US 2111 American Revolution

1. 1765-1783

2. • The American Revolution (1775-83) is also known as the American
Revolutionary War and the U.S. War of Independence.
• -The conflict arose from growing tensions between residents of Great Britain’s 13
North American colonies and the colonial government, which represented the British
crown.
• -Skirmishes between British troops and colonial militiamen in Lexington and
Concord in April 1775 kicked off the armed conflict, and by the following summer,
the rebels were waging a full-scale war for their independence.
• -France entered the American Revolution on the side of the colonists in 1778,
turning what had essentially been a civil war into an international conflict.
• -After French assistance helped the Continental Army force the British surrender at
Yorktown, Virginia, in 1781, the Americans had effectively won their independence,
though fighting would not formally end until 1783.

3. Background
• - In 1763, the British Empire emerged as the victor of the Seven Years’ War (1756-
63). Although the victory greatly expanded the empire’s imperial holdings, it also left it
with a massive national debt, and the British government looked to its North
American colonies as an untapped source of revenue.
• -Attempts by the British government to raise revenue by taxing the colonies
• 1. Stamp Act of 1765,
2. the Townshend Tariffs of 1767
3. the Tea Act of 1773
-These acts were met with heated protest among many colonists, who resented their
lack of representation in Parliament and demanded the same rights as other British
subjects.

4. • -Colonial resistance led to violence in 1770,
when British soldiers opened fire on a mob of
colonists, killing five men in what was known as
the Boston Massacre.
• -Their resistance culminated in the Boston Tea
Party on December 16, 1773, in which colonists
boarded East India Company ships and dumped
their loads of tea overboard. Parliament
responded with a series of harsh measures
intended to stifle colonial resistance to British
rule.
• - The Boston Tea Party caused considerable
property damage and infuriated the British
government. Parliament responded with the
Coercive Acts of 1774, which colonists came to
call the Intolerable Acts.

5. Prelude to War
• - The colony of Massachusetts was seen by King
George III and his ministers as the hotbed of
disloyalty.
• -After the Boston Tea Party (December 16, 1773),
Parliament responded with the Intolerable Acts
(1774), a series of punitive measures that were
intended to cow the restive population into obedience.
• - The 1691 charter of the Massachusetts Bay Colony
was abrogated, and the colony’s elected ruling
council was replaced with a military government
under Gen. Thomas Gage, the commander of all
British troops in North America.
• Beginning in the late summer of 1774, Gage
attempted to suppress the warlike preparations
throughout New England by seizing stores of
weapons and powder. Although the colonials were
initially taken by surprise, they soon mobilized.

6. • - On April 14, 1775, Gage received a letter from Dartmouth
informing him that Massachusetts had been declared to be in a
state of open revolt and ordering him to
“arrest and imprison the principal Actors and Abettors
in the [Massachusetts] Provincial Congress.”
-On April 16 Revere rode to Concord, a town 20 miles (32
km) northwest of Boston, to advise local compatriots to secure
their military stores in advance of British troop movements.
• - Two nights later Revere rode from Charlestown—where he
confirmed that the local Sons of Liberty had seen the two
lanterns that were posted in Boston’s Old North Church,
signaling a British approach across the Charles River—to
Lexington to warn that the British were on the march.
• - Some 700 British troops spent the evening of April 18,
1775, forming ranks on Boston Common, with orders to seize
the colonial armory at Concord. The lengthy public display
ensured that Gage had lost any chance at secrecy,

7. • - By the time the soaked infantrymen
arrived in Lexington at approximately 5:00
am, 77 minutemen were among those who
had assembled on the village green. Officers
on both sides ordered their men to hold their
positions but not to fire their weapons.
• - It is unclear who fired “the shot heard
’round the world,” but it sparked a
skirmish that left eight Americans dead. The
colonial force evaporated, and the British
moved on to Concord, where they were met
with determined resistance from hundreds
of militiamen.

8. Political Response
• -In response to the passage of the intolerable acts, a
group of colonial delegates (including George
Washington of Virginia, John and Samuel Adams of
Massachusetts, Patrick Henry of Virginia) met in
Philadelphia in September 1774 to give voice to their
grievances against the British crown.
• -This First Continental Congress did not go so far as
to demand independence from Britain, but it
denounced taxation without representation, as well as
the maintenance of the British army in the colonies
without their consent, and issued a declaration of the
rights due every citizen, including life, liberty,
property, assembly and trial by jury.

