American Revolution
From Open Encyclopedia
The American Revolution is the series of events, ideas, and changes that resulted in the revolution and ensuing political separation of thirteen colonies in North America from the British Empire and the creation of the United States of America with a new political system. The American War of Independence (1775–1783) was one part of the revolution, but the revolution by the Americans began before the first shot was fired at Lexington and Concord and continued after the British surrender at Yorktown. Years later, in 1818, John Adams wrote: "The Revolution was effected before the War commenced," and "The Revolution was in the minds and hearts of the people."
The precise nature and extent of the revolution is a matter of great interpretation. It is generally agreed that the revolution originated around the time of the French and Indian War (1754–1763), and ended with the election of George Washington as the first President of the United States in 1789. Beyond that, interpretations vary. At one end of the spectrum is the view that the American Revolution was not "revolutionary" at all, that it did not radically transform colonial society, but 'simply replaced a distant government with a local one'. The opposite view is that the American Revolution was a unique and radical event, producing significant changes that had a profound impact on world history. Most current interpretations fall somewhere in between these two positions. Image:Map of territorial growth 1775.jpg
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Origins
In the early 1760's, Great Britain possessed a vast empire on the North American continent. In addition to the thirteen British colonies, victory in the Seven Years' War had given Great Britain claim over New France (Canada), Spanish Florida, and the Native American lands east of the Mississippi River. A war against France's former Indian allies—Pontiac's Rebellion—had, if not conquered, at least 'pacified' the western frontier. At this time, most white colonists in America considered themselves loyal subjects of the British Crown, with the same rights and obligations as Englishmen in Britain.
Philosophy and radical thought
The Enlightenment elevated natural philosophy, and began to replace arguments born of tradition and authority with those based upon observation and independent reasoning. The implications of the earlier scientific revolution began to have a greater effect on everyday life and in the conscious thought of men everywhere. Increased publication and communications between like-minded people opened up new areas to question and consideration. The early works of thinkers like John Locke became the analysis of men like Montesquieu. The deist views of several of the Founding Fathers of the United States, and their views on the proper form of government have roots in this European Enlightenment, and were a source for ideas regarding separation of church and state and other liberties. In addition, the ideas of "social contract" and "natural rights", espoused by John Locke, formed the basis of political reasonings.
Religious trends
The Great Awakening of the 1730s and 1740s, was the American extension to the earlier religious revivals in Europe. It called into question the authority of established religious institutions; especially, but not exclusively, the Church of England, whose authority many of the colonists had come to New England to escape. The revival placed emphasis upon individual conscience and experience as the source of value in religious experience.
Socially, there was also a strong element of 'class' revolt: God worked through grace that was given to every man or woman, regardless of station or level of education. This was a direct challenge to upper-class, aristocratic assumptions about the deference due to authority— it was a model of revolutionary thought to come; it was also the first event that swept through all the colonies, from New England to the Carolinas, as a generally common experience.
Road to rebellion
After the French and Indian War and Pontiac's Rebellion, the British government sought to overhaul its expansive North American possessions. In order to make the Empire more stable and profitable, new economic and land distribution policies were implemented. Specifically, the new British policies included the understandable desire of the crown that the colonists would shoulder a greater share of the burdens of war and the cost of their own defense, as well as the curtailment of smuggling with the colonies of the West Indies, the payment of royal tariffs and the exclusive trade with the British homeland.
Economic disputes, 1760-70
King George wanted the colonists' money. The British national debt had risen to alarming levels during the war years and so in 1760 the Crown began a series of economic initiatives designed to extract more revenue from the colonies. These policies were 'justifiable', the reasoning went, because the colonists were enjoying the benefits of the peace that had been won. Image:James Otis.gif In theory, Great Britain already regulated the economies of the colonies through the Navigation Acts, but widespread evasion of these laws had long been tolerated. Now, through the use of open-ended search warrants (Writs of Assistance), strict enforcement 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 1763, Patrick Henry argued the Parson's Cause case. Clerical pay had been tied to the price of tobacco by Virginia legislation. When the price of tobacco skyrocketed after a bad crop in 1758, the Virginia legislature passed the Two-Penny Act to stop clerical salaries from inflating as well. In 1763, King George III vetoed the Two-Penny Act. Patrick Henry defended the law in court and 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."
