government made the call for institutional complexity and balance. That debate would continue until 1788. Adams also suggested that any new constitution would need some sort of popular ratification. New York artisans and farmers in western Massachusetts were making the same point. More immediately, doubters and moderates had to be convinced, particularly in New York and in Pennsylvania, whose old government continued to meet in the same building as Congress until May 1776.

Congress moved toward independence gradually between April and July, opening the ports to non-British trade, calling for remaining royal government to end, and finally naming the five-man committee that drafted its Declaration to the world. It also named committees to begin the business of foreign affairs, particularly with France, which already was giving clandestine aid, and to draft Articles of Confederation binding the separate states. Until that document was finally approved in 1781, there was no real basis for the United States to exist. Yet during those years Congress organized an army, supported a war, presided over the beginnings of a national economy, and won an alliance with France and financial aid from the Netherlands.

The Declaration of Independence has three parts: an eloquent statement about human rights, a long bill of indictment against "the present king of Britain," and the formal statement of separation. Of these the most important at the time was the attack on King George. The Declaration did not attack monarchy in principle. That would have been foolish, given the need for French aid. What Jefferson wrote was not what Congress finally declared. To the Virginian's chagrin, his collective editor cut much of his impassioned rhetoric toward the document's end, including his attempt to blame slavery on King George, which Jefferson himself saw as the final and most powerful charge. Historically the charge was ridiculous; Virginians had wanted their slaves. But slavery was emerging as a moral and political problem that cut across all other lines of dispute, including that of loyal Briton and revolutionary American. When British writer Samuel Johnson asked in 1776 how it was "that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty from the drivers of Negroes," his revulsion was just as strong as Jefferson's.

The War is Fought

Congress voted independence on July 2 and accepted the final draft on July 4. It was not fully signed until early August. By then an enormous fleet was discharging British and hired German troops on Staten Island, preparing to capture New York City. Expecting the invasion, George Washington had moved his half-trained and ill-equipped Continental Army to Brooklyn. His attempt to defend the city in the "Battle of Long Island" failed, but a superb retreat to Manhattan got most of his troops out of the way of capture. The Americans continued to retreat, first upstate and then across the Hudson River into New Jersey. Washington's strategy until 1781 would be to keep the army intact, rather than to win set pieces, unless a stroke was needed for purposes of military and civilian morale. He achieved two such strokes, one at Trenton in December 1776 and the other at Princeton in January 1777. New York City would remain in British hands until 1783.

The only great set-piece battles after Long Island were Saratoga in 1777, when American victory helped bring France into the conflict openly, and Yorktown in 1781. The French fleet made that possible by blocking the Chesapeake until a combined army under Washington could cut Lord Cornwallis and his troops off, breaking the British political will to continue.

By then the war had touched virtually everybody inside the whole zone that Britain had won in 1763. Even the Southwest, where Choctaws and Chickasaws were nominally pro-British but primarily interested in their own independence, saw an influx of loyalist refugees, as well as military aid from the Spanish authorities in New Orleans to the Americans farther east. Spain entered the war not as an outright ally of the United States, but rather to honor its own alliance with France. The "old northwest," New York State, eastern Pennsylvania, the Chesapeake, the southern backcountry, and the Carolina and Georgia lowlands all witnessed massive material destruction. Among all American wars, the struggle for independence was the second longest, after Vietnam. The rate of military casualties in relation to the population was the second highest after the Civil War.

The Revolution's Aftermath

At the war's end perhaps sixty thousand white refugees fled, going to Canada and Britain. Thousands of black people who had sought the king's freedom secured it by fleeing too, on the ships that left Savannah, Charleston, and New York late in 1783. The Mohawk Indians, who had been actively pro-British, went to Canada; most others believed they had lost nothing, whichever side they had chosen. The treaty signed in Paris that year provided almost everything the Americans could have wanted. It yielded not just the areas where American troops were in control but also the three major occupied ports. It also ceded the entire zone east of the Mississippi, south of the Great Lakes, and north of Florida, whatever Indians thought about it. Washington rightly called his fellow Americans "lords of a great empire" in 1784.

Within America changes were unfolding rapidly. Vermont abolished slavery in 1777 when it declared its own independence from New York. Pennsylvania began gradual abolition in 1780, to be completed in 1799. The Massachusetts Supreme Court decreed slavery's immediate abolition there in 1783. Women were starting to raise their voices about public affairs and about their own concerns. During the war all the states persecuted Loyalists, attainting them by name in statutes that confiscated their property and threatened them with death. The Penn family lost their feudal proprietorship over Pennsylvania. The material demands of the war generated a national economy, which simply had not existed prior to independence. The experiences of war as seen from the center of national politics and of diplomacy began turning the provincial gentlemen who had been mostly strangers when they first assembled in 1774 into a national elite with a common point of view and an increasingly common purpose.

Deciding on a New Political Order

The greatest immediate problem after independence was to work out the terms of a new political order. John Adams wanted to "glide insensibly" from the old order to the new, with minimal change in institutions or customs. That is what happened in Connecticut and Rhode Island, which already ran their own affairs entirely. But elsewhere the old institutions collapsed at independence, and new ones had to be built from the beginning. Thomas Paine thought that annual assemblies "with a president only" would do, and that is close to what came to be in Pennsylvania and Vermont. The idea horrified John Adams in Massachusetts, New York's John Jay, and Maryland leader Charles Carroll of Carrollton. Each state created complex institutions that their designers intended to balance society's elements against one another. Following British tradition and wanting to protect private property, they tried to define those elements in terms of "the few" and "the many," with property requirements for voting and holding public office.

The state constitutions of New York (1777) and Massachusetts (1780) foreshadowed the structure of executive branch, legislative branch, and judicial branch that the United States Constitution would establish. That document's authors intended to sort men who were qualified to rule from the rest. When they wrote it in 1787, they had come firmly to believe that ordinary people had shown themselves unfit to rule by their conduct in the separate states. But the Constitution says nothing about social distinctions among citizens, let alone about property requirements for voting and holding office. Its sorting out would be indirect, on the unproven premise that on a large stage only the truly qualified could emerge.

Perhaps the worst intellectual problem was figuring out how to be a republican people at all. It was not enough to depose the king, as the English had deposed James II in 1688. They had simply called new joint monarchs, James's daughter Mary and her husband, William, to the throne, but there would be no European prince for Americans. Nor was it enough to draw up a set of new institutions, call the document a constitution, and declare it in operation. Most states did try to do exactly that. The possible consequences became apparent when South Carolina's legislature repealed the state's two-year-old constitution in 1778. The governor vetoed the repeal and then resigned his office, leaving the state with neither a certain basis for its own institutions nor anybody in charge. Not until Massachusetts employed the devices of both a special convention to write a constitution and a special process to ratify it in 1780 did the notion of "the people" being its own sovereign begin to take on operational meaning. That device has underpinned American constitutional thinking ever since.

The movement for the federal Constitution sprang from the inadequacies of the Articles of Confederation, which rendered Congress nearly powerless, from foreign debts that could not be paid and treaty obligations that could not be met, from the Revolution's surge of "new men" into power at the state level, and from what those men did with the power they gained. That included continuing to persecute loyalists despite the peace treaty, cushioning the problems of debtors by staying suits and issuing cheap paper money, and looking to local needs ahead of national ones. The men we call "the Framers" already knew one another thanks to wartime experience, and they had developed a common perspective. To their minds the whole situation pointed toward disaster, particularly after Shays's Rebellion (1786) seemed to threaten the very government of Massachusetts.

Alexander Hamilton of New York began writing essays in favor of strong government as early as 1782. James Madison of Virginia retreated from the frustrations of serving in Congress to ponder political science. Serving as American minister in London, John Adams tried to defend "the constitutions of the United States." George Washington wrote worried letters to his friends. Informal meetings at Mount Vernon (1785) and Annapolis (1786) led to a call for a general convention to "propose amendments" to the Articles of Confederation, which would meet in Philadelphia in 1787.

That call had no legal basis, but Congress endorsed it, and only Rhode Island failed to send delegates. Even their absence could have been fatal, since amending the Articles required the legislatures of all thirteen founding states (excluding Vermont, which went unrecognized) to consent. The convention sidestepped that problem by providing that the Constitution would take effect when special conventions in nine states accepted it. The solution was strictly illegal, but by June 1788 nine states had ratified, though the majority of voters probably intended to reject it. Institutional stability finally returned when the United States Congress assembled and George Washington assumed the presidency early in 1789.

The Constitution solved the problems of political authority, political order, and political economy among the republic's citizens that the Revolution had raised. It created a huge common market within which a commercial economy could flourish. It gave the United States the strength to survive in a difficult, dangerous world and to create its own continent-spanning empire. The Northwest Ordinances adopted by the old Congress during the same period solved the problem of incorporating that American empire into the republic, both politically and economically. But the Constitution failed completely to address the issues of equality and freedom that people who were not white and not male had raised during the Revolution.

Those questions had had no place on the old agenda for discussion and action that had gone with being British in America. They would have very prominent places on the new agenda that sprang from the Revolution's proposition that to be American was to be equal and free. Part of what was revolutionary about American independence was that it happened at all, given Britain's strength and the amount of disruption required. Part was working out a way for republicanism to work over an enormous area. Part was opening up those questions of American equality, identity, and belonging, even though most would remain unanswered long after George Washington became president.

Bibliography

Bailyn, Bernard. The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1967.

Calloway, Colin. The American Revolution in Indian Country: Crisis and Diversity in Native American Communities. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1995.

Countryman, Edward. The American Revolution. New York: Hill and Wang, 1985. Revised edition in preparation.

Frey, Sylvia. Water from the Rock: Black Resistance in a Revolutionary Age. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1991.

Greene, Jack P., and J. R. Pole, eds. A Companion to the American Revolution. Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2000.

Gross, Robert A. The Minutemen and Their World. Rev. ed. New York: Hill and Wang, 2001.

Holton, Woody. Forced Founders: Indians, Debtors, Slaves, and the Making of the American Revolution in Virginia. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999.

Norton, Mary Beth. Liberty's Daughters: The Revolutionary Experience of American Women, 1750–1800. Rev. ed. Boston: Little, Brown, 1996.

Wood, Gordon S. The Radicalism of the American Revolution. New York: Vintage Books, 1993.

Young, Alfred F. The Shoemaker and the Tea Party: Memory and the American Revolution. Boston: Beacon Press, 1999.

Military History

Without the War of Independence, there would have been no American Revolution and no American national state in the eighteenth century. Even if Britain had granted her disgruntled colonists separation from the empire in 1775 or 1776, the statement holds true. This generalization about the link between war and American state formation also applies to the creation of many nations since the Early Modern Era in Europe, which saw the emergence of the national state in something remotely approaching its modern form between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries. America, in some measure, followed the pattern of weak kingdoms and other polities in Europe, since wars led to centralizing tendencies because of the heavy taxes, large armies, and bureaucratic agencies needed to energize and manage military undertakings. Some of those forms of centralization and bureaucratization remained permanently with the advent of peace in Spain, France, Sweden, and, in time, Britain.

It has seldom been noted that the earliest beginnings of war and state formation in America date back to almost a century before the War of Independence and other events that led to the Constitutional Convention in 1787. Britain's four imperial wars with France between 1689 and 1763 resulted in the growth of permanent powers for the thirteen British American legislative assemblies. Dependent on the colonies for men and money to defend the frontiers and to send expeditions against Canada, the colonial lawmakers became military policymakers by indicating the way monies were spent, the number of men to be raised, and the length and location of their service. In using wars as a way to increase their authority, the colonial legislatures seized greater control over military affairs than the House of Commons ever acquired in Britain. These were the bodies that led the resistance against Britain's new imperial program after 1763 and that produced American leaders in the War of Independence. Without the institutional gains from those previous wars in the New World, these assembles would hardly have been able to challenge Britain.

Beginning in 1774, after a decade of opposing British efforts to tax the colonies and to tighten the imperial system in other ways as well, the assemblies, meeting independently as de facto provincial congresses, took control of colonial governments, including the Militias, and elected delegates to the First Continental Congress in Philadelphia. The following year, just after fighting erupted at Lexington and Concord in Massachusetts, the Second Continental Congress met and began to function as a quasi-central government. It took command of the New England colonial forces besieging the British in Boston, appointed George Washington commander in chief, and declared independence the following year. No organic growth of an American nation lay behind these actions, nor can American nationalism provide the explanation. Colonial rivalries and jealousies were deep and of long standing. Benjamin Franklin once remarked that the colonies had a greater dislike for one another than they had for Britain, and those sentiments hardly disappeared completely after independence. They were muted only to a limited degree by the war and the separation from Britain. Yet, concerns for self-preservation can propel people of different interests and traditions a vast distance—people who were reluctant revolutionaries, who found the break with the mother country a painful experience.

As for Britain, she had refused to work for a political solution to the problem of the constitutional relationship between London and her North American dependencies. That is why General Thomas Gage, stationed in Boston, received orders that resulted in his dispatching a troop column on 18 April 1775 to destroy the Massachusetts militia's military stores at Concord. The voices of conciliation and compromise in Parliament, led by Lord Chatham, never received a hearing, even though they prophetically warned of a difficult war of overwhelming costs and of French and Spanish intervention on the side of the rebellion.

The Resources of America

Unlike most revolutionaries in modern history, the Americans began the war in control of the infrastructure of the country. They did so through the provincial congresses, which provided written constitutions for the newly independent states, and through their command of the militias. Though often ineffective in pitched battles against British regulars, poorly trained militia performed a valuable constabularly role on the local scene in the Revolutionary War. As a result the loyalists, or tories, were always on the defensive, except when backed by the presence of a Royal Army. A South Carolina loyalist official, James Simpson, correctly observed that the great contribution of the militia was in sustaining civil governments; "their civil institutions" gave the rebels "the whole of their strength." Moreover, Americans fought on their own soil, very different from the relatively flat battlefields of western Europe, over which armies had swept back and forth for centuries. The militia and the Continental army knew the densely wooded country, with its mountains, valleys, swamps, and rivers, and made effective use of them. Americans, particularly the militia, sometimes used night attacks and resorted to winter fighting. Another plus for the Americans was an abundance of manpower. Certainly most white men between ages eighteen and forty-five saw some military service, whether in the militia or the Continental army. The militia understandably preferred to serve under their own local officers, and the states usually limited their active service to anywhere from a few months to as much as a year. They were most valuable to Washington in the winter months when regular Continental enlistments usually ended and a virtually new army had yet to be raised for service in the following spring and summer.

