ARTICLES
The American Revolution, 1763–1783
by Pauline Maier
The British colonists of mainland North America had great hopes for the
future in 1763, when the Peace of Paris formally ended the Seven Years’ War.
Since the late seventeenth century, their lives had been disrupted by a series
of wars between Britain and the “Catholic Powers,” France and Spain. Now,
however, a triumphant Britain took title to Spanish Florida, French Canada, and
all of Louisiana east of the Mississippi. With the British flag flying over so
much of the North American continent, the colonists looked forward to a time of
uninterrupted peace, expansion, and prosperity. Deeply proud of the British
victory and their own identity as “free Britons,” they neither wanted nor
foresaw what the next two decades would bring—independence, revolution, and yet
another war.
Independence
The Seven Years’ War had left Great Britain with a huge debt by the standards
of the day. Moreover, thanks in part to Pontiac’s Rebellion, a massive American
Indian uprising in the territories won from France, the British decided to keep
an army in postwar North America. Surely the colonists could help pay for that
army and a few other expenses of administering Britain’s much enlarged American
empire. Rather than request help from provincial legislatures, however, Britain
decided to raise the necessary money by acts of Parliament.
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Two laws, the Sugar Act (1764) and the Stamp Act (1765), began the conflict
between London and America. The Sugar Act imposed duties on certain imports not,
as in the past, to affect the course of trade—for example, by making it more
expensive for colonists to import molasses from the non-British than from the
British West Indies—but to raise a revenue in America “for defraying the expense
of defending, protecting, and securing the same.” The Stamp Act levied entirely
new excise taxes (like sales taxes) in America on pamphlets, almanacs,
newspapers and newspaper advertisements, playing cards, dice, and a wide range
of legal and commercial documents. Those accused of violating the Stamp Act
would be tried in Admiralty Courts, which had no juries and whose jurisdiction
normally pertained to maritime affairs. The colonists protested that provision
because it violated their right to trial by jury. Above all, however, they
insisted that both acts levied taxes on them and that, under the old English
principle of “no taxation without representation,” Parliament had no right to
tax the colonists because they had no representatives in the House of
Commons.
British spokesmen did not question the principle but argued that the
colonists, like many Englishmen in places that could not send delegates to
Parliament, were “virtually” represented in Parliament because its members
sought the good of the British people everywhere, not just of those who chose
them. That made no sense to the Americans, who lived in a young society where
representation was generally tied to population and voters expected their
representatives to know and defend their interests. A legislator could not
represent people who did not choose him, they argued. It was as simple as
that.
Several colonies unsuccessfully petitioned Parliament against the Sugar and
Stamp Acts. A Stamp Act Congress of delegates from nine colonies met in New York
in October 1765, passed resolutions asserting their rights, and petitioned the
king, the Lords, and the Commons for redress of their grievances. What else
could the colonists do? Allowing the Stamp Act to go into effect would create a
precedent for new taxes, which Parliament would surely approve again and again
because every tax on the Americans relieved them and their constituents of that
financial burden.
Boston led the way. On August 14 and 15, 1765, a popular uprising there
forced the Massachusetts stamp collector, Andrew Oliver, to resign his office.
That meant there was nobody in the colony to distribute stamps or collect the
taxes. With a minimum of force, the Stamp Act had been effectively nullified in
Massachusetts. Soon other colonies’ stampmen resigned to avoid Oliver’s fate. In
the end, the Stamp Act went into effect only in remote Georgia for a brief time.
In the spring of 1766, Parliament repealed the Stamp Act, but it also passed a
Declaratory Act that said Parliament had the right to bind the colonies “in all
cases whatsoever.”
As if to affirm that right, in 1767 the new chancellor of the exchequer,
Charles Townshend, persuaded Parliament to pass an act levying new duties on
glass, lead, paint, paper, and tea imported into the American colonies to help
pay for the colonies’ defense and also to pay royal officials who had previously
been dependent on provincial assemblies for their salaries. Those “Townshend
duties” sparked a second wave of opposition. In an effort to avoid further
violence within America, the colonists organized non-importation associations to
build pressure for repeal of the duties among those manufacturers and merchants
in Britain who suffered from the decline in exports to America. Only men signed
the associations, but women often supported the effort by making homespun cloth
to replace British textiles and seeking alternatives to imported tea. Exports to
America declined enough that in 1770 Parliament repealed most of the Townshend
duties, retaining only the one on tea.