In 1764, British Prime Minister George Grenville's Sugar Act and Currency Act created economic hardship in the colonies. Protests led to the boycott of British goods, and to the emergence of the popular slogan "no taxation without representation," in which colonists argued that only their colonial assemblies, and not Parliament, could levy taxes on them. Committees of correspondence were formed in the colonies to coordinate resistance to paying the taxes. In previous years, the colonies had shown little inclination towards collective action. Grenville's policies were bringing them together.
A milestone in the Revolution occurred in 1765, when Grenville passed the Stamp Act, as a way to finance the quartering of troops in North America. The Stamp Act required all legal documents, permits, commercial contracts, newspapers, pamphlets, and playing cards in the colonies to carry a tax stamp.
Colonial protest was widespread. Secret societies known as the Sons of Liberty were formed in every colony, and used propaganda, intimidation, and mob violence to prevent the enforcement of the Stamp Act. The furor culminated with the "Stamp Act Congress", which sent a formal protest to Parliament in October of 1765. Parliament responded by repealing the Stamp Act, but pointedly declared its legal authority over the colonies “in all cases whatsoever.”
The sequel to the Stamp Act was not long in coming. In 1767, Parliament passed the Townshend Acts, placing taxes on a number of common goods imported into the colonies, including glass, paint, lead, paper, and tea. In response, colonial leaders organized boycotts of these British imports. On June 10, 1768, the Liberty, a ship belonging to colonial merchant John Hancock and suspected of smuggling, was seized by customs officials in Boston. Angry protests on the street led customs officials, fearing for their safety, to report to London that Boston was in a state of insurrection.
British troops began to arrive in Boston in October of 1768. Tensions continued to mount; culminating in the "Boston Massacre" on March 5, 1770, when British soldiers of the 29th Regiment of Foot fired into an angry mob, killing five. Revolutionary agitators, like Samuel Adams, used the event to stir up popular resistance, but, after the trial of the soldiers, who were defended by John Adams, tensions diminished.
The Townshend Acts were repealed in 1770, after much colonial protest, and it was still theoretically possible that further bloodshed in the colonies might be avoided. However, the British government had left one tax from the Townshend Acts in place as a symbolic gesture of their right to tax the colonies—the tax on tea. For the revolutionaries, who stood firm on the principle that only their colonial representatives could levy taxes on them, it was still "one tax too many". This resulted in the Boston Tea Party.
Western land dispute
The Proclamation of 1763 sought to limit the conflicts between Native Americans and the English settlers by restricting settlement west of the Appalachian Mountains. However, groups of settlers, led for example by Daniel Boone, continued to move into the region beyond the Proclamation Line and fought with the Shawnees and other peoples inhabiting the area. Furthermore, the Quebec Act of 1774, extended Quebec's boundaries to the Ohio River, reestablished French civil law, and instituted toleration for Roman Catholics in that territory, an action which horrified some colonials, who had come to New England to establish their own protestant sects. Proposals to post British regulars to man forts in the west further disquieted Americans eager to occupy Indian land.
Crises, 1772-75
While there were many causes of the American Revolution, it was a series of specific events, or crises, that finally triggered the outbreak of war.
The first of these was the Gaspée Affair. The HMS Gaspée, a British ship that had been vigorously enforcing unpopular trade regulations (the Navigation Acts), ran aground on June 9, 1772, off of Narragansett Bay in Rhode Island, while chasing the packet boat Hannah. In an act of defiance that gained considerable notoriety, the ship was attacked, boarded, stripped of valuables and torched by American patriots.
The next crisis was a result of the so-called "Tea Act", passed by the British Parliament in 1773. This act allowed the British East India Company to sell tea to the British colonies without the usual colonial tax, thereby allowing it to undercut the prices of the colonial merchants. To help pay for its colony in India, the British government intended to give the East India Company a monopoly on tea imports to the colonies; this, however, backfired. Because many Americans merchants earned their living from smuggling, this act would take away their livelihood. The result was widespread boycotts of tea throughout the colonies, and, eventually, to the Boston Tea Party where American colonists, believed to be the Sons of Liberty, dressed up like Indians and threw crates of tea from the East India Company ships into the Boston Harbor.