One does not have to be slavishly devoted to a great man theory of history to maintain that Washington was the most valuable asset for the Americans—in any event, the greatest human asset. From the beginning, he showed his total commitment to civil control of the military. He himself was a former colonial legislator and a member of the Congress that appointed him in June 1775. He kept the lawmakers informed of his activities and unfailingly obeyed their instructions, although he was honest and open in making it known when he disagreed with his masters. Congress moved at a slower pace in the process of nation building than had been the case during the early modern European wars. That fact frustrated Washington, but he knew the foremost problem was that the newly independent states were initially hesitant to create a strong central government. Congress, however, had wasted no time in 1776 in beginning the process, drafting the Articles of Confederation; however, disagreement about certain allocations of powers along with state jealousies kept the document from being formally ratified by all the thirteen states, as required, until 1781. Washington conceded that it was difficult to create an American constitutional union in the midst of war, at a time when Congress was deflected by its myriad military and diplomatic responsibilities. The loosely structured Confederation was a kind of federalism, more like the pre-1776 version of imperial federalism than the form of federalism to triumph after the war in 1787.

Washington himself was militarily conservative and so was Congress. A massive guerrilla war might well have spawned countless atrocities, the destruction of cities, and the weakening of American social and political institutions. As a French and Indian War colonel, commanding the Virginia forces, he had sought to make his regiment as professional as possible, calling for strict discipline, rigorous training, and officers well read in European military literature. The same attitude shaped his thinking about the Continental army. The army suffered its share of defeats, but even on those occasions it often fought reasonably well. And it had open space in which to retreat and regroup. Washington escaped across New Jersey after the loss of New York City. General Nathanael Greene, pursued by Lord Cornwallis in the South, fled across the Dan River into Virginia. The army learned from its mistakes and steadily improved, displaying incredible staying power in a contest that lasted eight and one-half years. Much of the credit for its progress goes to Friedrich Wilhelm von Steuben, the so-called Prussian drillmaster, and to a cluster of French officers who constituted the corps of engineers.

If Washington's principal task was to hold his army together, he had two reasons for doing so. One was simply to outlast the British, to wear them down, to destroy their will to win a war that became an endlessly long contest of attrition. And it worked, just as North Vietnam's similar approach eventually spelled failure for the United States in Southeast Asia in the 1970s. For in both the earlier and later war, political pressures and public opinion generally led Britain and the United States, respectively, to withdraw from a quagmire, although both countries were still quite capable from a narrow military perspective of continuing the struggle. The second dimension of Washington's job was to foster a sense of unity in the army and, from his perspective, in the new nation as a whole. Washington urged the officers and men of the army to forsake religious, ethnic, and provincial jealousies. He contended with Protestants who did not like Catholics and Jews and conservative Protestant ministers who opposed the appointment of John Murray, the father of American Universalism, as an army chaplain. New England men did not want to serve under New York officers and frontier riflemen fought with Marblehead fishermen from Massachusetts. In his general orders, he constantly encouraged his soldiers to think of themselves first as Americans and not simply as Virginians or Pennsylvanians or Georgians. He enjoyed his greatest success in inculcating national identity and esprit in his officers, including Nathanael Greene, Henry Knox, Anthony Wayne, Henry Lee, and John Marshall. As a person, he emerged as the most visible symbol of unity for Americans. And as an institution, his army stood out as the most visible symbol of unity for his countrymen.

The Resources of Britain

Britain had certain formidable advantages over the colonies at the outbreak of the war. One was a growing sense of national identity that increased the unity of England, Scotland, and Wales. It was based on a mighty empire, economic growth, success in war, and anti-Catholicism. When had Britain ever lost a war? She was the dominant superpower in Europe after humiliating France and Spain in the Seven Years' War (the French and Indian War in North America). Her post-1688 imperial wars had been fueled by a dynamic economy stimulated by the Industrial Revolution. At the same time, the government pioneered in new methods of taxation and deficit financing. The result was the development of a "fiscal-military state." The actual war machinery was headed by the king, George III, who was far from a figurehead. Ministers still had to be acceptable to him and so did military commanders. His job in wartime was to back his ministers and to dispense patronage to members of Parliament and other public figures who supported his government. He served as a cheerleader rather than as a planner of campaigns or as one involving himself in day-to-day decisions.

Human power constituted another plus for Britain. Her population came to eleven million, whereas there were fewer than three million colonials, of whom one-sixth were held in slavery. In 1775 the army numbered 48,000 men, of whom many were veterans of warfare and proud of their regiments and their traditions. The regimental officers were competent, some of them outstanding. The commanding generals who served in America, all veterans of the Seven Years' War, were sound by the standards of their day, but none displayed the talents of a Wolfe or a Wellington. The navy, long England's first line of defense and its pride, was the largest in the kingdom's history, although post-1763 budget restraints had led to its deterioration. It no longer in 1775 maintained the two-power standard: the numerical equal of Britain and Spain. But commanders were almost all reputable figures, superior to most senior officers of the Bourbon navies. If the Royal Navy used impressment to meet its critical manpower needs, the army turned to the German states, as did other countries needing foreign mercenaries. The ministry purchased the services of 33,000 from six principalities, the great majority of this human flesh coming from Brunswick and Hesse-Cassel. Valuable additions, they not surprisingly were of uneven quality. Having no real stake in the conflict, several thousand deserted and remained in America, lured by land and German American kinsmen in Pennsylvania and elsewhere. Additional human resources were found in America: loyalists and Native Americans. Perhaps two-thirds of the politically active Americans supported the Revolution. That left a sizable number who were neutralists or loyalists, and in fact colonials not uncommonly changed sides depending on who was winning and how they were treated. In the early years, Britain displayed a good deal of indifference to the king's friends, and in the later years, when French entry created a shortage of redcoats in North America, Britain turned too fully to the loyalists and exaggerated their strength, for by that time many Crown adherents had become angered by the army's indifference or mistreatment of them. Even so, perhaps some twenty thousand at one time or another took up arms against the revolutionaries. The Native Americans, as in the imperial wars, influenced the balance of power in the interior. Although both sides courted the tribesmen, the British were better versed in Indian affairs and benefited from the Native Americans' resentment against colonial encroachments on their lands. Consequently, the great majority of the participating Indians fought on the British side.

If the American disadvantages were obvious from the outset—their historic provincial jealousies, largely agricultural economy, and lack of a strong central government—British problems became apparent as the contest progressed. Lord North, the first minister, admitted he knew little of managing a war effort. The direction of military affairs then fell on the secretary of state for the colonies, Lord George Germain, able but prickly, hardly a dynamic war leader as William Pitt had been in the Seven Years' War. Problems of transportation, communication, and supply over the three-thousand-mile Atlantic increased in a war that lasted eight and one-half years. The generals and admirals, most of them members of Parliament, did not trust the ministry—the feeling was mutual—and were members of different factions in the House of Commons. The loyalists, as already indicated, contributed less than London officialdom had hoped. Even the Indians, although they wreaked havoc in the region later known as Kentucky, the Ohio country, and western New York, may have been more of a negative than a positive factor, for their depredations tended to unite and energize western settlers.

The War in New England

In general, the war moved from north to south in terms of where the brunt of the fighting took place between the regular armies of Britain and America. The first year of the conflict saw the colonists on the offensive. Even before Washington's arrival at the American camp at Cambridge in July 1775, the New Englanders, after forcing a British column back from Concord, laid siege to Boston and fought the bloody but inconclusive Battle of Bunker Hill on 17 June. In that clash, General Thomas Gage, the British commander in chief, sanctioned an attack against the well-entrenched Americans that brought the redcoats a Pyrrhic victory. Before finally driving the colonials back, the British suffered their heaviest losses of any battle during the war, their casualties amounting to 42 percent of the 2,500 troops engaged. While Washington continued the siege, he sent a small American force from his camp through the Maine woods to attack Quebec. Its commander, Benedict Arnold, had gained recent renown, along with Ethan Allen, in seizing small British garrisons at Forts Ticonderoga and Crown Point on Lake Champlain in upper New York. Outside the Canadian city, he met a second American army under Richard Montgomery that had advanced up the Hudson–Lake Champlain waterway. On New Year's Eve, the two American columns were repulsed. Montgomery met death and Arnold took a bullet in the leg. The following year, the Americans were thrown out of Canada and thus ended Congress's serious effort to make the Canadians the fourteenth colony in rebellion.

During the siege of Boston, Washington forged an army out of what he described as a "mixed multitude of people," bringing order and discipline. He dismissed incompetent officers and elevated younger men with potential such as Henry Knox of Massachusetts and Nathanael Greene of Rhode Island, who became his most valuable subordinates and served throughout the war. He communicated regularly his needs and his objectives to the New England governments, and he deferred to their authority and their laws, winning their respect and esteem. He proved to New Englanders and to Congress that Americans need not fear an army composed of their own citizens. From his fortified positions surrounding Boston on the land side, he brought increasing pressure on British general William Howe, Gage's successor. After Washington planted artillery on Dorchester Heights, within range of the city, Howe evacuated his army by sea on 17 March. Retiring to Nova Scotia, he sought to re-group, await reinforcements, and attack New York City. Massachusetts appeared to be the center of the rebellion, and New York seemed to offer the prospect of greater success.

The War in the Middle States

Phase two of the struggle took place in the middle states, from 1776 to 1778. Except for the brief months of the Yorktown campaign in late 1781, Washington remained continuously in that theater. His balance sheet shows mixed results. In 1776 the London ministry elected to make a massive display of force, one that would quell the colonial uprising; it was the largest expeditionary undertaking in English history to that time. In the summer of that year General William Howe and his brother, Admiral Richard, Lord Howe appeared before New York City with seventy-three warships, several hundred transports, and 32,000 troops. The British plan was to take the New York capital, and cut off New England from the rest of the colonies. The Howes believed that if they could over-whelm the Puritan colonies, allegedly the most rebellious region, they would have a good chance of ending the uprising, especially if in the process they inflicted a decisive defeat on Washington, who had moved down from Boston to oppose them. But in some measure the Howes had mixed motives. They came as peace commissioners as well as conquerors. Both had been moderates on imperial questions and they seemingly hoped to bring the Americans to a cessation of hostilities by negotiation if possible. If so, they had little to offer in a meeting with a congressional delegation, only to accept an American agreement to stop the fighting before any London officials would consider concessions on policy.

For Britain, the campaign of 1776 began on a positive note and ended on a negative one. Washington suffered a series of setbacks in the New York City area between August and November and ran the risk of losing his army. Defeated on Long Island, he escaped to Manhattan and retreated up the island, fighting a series of battles at Kips Bay, Harlem Heights, and White Plains as the British unsuccessfully tried to get behind him and seal off his escape. But General Howe did capture Fort Washington, which Washington had unwisely left garrisoned on Manhattan. Washington then fled through New Jersey and reached safety by crossing the Delaware River to the Pennsylvania side. Even so, the year terminated with sparkling American counterstrokes. General Guy Carleton, after throwing the American invasion force of Montgomery and Arnold out of Canada, headed down Lake Champlain in hopes of linking up with Howe somewhere on the Hudson. But a setback at the hands of a tiny American fleet under Arnold on that lake, along with the lateness of the season, led Carleton to withdraw to Canada. And Washington, always an aggressive commander, was down but not out. At the end of December he struck back at the British, already settled into winter quarters, overwhelming their garrisons at Trenton and Princeton in New Jersey and then escaping in the first week of the new year into secure lodgings for the season in the hills around Morristown. The year 1777 displayed marked similarities to 1776, with two British armies in the field. The Canadian-based army, now under General John Burgoyne, pressed down the Lake Champlain–Hudson trough, but without a commitment from General Howe to link up on the Hudson or elsewhere. Howe, leaving Sir Henry Clinton with a garrison in New York City, put to sea with most of his army for a strike at Philadelphia, leaving Burgoyne to his own devices. Lord Germain had sanctioned a campaign without a unifying concept, and Howe and Burgoyne did not trust each other. Overconfidence in the wilderness of upper New York led to Burgoyne's downfall. His army literally broke down in the heavily wooded terrain. Near Saratoga, New York, Burgoyne twice attacked General Horatio Gates's well-entrenched American northern army on Bemis Heights. Twice repulsed with heavy losses, Burgoyne surrendered at Saratoga on 17 October. His loss of over six thousand men demonstrated that European armies, with their bright uniforms and traditional linear formations, did not fare well in the interior of North America.

William Howe, smarter than Burgoyne in some respects, avoided the interior and recognized the importance of staying close to coastal urban areas to keep his supply lines open. Moreover, he won two battles in the fall of 1777. Landing his force at the head of Chesapeake Bay, he advanced on Philadelphia until Washington blocked his route at Brandywine Creek in southern Pennsylvania. After heavy fighting and turning Washington's right flank on 11 September, Howe pushed his opponent aside and occupied Philadelphia. Washington counterpunched on 4 October, staging a night assault on Howe's advance base at Germantown, Pennsylvania. Again the fighting was spirited, but Washington's battle plan was too complicated and he pulled back and soon went into winter quarters at Valley Forge, some twenty miles from Philadelphia.

The campaigns of 1776 and 1777 revealed the weaknesses of Britain military planning—a lack of overall strategic thinking, an inadequate naval blockade, and a lack of coordination on land. The Howe brothers, increasingly pessimistic about military victory over America and resenting criticism in London circles, resigned and returned to the metropolis to defend their reputation and attribute their failures to Germain and others. Washington, in contrast, showed remarkable persistence and fortitude, keeping his army alive and using the winter and spring of 1777–1778 to survive the Valley Forge winter and to becoming more professional with each passing year through longer enlistments, larger bounties, and better training. It was at Valley Forge that Steuben, the drillmaster, made his mark on the army by standardizing drill and battlefield tactics.