That led to a third crisis in 1773, when Parliament passed a Tea Act to help
the financially strapped East India Company (EIC) sell its surplus tea in
America. The Tea Act did not impose a new tax. It refunded to the EIC duties
collected in Britain and allowed the company to sell tea in America through its
own agents (or “consignees”) rather than through independent merchants. The
king’s minister, Lord North, who proposed the act, thought that the Tea Act
would allow the EIC to price its tea low enough to compete with smugglers of
cheap Dutch tea. The act also gave the EIC a monopoly of the American market,
which caused discontent among colonial merchants cut out of the tea trade and
others who feared that more monopolies would follow if this one became
established. More important, Lord North insisted on retaining the old Townshend
duty on tea. He did not anticipate how much opposition that would provoke from
colonists determined to resist all taxes imposed upon them by Parliament.
The first tea ship, the Dartmouth, arrived in Boston on November 28,
1773. For several weeks thereafter, a mass meeting of “the Body of the People,”
whose members came from Boston and several nearby towns, tried unsuccessfully to
get the consignees to resign and to secure permission from customs officials and
the royal governor for the ships to leave the harbor and take their tea back to
England. (In Philadelphia and New York, the consignees resigned and the tea
ships were successfully sent back to England with the tea chests still on
board.) Finally, on December 16, the night before the tea became subject to
seizure by customsmen, to whom the consignees would surely pay the duty, a group
of men disguised as Indians threw 342 chests of tea into the harbor.
An angry Parliament responded to the “Boston Tea Party” in 1774 by passing a
series of Coercive Acts that the colonists soon called the “Intolerable Acts.”
They closed Boston Harbor (the Port Act); nullified the Massachusetts Charter of
1691 and instituted a new government with greater royal control (the
Massachusetts Government Act); and allowed royal officials accused of committing
felonies while executing their offices in Massachusetts to be tried in England
(the Administration of Justice Act). The fourth Coercive Act, a new Quartering
Act, facilitated housing troops where they could be used against colonial
civilians. Soon the king appointed General Thomas Gage, head of the British army
in North America, as governor of Massachusetts, and essentially put the province
under military rule.
If the Coercive Acts were meant to isolate Massachusetts, they failed; the
other colonies rallied to its defense. A Continental Congress met in
Philadelphia (September 5–October 26, 1774), adopted a statement of rights,
demanded the repeal of several acts of Parliament including the
“unconstitutional” Coercive Acts, advised the people of Massachusetts to act in
self defense, and approved a comprehensive program of economic sanctions against
Britain (the “Continental Association”) that would be enforced by elected local
committees. It also called a second Continental Congress to meet on May 10,
1775, if the Americans’ grievances had not yet been redressed. By then, however,
war between provincial and regular soldiers had begun at Lexington and Concord
in Massachusetts (April 19, 1775).
The Second Continental Congress again petitioned the king for redress of
grievances and assured him of the colonists’ loyalty. Nonetheless, in a
proclamation in August and again in a speech to Parliament in October 1775, King
George III said that the Americans were seeking independence. Their professions
of loyalty, he claimed, were “meant only to amuse,” that is, to mislead. He had
already decided that only force could end the conflict. In November, Lord
Dunmore, the royal governor of Virginia, offered freedom to slaves who fled to
the British lines. That further alienated white planters. And in December, the
king signed a Prohibitory Act that put American shipping on the same status as
that of enemy nations, effectively putting the American colonists outside his
protection. Soon he began negotiating with German princes to hire soldiers to
help put down the American “rebellion.” Those actions drove more and more
Americans toward the independence that the king sought to prevent.
Some colonists—roughly 20 percent of the population—remained loyal to the
Crown. Those “loyalists” included farmers and artisans of modest means as well
as wealthy merchants and planters. One group, however, was represented among
loyalists out of proportion to its incidence in the population as a whole:
British officeholders, from sheriffs to royal governors. Other loyalists lived
in areas cut off from the flow of information, and so were not driven by events
to reconsider their allegiance, or they had reason to think their liberty and
interests would be better served under the Crown than in a government controlled
by the majority of their white male neighbors. Many members of the Church of
England who lived in Congregationalist Connecticut drew that conclusion. So did
the unassimilated members of several ethnic minorities and those slaves who
flocked into British lines.
By the spring of 1776, however, even many reluctant colonists thought they
had no choice. They could declare their independence and secure foreign help,
probably from France, Britain’s old enemy, or they would be crushed. On July 2,
Congress, confident that it had the support of the people, approved a resolution
that “these united colonies are, and of right ought to be, free and independent
States,” then spent much of the next two days editing a draft declaration of
independence. On July 4, it approved the text by which the United States claimed
a “separate and equal station” among “the powers of the earth,” free of that
allegiance to the Crown and state of Great Britain that had for so long been a
cause of profound pride among the British colonists of North America.
