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Portrait of The American Revolution

History · Revolutions & empires

The American Revolution

1765–1783 (war from 1775)

The thirteen colonies break from Britain and found a republic

What began as a colonial quarrel over taxes levied by a parliament in which the colonists had no seats became a war of independence and then a political experiment. Thirteen British colonies on the Atlantic seaboard declared themselves free states in July 1776, held out through six more years of fighting with decisive help from France, and won recognition at Paris in 1783. The republic that followed, framed by the Constitution of 1787, gave the age a working model of government by consent.

How to spot them

  • ▸A slogan about taxation and representation; a stamp duty, a tea duty and a harbour full of floating cargo
  • ▸A congress at Philadelphia; a declaration adopted on the fourth of July; a Virginian planter made commander-in-chief
  • ▸Redcoats and minutemen; a Prussian drillmaster at a Pennsylvania winter camp; a French fleet off the Chesapeake
  • ▸Ends with a surrender in Virginia and a treaty signed in Paris

What happened

Chests of tea tipped into a harbour by men disguised as Mohawks (16 December 1773)

Around 340 chests of East India Company tea destroyed in Boston harbour; Parliament replied with the Coercive (Intolerable) Acts.

'The shot heard round the world' — Emerson's phrase for a skirmish at a Massachusetts bridge (19 April 1775)

The opening exchange at Lexington Green and Concord's North Bridge; Emerson's Concord Hymn of 1837 gave it the phrase.

A declaration adopted on the fourth of July 1776, drafted chiefly by Thomas Jefferson (1776)

'We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.'

Burgoyne's surrender in upstate New York, the victory that brought France into the war (October 1777)

The turning point; the Franco-American alliance followed in February 1778.

A freezing Pennsylvania winter camp where a Prussian baron drilled a ragged army into shape (1777–78)

Friedrich Wilhelm von Steuben's drill manual reshaped the Continental Army.

Cornwallis penned against a Virginia river by Washington, Rochambeau and a French fleet (October 1781)

De Grasse's victory at the Chesapeake sealed the trap; the surrender effectively ended the fighting.

The peace signed in Paris in 1783 by Franklin, Adams and Jay (3 September 1783)

Britain recognised the independence of the United States and ceded territory to the Mississippi.

Key ideas

  • 'No taxation without representation': the constitutional objection that colonists were bound by a Parliament they did not elect
  • Thomas Paine's Common Sense (January 1776) turned a dispute over rights into an argument for a republic, selling in vast numbers
  • The Articles of Confederation proved too weak, and were replaced by the Constitution drafted at Philadelphia in 1787

Quick-fire facts

  • •George III was the reigning British monarch; Lord North was prime minister for most of the war
  • •George Washington was appointed commander-in-chief of the Continental Army by the Second Continental Congress in June 1775
  • •Independence was voted on 2 July 1776 and the Declaration adopted on 4 July; most delegates signed on 2 August
  • •John Hancock, president of Congress, signed first and largest, so that 'Hancock' became American slang for a signature
  • •Bunker Hill (June 1775) was actually fought largely on Breed's Hill, and was a costly British victory
  • •Benedict Arnold, a hero at Saratoga, later plotted to hand over West Point and defected in 1780
  • •France entered in 1778, Spain in 1779 and the Dutch Republic in 1780, turning it into a global war
  • •Tradition holds that the British band at Yorktown played 'The World Turned Upside Down', though the story is not contemporary
  • •The Treaty of Paris was signed on 3 September 1783; Washington resigned his commission that December

Drill it — 8 cards

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Sources