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Chapter 7 · pp. 199–238
This chapter explains how thirteen British colonies came to break from the empire and form a new nation. It starts with long-term origins in the eighteenth century, then follows the crises of the 1760s and 1770s: the Stamp Act, the Townshend duties, the Tea Act and the Coercive Acts. It then covers the war, independence, and the Revolution's lasting effects on politics, slavery, women, Native nations and the wider world.
The Revolution was full of contradictions. Its leaders fought in the name of liberty, yet slavery continued. They urged citizens to be selfless and to protect the public good, yet the same period also encouraged people to chase private gain. Resisting a distant central authority also pulled the separate colonies closer together, under new governments of their own. (p. 199)
A common belief is that a handful of elite founding fathers planned the Revolution and won it in order to build a democracy. This is a misconception. The leaders wanted independence from Britain, not democracy. They also could not win alone. Ordinary colonists joined in as protesters, boycotters and soldiers, and these popular forces pushed the Revolution in directions the elites did not always welcome. Men and women of every rank, and Black and white soldiers, helped make victory possible. (pp. 199, 232)
Historians separate the Revolution's causes into two kinds. The long-term origins were political, intellectual, cultural and economic changes across the eighteenth century. The short-term causes were the imperial crises of the 1760s and 1770s, which began when Britain tried to reform its empire after 1763. The long-term changes explain why colonists reacted so strongly once the crisis arrived. (p. 199)
From the Glorious Revolution of 1688 to the middle of the 1700s, Britain never clearly defined where the colonies fit in the empire. Two things got in the way:
The two sides were these:
Because neither side could win the argument, reforms were only occasional and never systematic.
Colonists thought of themselves as British subjects who held the same rights as people living in Britain. Some went further. In 1764 James Otis Jr. argued that colonists deserved all the rights of Britons and, in some ways, more. Colonial economies and populations grew a great deal in the 1700s, and colonists credited part of that success to Britain's light touch. They concluded that they held a special place in the empire. This belief would later clash with British reforms. (p. 200)
Every colony set up its own assembly soon after it was founded. Like the House of Commons, these bodies taxed residents, controlled how government money was spent, and paid the salaries of royal officials. Samuel Adams described each colony as a separate body politic from Britain. (p. 200)
Colonial leaders asked Britain in the early 1700s to spell out what the assemblies could legally do, but Britain was too busy with wars in Europe to answer. Royal governors, acting for the Board of Trade, tried to rein in the assemblies, yet the assemblies kept gaining power. Many colonists came to believe their assembly had the same authority over them that Parliament had over people in England. They read Britain's silence as approval of local self-government. The Crown and Parliament disagreed, and since no one ever settled the question, each side held a view the other could not accept. (pp. 200–201)
In both Britain and the colonies, owning land was the key to taking part in politics. Land was easier to get in the colonies, so more colonial men met the requirement. A larger share of men took part in colonial politics than in Britain, which made colonial political culture different. (p. 201)
Colonial thinking also drew on republicanism. This ideology came from the British 'country' party, which was only a small fringe in Britain but widely accepted in the colonies. It held that power corrupts. It also held that good citizens show virtue, meaning they put the public good ahead of their own interests. Republicans believed people had to stay alert for conspiracies, centralized control and tyranny. Colonists who held these ideas were primed to see new British policies as threats. (p. 201)
In the 1740s, two very different currents of thought began to blend in the colonies. Both taught individuals to question authority. (p. 201)
John Locke and reason. Locke argued in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding that the mind starts as a tabula rasa, or blank slate. People are shaped mostly by their surroundings, not by birth. If so, aristocrats were not naturally superior. They simply had better access to wealth, education and patronage. In Some Thoughts Concerning Education, Locke added that schooling could produce rational people who think for themselves and question authority, instead of quietly accepting tradition. (p. 201)
George Whitefield and emotion. During a wave of evangelical revivalism called the Great Awakening, the traveling preacher George Whitefield toured the colonies in 1739–1740. He gave Calvinist sermons to huge crowds, and he aimed at feelings rather than logic. He taught that salvation required each person to take responsibility for a direct relationship with God, a 'conversion' experience. He also said that church hierarchies led by 'unconverted' ministers only stood between people and God. Other traveling preachers took up his message, and many congregations split as church authority was challenged. (pp. 201–202)
The methods differed, with Locke appealing to reason and Whitefield to emotion. Yet both encouraged ordinary people to question authority and take charge of their own lives. (p. 202)
By the mid-1700s, colonists were becoming more like Britons in everyday life. Historians call this Anglicization. As the colonial economy grew, the colonies turned into a major market for British manufactured goods. Even middling colonists, not just the wealthy, could now afford items once seen as luxuries, such as British fashions and fine dining wares (p. 202).