Revolution
The Declaration of Independence asserted the right of the people to “alter or
to abolish” a government that failed to secure their rights and to adopt another
in a form they thought most likely “to effect their safety and happiness.” For
that purpose, the Americans rejected not only British rule but also monarchy.
The governments they founded would be republics—that is, governments without any
hereditary rulers, in which all power came directly or indirectly from the
people. In the eighteenth century, that was revolutionary.
It might also have been foolhardy: all the republics of past times had
failed. But with a resolution and radical preface approved on May 10 and 15,
1776, well before declaring independence, Congress had called on the states to
establish new governments in which “every kind of authority” under the British
Crown was “totally suppressed” and all authority was exerted “under the
authority of the people.” In 1776, ten states wrote new constitutions (the
world’s first written constitutions) or, in the case of Connecticut and Rhode
Island, made appropriate changes in their colonial charters. New York and
Georgia followed in 1777, along with Vermont, which was trying to win its
independence from New York. Finally, in 1780, Massachusetts wrote the last of
the first state constitutions. Soon states began to replace their first
constitutions, building on their experience and the example of constitutions
created in other states.
The state-based institutional experiments between 1776 and 1780 shaped the
future of American government. At first, the states placed most power in their
legislatures, which in most colonial governments had been the only institution
elected by the people. Gradually, however, the states moved toward dividing
power, first among the executive and two houses of the legislature (like the
king, Lords, and Commons of Britain’s unwritten constitution), and then among
the legislative, executive, and judiciary branches of government (separation of
function). As a result, the Articles of Confederation (which Congress sent to
the states for ratification on November 15, 1777) seemed old-fashioned by the
time the document was were ratified in March 1781. The Articles made a worthy
effort at dividing power between the states and the nation but put all of the
central government’s power in one institution, Congress. In 1787, the Federal
Convention in Philadelphia decided that the Confederation could not safely be
given more power unless that power was divided among different branches of
government. In that regard, as in others, the federal Constitution grew out of
the earlier development of constitutions within the states.
The state constitution-writers also realized that constitutional or
fundamental laws had to be distinguished from ordinary laws, which could be
enacted and then easily revised by state legislatures. Massachusetts solved that
problem in 1780 when it adopted a state constitution that had been—by popular
demand—drafted by a specially elected state convention, then ratified directly
by the sovereign people in the towns. Henceforth constitutions, including the
federal Constitution, would be a direct act of legislation by “We the people,” a
phrase that, in 1787, the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia took
directly from the 1780 Massachusetts constitution and inserted into the federal
Constitution. Ordinary laws remained the work of legislatures. That distinction
remains fundamental to the American legal system.
These critical institutional advances were achieved relatively quickly and
remain part of the Revolution’s legacy. Other changes took more time. The ideals
of the Revolution, especially the notion that “all men are created equal” and
have God-given rights, and that all legitimate authority comes from consent,
were incompatible with the institution of slavery. Some states understood that
and passed gradual emancipation laws or laws that facilitated private
manumissions. Often, slaves freed themselves by running away—repeatedly if
necessary. Women, too, began to ask why the laws treated them differently than
men. In truth, even the idea of equality among white men faced resistance in a
society where educated and propertied white men saw themselves as the country’s
natural rulers. But just raising the issue of what equality implied made clear
that colonial America was gone forever, and that the Revolution would, in time,
bring changes far beyond what its most prominent advocates anticipated.
War
The war was not the Revolution, but without military victory the
Revolution—that is, the fundamental changes that revolution brought—would have
failed. Even a negotiated settlement with Britain would have brought the
Americans back under the British Crown, ending the republic, the constitutional
experimentation, and the social transformations begun in 1776.
At first, the Americans did remarkably well against the king’s troops.
General Gage arrived in Boston expecting, as did the king and ministers in
Britain, that a modest number of regular soldiers could arrest local
troublemakers and restore royal authority in Massachusetts. That expectation
proved to be wrong. Insurgent colonists throughout the colony forced men
appointed to the new provincial Council under the Massachusetts Government Act
to resign or flee to the protection of the royal army in Boston. Then the
provincials imposed heavy casualties on the regular soldiers retreating toward
Boston after the battles at Lexington and Concord, and again two months later,
on June 17, 1775, at the Battle of Bunker (or, more exactly, Breed’s) Hill. Soon
after, General George Washington took charge of the Massachusetts Provincial
Army, which became the Continental Army, camped in Cambridge. The king’s
soldiers remained under siege across the Charles River in Boston, then a
peninsula connected to the mainland by a narrow causeway. After the Americans
fortified Dorchester Heights, threatening British control of the harbor, General
William Howe, Gage’s successor, decided to evacuate, which he and his army did
on March 17, 1776.