The Intolerable Acts, called by the British the "Coercive Acts" or "Punitive Acts", were a series of laws, passed by the British Parliament in 1774, in response to the growing unrest in the thirteen American colonies, particularly in Boston, Massachusetts with its Boston Tea Party. Enforcement of the Acts played a major role in the outbreak of the American Revolutionary War and the establishment of the First Continental Congress.
The Intolerable Acts included:
The First Continental Congress was convened in 1774 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and endorsed the Suffolk Resolves, which declared the Intolerable Acts to be unconstitutional, called for the people to form militias, and for Massachusetts to form a Patriot government.
In response, primarily to the Massachusetts Government Act, the inhabitants of Worchester, Massachusetts set up an armed picket line in front of the local courthouse and refused to allow the British magistrates to enter. The magistrates, faced with over 1500 armed men, did not attempt to force entry. Thereafter, the town of Worchester largely governed itself. Similar events occurred, soon after, all across the colony. British troops were sent from Britain, but, by the time they arrived, the entire colony of Massachusetts, with the exception of the heavily garrisoned city of Boston, had thrown off British control of local affairs.
The Battle of Lexington and Concord were the first battles of the American Revolutionary War. They were fought on April 19, 1775 in Massachusetts within the towns of Lexington, Concord, Lincoln, Menotomy, and Cambridge. The battles marked the outbreak of open war between Great Britain and the colonies and are known as the "shot heard 'round the world."
The Second Continental Congress convened in 1775, after the war had started. While creating the Continental Army, it also extended the Olive Branch Petition to the crown as an attempt at reconciliation. King George III refused to receive it, leaving the American Patriots no other choice but to wage war against Britain to achieve their Independence.
The American revolutionaries, known as Patriots (or Whigs or rebels), included many shades of opinion. Alexander Hamilton, John Jay and George Washington represented a socially conservative faction that would later take shape as the Federalist party and are traditionally characterized as preoccupied with preserving the wealth and power of the "better sorts" of colonial society. Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Paine are usually portrayed as representing the less economically affluent side of society, accepting greater political equality. After the revolution, some of these men would become known as the "anti-federalists" who, led by George Mason, considered the Constitution of the United States to be a dangerously flawed document, one which would cause greater tyranny than either the British Parliament or the British Crown had.
A great many American colonists remained loyal to the British Crown; these became known as Loyalists (or 'Tories', or 'King's men'). Loyalists were often of the same well-to-do social circles that produced the right wing of the Patriots (for example Thomas Hutchinson); however, the Scottish highlanders of the Mohawk Valley and the frontiersmen of Georgia included a large number of poorer men. Some Loyalists were Native Americans, including Joseph Brant, who led a mixed band of Indians and white farmers and laborers in the Loyalist cause; others were African Americans.
After the war, United Empire Loyalists became a central component of the populations of the Abaco islands (in the Bahamas), and the Canadian provinces of New Brunswick and Ontario, where many of them fled to escape persecution in the new United States. Some of the African Americans, who had been freed from slavery by fighting for the British, were settled in Freetown, Sierra Leone.
Class differences among the Patriots
Just as there were rich and poor Loyalists, the Patriots were a 'mixed lot', and often had different aims for the revolution. Wealthy Patriots viewed independence as a means of freeing themselves from British taxation and limitations on taking western land, but had every intention of remaining in control of the resulting nation. Many craftsmen, small merchants and small farmers, however, were looking at independence as a means of reducing the power and privilege of the elite. Wealthy Patriots knew that they needed the support of the lower classes, but were fearful of their more radical democratic aims. John Adams (an elite more by education than by wealth) attacked Thomas Paine's Common Sense for the "absurd democratical notions" it proposed.
Women
The boycott of British goods would have been entirely unworkable without the willing participation of American women: women made the bulk of household purchases, and the boycotted items were largely household items such as tea and cloth. And as cloth was still a basic necessity, for the boycott to work, women would have 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 of cloth.
As the Revolution progressed and economic disruption deepened, women participated directly in the food riots and tar and feathering that was the people's response to price gouging by merchants, Loyalist and Patriot alike. On July 24, 1777, Thomas Boyleston, a Patriot merchant who was withholding coffee and sugar from the market waiting for prices to rise, was confronted by a crowd of 100 or more women, who seized the keys to his warehouse and distributed the coffee themselves while a large crowd of men stood by and watched, dumbfounde d.