The International War

Britain's failure to subdue New England and the middle states by the spring of 1778 combined with French entry on the side of America changed the scope and character of the conflict. Nursing old grievances against England, France moved from giving clandestine support to the revolutionaries—providing military stores funneled through a fictitious company and allowing the tiny Continental navy and rebel privateers use of her ports—to signing treaties of commerce and alliance with the United States in February 1778. Gallic dangers led Britain to spread her military and naval resources more thinly in America in order to protect the home kingdom and her valuable West Indian sugar islands. Sir Henry Clinton, General Howe's successor as commander in chief in America, evacuated Philadelphia in order to concentrate his forces at New York City and to send troops to the Caribbean. Breaking camp at Valley Forge, Washington pursued him across New Jersey, attacking his rear guard at Monmouth Courthouse on 28 June 1778. As the day wore on, a full-scale battle resulted. The Continental army, much enlarged and trained by Steuben, gave one of its best performances of the war. The outcome was indecisive, but the American regulars had more than held their own against veteran British troops, obtaining a moral victory that they sorely needed after their Brandywine and Germantown reversals. Washington's army followed behind Clinton and took up positions outside New York City at White Plains. The two armies were back in the same proximity of two years earlier, a sign that Howe's and Clinton's wanderings had little to show for. It was a matter of up and down and round and round, in the caustic words of the London Evening Post.

There were no more major battles in New England or the middle states after Monmouth, only skirmishes, raids, and Indian incursions on the fringes as Washington settled in to observing the British in New York City, although the British garrisoned Stony Point and other small posts on the Lower Hudson until they were dislodged or pressured to relinquish them. Unfortunately for Washington, although the French alliance resulted in a substantial increase in military supplies from France, his new allies failed to play an active role in the American part of the international war until quite late. In 1778 Admiral the Comte d'Estaing failed to intercept a British convoy bound from Philadelphia to New York City and a storm destroyed his chances of defeating Admiral Howe off the coast of Rhode Island. For over two years Washington remained in a holding pattern, not moving his base of operations until the Yorktown Campaign of 1781. The most traumatic event of those years was the treason of his ablest combat general, Benedict Arnold, whose plot to turn over the strategic bastion of West Point to Clinton in return for money and a British generalship fell through, with Arnold himself escaping but his contact man, Major John Andre, being captured and executed as a spy.

The War in the South

In the winter of 1778–1779 the war began taking on a southern complexion. Unsuccessful in the north and fearful of French attacks in Europe and the West Indies, Britain tried its luck in the South. For several years southern loyalists had argued that the king's friends were most numerous in their region and that the South's agricultural resources were the most valuable part of the king's North American empire. With manpower resources stretched tissue thin, the idea of relying heavily on loyalists was beguiling. Yet there were reasons to question it, especially because of events there in 1776. A British naval assault on Charles Town, South Carolina, had been turned away and uprisings of loyalists in North Carolina and Cherokee in the backcountry had been crushed. The new southern policy was adopted only in piecemeal fashion, perhaps because Clinton was less enthusiastic about it than Germain. A small British expeditionary force overran Georgia at roughly the end of 1778, but in 1779 alack of sufficient royal troops delayed a serious attempt to overwhelm South Carolina. Finally, Clinton himself brought several thousand additional men from New York and laid siege to Charles Town, which fell to Sir Henry on 12 May 1780, a devastating loss for the Americans since over five thousand continentals and militiamen were taken. A newly raised American southern army met a similar fate in upper South Carolina when it suffered a stinging defeat at Camden on 16 August and its remnant was scattered and demoralized. Clinton, by now back in New York City, had instructed Lord Cornwallis, commanding the southern operation, not to invade North Carolina and Virginia until he had secured the backcountry and had organized the loyalists into an effective constabulary for controlling the vast stretches behind the lines. But Cornwallis exaggerated the strength and effectiveness of the tories and underestimated the resistance movement led by partisan or guerrilla leaders such as Francis Marion, Thomas Sumter, and Andrew Pickens. On 7 October 1780, near the North Carolina border, Cornwallis's one-thousand-man loyalist left wing was destroyed by far-western frontiersmen at King's Mountain.

By December 1780 the southern conflict had become a duel between Cornwallis and Nathanael Greene, who regrouped and augmented the American southern forces. Dividing his small army, Greene sent General Daniel Morgan into the South Carolina backcountry, where he defeated Banastre Tarleton's Tory Legion on 17 January 1781. Greene then reunited his forces and escaped northward from Cornwallis into Virginia. Returning to North Carolina, he fought Cornwallis at Guilford Courthouse (later Greensboro) on 15 March, inflicting heavy casualties on the British, although neither side could claim a victory. Greene had played a cat-and-mouse game with his opponent. After wearing Cornwallis down, the British general limped to the North Carolina coast and then on to the Virginia Chesapeake. Greene continued his strategy of movement, isolating and picking off one by one British posts in South Carolina. His brilliant campaigning had left the enemy in control of only Charles Town and Savannah.

Washington too displayed boldness in 1781, racing south in an effort to trap Cornwallis on the Yorktown Peninsula in cooperation with French naval forces under Admiral the Comte de Grasse, and a French military force under General the Comte de Rochambeau. Cornwallis was doomed. His eight thousand men faced a Franco-American army of seventeen thousand, and Admiral de Grasse beat back British naval efforts to rescue the beleaguered Cornwallis. The month-long siege ended 17 October when Cornwallis surrendered. (Contrary to legend, British musicians did not play a tune called "The World Turned Upside Down" while redcoats stacked their arms.) The outcome of the war was determined in the south, since Yorktown destroyed Britain's will to pursue the conflict in America, although fighting continued elsewhere between England and France and the latter's Bourbon ally Spain in 1782. British mistakes were their loyalist policy and Cornwallis's errors in abandoning South Carolina too quickly and moving to Virginia, where he became vulnerable to Franco-American land and sea cooperation. The year 1781 saw both Greene and Washington at their best and, for the first time, active French participation in America.

The War and American Society

The conflict impacted the lives of Americans in countless ways. In the short term, it did little for African Americans, although some hundreds of blacks fought in Washington's army, and thousands of bondsmen fled to the British, where some received their freedom but many were mistreated, a large percentage of them enslaved by royal authorities and tories. Women of ten assumed the responsibilities of men in shops and on farms as their sons and husbands took up arms. A comparative few even served in Washington's army and countless others moved with the army, fulfilling various needs such as washing and cooking. An organization of females founded by Esther Reed of Philadelphia raised money with the idea of providing soldiers some of the amenities of life. Some Americans acquired land for the first time by purchasing confiscated tory property, although most of that real estate went to the highest bidder to acquire money for war needs. Native Americans were losers without qualification. Without Britain as a buffer, the tide of American settlement rolled inexorably westward during and after the war, particularly into what became Tennessee, Kentucky, and Ohio. Inflation, paper money, and lack of specie hurt all sectors, including the officers and men of the Continental army. Late in the war there were small mutinies by the rank and file and grumbling by officers, especially at the field-grade level, seemed ominous. The desertion rate, about 20 percent of enlisted men, seems high but not by European standards. In March 1783 Washington doused the fires of officer discontent in a dramatic appearance before the officers at Newburgh, New York, promising to see that Congress addressed their legitimate grievances. In the final analysis, the army showed its loyalty to Washington and to civilian control, one of the great legacies of the Revolution. The officers and men returned peacefully to the civilian society from which they had come.

The most important consequences of the war itself, in addition to the precedent of civil control, were two in number. First, the treaty of peace in 1783 not only recognized America's independence but acknowledged its claims to the Mississippi River as the country's western boundary. Diplomats John Jay, John Adams, and Benjamin Franklin were tough at the bargaining table, but they profited by the rivalry between England and France, both of which sought American goodwill in the postwar world. The last consequence saw the final phase of the process of state formation in America. The foremost political and military leaders, almost without exception, had become nationalists. They felt that the war showed that the Revolution could not reach its logical culmination without a central government with the authority to unite America and to protect it from domestic violence and foreign dangers. The result was the Constitution of 1787, which was both a political and a military document. The military provisions proved to be so comprehensive that amendments in that area have never been added to the original document.

Bibliography

Carp, E. Wayne. To Starve the Army at Pleasure: Continental Army Administration and American Political Culture, 1775–1783. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984.

Higginbotham, Don. The War of American Independence: Military Attitudes, Policy, and Practice, 1763–1789. New York: Macmillan, 1971.

———. George Washington and the American Military Tradition. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1985.

Mackesy, Piers. The War for America, 1775–1783. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1964.

Mayer, Holly A. Belonging to the Army: Camp Followers and Community During the American Revolution. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1996.

Royster, Charles. A Revolutionary People at War: The Continental Army and American Character, 1775–1783. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1979.

Shy, John. A People Numerous and Armed: Reflections on the Military Struggle for American Independence. Rev. ed. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1990.

Willcox, William B. Portrait of a General: Sir Henry Clinton in the War of Independence. New York: Knopf, 1964.

Diplomatic Aspects

During the decade before the American Revolution, European diplomacy was focused on the convulsions in eastern Europe that culminated in the first partition of Poland. Charles Gravier, comte de Vergennes, the French foreign minister in 1775, realized that the partition posed a danger to France. Unknown to the young King Louis XVI, Vergennes had been a charter member of a secret diplomatic organization devoted to restoring French influence in Poland and to blocking Russian expansion. Since he regarded Great Britain as Russia's chief backer, he believed that depriving Britain of her monopoly of American trade would weaken her and, hence, Russia.

In late 1775, a French agent, Julien-Alexandre Archard de Bonvouloir, met in Philadelphia with a committee of the Continental Congress. He assured them that France had no intention of retaking Canada and encouraged them to send ships to France; they in turn asked to purchase military supplies. Vergennes received the king's permission to sell supplies to Congress, and France subsequently loaned money to a trading company that planned to exchange military supplies for American tobacco. Simultaneously, France began to rebuild and resupply her navy, which would take until the end of 1777.

As Congress moved toward a declaration of independence, it became more ready to accept French assistance. It sent the congressional delegate Silas Deane to France to purchase supplies and then appointed Deane, Benjamin Franklin, and Arthur Lee as commissioners to negotiate a commercial treaty. At the beginning of 1777, the commissioners assembled in Paris. Initially, the French government was willing to loan them money but not to risk a premature war by signing a treaty. Naval rearmament permitted France to become directly involved in the war, but first Vergennes had to convince King Louis XVI. Luckily, news of the American victory at Saratoga arrived in early December. Vergennes argued that there was now a danger that the Americans would compromise with Britain and abandon independence. The commissioners played along by meeting with British agents. The king gave way and, in exchange for a treaty of amity and commerce, the commissioners would agree to a treaty of alliance, prohibiting the United States from abandoning independence or making a separate peace. Both treaties were signed on 6 February 1778.

By summer, France and Britain were at war. France hoped to win a quick victory by sending a fleet to attack British-held New York, but the attack failed. Knowing her navy would soon be badly outnumbered by the British, France sought the assistance of Spain, the only other great naval power. Spain distrusted the United States, but in mid-1779, the French promised to help retake Gibraltar from Britain and convinced her to join the war. A coalition was formed, and in 1781 a Dutch fleet in the North Sea and a Spanish-French fleet off the southern coast of England helped prevent Britain from sending the ships to rescue general Cornwallis at Yorktown.

The French government sent large sums to Congress to prevent its bankruptcy, which was handled by Benjamin Franklin, the sole American representative in Paris for most of the period from 1779 to mid-1782. American representatives John Jay in Spain and John Adams in the Netherlands procured smaller sums.

Cornwallis's capture led to the beginning of peace negotiations, which were largely the work of Franklin and the Earl of Shelburne, the British home secretary from March to July, 1782, and, thereafter, prime minister. Franklin refused to make a separate peace in exchange for British recognition of American independence, demanding in addition the Mississippi as a border and a share in the Newfoundland fishery. At the end of July, Shelburne accepted Franklin's conditions, hoping to use a separate peace to pressure France to make peace also. (If America made a separate peace, the British could send their large garrison at New York to attack the French West Indies.) Franklin, Jay, and Henry Laurens reached agreement with the British on 30 November 1782. Vergennes well realized that France now had to make peace or fight without American aid. Shelburne had offered him a carrot as well as a stick—future British help against Russia—but France could not make peace unless Spain also agreed. Luckily, Spain finally was convinced to accept the return of Florida and Minorca in lieu of Gibraltar. A general peace agreement was reached on 20 January 1783.

Bibliography

Dull, Jonathan R. A Diplomatic History of the American Revolution. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1985.

Hoffman, Ronald and Peter J. Albert, eds. Diplomacy and Revolution: The Franco-American Alliance of 1778. Charlottesville, Va.: University Press of Virginia, 1981.

———. Peace and the Peacemakers: The Treaty of 1783. Charlottesville, Va.: University Press of Virginia, 1986.

Hutson, James H. John Adams and the Diplomacy of the American Revolution. Lexington, Ky.: University Press of Kentucky, 1980.

Scott, H. M. British Foreign Policy in the Age of the American Revolution. New York: Oxford University Press, 1990.

Stinchcombe, William C. The American Revolution and the French Alliance. Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1969.

Financial Aspects

Because of colonial hatred of any form of taxation, one of the most difficult tasks that faced the Continental Congress was raising money to finance the revolutionary war. Following hostilities at Bunker Hill in June 1775, an issue of $2 million in bills of credit was voted, based on the credit of the states. Depreciation set in shortly, and by March 1780, in spite of legal-tender laws and an attempt to fix prices, the value of continental currency in silver had fallen to forty to one. Debtors pursued their creditors and prices rose to unheard-of heights. "Not worth a continental" became a phrase of derision and stark reality.

A system of direct requisitions on the states for corn, beef, pork, and other supplies was resorted to in 1780 but proved equally discouraging, for it lacked an efficient plan of assessment and record. Other means used to obtain funds included domestic and foreign loans; quartermaster, commissary, and purchasing agent certificates; lotteries; and prize money received from the sale of captured enemy vessels. Foreign loans secured from France, Spain, and Holland through the influence of Benjamin Franklin and John Adams proved invaluable. These, and an outright gift from France, did much to strengthen colonial morale and finance.

At war's close, Finance Superintendent Robert Morris was hampered by local jealousies, continued state refusal to levy taxes, and inadequate financial provisions of the Articles of Confederation. It remained for the new Constitution and the financial genius of Alexander Hamilton to place the United States on a firm national and international credit basis.

Bibliography

Carp, E. Wayne. To Starve the Army at Pleasure: Continental Army Administration and American Political Culture, 1775–1783. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984.

Ferguson, James E. The Power of the Purse: A History of American Public Finance, 1776–1790. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1961.

McDonald, Forrest. We the People: The Economic Origins of the Constitution. New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction, 1992.