If the king’s troops were conducting not a local police action but a war, the
place to be was in or near New York City, an island at the base of the great
Hudson River. And there, in late June and early July, as the Continental
Congress in Philadelphia bravely declared independence, the British assembled
more than 30,000 experienced soldiers and sailors, the greatest military force
ever seen in North America. At the end of June, Washington had only 19,000
troops, most of whom had been in active duty only a few months. By contrast,
privates in the British infantry units averaged nine years of service.
Similarly, the king’s generals averaged thirty years of military experience,
while their American counterparts had only two. It took no genius to see that
the provincials were not only outnumbered but also seriously outclassed.
Washington lost the Battle of Brooklyn Heights on nearby Long Island (August
27, 1776), but managed to transfer his remaining men to Manhattan that night. He
retreated up the island and crossed onto the mainland, fought a battle at White
Plains in Westchester County, New York, on October 28, then slipped down through
New Jersey, where the people were busy trying to save their necks by signing
loyalty oaths to the king. Even Washington feared the war was lost. But he
crossed the Delaware River into Pennsylvania on December 11, then re-crossed it
and stopped the downward spiral by winning critical battles at Trenton and
Princeton, New Jersey, on December 26, 1776, and January 3, 1777. Then he took
his army into winter quarters as irregular troops in New Jersey, angered by
British soldiers’ abuses of civilians, put the king’s forces on the
defensive.
The year 1777 was a turning point in the war. General John Burgoyne led a
major campaign from Canada down the Richelieu and Hudson Rivers, but the
Continental Army, reinforced with New England militiamen, forced him to
surrender at Saratoga, New York (October 17). After hearing the news, the French
opened negotiations for an alliance. On February 6, 1778, the French and
American negotiators signed a treaty of military alliance and another of amity
and commerce, which Congress ratified the following September. Once France
entered the war, Britain had to defend its homeland and its possessions in the
West Indies, not just fight the Americans. Moreover, it had to face a powerful
French navy on the world’s waterways. That made the war much harder for Britain
to win.
As a consequence, the British evacuated Philadelphia in 1778, which General
Howe had taken the year before (when he might better have relieved Burgoyne).
Leaving a base on Manhattan, they concentrated their attention on the southern
colonies, as if to save a part of their American empire, while waging secondary
battles on the western frontier and making scattershot attacks on New England
ports. The British took Savannah in December 1778, then Charleston, where the
American General Benjamin Lincoln surrendered his army in May 1780. A second
American army under General Horatio Gates fell to the British at Camden, North
Carolina, in August.
Even without an American army in the field, the fighting continued. The
British organized loyalist militias to maintain control over conquered
territory, but once the British army left, guerrilla bands emerged from hiding
and the war in the South became a nasty civil war, neighbor against neighbor.
Meanwhile, a third southern army, under General Nathanael Greene, nibbled away
at the British army until its commander, Lord Charles Cornwallis, retreated
northward into Virginia. Finally Cornwallis settled in at Yorktown on the
Chesapeake Bay waiting for reinforcements from New York. That was a big mistake:
the French fleet under Comte François de Grasse sealed the bay off to British
ships while Washington and the French General Rochambeau marched south and
mounted a siege that forced Cornwallis to open negotiations for a surrender
(October 17, 1781). The British still held New York City and Charleston, but
Lord North understood that the war was over when he heard the news. Parliament
would not replace Cornwallis’s army. It had thrown enough good money after
bad.
Thanks in part to the skill of the American negotiators, the Peace of Paris
(1783) was very favorable to the United States. Great Britain recognized
American independence, as France had done in 1778, and the United States gained
all the land east of the Mississippi between Canada, which Britain retained, and
Florida, which returned to Spain. The future of the American republic remained
uncertain, but it would at least be in the hands of its people, a people who
had, with considerable help from the French, won their independence from the
most powerful nation in the world.
Pauline Maier is the William R. Kenan, Jr.,
Professor of American History at MIT. Her publications include From
Resistance to Revolution: Colonial Radicals and the Development of American
Opposition to Britain, 1765–1776 (1972), American Scripture: Making the
Declaration of Independence (1997), and Ratification: The People Debate
the Constitution, 1787–1788 (2010), which received the George Washington
Book Prize.
by Pauline Maier
The British colonists of mainland North America had great hopes for the
future in 1763, when the Peace of Paris formally ended the Seven Years’ War.
