Why did the American Revolution increase human rights?

Answer 1

The American Revolution served as one of the most significant events in world history up until its point and time, and even for some time since and arguably still today, but the idea of the war is the source of debate among historians. The American Revolution is thought to be a true "revolution", in the sense that it brought a radical change in the form of displacing the monarchy. To many of the outside world, the revolution represented colonists, small agrarian workers who were not completely united as a whole, throwing aside the army of the mighty England and forming a new nation. The American Revolution was one of the most significant events because it signaled not only the radicalism of change in North America but a radical revolutionary period that was seen throughout all of the Americas.

The American Revolution created a society that was based off of both democratic and republic ideas to create one of the most liberally-minded societies to date. The hierarchy of the old monarchy and aristocracy was abolished and replaced with a new kind of social structures in the thirteen colonies, though all thirteen states were not affected equally. For Loyalists, members of the colonies who wanted to remain loyal to England, the result of the Revolutionary War meant a danger to themselves. They were forced to flee, mostly to Canada and England itself, in search of refuge.

During the war, in states such as Georgia and South Carolina, British troops had occupied land that used slave labor, and England set these slaves free to fight in the army. After the war, instead of returning to plantations, Great Britain relocated these former slaves outside of the United States. The king and Parliament in England had restricted the colonists from moving west of the Appalachian Mountains, because it felt it would not be able to protect the colonists once they entered Indian territory. With the political bonds severed, the western frontier was open to the colonists, and it would begin the systematic relocation of American Indians that came to be manifested in movements such as the Trail of Tears.

The American Revolution created a new society, and the new nation had two drastically different regions. The industrial North, in New England especially, had rocky soil that was not fit for agriculture, whereas the soil in the South led to a heavily agrarian lifestyle. In order to satisfy this agrarian lifestyle that depended on cotton and tobacco as cash crops, the Southern states imported a larger number of slaves than did the North. These differences were made more apparent after the war, when the American economy was forced to become as completely self-sufficient as any nation would need to be successful. Perhaps the largest failure of the United States Constitution, written after the American Revolution and a symbol of the modern United States, was the failure of dealing with the issue of slavery. It was consciously left out to avoid any problems with ratification in either the Northern of Southern states.

Outside of the United States, in the other American nations, revolutions began to follow in the same radical vain as the American Revolution. Latin American revolutions began to stir up after first facing colonization at the beginning of the 1500s. The American Revolution was so radical that it served as an influence on the Latin American countries that would rise up to attempt to overthrow their colonizing powers. The Monroe Doctrine, in theory, would support these radical movements. It kept all European powers from creating new colonies in the Americas, and opened up an opportunity for Latin American countries to seek their own independence. The American Revolution, in effect, began an age that saw the shrinking of global empires and the emergence of new countries through armed, freedom-fighting revolution.