Profiteering

The American Revolution left the colonies without hard currency and cut off from European trade. The Continental Congress repeatedly issued unbacked paper currency, creating rapid inflation. The increased risks and costs of importing goods, along with scarce supplies and overwhelming demand, added to inflationary pressures. Profiteers bought available commodities, held them until prices rose, and then sold for high profits. The Continental army suffered throughout the war from profiteers, but government efforts to halt them failed. Even the 1787 Constitutional Convention's resolution to protect public securities benefited profiteers, who bought up great amounts of the paper money that was almost worthless during the Revolution and gained fortunes by redeeming it at face value.

Bibliography

Miller, John C. Triumph of Freedom, 1775–1783. Boston: Little, Brown, 1948.

The War of Independence, also known as the American Revolution and the Revolutionary War, was fought from 1775 to 1783 between Great Britain and the thirteen British colonies in North America. The 1783 Treaty of Paris, which ended the war, gave the thirteen colonies political independence and led to the formation of the United States of America.

The war had its roots in the growing economic power of the colonies and the limited political freedom granted by Great Britain to the colonists to manage their affairs. Acts of British Parliament in the 1760s that imposed taxes and import duties on the colonies increased these tensions.

The British victory in the French and Indian War, also known as the Seven Years' War (1756-63), removed France as a power in North America, yet the costs of the war were staggering for Great Britain. Faced with a large national debt, Parliament passed the Molasses Act and the Sugar Act in 1764, which imposed a duty on molasses and sugar imported by the colonies. The Stamp Act of 1765 taxed papers such as legal documents, newspapers, and almanacs. The Quartering Act indirectly taxed the colonists by requiring them to house, feed, and supply British troops.

American colonists reacted angrily to these tax measures, believing that it was unfair of Great Britain to subject them to taxation without representation. British leaders repealed the Stamp Act in 1766, but the following year Parliament passed the Townshend Act, which imposed a series of new taxes on goods arriving at American ports. The new taxes were designed to pay the salaries of royal governors and other colonial appointees of Britain's King George III. The Townshend Act also restructured the customs service in the colonies, placing its headquarters in Boston.

The Townshend Act evoked more protests from the colonists. Groups such as the Sons of Liberty and the Daughters of Liberty organized protests against customs officials and boycotts of taxed goods. Merchants agreed not to sell imported goods.

British customs agents in Boston extorted money and seized American ships with little justification, leading to a riot in March 1770. The British troops, popularly known as redcoats because of their red uniforms, fired on the crowd, killing five people. The episode became known as the Boston Massacre.

Great Britain again reacted to economic pressure by removing most of the Townshend Act taxes. A notable exception was the tax on tea, which remained a symbol of Parliament's authority to tax colonists. In 1773 Britain tried to save the financially troubled British East India Company by passing the Tea Act, which lowered the tax on tea shipped by the company to the colonies, giving the company an edge over tea smugglers. The colonists responded by refusing to buy English tea or even allow it to be unloaded from British ships. In Boston protesters dressed as American Indians dumped the crates of tea into the water, and the event came to be known as the Boston Tea Party.

Parliament retaliated in 1774 by passing the Coercive Acts, which were labeled the "Intolerable Acts" by the colonists. These laws closed the port of Boston until the East India Company was repaid for the dumped tea, restricted the powers of the Massachusetts colonial legislature, and permitted British soldiers and officials accused of capital crimes to be tried in England rather than in the hostile colony. In addition, Parliament appointed General Thomas Gage, commander of the British Army in North America, as the governor of Massachusetts. Gage was to enforce the Coercive Acts.

Representatives of twelve colonies and Canada met in September 1774 to consider what action to take against Parliament. The delegates to the First Continental Congress agreed that the colonies, and not Parliament, had the right to tax and make laws for the colonies. They called for a complete trade boycott against Britain until the Coercive Acts were repealed, but they acknowledged Parliament's right to regulate trade. The Congress did not call for independence from Great Britain.

The war began in 1775 when General Gage tried to break up a Massachusetts militia group and seize its ammunition and supplies. On the evening of April 18, 1775, Gage ordered his troops to seize munitions at Concord. Militia messengers, including silversmith Paul Revere, rode the eighteen miles from Boston to Concord on horseback to warn the militia. Militia forces met the redcoats in Lexington, and they exchanged fire. The British killed eight men and proceeded to Concord, where they again encountered militia companies. The British retreated to Boston after 273 redcoats were killed in the battle. The militia followed, laying siege to the city for almost one year.

In early May 1775 colonial delegates met in Philadelphia for the Second Continental Congress. The New England militia was renamed the Continental Army, and George Washington, a Virginia plantation owner who had served in the French and Indian War, was named commander. The delegates also made the Congress the central government for "The United Colonies of America."

King George III replaced Gage with General William Howe. The king had become concerned over mounting British casualties that accompanied battles in Massachusetts, including the Battle of Bunker Hill. On August 23, 1775, the king declared the colonies to be in rebellion and subjected colonial ships to seizure.

American troops invaded Canada in August 1775, capturing Montreal in November. However, their efforts to take the city of Quebec failed, and the troops were forced to withdraw. During the winter of 1775-76, Washington positioned artillery around Boston. In March 1776 a massive artillery attack on the city led British troops and more than one thousand Loyalists (colonists who supported the British) to flee on ships to Nova Scotia, Canada.

In June 1776, as the British assembled reinforcements for an invasion, the Continental Congress debated a declaration of the colonies' independence from Britain. Thomas Jefferson borrowed from the recently completed Virginia Declaration of Rights in drafting the Declaration of Independence. The Virginia declaration, written by George Mason, stated that government derived from the people, that individuals were created equally free and independent, and that they had inalienable rights that the government could not legitimately deny them. On July 4, 1776, the Congress declared that the colonies were free and independent states, and it adopted the Declaration of Independence.

On June 29, 1776, Howe led an invasion force of thirty-two thousand troops, including eight thousand German mercenaries (Hessian troops), that landed off Sandy Hook, New Jersey. The British attacked Washington's forces in New York on August 22, and by the end of the year Washington had abandoned New York City and had moved his troops into Pennsylvania. He made a successful surprise attack on Trenton, New Jersey, on December 25, 1776. On January 3, 1777, Washington's troops defeated the British at Princeton, New Jersey. The two victories were critical to maintaining colonial morale, and by the spring of 1777 more than eight thousand new soldiers had joined the Continental Army.

The British implemented a plan in 1777 that sought to end the war that year by separating New England from the colonies in the south. General John Burgoyne led British forces from Montreal toward Albany, New York. After securing a victory at Fort Ticonderoga on July 5, Burgoyne became overconfident. The Continental Army and local militia counterattacked, forcing Burgoyne to surrender his army after a battle at Saratoga, New York, on October 17.

To the south, Washington vainly tried to stop the British from taking Philadelphia, the home of the Continental Congress. His troops lost at the battle of Brandywine Creek, and Philadelphia fell to the British on September 26. The Congress moved to Baltimore, Maryland.

Despite the loss of Philadelphia and some discontent with Washington's leadership during the winter of 1777-78, American fortunes brightened in 1778. In February France signed a formal treaty of commerce and alliance with the American states. France sent a naval fleet along with military advisers and financial aid.

In June 1778 Washington attacked the British at Monmouth, New Jersey, but again was defeated. He then shifted his military strategy, keeping his troops encamped around British forces in Connecticut, New York, and New Jersey. Although American forces led by George Rogers Clark regained control of the Ohio River Valley, British troops had success in South Carolina in 1779. However, in 1780 American troops prevailed in the Battle of Kings Mountain and again in the Battle of Cowpens in 1781. The British attempt to control the southern colonies ended in a stalemate.

In 1781 Washington's troops, with the assistance of the French Navy, cut off British forces led by General Charles Cornwallis at Yorktown, Virginia. The Battle of Yorktown, in which British troops were outnumbered two to one, ended in a British surrender on October 19, 1781. This marked the end of major military actions in the War of Independence.

The defeat at Yorktown led to the resignation of the British prime minister and a desire by the new cabinet to begin peace negotiations, which commenced in Paris, France, in April 1782. The U.S. delegation included Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, and John Jay. The negotiators concluded a preliminary treaty on November 30, 1782, and a final agreement was signed in September 1783 and ratified by the Continental Congress on January 14, 1784.

In the Treaty of Paris the British recognized the independence of the United States. The treaty established generous boundaries for the United States, with U.S. territory extending from the Atlantic Ocean to the Mississippi River in the west, and from the Great Lakes and Canada in the north to the thirty-first parallel in the south. The U.S. fishing fleet was guaranteed access to the fisheries off the coast of Newfoundland, Canada. Navigation of the Mississippi River was to be open to both the United States and Great Britain.

During the War of Independence, the Continental Congress struggled to formulate a constitution for the entity known as the United States of America. Colonists were not interested in establishing a central government with broad powers, because they feared replacing undemocratic British authority with a local version. Therefore, the Articles of Confederation that were drafted in 1777, but not ratified until 1781 by all the states, created only a national congress of limited authority. By the end of the war, Congress found itself receiving less cooperation from the individual states. The failure of the Articles of Confederation became apparent after the Treaty of Paris was ratified, leading to the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia in 1787 where the Founding Fathers would write the U.S. Constitution.

See: Boston Massacre Soldiers.

This article is about political and social developments, and the origins and aftermath of the war. For military actions, see American Revolutionary War. For other uses, see American Revolution (disambiguation).

In this article, inhabitants of the thirteen colonies that supported the American Revolution are primarily referred to as "Americans," with occasional references to "Patriots," "Whigs," "Rebels" or "Revolutionaries." Colonists who supported the British in opposing the Revolution are usually referred to as "Loyalists" or "Tories." The geographical area of the thirteen colonies is often referred to simply as "America."

John Trumbull's Declaration of Independence, showing the five-man committee in charge of drafting the Declaration in 1776 as it presents its work to the Second Continental Congress in Philadelphia

The American Revolution is the political upheaval during the last half of the 18th century in which thirteen of Britain's colonies in North America at first rejected the governance of the Parliament of Great Britain, and later the British monarchy itself, to become the sovereign United States of America. In this period the colonies first rejected the authority of the Parliament to govern them without representation, expelling all royal officials and setting up thirteen Provincial Congresses or equivalent to form individual self-governing states. Through representatives sent to the Second Continental Congress, they originally joined together to defend their respective self-governance and manage the armed conflict against the British known as the American Revolutionary War (1775-1783, also American War of Independence). The states ultimately determined collectively that the monarchy, by acts of tyranny, could no longer legitimately claim their allegiance. They then united to form one nation, breaking away from the British Empire in July 1776 when the Congress issued the Declaration of Independence, rejecting the monarchy on behalf of the United States of America. The war ended with effective American victory in October 1781, followed by formal British abandonment of any claims to the United States with the Treaty of Paris in 1783.

The American Revolution commenced a series of intellectual, political, and social shifts in early American society and government. The development of republicanism in the United States was particularly significant, including installation of a representative government responsible to the will of the people, thus rejecting the prevalent plutocracies of the inherited aristocracies in Europe at the time. However, sharp political debates broke out over the level of democracy desirable in the new government, with a number of Founders fearing mob rule.

The basic issues of national governance were settled with the unanimous ratification in 1788 of the Constitution of the United States (written in 1787), which replaced the relatively weak Articles of Confederation (ratified 1781) that framed the first attempt at a national government. In contrast to the loose confederation, the Constitution established a relatively powerful federated government. The United States Bill of Rights (1791), comprising the first 10 constitutional amendments, quickly followed. It guaranteed many natural rights that were so influential in justifying the revolution, attempting to balance a strong national government with relatively broad personal liberties. The American shift to republicanism, and the gradually increasing democracy, caused an upheaval of the traditional social hierarchy, and created the ethic that has formed a core of political values in the United States.^[1]

Contents 1 Origins 1.1 Summary 1.1.1 Liberalism, republicanism, and religion 1.2 Incendiary British legislation 1.2.1 Navigation Acts 1.2.2 Western Frontier 1.2.3 Taxation without representation 1.2.4 1764 - new taxes 1.2.5 Stamp Act 1765 1.2.6 Townshend Act 1767 and Boston Massacre 1770 1.2.7 Tea Act 1773 1.2.8 Intolerable Acts 1774 1.3 American political opposition 2 Factions: Patriots, Loyalists and Neutrals 2.1 Patriots - The Revolutionaries 2.1.1 Class differences among the Patriots 2.2 Loyalists and neutrals 2.3 Women 3 Other participants 3.1 France and Spain 3.2 Native Americans 3.3 Slaves 4 Military hostilities begin 4.1 Prisoners 5 Creating new state constitutions 6 Independence and Union 7 Defending the Revolution 7.1 British return: 1776-1777 7.2 American alliances after 1778 7.3 The British move South, 1778-1783 7.3.1 Yorktown 1781 8 Peace treaty 9 Immediate aftermath 9.1 Interpretations 9.2 Loyalist expatriation 9.3 Worldwide influence 9.4 National debt 10 See also 11 Bibliography 11.1 Notes 11.2 Reference works 11.3 Primary sources 11.4 Surveys 11.5 Specialized studies 12 External links

Origins

Before the Revolution: The Thirteen Colonies are in pink

The American Revolution was predicated by a number of ideas and events that, combined, led to a political and social separation of colonial possessions from the home nation and a coalescing of those former individual colonies into an independent nation.

Summary

The revolutionary era began in 1763, when the French military threat to British North American colonies ended. Adopting the policy that the colonies should pay an increased proportion of the costs associated with keeping them in the Empire, Britain imposed a series of taxes followed by other laws intended to demonstrate British authority, all of which proved extremely unpopular. Because the colonies lacked elected representation in the governing British Parliament many colonists considered the laws to be illegitimate and a violation of their rights as Englishmen. Additionally, British mercantilist policies benefiting the home country resulted in trade restrictions, which limited the growth of the American economy and artificially constrained colonial merchants' earning potential. In 1772, groups began to create committees of correspondence, which would lead to their own Provincial Congress in most of the colonies. In the course of two years, the Provincial Congresses or their equivalents rejected the Parliament and effectively replaced the British ruling apparatus in the former colonies, culminating in 1774 with the coordinating First Continental Congress.

In response to protests in Boston over Parliament's attempts to assert authority, the British sent combat troops. Consequently, the colonies mobilized their militias, and fighting broke out in 1775. First ostensibly loyal to King George III, Congress' repeated pleas for royal intervention with Parliament on their behalf only resulted in the states being declared "in rebellion", and Congress traitors. In 1776, representatives from each of the original thirteen states voted unanimously in the Second Continental Congress to adopt a Declaration of Independence, which now rejected the British monarchy in addition to its Parliament. The Declaration established the United States, which was originally governed as a loose confederation through a representative government selected by state legislatures (see Second Continental Congress and Congress of the Confederation).