Since the late seventeenth century, their lives had been disrupted by a series
of wars between Britain and the “Catholic Powers,” France and Spain. Now,
however, a triumphant Britain took title to Spanish Florida, French Canada, and
all of Louisiana east of the Mississippi. With the British flag flying over so
much of the North American continent, the colonists looked forward to a time of
uninterrupted peace, expansion, and prosperity. Deeply proud of the British
victory and their own identity as “free Britons,” they neither wanted nor
foresaw what the next two decades would bring—independence, revolution, and yet
another war.
Independence
The Seven Years’ War had left Great Britain with a huge debt by the standards
of the day. Moreover, thanks in part to Pontiac’s Rebellion, a massive American
Indian uprising in the territories won from France, the British decided to keep
an army in postwar North America. Surely the colonists could help pay for that
army and a few other expenses of administering Britain’s much enlarged American
empire. Rather than request help from provincial legislatures, however, Britain
decided to raise the necessary money by acts of Parliament.
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Two laws, the Sugar Act (1764) and the Stamp Act (1765), began the conflict
between London and America. The Sugar Act imposed duties on certain imports not,
as in the past, to affect the course of trade—for example, by making it more
expensive for colonists to import molasses from the non-British than from the
British West Indies—but to raise a revenue in America “for defraying the expense
of defending, protecting, and securing the same.” The Stamp Act levied entirely
new excise taxes (like sales taxes) in America on pamphlets, almanacs,
newspapers and newspaper advertisements, playing cards, dice, and a wide range
of legal and commercial documents. Those accused of violating the Stamp Act
would be tried in Admiralty Courts, which had no juries and whose jurisdiction
normally pertained to maritime affairs. The colonists protested that provision
because it violated their right to trial by jury. Above all, however, they
insisted that both acts levied taxes on them and that, under the old English
principle of “no taxation without representation,” Parliament had no right to
tax the colonists because they had no representatives in the House of
Commons.
British spokesmen did not question the principle but argued that the
colonists, like many Englishmen in places that could not send delegates to
Parliament, were “virtually” represented in Parliament because its members
sought the good of the British people everywhere, not just of those who chose
them. That made no sense to the Americans, who lived in a young society where
representation was generally tied to population and voters expected their
representatives to know and defend their interests. A legislator could not
represent people who did not choose him, they argued. It was as simple as
that.
Several colonies unsuccessfully petitioned Parliament against the Sugar and
Stamp Acts. A Stamp Act Congress of delegates from nine colonies met in New York
in October 1765, passed resolutions asserting their rights, and petitioned the
king, the Lords, and the Commons for redress of their grievances. What else
could the colonists do? Allowing the Stamp Act to go into effect would create a
precedent for new taxes, which Parliament would surely approve again and again
because every tax on the Americans relieved them and their constituents of that
financial burden.
Boston led the way. On August 14 and 15, 1765, a popular uprising there
forced the Massachusetts stamp collector, Andrew Oliver, to resign his office.
That meant there was nobody in the colony to distribute stamps or collect the
taxes. With a minimum of force, the Stamp Act had been effectively nullified in
Massachusetts. Soon other colonies’ stampmen resigned to avoid Oliver’s fate. In
the end, the Stamp Act went into effect only in remote Georgia for a brief time.
In the spring of 1766, Parliament repealed the Stamp Act, but it also passed a
Declaratory Act that said Parliament had the right to bind the colonies “in all
cases whatsoever.”
As if to affirm that right, in 1767 the new chancellor of the exchequer,
Charles Townshend, persuaded Parliament to pass an act levying new duties on
glass, lead, paint, paper, and tea imported into the American colonies to help
pay for the colonies’ defense and also to pay royal officials who had previously
been dependent on provincial assemblies for their salaries. Those “Townshend
duties” sparked a second wave of opposition. In an effort to avoid further
violence within America, the colonists organized non-importation associations to
build pressure for repeal of the duties among those manufacturers and merchants
in Britain who suffered from the decline in exports to America. Only men signed
the associations, but women often supported the effort by making homespun cloth
to replace British textiles and seeking alternatives to imported tea. Exports to
America declined enough that in 1770 Parliament repealed most of the Townshend
duties, retaining only the one on tea.