9. DECLARING INDEPENDENCE (1775-76)
• -When the Second Continental Congress convened in Philadelphia, delegates–
including new additions Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson–voted to form a
Continental Army, with Washington as its commander in chief.
• -On June 17, in the Revolution’s first major battle, colonial forces inflicted heavy
casualties on the British regiment of General William Howe at Breed’s Hill in Boston.
• -By June 1776, with the Revolutionary War in full swing, a growing majority of the
colonists had come to favor independence from Britain.
• -On July 4, the Continental Congress voted to adopt the Declaration of
Independence, drafted by a five-man committee including Franklin and John Adams
but written mainly by Jefferson.

10. Declaration of Independence
• -Thomas Jefferson was a student of Enlightenment philosophy and studied the work
of John Locke, one of the preeminent Enlightenment political philosophers of the late
17th century.
• -The Declaration of Independence outlines Colonial grievances under the natural
rights that Locke set forth: life, liberty, and property (substituted with "pursuit of
happiness" in Declaration).
• -According to Locke, it was the duty of the government to protect these rights and
should government fail to do so, then it was the right of the people to resist or even
dissolve that government.
• 1. Life:
• 2. Liberty:
• 3. Property:

11. SARATOGA: REVOLUTIONARY WAR
TURNING POINT (1777-78)
• -British strategy in 1777 involved two main prongs of attack, aimed at separating
New England (where the rebellion enjoyed the most popular support) from the other
colonies.
• - To that end, General John Burgoyne’s army aimed to march south from Canada
toward a planned meeting with Howe’s forces on the Hudson River. Burgoyne’s men
dealt a devastating loss to the Americans in July by retaking Fort Ticonderoga,
while Howe decided to move his troops southward from New York to confront
Washington’s army near the Chesapeake Bay.
• -Howe’s move had left Burgoyne’s army exposed near Saratoga, New York, and the
British suffered the consequences of this on September 19, when an American force
under General Horatio Gates defeated them at Freeman’s Farm (known as the first
Battle of Saratoga).

12. • -After suffering another defeat on
October 7 at Bemis Heights (the Second
Battle of Saratoga), Burgoyne surrendered
his remaining forces on October 17.
• -The American victory Saratoga would
prove to be a turning point of the
American Revolution, as it prompted
France (which had been secretly aiding
the rebels since 1776) to enter the war
openly on the American side, though it
would not formally declare war on Great
Britain until June 1778.

13. REVOLUTIONARY WAR DRAWS
TO A CLOSE (1781-83)
• -In the South, the British occupied Georgia by early 1779 and captured
Charleston, South Carolina in May 1780.
• -British forces under Lord Charles Cornwallis then began an offensive in the
region, crushing Gates’American troops at Camden in mid-August, though the
Americans scored a victory over Loyalist forces at King’s Mountain in early
October.
• -By the fall of 1781, Greene’s American forces had managed to force Cornwallis
and his men to withdraw to Virginia’s Yorktown peninsula, near where the York
River empties into Chesapeake Bay.
• -Trapped and overpowered, Cornwallis was forced to surrender his entire army
on October 19

14. The United States Government
(Articles of Confederation
• -The Articles of Confederation served as the written document that established the functions of the national
government of the United States after it declared independence from Great Britain.
• -The Continental Congress adopted the Articles of Confederation, the first constitution of the United States,
on November 15, 1777.
• -The Articles created a loose confederation of sovereign states and a weak central government, leaving most
of the power with the state governments.
• -The Albany Plan an earlier, pre-independence attempt at joining the colonies into a larger union, had failed
in part because the individual colonies were concerned about losing power to another central insitution.
• -As the American Revolution gained momentum, however, many political leaders saw the advantages of a
centralized government that could coordinate the Revolutionary War.
• -The Articles created a sovereign, national government, and, as such, limited the rights of the states to
conduct their own diplomacy and foreign policy.

15. • -The Articles created a loose confederation of
sovereign states and a weak central government,
leaving most of the power with the state
governments.
• -The Albany Plan an earlier, pre-independence
attempt at joining the colonies into a larger union,
had failed in part because the individual colonies
were concerned about losing power to another
central institution.
• -As the American Revolution gained momentum,
however, many political leaders saw the advantages
of a centralized government that could coordinate the
Revolutionary War.
• -The Articles created a sovereign, national
government, and, as such, limited the rights of the
states to conduct their own diplomacy and foreign
policy.

16. • - However, this proved difficult to enforce, as the national government
could not prevent the state of Georgia from pursuing its own
independent policy regarding Spanish Florida, attempting to occupy
disputed territories and threatening war if Spanish officials did not work
to curb Indian attacks or refrain from harboring escaped slaves.
• -In addition, the Articles did not allow Congress sufficient authority to
enforce provisions of the 1783 Treaty of Paris that allowed British
creditors to sue debtors for pre-Revolutionary debts, an unpopular
clause that many state governments chose to ignore.
• -The weakness of the Articles is best highlighted in the inability of the
Government to deal with Shay’s rebellion.