The French signed an alliance with the United States government in 1778 that evened the military and naval strengths, later bringing Spain and the Dutch Republic into the conflict by their own alliance with France. Although Loyalists were estimated to comprise 15-20% of the population,^[2] throughout the war the Patriots generally controlled 80-90% of the territory; the British could hold only a few coastal cities for any extended period of time. Two main British armies surrendered to the Continental Army, at Saratoga in 1777 and Yorktown in 1781, amounting to victory in the war for the United States. The Second Continental Congress transitioned to the Congress of the Confederation with the ratification of the Articles of Confederation earlier in 1781. The Treaty of Paris in 1783 was ratified by this new national government, and ended British claims to any of the thirteen states.

Liberalism, republicanism, and religion

Main articles: Republicanism in the United States and Liberalism in the United States

Further information: A Summary View of the Rights of British America, Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania, and Declaration of the Causes and Necessity of Taking Up Arms

John Locke's ideas on liberalism greatly influenced the political minds behind the revolution; for instance, his theory of the "social contract" implied that among humanity's natural rights was the right of the people to overthrow their leaders, should those leaders betray the historic rights of Englishmen.^[3][4] In terms of writing state and national constitutions, the Americans used Montesquieu's analysis of the "balanced" British Constitution.

A motivating force behind the revolution was the American embrace of a political ideology called "republicanism", which was dominant in the colonies by 1775. The "country party" in Britain, whose critique of British government emphasized that corruption was to be feared, influenced American politicians. The commitment of most Americans to republican values and to their rights, helped bring about the American Revolution, as Britain was increasingly seen as hopelessly corrupt and hostile to American interests; it seemed to threaten the established liberties that Americans enjoyed.^[5] The greatest threat to liberty was depicted as corruption—not just in London but at home as well.^[6] The colonists associated it with luxury and, especially, inherited aristocracy, which they condemned.^[7]

The Founding Fathers were strong advocates of republican values, particularly Samuel Adams, Patrick Henry, George Washington, Thomas Paine, Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison and Alexander Hamilton.^[8] which required men to put civic duty ahead of their personal desires. Men had a civic duty to be prepared and willing to fight for the rights and liberties of their countrymen and countrywomen. John Adams, writing to Mercy Otis Warren in 1776, agreed with the Greeks and the Romans in that "Public Virtue cannot exist without private, and public Virtue is the only Foundation of Republics." He continued:

"There must be a positive Passion for the public good, the public Interest, Honour, Power, and Glory, established in the Minds of the People, or there can be no Republican Government, nor any real Liberty. And this public Passion must be Superior to all private Passions. Men must be ready, they must pride themselves, and be happy to sacrifice their private Pleasures, Passions, and Interests, nay their private Friendships and dearest connections, when they Stand in Competition with the Rights of society."^[9]

For women, "republican motherhood" became the ideal, exemplified by Abigail Adams and Mercy Otis Warren; the first duty of the republican woman was to instil republican values in her children and to avoid luxury and ostentation.

In 1776, after the Revolution had started, Tom Paine's pamphlet, Common Sense was published and became a best-seller, often read aloud in taverns, contributing significantly in maintaining popular support for the revolution, advocacy for separation from Britain, and recruitment for the Continental Army. Historians point to the enormous popularity of Thomas Paine's Common Sense in 1776, which expounded republicanism to audiences that apparently comprised most male citizens.^[10]

Dissenting (i.e. Protestant, non-Church of England) churches of the day were the “school of democracy”^[11] President John Witherspoon of the College of New Jersey (now Princeton University) wrote widely circulated sermons linking the American Revolution to the teachings of the Hebrew Bible.

Throughout the colonies dissenting Protestant congregations (Puritan, Congregationalist, Baptist, and Presbyterian) preached Revolutionary themes in their sermons, and organized their congregations as the basic unit of Revolutionary War politics while others, especially Church of England members, supported the King.^[12] Religious motivation for fighting tyranny reached across the board to rich and poor, men and women, frontiersmen and townsmen, farmers and merchants.^[13]

The classical authors read in the Enlightenment period taught an abstract ideal of republican government that included hierarchical social orders of king, aristocracy and commoners. It was widely believed that English liberties relied on the balance of power between these three social orders, maintaining the hierarchal deference to the privileged class.^[14] Historian Bernard Bailyn notes, "Puritanism … and the epidemic evangelism of the mid-eighteenth century, had created challenges to the traditional notions of social stratification” by preaching that the Bible taught all men are equal, that the true value of a man lies in his moral behavior, not his class, and that all men can be saved."^[15]

Incendiary British legislation

The Revolution was predicated by a number of pieces of legislation originating from the British Parliament that, for Americans, were illegitimate acts of a government that had no right to pass laws on Englishmen in the Americas who did not have elected representation in that government. For the British, policy makers saw these laws as necessary to rein-in colonial subjects who, in the name of economic development that was designed to benefit the home nation, had been allowed near-autonomy for too long.

Navigation Acts

Main article: Navigation Acts

Further information: Mercantilism and Writs of Assistance

The British Empire at the time operated under the mercantile system, where economic assets, or capital, are represented by bullion (gold, silver, and trade value) held by the state, which is best increased through a positive balance of trade with other nations (exports minus imports). Mercantilism suggests that the ruling government should advance these goals through playing a protectionist role in the economy, by encouraging exports and discouraging imports, especially through the use of tariffs. Great Britain regulated the economies of the colonies through the Navigation Acts according to the doctrines of mercantilism. Widespread evasion of these laws had long been tolerated. Eventually, through the use of open-ended search warrants (Writs of Assistance), strict enforcement of these Acts became the practice. In 1761, Massachusetts lawyer James Otis argued that the writs violated the constitutional rights of the colonists. He lost the case, but John Adams later wrote, "American independence was then and there born".

In 1762, Patrick Henry argued the Parson's Cause in Virginia, where the legislature had passed a law and it was vetoed by the King. Henry argued, "that a King, by disallowing Acts of this salutary nature, from being the father of his people, degenerated into a Tyrant and forfeits all right to his subjects' obedience".^[16]

Western Frontier

Main articles: British Royal Proclamation of 1763 and Quebec Act

The Proclamation of 1763 restricted colonization across the Appalachian Mountains as this was designated an Indian Reserve. Regardless, groups of settlers continued to move west and lay claim to these lands. The proclamation was soon modified and was no longer a hindrance to settlement, but its promulgation and the fact that it had been written without consulting colonists angered them. The Quebec Act of 1774 extended Quebec's boundaries to the Ohio River, shutting out the claims of the thirteen colonies. By then, however, the settler Americans had little regard for new laws from London; they were drilling militia and organizing for war.^[17]

Taxation without representation

Main article: No taxation without representation

Further information: Massachusetts Circular Letter

By 1763, Great Britain possessed vast holdings in North America. In addition to the thirteen colonies, twenty-two smaller colonies were ruled directly by royal governors. Victory in the Seven Years' War had given Great Britain New France (Canada), Spanish Florida, and the Native American lands east of the Mississippi River. In 1765 however, the colonists still considered themselves loyal subjects of the British Crown, with the same historic rights and obligations as subjects in Britain.^[18]

The British did not expect the colonies to contribute to the interest or the retirement of debt incurred during the French and Indian War, but they did expect a portion of the expenses for colonial defense to be paid by the Americans. Estimating the expenses of defending the continental colonies and the West Indies to be approximately £200,000 annually, the British goal after the end of this war was that the colonies would be taxed for £78,000 of this amount.^[19] The issues with the colonists were both that the taxes were high and that the colonies had no representation in the Parliament which passed the taxes. Lord North in 1775 argued for the British position that Englishmen paid on average twenty-five shillings annually in taxes whereas Americans paid only sixpence (the average Englishman, however, also earned quite a bit more while receiving more services directly from the government).^[20] Colonists, however, as early as 1764, with respect to the Sugar Act, indicated that “the margin of profit in rum was so small that molasses could bear no duty whatever.”^[21]

The phrase "No taxation without representation" became popular in many American circles. London argued that the colonists were "virtually represented"; but most Americans rejected this.^[22]

1764 - new taxes

Main articles: Sugar Act, Currency Act, and Quartering Act

In 1764, Parliament enacted the Sugar Act and the Currency Act, further vexing the colonists. Protests led to a powerful new weapon, the systematic boycott of British goods. The British pushed the colonists even further that same year by also enacting the Quartering Act, which stated that British soldiers were to be quartered at the expense of residents in certain areas.

Stamp Act 1765

Main article: Stamp Act 1765

Burning of the Gaspée

In 1765 the Stamp Act was the first direct tax ever levied by Parliament on the colonies. All newspapers, almanacs, pamphlets, and official documents—even decks of playing cards—were required to have the stamps. All 13 colonies protested vehemently, as popular leaders such as Patrick Henry in Virginia and James Otis in Massachusetts, rallied the people in opposition. A secret group, the "Sons of Liberty" formed in many towns and threatened violence if anyone sold the stamps, and no one did.^[23] In Boston, the Sons of Liberty burned the records of the vice-admiralty court and looted the elegant home of the chief justice, Thomas Hutchinson. Several legislatures called for united action, and nine colonies sent delegates to the Stamp Act Congress in New York City in October 1765. Moderates led by John Dickinson drew up a "Declaration of Rights and Grievances" stating that taxes passed without representation violated their Rights of Englishmen. Lending weight to the argument was an economic boycott of British merchandise, as imports into the colonies fell from £2,250,000 in 1764 to £1,944,000 in 1765. In London, the Rockingham government came to power and Parliament debated whether to repeal the stamp tax or send an army to enforce it. Benjamin Franklin made the case for the boycotters, explaining the colonies had spent heavily in manpower, money, and blood in defense of the empire in a series of wars against the French and Native Americans, and that further taxes to pay for those wars were unjust and might bring about a rebellion. Parliament agreed and repealed the tax, but in a "Declaratory Act" of March 1766 insisted that parliament retained full power to make laws for the colonies "in all cases whatsoever".^[16]

Townshend Act 1767 and Boston Massacre 1770

Main articles: Townshend Act and Boston Massacre

In 1767, the Parliament passed the Townshend Acts, which placed a tax on a number of essential goods including paper, glass, and tea. Angered at the tax increases, colonists organized a boycott of British goods. In Boston on March 5, 1770, a large mob gathered around a group of British soldiers. The mob grew more and more threatening, throwing snowballs, rocks and debris at the soldiers. One soldier was clubbed and fell. All but one of the soldiers fired into the crowd. Eleven people were hit; three civilians were killed at the scene of the shooting, and two died after the incident. The event quickly came to be called the Boston Massacre. Although the soldiers were tried and acquitted (defended by John Adams), the widespread descriptions soon became propaganda to turn colonial sentiment against the British. This in turn began a downward spiral in the relationship between Britain and the Province of Massachusetts.

Tea Act 1773

This 1846 lithograph has become a classic image of the Boston Tea Party

Main article: Tea Act

Further information: Boston Tea Party

In June 1772, in what became known as the Gaspée Affair, a British warship that had been vigorously enforcing unpopular trade regulations was burned by American patriots. Soon afterwards, Governor Thomas Hutchinson of Massachusetts reported that he and the royal judges would be paid directly from London, thus bypassing the colonial legislature.

On December 16, 1773, a group of men, led by Samuel Adams and dressed to evoke American Indians, boarded the ships of the government-favored British East India Company and dumped an estimated £10,000 worth of tea on board (approximately £636,000 in 2008) into the harbor. This event became known as the Boston Tea Party and remains a significant part of American patriotic lore.

Intolerable Acts 1774

An American version of London cartoon that denounces the "rape" of Boston in 1774 by the Intolerable Acts

Main article: Intolerable Acts

The British government responded by passing several Acts which came to be known as the Intolerable Acts, which further darkened colonial opinion towards the British. They consisted of four laws enacted by the British parliament.^[24] The first was the Massachusetts Government Act, which altered the Massachusetts charter and restricted town meetings. The second Act, the Administration of Justice Act, ordered that all British soldiers to be tried were to be arraigned in Britain, not in the colonies. The third Act was the Boston Port Act, which closed the port of Boston until the British had been compensated for the tea lost in the Boston Tea Party (the British never received such a payment). The fourth Act was the Quartering Act of 1774, which allowed royal governors to house British troops in the homes of citizens without requiring permission of the owner.

American political opposition

See also: Suffolk Resolves, Declaration of Rights and Grievances, Continental Association, Petition to the King (1774), Declaration and Resolves of the First Continental Congress, Conciliatory Resolution, Olive Branch Petition, and Hutchinson Letters Affair

American political opposition was initially through the colonial assemblies such as the Stamp Act Congress, which included representatives from across the colonies. In 1765, the Sons of Liberty were formed which used public demonstrations, violence and threats of violence to ensure that the British tax laws were unenforceable. While openly hostile to what they considered an oppressive Parliament acting illegally, colonists persisted in numerous petitions and pleas for intervention from a monarch to whom they still claimed loyalty. In late 1772, after the Gaspée Affair, Samuel Adams set about creating new Committees of Correspondence, which linked Patriots in all thirteen colonies and eventually provided the framework for a rebel government. In early 1773 Virginia, the largest colony, set up its Committee of Correspondence, on which Patrick Henry and Thomas Jefferson served.^[25]

In response to the Massachusetts Government Act, Massachusetts Bay and then other colonies formed provisional governments called Provincial Congresses. In 1774, the Continental Congress was formed, made up of representatives from each of the Provincial Congresses or their equivalents, to serve as a provisional government. Standing Committees of Safety were created in each colony for the enforcement of the resolutions by the Committee of Correspondence, Provincial Congress, and the Continental Congress. In North America British colonies that did not have responsible government did not join the Continental Congress, but remained loyal to the Crown; they included Quebec, Nova Scotia, Newfoundland, Bermuda, West Florida and East Florida.

Factions: Patriots, Loyalists and Neutrals

The population of the Thirteen Colonies was far from homogeneous, particularly in their political views and attitudes. Loyalties and allegiances varied widely not only within regions and communities, but also within families and sometimes shifted during the course of the Revolution.