Writing the state constitutions
By 1776, the colonies had overthrown their existing government, closing courts and driving British agents and governors from their homes, and they had elected conventions and "legislatures" that existed outside of any legal framework whatsoever— new constitutions were desperately needed in each colony to replace the superseded royal charters.
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.
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. This would be just the start of a process that would pit conservatives against radicals in each state. In states where the wealthy exerted firm control over the process, such as Maryland, Virginia, Delaware, New York and Massachusetts, the result was constitutions that featured:
- substantial property qualifications for voting and even more substantial requirements for elected positions (though New York and Maryland lowered property qualifications);
- 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.
In states where the less affluent had organized sufficiently to have significant power, especially Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New Hampshire and Vermont, the resulting constitutions embodied:
- universal white manhood suffrage, or minimal property requirements for voting or holding office (New Jersey went so far as to enfranchise women, a radical step that they retracted 25 years later);
Image:Benjamin Rush Painting by Peale 1783.jpg
- strong, unicameral legislatures;
- relatively weak governors, without veto powers, and little appointing authority;
- prohibition against individuals holding multiple government posts;
- disestablishment of religion.
Naturally, the fact that conservatives or radicals held sway in a state did not mean that the side with less power accepted the result quietly. In Pennsylvania, the propertied class was horrified by their new constitution (Benjamin Rush called it "our state dung cart"), while in Massachusetts, voters twice rejected the constitution that was presented for ratification; it was ultimately ratified only as a result of the legislature tinkering with the third vote. The radical provisions of Pennsylvania's constitution were to last only fourteen years— in 1790, conservatives gained power in the state legislature, called a new constitutional convention, and wrote a new constitution that 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.
War for independence, 1775-83
Image:Commonsense.jpg Image:Yorktown80.JPG Main article: American Revolutionary War
On January 10, 1776, Thomas Paine published a pamphlet entitled Common Sense arguing that the only solution to the problems with Britain was Republicanism and independence from Great Britain.
On July 4, 1776, the United States Declaration of Independence was ratified by the Second Continental Congress.
The Articles of Confederation and Perpetual Union, commonly known as the Articles of Confederation, formed the first governing document of the United States of America. They combined the colonies of the American Revolutionary War into a loose confederation of sovereign states. The second Continental Congress adopted the Articles on November 15, 1777.
America after the war
The American Revolution saw several noteworthy political innovations: the separation of church and state, which ended the special privileges of the Church of England in the South and the Congregationalist Church in New England; an assertion of liberty, individual rights and equality which would prove highly appealing in Europe; the idea that government should be by consent of the governed (including the right of rebellion against tyranny); the delegation of power to the government through written constitutions; and the notion that colonial peoples of the Americas could become self-governing nations in their own rights.
All was not well, however, in the new nation.
The Shays Rebellion was an armed uprising in Western Massachusetts that lasted from 1786 to 1787. Many of the rebels, known as Shaysites or Regulators, were small farmers angered by high debt and tax burdens. A state militia that had been raised as a private army defeated the Shaysites. The lack of a government force to respond to the uprising led some to re-evaluate of the effectiveness of the Articles of Confederation.
The Treaty of Paris (1783) had given the U.S. government control, on paper, of all land east of the Mississippi River and south of the Great Lakes, but the Native American nations actually living in this region were not a party to this treaty and had not been militarily defeated by the Patriots. Further, the British remained in possession of the Great Lakes forts through which they continued to supply their Native American allies with trade items (including weapons) and to otherwise stir up trouble for Americans.
Then, Congress sought to stabilize the dollar and pay down its war debt through the sale of western lands still under Native American control. The Land Ordinance of 1785 gave encouragement to land speculators, surveyors, and so on, who sought to gain this land-- sometimes through bribery or deceit--for resale to white settlers. Congress negotiated a treaty with Native Americans in 1785 to acquire most of the eastern portion of Ohio Country for settlement. However, settlers were already moving into land that the treaty set aside for the tribes. Conflict soon broke out, as the Northwest Indian War. Due to the lack of an army under the Confederation government, Congress was unable to successfully fight the tribes.
These events and others led the Continental Congress to support the Philadelphia Convention in 1787, leading to the creation of a new central government that lasts to this day in the United States.