That led to a third crisis in 1773, when Parliament passed a Tea Act to help
the financially strapped East India Company (EIC) sell its surplus tea in
America. The Tea Act did not impose a new tax. It refunded to the EIC duties
collected in Britain and allowed the company to sell tea in America through its
own agents (or “consignees”) rather than through independent merchants. The
king’s minister, Lord North, who proposed the act, thought that the Tea Act
would allow the EIC to price its tea low enough to compete with smugglers of
cheap Dutch tea. The act also gave the EIC a monopoly of the American market,
which caused discontent among colonial merchants cut out of the tea trade and
others who feared that more monopolies would follow if this one became
established. More important, Lord North insisted on retaining the old Townshend
duty on tea. He did not anticipate how much opposition that would provoke from
colonists determined to resist all taxes imposed upon them by Parliament.
The first tea ship, the Dartmouth, arrived in Boston on November 28,
1773. For several weeks thereafter, a mass meeting of “the Body of the People,”
whose members came from Boston and several nearby towns, tried unsuccessfully to
get the consignees to resign and to secure permission from customs officials and
the royal governor for the ships to leave the harbor and take their tea back to
England. (In Philadelphia and New York, the consignees resigned and the tea
ships were successfully sent back to England with the tea chests still on
board.) Finally, on December 16, the night before the tea became subject to
seizure by customsmen, to whom the consignees would surely pay the duty, a group
of men disguised as Indians threw 342 chests of tea into the harbor.
An angry Parliament responded to the “Boston Tea Party” in 1774 by passing a
series of Coercive Acts that the colonists soon called the “Intolerable Acts.”
They closed Boston Harbor (the Port Act); nullified the Massachusetts Charter of
1691 and instituted a new government with greater royal control (the
Massachusetts Government Act); and allowed royal officials accused of committing
felonies while executing their offices in Massachusetts to be tried in England
(the Administration of Justice Act). The fourth Coercive Act, a new Quartering
Act, facilitated housing troops where they could be used against colonial
civilians. Soon the king appointed General Thomas Gage, head of the British army
in North America, as governor of Massachusetts, and essentially put the province
under military rule.
If the Coercive Acts were meant to isolate Massachusetts, they failed; the
other colonies rallied to its defense. A Continental Congress met in
Philadelphia (September 5–October 26, 1774), adopted a statement of rights,
demanded the repeal of several acts of Parliament including the
“unconstitutional” Coercive Acts, advised the people of Massachusetts to act in
self defense, and approved a comprehensive program of economic sanctions against
Britain (the “Continental Association”) that would be enforced by elected local
committees. It also called a second Continental Congress to meet on May 10,
1775, if the Americans’ grievances had not yet been redressed. By then, however,
war between provincial and regular soldiers had begun at Lexington and Concord
in Massachusetts (April 19, 1775).
The Second Continental Congress again petitioned the king for redress of
grievances and assured him of the colonists’ loyalty. Nonetheless, in a
proclamation in August and again in a speech to Parliament in October 1775, King
George III said that the Americans were seeking independence. Their professions
of loyalty, he claimed, were “meant only to amuse,” that is, to mislead. He had
already decided that only force could end the conflict. In November, Lord
Dunmore, the royal governor of Virginia, offered freedom to slaves who fled to
the British lines. That further alienated white planters. And in December, the
king signed a Prohibitory Act that put American shipping on the same status as
that of enemy nations, effectively putting the American colonists outside his
protection. Soon he began negotiating with German princes to hire soldiers to
help put down the American “rebellion.” Those actions drove more and more
Americans toward the independence that the king sought to prevent.
Some colonists—roughly 20 percent of the population—remained loyal to the
Crown. Those “loyalists” included farmers and artisans of modest means as well
as wealthy merchants and planters. One group, however, was represented among
loyalists out of proportion to its incidence in the population as a whole:
British officeholders, from sheriffs to royal governors. Other loyalists lived
in areas cut off from the flow of information, and so were not driven by events
to reconsider their allegiance, or they had reason to think their liberty and
interests would be better served under the Crown than in a government controlled
by the majority of their white male neighbors. Many members of the Church of
England who lived in Congregationalist Connecticut drew that conclusion. So did
the unassimilated members of several ethnic minorities and those slaves who
flocked into British lines.
By the spring of 1776, however, even many reluctant colonists thought they
had no choice. They could declare their independence and secure foreign help,
probably from France, Britain’s old enemy, or they would be crushed. On July 2,
Congress, confident that it had the support of the people, approved a resolution
that “these united colonies are, and of right ought to be, free and independent
States,” then spent much of the next two days editing a draft declaration of
independence. On July 4, it approved the text by which the United States claimed
a “separate and equal station” among “the powers of the earth,” free of that
allegiance to the Crown and state of Great Britain that had for so long been a
cause of profound pride among the British colonists of North America.