Patriots - The Revolutionaries

Main article: Patriot (American Revolution)

See also: Sons of Liberty

At the time, revolutionaries were called 'Patriots', 'Whigs', 'Congress-men', or 'Americans'. They included a full range of social and economic classes, but a unanimity regarding the need to defend the rights of Americans. After the war, Patriots such as George Washington, James Madison, John Adams, Alexander Hamilton, and John Jay were deeply devoted to republicanism while also eager to build a rich and powerful nation, while Patriots such as Patrick Henry, Benjamin Franklin, and Thomas Jefferson represented democratic impulses and the agrarian plantation element that wanted a localized society with greater political equality.

The word "patriot" refers to a person in the colonies who sided with the American Revolution. Calling the revolutionaries "patriots" is a long-standing historical convention, which began by 1773.

Class differences among the Patriots

Historians, such as J. Franklin Jameson in the early 20th century, examined the class composition of the Patriot cause, looking for evidence that there was a class war inside the revolution. In the last 50 years, historians have largely abandoned that interpretation, emphasizing instead the high level of ideological unity. Just as there were rich and poor Loyalists, the Patriots were a 'mixed lot', with the richer and better educated more likely to become officers in the Army. Ideological demands always came first: the Patriots viewed independence as a means of freeing themselves from British oppression and taxation and, above all, reasserting what they considered to be their rights. Most yeomen farmers, craftsmen, and small merchants joined the patriot cause as well, demanding more political equality. They were especially successful in Pennsylvania and less so in New England, where John Adams attacked Thomas Paine's Common Sense for the "absurd democratical notions" it proposed.^[26]

Loyalists and neutrals

Main article: Loyalist (American Revolution)

While there is no way of knowing the actual numbers, historians have estimated that about 15-20% of the population remained loyal to the British Crown; these were known at the time as "Loyalists", "Tories", or "King's men".^[27][28] They were outnumbered by perhaps 2-1 by the patriots; the Loyalists never controlled territory unless the British Army occupied it. ^[2] Loyalists were typically older, less willing to break with old loyalties, often connected to the Church of England, and included many established merchants with business connections across the Empire, as well as royal officials such as Thomas Hutchinson of Boston. The revolution sometimes divided families; for example, the Franklins. William Franklin, son of Benjamin Franklin and Governor of New Jersey remained Loyal to the Crown throughout the war and never spoke to his father again. Recent immigrants who had not been fully Americanized were also inclined to support the King, such as recent Scottish settlers in the back country; among the more striking examples of this, see Flora MacDonald.^[29]

Most Native Americans rejected pleas that they remain neutral and supported the king. The tribes that depended most heavily upon colonial trade tended to side with the revolutionaries, though political factors were important as well. The most prominent Native American leader siding with the king was Joseph Brant of the Mohawk nation, who led frontier raids on isolated settlements in Pennsylvania and New York until an American army under John Sullivan secured New York in 1779, forcing the Loyalist Indians permanently into Canada.^[30]

Some African-American slaves became politically active and supported the king, especially in Virginia where the royal governor actively recruited black men into the British forces in return for manumission, protection for their families, and the promise of land grants. Following the war, many of these "Black Loyalists" settled in Nova Scotia, Upper and Lower Canada, and other parts of the British Empire, where the descendants of some remain today.^[31]

A minority of uncertain size tried to stay neutral in the war. Most kept a low profile. However, the Quakers, especially in Pennsylvania, were the most important group that was outspoken for neutrality. As patriots declared independence, the Quakers, who continued to do business with the British, were attacked as supporters of British rule, "contrivers and authors of seditious publications" critical of the revolutionary cause.^[32]

After the war, the great majority of the 450,000-500,000 Loyalists remained in America and resumed normal lives. Some, such as Samuel Seabury, became prominent American leaders. Estimates vary, but about 62,000 Loyalists relocated to Canada (46,000 according to the Canadian book on Loyalists, True Blue), Britain (7,000) or to Florida or the West Indies (9,000). This made up approximately 2% of the total population of the colonies. When the Loyalists left the South in 1783, they took thousands of blacks with them as slaves to the British West Indies.^[33]

Women

Abigail Adams

Main article: Women in the American Revolution

Several types of women contributed to the American Revolution in multiple ways. Like men, women participated on both sides of the war. Among women, European Americans, African Americans, and Native Americans also divided between the Patriot and Loyalist causes.

While formal Revolutionary politics did not include women, ordinary domestic behaviors became charged with political significance as patriot women confronted a war that permeated all aspects of political, civil, and domestic life. They participated by boycotting British goods, spying on the British, following armies as they marched, washing, cooking, and tending for soldiers, delivering secret messages, and in a few cases like Deborah Samson fighting disguised as men. Above all, they continued the agricultural work at home to feed the armies and their families.^[34]

The boycott of British goods required the willing participation of American women; the boycotted items were largely household items such as tea and cloth. Women had to return to spinning and weaving—skills that had fallen into disuse. In 1769, the women of Boston produced 40,000 skeins of yarn, and 180 women in Middletown, Massachusetts, wove 20,522 yards (18,765 m) of cloth.^[35]

A crisis of political loyalties could also disrupt the fabric of colonial America women’s social worlds: whether a man did or did not renounce his allegiance to the king could dissolve ties of class, family, and friendship, isolating women from former connections. A woman’s loyalty to her husband, once a private commitment, could become a political act, especially for women in America committed to men who remained loyal to the king. Legal divorce, usually rare, was granted to patriot women whose husbands supported the king.^[36]

Other participants

France and Spain

Spain and France were traditional enemies of Britain and looked for revenge. In early 1776, France set up a major program of aid to the Americans, and the Spanish secretly added funds. Each country spent 1 million "livres tournaises" to buy munitions. A dummy corporation run by Pierre Beaumarchais concealed their activities. Americans obtained some munitions through Holland as well as French and Spanish ports in the West Indies.^[37]

Native Americans

The great majority of the 200,000 Native Americans east of the Mississippi distrusted the colonists and supported the British cause.^[38] The British provided funding and guns to attack American outposts. Some Indians tried to remain neutral, seeing little value in participating yet again in a European conflict. A few supported the American cause.^[39]

The British provided arms for the Indians, under Loyalist leadership, to raid frontier settlements from the Carolinas to New York, threatening to massacre the settlers, especially in Pennsylvania. The most prominent was Mohawk chief Joseph Brant, who led a band of 300 Indian warriors and 100 white loyalists in 1778 and 1780 multiple attacks on small settlements in New York and Pennsylvania.^[40] In 1776 Cherokee war parties attacked all along the southern frontier.^[41]

While the Indians could launch raids with up to 100 warriors, they could not mobilize enough forces to fight a major invasion of thousands of soldiers, so the Americans sent invasion armies against the Cherokees in 1776 and 1780. In 1779 Washington sent General John Sullivan with four brigades of Continental soldiers to drive the Iroquois out of upstate western New York. There was little combat but Sullivan systematically burned 40 (empty) Indian villages and, most important, destroyed about 160,000 bushels of corn that comprised the winter food supply. Facing starvation the Iroquois permanently fled to the Niagara Falls area and to Canada, where the British fed them.^[42]

At the peace conference the British abandoned their Indian allies, and the Americans took possession of all the land west of the Mississippi and north of Florida. Calloway concludes:

Burned villages and crops, murdered chiefs, divided councils and civil wars, migrations, towns and forts choked with refugees, economic disruption, breaking of ancient traditions, losses in battle and to disease and hunger, betrayal to their enemies, all made the American Revolution one of the darkest periods in American Indian history.^[43]

The British, however, did not give up their forts in the west until 1796 and kept alive the dream of one day forming a satellite Indian nation in what is now the Ohio to Wisconsin part of the Midwest. That hostile goal was one of the causes of the War of 1812.^[44][45]

Slaves

African Americans, both men and women, understood Revolutionary rhetoric as promising freedom and equality. These hopes were not realized. Both British and American governments made promises of freedom for service and some slaves attempted to better their lives by fighting in or assisting one or the other armies. Starting in 1777 abolition occurred in the North, usually on a gradual schedule with no payments to the owners, but slavery persisted in the South and took on new life after the cotton gin lowered prices, increasing demand, expanding the plantation system to grow it, and requiring exponentially larger numbers of workers to pick it.^[46]

During the Revolution, efforts were made by the British to turn slavery against the Americans,^[28] but historian David Brion Davis explains the difficulties with a policy of wholesale arming of the slaves:

But England greatly feared the effects of any such move on its own West Indies, where Americans had already aroused alarm over a possible threat to incite slave insurrections. The British elites also understood that an all-out attack on one form of property could easily lead to an assault on all boundaries of privilege and social order, as envisioned by radical religious sects in Britain’s seventeenth-century civil wars.^[47]

Davis underscored the British dilemma: "Britain, when confronted by the rebellious American colonists, hoped to exploit their fear of slave revolts while also reassuring the large number of slave-holding Loyalists and wealthy Caribbean planters and merchants that their slave property would be secure".^[48] The colonists accused the British of encouraging slave revolts.^[49]

American advocates of independence were commonly lampooned in Britain for their hypocritical calls for freedom, while many of their leaders were slave-holders. Samuel Johnson observed "how is it we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the [slave] drivers of the Negroes?"^[50] Benjamin Franklin countered by criticizing the British self-congratulation about "the freeing of one Negro" (Somersett) while they continued to permit the Slave Trade.^[51][52]

In the North, slavery was first abolished in the state constitution of Vermont in 1777, in Massachusetts in 1780, and New Hampshire in 1784. Pennsylvania, Connecticut, and Rhode Island adopted systems of gradual emancipation during these years, freeing the children of slaves at birth. All the northern states passed laws to end slavery, the last being New Jersey in 1804. Slavery was banned in the Northwest Territories, but no southern state abolished it.

During the Revolution, some African American writers rose to prominence, notable Phyllis Wheatley, who came to public attention when her Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral appeared in London in 1773, while she was still a domestic slave in Boston. Kidnapped in Africa as young girl and converted to Christianity during the Great Awakening, Wheatley wrote poems combining piety and a concern for African Americans.^[52]

Military hostilities begin

Further information: Shot heard round the world, Boston campaign, Invasion of Canada (1775)

Join, or Die by Benjamin Franklin was recycled to encourage the former colonies to unite against British rule.

The Battle of Lexington and Concord took place April 19, 1775, when the British sent a force of roughly 1000 troops to confiscate arms and arrest revolutionaries in Concord.^[53] They clashed with the local militia, marking the first fighting of the American Revolutionary War. The news aroused the 13 colonies to call out their militias and send troops to besiege Boston. The Battle of Bunker Hill followed on June 17, 1775. While a British victory, it was made a victory by heavy losses on the British side; about 1,000 British casualties from a garrison of about 6,000, as compared to 500 American casualties from a much larger force.^[54][55]

The Second Continental Congress convened in 1775, after the war had started. The Congress created the Continental Army and extended the Olive Branch Petition to the crown as an attempt at reconciliation. King George III refused to receive it, issuing instead the Proclamation of Rebellion, requiring action against the "traitors".

In the winter of 1775, the Americans invaded Canada. Richard Montgomery captured Montreal but a joint attack on Quebec with the help of Benedict Arnold failed.

In March 1776, with George Washington as commander, the Continental Army forced the British to evacuate Boston, withdrawing their garrison to Halifax, Nova Scotia. The revolutionaries were in control of governments throughout the 13 colonies and were ready to declare independence. While there still were many Loyalists, they were no longer in control anywhere by July 1776, and all of the Royal officials had fled.^[56]

Prisoners

Main article: Prisoners in the American Revolutionary War

In August 1775, the King declared Americans in arms against royal authority to be traitors to the Crown. The British government at first started treating captured rebel combatants as common criminals and preparations were made to bring them to trial for treason. American Secretary Lord Germain and First Lord of the Admiralty Lord Sandwich were especially eager to do so, with a particular emphasis on those who had previously served in British units (and thereby sworn an oath of allegiance to the crown).

Many of the prisoners taken by the British at Bunker Hill apparently expected to be hanged, but British authorities declined to take the next step: treason trials and executions. There were tens of thousands of Loyalists under American control who would have been at risk for treason trials of their own (by the Americans)^{[clarification needed]}, and the British built much of their strategy around using these Loyalists. After the surrender at Saratoga in 1777, there were thousands of British prisoners in American hands who were effectively hostages.

Therefore no American prisoners were put on trial for treason, although most were badly treated and many died nonetheless, resulting in more deaths than every American battlefield and naval action fatality, combined.^[57][58] Eventually they were technically accorded the rights of belligerents in 1782, by act of Parliament, when they were officially recognized as prisoners of war rather than traitors. At the end of the war, both sides released their surviving prisoners.^[59]

Creating new state constitutions

Following the Battle of Bunker Hill in June 1775, the Patriots had control of most of the territory and population; the Loyalists were powerless.^{[dubious – discuss]} In all thirteen colonies, Patriots had overthrown their existing governments, closing courts and driving British governors, agents and supporters from their homes. They had elected conventions and "legislatures" that existed outside of any legal framework; new constitutions were used in each state to supersede royal charters. They declared they were states now, not colonies.^[60]

On January 5, 1776, New Hampshire ratified the first state constitution, six months before the signing of the Declaration of Independence. Then, in May 1776, Congress voted to suppress all forms of crown authority, to be replaced by locally created authority. Virginia, South Carolina, and New Jersey created their constitutions before July 4. Rhode Island and Connecticut simply took their existing royal charters and deleted all references to the crown.^[61]

The new states had to decide not only what form of government to create, they first had to decide how to select those who would craft the constitutions and how the resulting document would be ratified. In states where the wealthy exerted firm control over the process, such as Maryland, Virginia, Delaware, New York and Massachusetts, the results were constitutions that featured:

• Substantial property qualifications for voting and even more substantial requirements for elected positions (though New York and Maryland lowered property qualifications);^[60]
• Bicameral legislatures, with the upper house as a check on the lower;
• Strong governors, with veto power over the legislature and substantial appointment authority;
• Few or no restraints on individuals holding multiple positions in government;
• The continuation of state-established religion.