The impact on British North America
For tens of thousands of inhabitants of the Thirteen Colonies, the victory of the revolutionaries was followed by exile. Approximately fifty thousand United Empire Loyalists fled to the remaining British colonies in North America, such as the Province of Quebec, (concentrating in the Eastern Townships), Upper Canada (now known as Ontario), and Prince Edward Island and Nova Scotia (where their presence would result in the creation of New Brunswick). This exodus sowed the seeds for the French-English duality in British North America, arguably the most prominent political and cultural feature of what would one day become Canada.
Revolution beyond America
The American Revolution was the first wave of the Atlantic Revolutions that would also take hold in the French Revolution, the Haitian Revolution, and the Latin American wars of liberation. Aftershocks would also be felt in Ireland in the 1798 rising, in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, and in the Netherlands.
The Revolution had a strong immediate impact in Great Britain, Ireland, the Netherlands, and France. Many British and Irish Whigs had been openly indulgent to the Patriots in America, and the Revolution was the first lesson in politics for many European radicals who would later take on active roles during the era of the French Revolution. Jefferson's Declaration had an immediate impact on the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen of 1789.
The American Revolution affected the rest of the world. The thinkers of the Enlightenment only wrote that common people had the right to overthrow unjust governments. The American Revolution was a case of practical success, which provided the rest of the world with a 'working model'.
The American Revolution set an example to the people in Europe and other parts of the world. It encouraged the people to realize they had rights independent of the sovereign; it promoted republicanism to overthrow monarchs. It incited people to fight for their rights, and it showed them that it was possible to win even against the world's foremost power, Great Britain.
Nowhere was the influence of the American Revolution more profound than in Latin America, where American writings and the model of colonies, which actually broke free and thrived decisively, shaped their struggle for independence. Historians of Latin America have identified many links to the U.S. model . See John Lynch, "The Origins of Spanish American Independence," in Cambridge History of Latin America Vol. 3 (1985), pp 45-46
Legacy and interpretations
The American Revolution is often cited as a milestone in the history of American Exceptionalism. The intellectuals of the Revolution (Thomas Paine's Common Sense is most likely the best example) for the first time expressed the belief that America was not just an extension of Europe but a new land, a country of nearly unlimited potential and opportunity that was being abused by the British mother country they had outgrown. These sentiments laid the intellectual foundations for the Revolutionary concept of American exceptionalism and was closely tied to Republicanism, the belief that sovereignty belonged to the people, not to a hereditary ruling class.
See also
- British colonization of the Americas
- Founding Fathers of the United States
- Industrial Revolution
- List of important people in the era of the American Revolution
- Second American Revolution
- Timeline of United States revolutionary history (1760-1789)
- List of Continental Forces in the American Revolutionary War
Scholarly Secondary Sources
- Bailyn, Bernard. The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution. Harvard University Press, 1967. ISBN 0674443012.
- Boatner, Mark Mayo, III. Encyclopedia of the American Revolution. New York: McKay, 1966; revised 1974. ISBN 0811705781.
- Crow, Jeffrey J. and Larry E. Tise. The Southern Experience in the American Revolution (1978)
- Higginbotham, Don. The War of American Independence: Military Attitudes, Policies, and Practice, 1763-1789 (1983) Online in ACLS History E-book Project; best overview of military topics
- Lecky, William Edward Hartpole. The American Revolution, 1763-1783 (1898), British viewpoint
- McCullough, David. 1776 (2005).
- Mackesy, Piers. The War for America: 1775-1783 (1992) British viewpoint.
- Middlekauff, Robert. The Glorious Cause: The American Revolution, 1763-1789 (1985)
- Miller, John C. Triumph of Freedom, 1775-1783 (1948), excellent overview
- Miller, John C. Origins of the American Revolution (1943)
- Morison, S. E. ed. Sources and Documents Illustrating the American Revolution, 1764-1788, and the Formation of the Federal Constitution (1923)
- Nash, Gary B. The Unknown American Revolution: The Unruly Birth of Democracy and the Struggle to Create America. (2005). ISBN 0670034207.
- Purcell, L. Edward. "Who Was Who in the American Revolution" (1993)
- 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)
- Wrong, George M. Washington and His Comrades in Arms: A Chronicle of the War of Independence (1921) short overview
- 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. ISBN 0679404937.
External links
- The American Revolution at americanrevolution.com - historical information, documents, pictures, and more
- PBS Television Series
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