Revolution
The Declaration of Independence asserted the right of the people to “alter or
to abolish” a government that failed to secure their rights and to adopt another
in a form they thought most likely “to effect their safety and happiness.” For
that purpose, the Americans rejected not only British rule but also monarchy.
The governments they founded would be republics—that is, governments without any
hereditary rulers, in which all power came directly or indirectly from the
people. In the eighteenth century, that was revolutionary.
It might also have been foolhardy: all the republics of past times had
failed. But with a resolution and radical preface approved on May 10 and 15,
1776, well before declaring independence, Congress had called on the states to
establish new governments in which “every kind of authority” under the British
Crown was “totally suppressed” and all authority was exerted “under the
authority of the people.” In 1776, ten states wrote new constitutions (the
world’s first written constitutions) or, in the case of Connecticut and Rhode
Island, made appropriate changes in their colonial charters. New York and
Georgia followed in 1777, along with Vermont, which was trying to win its
independence from New York. Finally, in 1780, Massachusetts wrote the last of
the first state constitutions. Soon states began to replace their first
constitutions, building on their experience and the example of constitutions
created in other states.
The state-based institutional experiments between 1776 and 1780 shaped the
future of American government. At first, the states placed most power in their
legislatures, which in most colonial governments had been the only institution
elected by the people. Gradually, however, the states moved toward dividing
power, first among the executive and two houses of the legislature (like the
king, Lords, and Commons of Britain’s unwritten constitution), and then among
the legislative, executive, and judiciary branches of government (separation of
function). As a result, the Articles of Confederation (which Congress sent to
the states for ratification on November 15, 1777) seemed old-fashioned by the
time the document was were ratified in March 1781. The Articles made a worthy
effort at dividing power between the states and the nation but put all of the
central government’s power in one institution, Congress. In 1787, the Federal
Convention in Philadelphia decided that the Confederation could not safely be
given more power unless that power was divided among different branches of
government. In that regard, as in others, the federal Constitution grew out of
the earlier development of constitutions within the states.
The state constitution-writers also realized that constitutional or
fundamental laws had to be distinguished from ordinary laws, which could be
enacted and then easily revised by state legislatures. Massachusetts solved that
problem in 1780 when it adopted a state constitution that had been—by popular
demand—drafted by a specially elected state convention, then ratified directly
by the sovereign people in the towns. Henceforth constitutions, including the
federal Constitution, would be a direct act of legislation by “We the people,” a
phrase that, in 1787, the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia took
directly from the 1780 Massachusetts constitution and inserted into the federal
Constitution. Ordinary laws remained the work of legislatures. That distinction
remains fundamental to the American legal system.
These critical institutional advances were achieved relatively quickly and
remain part of the Revolution’s legacy. Other changes took more time. The ideals
of the Revolution, especially the notion that “all men are created equal” and
have God-given rights, and that all legitimate authority comes from consent,
were incompatible with the institution of slavery. Some states understood that
and passed gradual emancipation laws or laws that facilitated private
manumissions. Often, slaves freed themselves by running away—repeatedly if
necessary. Women, too, began to ask why the laws treated them differently than
men. In truth, even the idea of equality among white men faced resistance in a
society where educated and propertied white men saw themselves as the country’s
natural rulers. But just raising the issue of what equality implied made clear
that colonial America was gone forever, and that the Revolution would, in time,
bring changes far beyond what its most prominent advocates anticipated.
War
The war was not the Revolution, but without military victory the
Revolution—that is, the fundamental changes that revolution brought—would have
failed. Even a negotiated settlement with Britain would have brought the
Americans back under the British Crown, ending the republic, the constitutional
experimentation, and the social transformations begun in 1776.
At first, the Americans did remarkably well against the king’s troops.
General Gage arrived in Boston expecting, as did the king and ministers in
Britain, that a modest number of regular soldiers could arrest local
troublemakers and restore royal authority in Massachusetts. That expectation
proved to be wrong. Insurgent colonists throughout the colony forced men
appointed to the new provincial Council under the Massachusetts Government Act
to resign or flee to the protection of the royal army in Boston. Then the
provincials imposed heavy casualties on the regular soldiers retreating toward
Boston after the battles at Lexington and Concord, and again two months later,
on June 17, 1775, at the Battle of Bunker (or, more exactly, Breed’s) Hill. Soon
after, General George Washington took charge of the Massachusetts Provincial
Army, which became the Continental Army, camped in Cambridge. The king’s
soldiers remained under siege across the Charles River in Boston, then a
peninsula connected to the mainland by a narrow causeway. After the Americans
fortified Dorchester Heights, threatening British control of the harbor, General
William Howe, Gage’s successor, decided to evacuate, which he and his army did
on March 17, 1776.