Dr. Benjamin Rush, 1783

In states where the less affluent had organized sufficiently to have significant power—especially Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and New Hampshire—the resulting constitutions embodied

• universal white manhood suffrage, or minimal property requirements for voting or holding office (New Jersey enfranchised some property owning widows, a step that it retracted 25 years later);
• strong, unicameral legislatures;
• relatively weak governors, without veto powers, and little appointing authority;
• prohibition against individuals holding multiple government posts;

Whether conservatives or radicals held sway in a state did not mean that the side with less power accepted the result quietly. The radical provisions of Pennsylvania's constitution lasted only fourteen years. In 1790, conservatives gained power in the state legislature, called a new constitutional convention, and rewrote the constitution. The new constitution substantially reduced universal white-male suffrage, gave the governor veto power and patronage appointment authority, and added an upper house with substantial wealth qualifications to the unicameral legislature. Thomas Paine called it a constitution unworthy of America.^[62]

Independence and Union

Further information: United States Declaration of Independence, Articles of Confederation and Perpetual Union

Common Sense by Thomas Paine

On January 10, 1776, Thomas Paine published a political pamphlet entitled Common Sense arguing that the only solution to the problems with Britain was republicanism and independence.^[63] In the ensuing months, before the allied states declared independence in unison in the name of the United States, the colonies had begun the process of creating their own constitutions to form sovereign states and some of them individually took the step to declare independence. Virginia, for instance, declared its independence from Great Britain on May 15, 1776. The war had been underway since April 1775, and until this point, the states had sought favorable peace terms; compromise was no longer a possibility, despite belated British efforts to come to a political resolution.^[64]

On June 11, 1776, the Second Continental Congress appointed a committee to prepare a draft declaration of independence. Thomas Jefferson, with John Adams and Benjamin Franklin, brought the draft before Congress on June 28. On July 2, 1776, Congress voted the independence of the United States; two days later, on July 4, it adopted the Declaration of Independence, which date is now celebrated as Independence Day in the United States.

On June 12, 1776, the Second Continental Congress resolved to appoint a committee of thirteen to prepare a draft agreement on a governing constitution and a perpetual union of the states. The Articles of Confederation and Perpetual Union, commonly known as the Articles of Confederation or simply the Articles, formed the first governing document of the United States of America, based on a confederation type government. Of equal importance is the fact that the Articles combined the sovereign states into a perpetual Union. The Second Continental Congress approved the Articles for ratification by the States on November 15, 1777, and began operating under their terms. The Articles were formally ratified when the representatives of Maryland became the last to apply their signatures to the document on March 1, 1781. At that point, the Continental Congress was dissolved and on the following day a new government of the United States in Congress Assembled took its place, with Samuel Huntington as President.^[65][66]

Defending the Revolution

Main article: American Revolutionary War

George Washington rallying his troops at the Battle of Princeton

British return: 1776-1777

Further information: New York and New Jersey campaign, Staten Island Peace Conference, Saratoga campaign, Philadelphia campaign

After Washington forced the British out of Boston in spring, 1776, neither the British nor the Loyalists controlled any significant areas. The British, however, were massing forces at their great naval base at Halifax, Nova Scotia. They returned in force in July 1776, landing in New York and defeating Washington's Continental Army in August at the Battle of Brooklyn in one of the largest engagements of the war. The British requested a meeting with representatives from Congress to negotiate an end to hostilities, and a delegation including John Adams and Benjamin Franklin met Howe on Staten Island in New York Harbor on September 11. Howe demanded a retraction of the Declaration of Independence, which was refused, and negotiations ended until 1781. The British then quickly seized New York City and nearly captured Washington. They made the city their main political and military base of operations in North America, holding it until November 1783. New York City consequently became the destination for Loyalist refugees, and a focal point of Washington's intelligence network.^[67] The British also took New Jersey, but in a surprise attack in late December, 1776, Washington crossed the Delaware River into New Jersey and defeated Hessian and British armies at Trenton and Princeton, thereby regaining New Jersey. The victories gave an important boost to pro-independence supporters at a time when morale was flagging, and have become iconic images of the war.

In 1777, as part of a grand strategy to end the war, the British sent an invasion force from Canada to seal off New England, which the British perceived as the primary source of agitators. In a major case of mis-coordination, the British army in New York City went to Philadelphia which it captured from Washington. The invasion army under Burgoyne waited in vain for reinforcements from New York, and became trapped upstate. It surrendered after the Battle of Saratoga, New York, in October 1777. From early October 1777 until November 15 a pivotal siege at Fort Mifflin, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania distracted British troops and allowed Washington time to preserve the Continental Army by safely leading his troops to harsh winter quarters at Valley Forge.

American alliances after 1778

Further information: France in the American Revolutionary War, Spain in the American Revolutionary War

The capture of a British army at Saratoga encouraged the French to formally enter the war in support of Congress, as Benjamin Franklin negotiated a permanent military alliance in early 1778, significantly becoming the first country to officially recognize the Declaration of Independence. William Pitt spoke out in parliament urging Britain to make peace in America, and unite with America against France,^[68] while other British politicians who had previously supported independence now turned against the American rebels for allying with a formerly mutual enemy.

Later Spain (in 1779) and the Dutch (1780) became allies of the French, leaving the British Empire to fight a global war alone without major allies, and requiring it to slip through a combined blockade of the Atlantic. The American theater thus became only one front in Britain's war.^[69] The British were forced to withdraw troops from continental America to reinforce the sugar-producing Caribbean islands, which were considered more valuable.

Because of the alliance with France and the deteriorating military situation, Sir Henry Clinton, the British commander, evacuated Philadelphia to reinforce New York City. General Washington attempted to intercept the retreating column, resulting in the Battle of Monmouth Court House, the last major battle fought in the north. After an inconclusive engagement, the British successfully retreated to New York City. The northern war subsequently became a stalemate, as the focus of attention shifted to the smaller southern theater.^[69]

The British move South, 1778-1783

Further information: Southern theater of the American Revolutionary War, Naval operations in the American Revolutionary War

The British strategy in America now concentrated on a campaign in the southern colonies. With fewer regular troops at their disposal, the British commanders saw the Southern Strategy as a more viable plan, as the south was perceived as being more strongly Loyalist, with a large population of recent immigrants as well as large numbers of African Americans expected to be at best actively pro-British, and at worst indifferent.^[70]

Beginning in late December 1778, the British captured Savannah and controlled the coastline. In 1780 they launched a fresh invasion and took Charleston as well. A significant victory at the Battle of Camden meant that royal forces soon controlled most of Georgia and South Carolina. The British set up a network of forts inland, hoping the Loyalists would rally to the flag.

Not enough Loyalists turned out, however, and the British had to fight their way north into North Carolina and Virginia, with a severely weakened army. Behind them much of the territory they had already captured dissolved into a chaotic guerrilla war, fought predominantly between bands of Loyalist and American militia, which negated many of the gains the British had previously made.^[71]

Yorktown 1781

Main article: Siege of Yorktown

The siege of Yorktown ended with the surrender of a second British army, paving the way for the end of the American Revolutionary War

The southern British army marched to Yorktown, Virginia where they expected to be rescued by a British fleet which would take them back to New York.^[72] When that fleet was defeated by a French fleet, however, they became trapped in Yorktown.^[73] In October 1781 under a combined siege by the French and Continental armies, the British, under the command of General Cornwallis, surrendered. However, Cornwallis was so embarrassed at his defeat that he had to send his second in command to surrender for him.^[74]

News of the defeat effectively ended major offensive operations in America. Support for the conflict had never been strong in Britain, where many sympathised with the rebels, but now it reached a new low.^[75]

Although King George III personally wanted to fight on, his supporters lost control of Parliament, and no further major land offensives were launched in the American Theatre.^[69] A final naval battle was fought on March 10, 1783 off the coast of Cape Canaveral by Captain John Barry and his crew of the USS Alliance with three British warships led by HMS Sybil, who were trying to take the payroll of the Continental Army.

Peace treaty

Main article: Treaty of Paris (1783)

The peace treaty with Britain, known as the Treaty of Paris, gave the U.S. all land east of the Mississippi River and south of the Great Lakes, though not including Florida (On September 3, 1783, Britain entered into a separate agreement with Spain under which Britain ceded Florida back to Spain.). The Native American nations actually living in this region were not a party to this treaty and did not recognize it until they were defeated militarily by the United States. Issues regarding boundaries and debts were not resolved until the Jay Treaty of 1795.^[76]

Immediate aftermath

See also: Annapolis Convention (1786), Philadelphia Convention, Constitution of the United States of America, and United States Bill of Rights

Interpretations

Interpretations about the effect of the Revolution vary. Though contemporary participants referred to the events as "the revolution",^[77] at one end of the spectrum is the view that the American Revolution was not "revolutionary" at all, contending that it did not radically transform colonial society but simply replaced a distant government with a local one.^[78] More recent scholarship pioneered by historians such as Bernard Bailyn, Gordon Wood, and Edmund Morgan accepts the contemporary view of the participants that the American Revolution was a unique and radical event that produced deep changes and had a profound impact on world affairs, based on an increasing belief in the principles of republicanism, such as peoples' natural rights, and a system of laws chosen by the people.^[79]

Some historians, such as Daniel Boorstin, see the motivation for the revolution as primarily legal.^[80] The adherence of the colonists to the British constitution and what they viewed to be the tyrannical deprivation of English rights by the English Parliament, in concert with the failure of King George III to protect his subjects from such abuses, are what he sees as compelling the colonists to sever political ties with Great Britain.^[80]

Loyalist expatriation

For roughly five percent of the inhabitants of the United States, defeat was followed by self-exile. Approximately 62,000 United Empire Loyalists left the newly founded republic, most settling in the remaining British colonies in North America, such as the Province of Quebec (concentrating in the Eastern Townships), Prince Edward Island, and Nova Scotia. The new colonies of Upper Canada (now Ontario) and New Brunswick were created by Britain for their benefit.^[81]

Worldwide influence

See also: Atlantic Revolutions

After the Revolution, genuinely democratic politics, became possible.^[82] The rights of the people were incorporated into state constitutions. Thus came the widespread assertion of liberty, individual rights, equality and hostility toward corruption which would prove core values of republicanism to Americans. The greatest challenge to the old order in Europe was the challenge to inherited political power and the democratic idea that government rests on the consent of the governed. The example of the first successful revolution against a European empire, and the first successful establishment of a republican form of democratically elected government, provided a model for many other colonial peoples who realized that they too could break away and become self-governing nations with directly elected representative government.^[83]

In 1777, Morocco was the first state to recognize the independence of the United States of America. The two countries signed the Moroccan-American Treaty of Friendship ten years later. Friesland, one of the seven United Provinces of the Dutch Republic, was the next to recognize American independence (February 26, 1782), followed by the Staten-Generaal of the Dutch Republic on April 19, 1782). John Adams became the first US Ambassador in The Hague.^[84].

Since the Dutch Republic was at war with the United Kingdom at the signing of the treaty in 1782, it is often considered that Sweden was the first neutral sovereign power that recognized the United States of America. On April 3, 1783, Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary, Count Gustaf Philip Creutz, representing the King of Sweden, and Benjamin Franklin, Minister Plenipotentiary of the United States of America, signed a Treaty of Amity and Commerce in Paris, France. In the Treaty, they pledged, firm, inviolable and universal peace and a true and sincere friendship between the King, his heirs and successors, and the United States of America.^[85].

The American Revolution was the first wave of the Atlantic Revolutions that took hold in the French Revolution, the Haitian Revolution, and the Latin American wars of independence. Aftershocks reached Ireland in the Irish Rebellion of 1798, in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, and in the Netherlands.^[86]

The Revolution had a strong, immediate impact in Great Britain, Ireland, the Netherlands, and France. Many British and Irish Whigs spoke in favor of the American cause. The Revolution, along with the Dutch Revolt (end of the 16th century) and the English Civil War (in the 17th century), was one of the first lessons in overthrowing an old regime for many Europeans who later were active during the era of the French Revolution, such as Marquis de Lafayette. The American Declaration of Independence had some impact on the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen of 1789.^[87][88]

The North American states' newly-won independence from the British Empire resulted in the abolition of slavery in some Northern states 51 years before it would be banned in the British colonies, and allowed slavery to continue in the Southern states until 1865, 32 years after it was banned in all British colonies.

National debt

See also: United States public debt, Federalist Papers, and Alexander Hamilton

The national debt after the American Revolution fell into three categories. The first was the $11 million owed to foreigners—mostly debts to France during the American Revolution. The second and third—roughly $24 million each—were debts owed by the national and state governments to Americans who had sold food, horses, and supplies to the revolutionary forces. Congress agreed that the power and the authority of the new government would pay for the foreign debts. There were also other debts that consisted of promissory notes issued during the Revolutionary War to soldiers, merchants, and farmers who accepted these payments on the premise that the new Constitution would create a government that would pay these debts eventually. The war expenses of the individual states added up to $114,000,000, compared to $37 million by the central government.^[89] In 1790, at the recommendation of first Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton, Congress combined the state debts with the foreign and domestic debts into one national debt totaling $80 million. Everyone received face value for wartime certificates, so that the national honor would be sustained and the national credit established.

See also

• Diplomacy in the American Revolutionary War
• Timeline of United States revolutionary history (1760-1789)
• List of plays and films about the American Revolution
• Second American Revolution

Bibliography

Notes

1. ^ Wood (1992); Greene & Pole (1994) ch. 70
2. ^ ^{a b} Calhoon, "Loyalism and neutrality" in Greene and Pole, A Companion to the American Revolution (2000) p.235
3. ^ Charles W. Toth, Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite: The American Revolution & the European Response. (1989) p. 26.
4. ^ page 101, Philosophical Tales, by Martin Cohen, (Blackwell 2008)
5. ^ Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (1967)
6. ^ Gordon S. Wood The Radicalism of the American Revolution (1992) pp 174-5
7. ^ Gordon S. Wood The Radicalism of the American Revolution (1992) p 35
8. ^ Robert E. Shalhope, "Toward a Republican Synthesis," William and Mary Quarterly, 29 (Jan. 1972), pp 49-80
9. ^ Adams quoted in Paul A. Rahe, Republics Ancient and Modern: Classical Republicanism and the American Revolution. Volume: 2 (1994) P. 23.
10. ^ However, there is an alternative viewpoint presented by Michael Novak, a theologian. Novak argues that among the supporters of the American Revolution, it was from the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament, that most Patriots absorbed the beliefs and values that motivated them to rebel against Britain. Michael Novak, On Two Wings. Humble Faith and Common Sense at the American Founding. Encounter Books, 2002. pp. 11-13, 84. Novak's views have not been endorsed by historians.
11. ^ Bonomi, p 186
12. ^ William H. Nelson, The American Tory (1961) esp p. 186
13. ^ Bonomi, p. 186, Chapter 7 “Religion and the American Revolution
14. ^ Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution 1992 p. 273-4, 299-300
15. ^ Bailyn, 1992 p.303
16. ^ ^{a b} Miller (1943)
17. ^ Greene & Pole (1994) ch 15
18. ^ Greene & Pole (1994) ch 11
19. ^ Middlekauff pg. 62.
20. ^ Miller, p.89
21. ^ Miller pg. 101
22. ^ William S. Carpenter, "Taxation Without Representation" in Dictionary of American History, Volume 7 (1976); Miller (1943)
23. ^ Pauline Maier, From Resistance to Revolution: Colonial Radicals and the Development of American Opposition to Britain, 1765-1776 (1972)
24. ^ Miller (1943) pp 353-76
25. ^ Greene & Pole (1994) ch 22-24
26. ^ Nash (2005); Resch (2006)
27. ^ Staff. Tory, Encyclopaedia Britannica
28. ^ ^{a b} Revolutionary War: The Home Front, The Library of Congress
29. ^ Calhoon, Robert M. "Loyalism and neutrality" in Greene and Pole, The Blackwell Encyclopedia of the American Revolution (1991)
30. ^ Colin G. Calloway, The American Revolution in Indian Country: Crisis and Diversity in Native American Communities (1995)
31. ^ Hill (2007), see also blackloyalist.com
32. ^ Gottlieb 2005
33. ^ Greene & Pole (1994) ch. 20-22
34. ^ Carol Berkin, Revolutionary Mothers: Women in the Struggle for America's Independence (2005)
35. ^ Berkin (2005); Greene & Pole (1994) ch. 41
36. ^ Linda Kerber, Women of the Republic: Intellect and Ideology in Revolutionary America (1997) ch. 4, 6; also see Mary Beth Norton, Liberty's Daughters: The Revolutionary Experience of American Women (1980)
37. ^ Jonathan Dull, A Diplomatic History of the American Revolution (1985) pp 57-65; Edward F. Butler, "Spain's Involvement in the American Revolutionary War" The SAR Magazine Vol. 104 No. 1
38. ^ Greene and Pole (2004) chapters 19, 46 and 51; Colin G. Calloway, The American Revolution in Indian Country: Crisis and Diversity in Native American Communities (1995)
39. ^ Joseph T. Glatthaar and James Kirby Martin, Forgotten Allies: The Oneida Indians and the American Revolution (2007)
40. ^ see Barbara Graymont, "Thayendanegea," Dictionary of Canadian Biography Online
41. ^ Tom Hatley, The Dividing Paths: Cherokees and South Carolinians through the Era of Revolution (1993); James H. O'Donnell, III, Southern Indians in the American Revolution (1973)
42. ^ Joseph R. Fischer, A Well-Executed Failure: The Sullivan Campaign against the Iroquois, July-September 1779 (1997).
43. ^ Calloway (1995) p. 290
44. ^ Dwight L. Smith, "A North American Neutral Indian Zone: Persistence of a British Idea" Northwest Ohio Quarterly 1989 61(2-4): 46-63
45. ^ Francis M. Carroll, A Good and Wise Measure: The Search for the Canadian-American Boundary, 1783-1842, 2001, page 23
46. ^ Benjamin Quarles, The Negro in the American Revolution (1961)
47. ^ Davis p. 148
48. ^ Davis p. 149
49. ^ Schama p.28-30 p. 78-90
50. ^ Weintraub p.7
51. ^ Schama p.75
52. ^ ^{a b} Hochschild p.50-51
53. ^ Morrisey p.35
54. ^ Harvey p.208-210
55. ^ Urban p.74
56. ^ Miller (1948) p. 87
57. ^ Onderdonk, Henry. "Revolutionary Incidents of Suffolk and Kings Counties; With an Account of the Battle of Long Island and the British Prisons and Prison-Ships at New York". ISBN 978-0804680752
58. ^ Dring, Thomas and Greene, Albert. "Recollections of the Jersey Prison Ship" (American Experience Series, No 8), 1986 (originally printed 1826). ISBN 978-0918222923
59. ^ John C. Miller, Triumph of Freedom, 1775-1783 1948. Page 166.
60. ^ ^{a b} Nevins (1927); Greene & Pole (1994) ch 29
61. ^ Nevins (1927)
62. ^ Wood (1992)
63. ^ Greene and Pole (1994) ch 26.
64. ^ Greene and Pole (1994) ch 27.
65. ^ Greene and Pole (1994) ch 30;
66. ^ Klos, Stanley L. (2004). President Who? Forgotten Founders. Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania: Evisum, Inc.. ISBN 0-9752627-5-0. 
67. ^ Schecter, Barnet. The Battle for New York: The City at the Heart of the American Revolution. (2002); McCullough, 1776 (2005)
68. ^ Weintraub p.
69. ^ ^{a b c} Mackesy, 1992; Higginbotham (1983)
70. ^ Jeffrey J. Crow and Larry E. Tise, eds. The Southern Experience in the American Revolution (1978)
71. ^ Henry Lumpkin, From Savannah to Yorktown: The American Revolution in the South (2000)
72. ^ Harvey p.493-95
73. ^ Harvey p.502-06
74. ^ Harvey p.515
75. ^ Harvey p.528
76. ^ Miller (1948), pp 616-48
77. ^ McCullough, David. John Adams. Simon & Schuster, 2001. ISBN-9780743223133
78. ^ Greene, Jack. "The American Revolution Section 25". The American Historical Review. http://www.historycooperative.org/journals/ahr/105.1/ah000093.html. Retrieved 2007-01-06. 
79. ^ Wood (2003)
80. ^ ^{a b} Boorstin, Daniel J. (1953). The Genius of American Politics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 
81. ^ Van Tine (1902)
82. ^ Wood, Radicalism, p. 278-9
83. ^ Palmer, (1959)
84. ^ "Frisians first to recognize USA! (After an article by Kerst Huisman, Leeuwarder Courant 29th Dec. 1999)". http://mertsahinoglu.com/research/frisians-first-to-recognize-usa/. Retrieved 2009-10-29. 
85. ^ "Proclamation by the President of the United States, April 4, 1983". http://www.reagan.utexas.edu/archives/speeches/1983/40483c.htm. Retrieved 2009-07-20. 
86. ^ Palmer, (1959); Greene & Pole (1994) ch 53-55
87. ^ Palmer, (1959); Greene & Pole (1994) ch 49-52.
88. ^ "Enlightenment and Human Rights". http://chnm.gmu.edu/revolution/chap3a.html. Retrieved 2007-01-06. 
89. ^ Jensen, The New Nation (1950) p 379

Reference works

• Ian Barnes and Charles Royster. The Historical Atlas of the American Revolution (2000), maps and commentary
• Blanco, Richard. The American Revolution: An Encyclopedia 2 vol (1993), 1850 pages
• Boatner, Mark Mayo, III. Encyclopedia of the American Revolution. (1966); revised 1974. ISBN 0-8117-0578-1; new expanded edition 2006 ed. by Harold E. Selesky
• Fremont-Barnes, Gregory, and Richard A. Ryerson, eds. The Encyclopedia of the American Revolutionary War: A Political, Social, and Military History (ABC-CLIO 2006) 5 vol; 1000 entries by 150 experts, covering all topics
• Greene, Jack P. and J. R. Pole, eds. The Blackwell Encyclopedia of the American Revolution (1994), 845pp; emphasis on political ideas; revised edition (2004) titled A Companion to the American Revolution
• Purcell, L. Edward. Who Was Who in the American Revolution (1993); 1500 short biographies
• Resch, John P., ed. Americans at War: Society, Culture and the Homefront vol 1 (2005)

Primary sources

• The American Revolution: Writings from the War of Independence (2001), Library of America, 880pp
• Commager, Henry Steele and Morris, Richard B., eds. The Spirit of 'Seventy-Six: The Story of the American Revolution As Told by Participants (1975) (ISBN 0-06-010834-7) short excerpts from hundreds of official and unofficial primary sources
• Dring, Thomas and Greene, Albert. Recollections of the Jersey Prison Ship (American Experience Series, No 8), 1986 (originally printed 1826). ISBN 978-0918222923
• Humphrey, Carol Sue ed. The Revolutionary Era: Primary Documents on Events from 1776 to 1800 Greenwood Press, 2003
• Morison, Samuel E. ed. Sources and Documents Illustrating the American Revolution, 1764-1788, and the Formation of the Federal Constitution (1923). 370 pp online version
• Onderdonk, Henry. Revolutionary Incidents of Suffolk and Kings Counties; With an Account of the Battle of Long Island and the British Prisons and Prison-Ships at New York. ISBN 978-0804680752

• Tansill, Charles C. ed.; Documents Illustrative of the Formation of the Union of the American States. Govt. Print. Office. (1927). 1124 pages online version
• Martin Kallich and Andrew MacLeish, eds. The American Revolution through British eyes (1962) primary documents

Surveys

• Bancroft, George. History of the United States of America, from the discovery of the American continent. (1854-78), vol 4-10 online edition
• Cogliano, Francis D. Revolutionary America, 1763-1815; A Political History (2000), British textbook
• Harvey, Robert A few bloody noses: The American Revolutionary War (2004)
• Higginbotham, Don. The War of American Independence: Military Attitudes, Policies, and Practice, 1763-1789 (1983) Online in ACLS History E-book Project. Comprehensive coverage of military and other aspects of the war.
• Hochschild, Adam. Bury the Chains: The British Struggle to Abolish Slavery (2006)
• Jensen, Merrill. The Founding of a Nation: A History of the American Revolution 1763-1776. (2004)
• Bernhard Knollenberg, Growth of the American Revolution: 1766-1775 (2003) online edition
• Lecky, William Edward Hartpole. The American Revolution, 1763-1783 (1898), British perspective online edition
• Mackesy, Piers. The War for America: 1775-1783 (1992), British military study online edition
• Middlekauff, Robert. The Glorious Cause: The American Revolution, 1763-1789 (2005). The 1985 version is available online at online edition
• Miller, John C. Triumph of Freedom, 1775-1783 (1948) online edition
• Miller, John C. Origins of the American Revolution (1943) online edition
• Morrissey, Brendan. Boston 1775:The Shot Heard Around The World. Osprey (1993)
• Schama, Simon. Rough Crossings: Britain, The Slaves and the American Revolution (2006)
• Urban, Mark. Generals:Ten British Commanders who shaped the World (2005)
• Weintraub, Stanley. Iron Tears: Rebellion in America 1775-83 (2005)
• Wood, Gordon S. The American Revolution: A History (2003), short survey
• Wrong, George M. Washington and His Comrades in Arms: A Chronicle of the War of Independence (1921) online short survey by Canadian scholar

Specialized studies

• Bailyn, Bernard. The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution. Harvard University Press, 1967. ISBN 0-674-44301-2
• Becker, Carl. The Declaration of Independence: A Study on the History of Political Ideas (1922)online edition
• Samuel Flagg Bemis. The Diplomacy of the American Revolution (1935) online edition
• Berkin, Carol.Revolutionary Mothers: Women in the Struggle for America's Independence (2006)
• Breen, T. H. The Marketplace of Revolution: How Consumer Politics Shaped American Independence (2005)
• Crow, Jeffrey J. and Larry E. Tise, eds. The Southern Experience in the American Revolution (1978)
• Davis, David Brion. Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery n the New World. (2006)
• Fischer, David Hackett. Washington's Crossing (2004). 1776 campaigns; Pulitzer prize. ISBN 0–195–17034–2
• Greene, Jack, ed. The Reinterpretation of the American Revolution (1968) collection of scholarly essays
• Kerber, Linda K. Women of the Republic: Intellect and Ideology in Revolutionary America (1979)
• McCullough, David. 1776 (2005). ISBN 0-7432-2671-2
• Morris, Richard B. ed. The Era of the American revolution (1939); older scholarly essays
• Nash, Gary B. The Unknown American Revolution: The Unruly Birth of Democracy and the Struggle to Create America. (2005). ISBN 0-670-03420-7
• Nevins, Allan; The American States during and after the Revolution, 1775-1789 1927. online edition
• Norton, Mary Beth. Liberty's Daughters: The Revolutionary Experience of American Women, 1750-1800 (1980)
• Palmer, Robert R. The Age of the Democratic Revolution: A Political History of Europe and America, 1760-1800. vol 1 (1959) online edition
• Resch, John Phillips and Walter Sargent, eds. War And Society in the American Revolution: Mobilization And Home Fronts (2006)
• Rothbard, Murray, Conceived in Liberty (2000), Volume III: Advance to Revolution, 1760-1775 and Volume IV: The Revolutionary War, 1775-1784. ISBN 0-945466-26-9.
• Savas, Theodore and Dameron, J. David. A Guide to the Battles of the American Revolution. Savas Beatie LLC. El Dorado Hills. March 2006. ISBN 1-932714-12-X

• Schecter, Barnet. The Battle for New York: The City at the Heart of the American Revolution. Walker & Company. New York. October 2002. ISBN 0-8027-1374-2
• Shankman, Andrew. Crucible of American Democracy: The Struggle to Fuse Egalitarianism and Capitalism in Jeffersonian Pennsylvania. University Press of Kansas, 2004.
• Van Tyne, Claude Halstead. American Loyalists: The Loyalists in the American Revolution (1902)
• Volo, James M. and Dorothy Denneen Volo. Daily Life during the American Revolution (2003)
• Wahlke, John C. ed. The Causes of the American Revolution (1967) readings
• Wood, Gordon S. The Radicalism of the American Revolution: How a Revolution Transformed a Monarchical Society into a Democratic One Unlike Any That Had Ever Existed. Alfred A. Knopf, 1992.

External links

• Library of Congress Guide to the American Revolution
• Pictures of the Revolutionary War: Select Audiovisual Records, National Archives and Records Administration selection of images, including a number of non-military events and portraits
• American Revolution Digital Learning Project, New-York Historical Society
• PBS Television Series
• Smithsonian study unit on Revolutionary Money
• The American Revolution: Lighting Freedom's Flame, US National Park Service website
• Haldimand Collection Letters regarding the war to important generals. Fully indexed
• "Military History of Revolution" essay by Richard Jensen with links to documents, maps, URLs
• American Independence Museum
• Black Loyalist Heritage Society
• Spanish and Latin American contribution to the American Revolution
• American Archives: Documents of the American Revolution at Northern Illinois University Libraries
• The American Revolution as a People’s War by William F. Marina, The Independent Institute, July 1 1976
• American Revolution study guide and teacher resources

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