If the king’s troops were conducting not a local police action but a war, the
place to be was in or near New York City, an island at the base of the great
Hudson River. And there, in late June and early July, as the Continental
Congress in Philadelphia bravely declared independence, the British assembled
more than 30,000 experienced soldiers and sailors, the greatest military force
ever seen in North America. At the end of June, Washington had only 19,000
troops, most of whom had been in active duty only a few months. By contrast,
privates in the British infantry units averaged nine years of service.
Similarly, the king’s generals averaged thirty years of military experience,
while their American counterparts had only two. It took no genius to see that
the provincials were not only outnumbered but also seriously outclassed.
Washington lost the Battle of Brooklyn Heights on nearby Long Island (August
27, 1776), but managed to transfer his remaining men to Manhattan that night. He
retreated up the island and crossed onto the mainland, fought a battle at White
Plains in Westchester County, New York, on October 28, then slipped down through
New Jersey, where the people were busy trying to save their necks by signing
loyalty oaths to the king. Even Washington feared the war was lost. But he
crossed the Delaware River into Pennsylvania on December 11, then re-crossed it
and stopped the downward spiral by winning critical battles at Trenton and
Princeton, New Jersey, on December 26, 1776, and January 3, 1777. Then he took
his army into winter quarters as irregular troops in New Jersey, angered by
British soldiers’ abuses of civilians, put the king’s forces on the
defensive.
The year 1777 was a turning point in the war. General John Burgoyne led a
major campaign from Canada down the Richelieu and Hudson Rivers, but the
Continental Army, reinforced with New England militiamen, forced him to
surrender at Saratoga, New York (October 17). After hearing the news, the French
opened negotiations for an alliance. On February 6, 1778, the French and
American negotiators signed a treaty of military alliance and another of amity
and commerce, which Congress ratified the following September. Once France
entered the war, Britain had to defend its homeland and its possessions in the
West Indies, not just fight the Americans. Moreover, it had to face a powerful
French navy on the world’s waterways. That made the war much harder for Britain
to win.
As a consequence, the British evacuated Philadelphia in 1778, which General
Howe had taken the year before (when he might better have relieved Burgoyne).
Leaving a base on Manhattan, they concentrated their attention on the southern
colonies, as if to save a part of their American empire, while waging secondary
battles on the western frontier and making scattershot attacks on New England
ports. The British took Savannah in December 1778, then Charleston, where the
American General Benjamin Lincoln surrendered his army in May 1780. A second
American army under General Horatio Gates fell to the British at Camden, North
Carolina, in August.
Even without an American army in the field, the fighting continued. The
British organized loyalist militias to maintain control over conquered
territory, but once the British army left, guerrilla bands emerged from hiding
and the war in the South became a nasty civil war, neighbor against neighbor.
Meanwhile, a third southern army, under General Nathanael Greene, nibbled away
at the British army until its commander, Lord Charles Cornwallis, retreated
northward into Virginia. Finally Cornwallis settled in at Yorktown on the
Chesapeake Bay waiting for reinforcements from New York. That was a big mistake:
the French fleet under Comte François de Grasse sealed the bay off to British
ships while Washington and the French General Rochambeau marched south and
mounted a siege that forced Cornwallis to open negotiations for a surrender
(October 17, 1781). The British still held New York City and Charleston, but
Lord North understood that the war was over when he heard the news. Parliament
would not replace Cornwallis’s army. It had thrown enough good money after
bad.
Thanks in part to the skill of the American negotiators, the Peace of Paris
(1783) was very favorable to the United States. Great Britain recognized
American independence, as France had done in 1778, and the United States gained
all the land east of the Mississippi between Canada, which Britain retained, and
Florida, which returned to Spain. The future of the American republic remained
uncertain, but it would at least be in the hands of its people, a people who
had, with considerable help from the French, won their independence from the
most powerful nation in the world.
Pauline Maier is the William R. Kenan, Jr.,
Professor of American History at MIT. Her publications include From
Resistance to Revolution: Colonial Radicals and the Development of American
Opposition to Britain, 1765–1776 (1972), American Scripture: Making the
Declaration of Independence (1997), and Ratification: The People Debate
the Constitution, 1787–1788 (2010), which received the George Washington
Book Prize.