This matters for the Revolution. Buying British goods went along with wanting British liberties. Colonists saw themselves as part of the British world, so they expected the rights that Britons enjoyed. When Britain later tried to change how the empire worked, colonists felt their rights as Britons were being threatened (p. 202).
The Seven Years' War was a world war fought by several empires on several continents. Britain won, and the empire had never been bigger. It now controlled North America east of the Mississippi River, including French Canada (p. 202).
Victory was expensive, though. The war doubled Britain's national debt to 13.5 times its yearly revenue. Britain also faced new costs to defend its large empire, especially the western frontiers of the colonies. Britain's answer was to tighten control over the colonies and make them help pay. Colonists resisted this (pp. 202–203).
King George III took the throne in 1760 and brought Tories into government after about thirty years of Whig rule. His ministers favored an authoritarian empire in which the colonies stayed subordinate (p. 203).
The Royal Proclamation of 1763. This was Britain's first big postwar move in North America. It banned colonial settlement west of the Appalachian Mountains. The aim was to avoid costly wars with Native Americans. Colonists who had fought beside the British were angry to be shut out of western lands they felt they had earned (p. 203).
The Sugar Act (1764). Smuggling of molasses was common in New England. Parliament cut the molasses duty in half but enforced it much more strictly. Smugglers would now face vice-admiralty courts, which had no juries (p. 203).
The Currency Act (1764). This law limited the colonies' ability to print paper money. Gold and silver coins were already scarce, and a postwar recession had begun, so the law hurt trade at a bad moment (p. 203).
Together, these measures made some colonists suspect a pattern: higher taxes and fewer liberties, including the loss of jury trials for smugglers (p. 203).
In March 1765, Parliament passed the Stamp Act. Many items had to be printed on special stamped paper showing that a duty had been paid. These included newspapers, pamphlets, diplomas, legal documents and even playing cards (p. 203).
Direct versus indirect taxes. The Stamp Act was different from earlier policy. Before, the colonies paid indirect ("external") taxes such as customs duties on trade. The Stamp Act was a new direct ("internal") tax, which Parliament had never placed on colonists before. Daniel Dulany of Maryland reflected a common view: Parliament could regulate trade, but it could not tax the colonies internally just to raise money without their consent (p. 203).
Why resistance grew wider. The Sugar Act mostly hit merchants. The Stamp Act touched many more people: printers, lawyers, college graduates, and even sailors who played cards. More groups with a reason to be angry meant broader, more popular resistance (p. 203).
Resistance to the Stamp Act took three forms, which mostly followed class lines: legislative resistance by elites, economic resistance by merchants, and popular protest by ordinary colonists (p. 204).
Elites worked through their colonial assemblies. The best known response was the Virginia Resolves of May 30, 1765, passed by the House of Burgesses. They said colonists had all the liberties and privileges of people in Great Britain (p. 204).
When newspapers elsewhere printed the Resolves, they often added extra resolutions that Virginia never passed. These were much more radical. They claimed that only the colony's own assembly could tax it. Because they spread widely, they pushed other assemblies to take stronger positions (p. 204).
These responses led to the Stamp Act Congress, which met in New York City in October 1765. Nine colonies sent delegates. It issued a Declaration of Rights and Grievances. Like the Virginia Resolves, it promised loyalty to the king and "all due subordination" to Parliament. But it also said colonists had the same rights as Britons, including trial by jury and taxation only by their own elected representatives (p. 204).
Representation. The colonists' argument was simple. They elected no members of Parliament, so Parliament did not represent them and could not tax them. Parliament and the Crown replied that colonists were "virtually represented." They compared the colonies to English towns that elected no members but were still said to be represented. Colonists rejected this, and one writer called it a "monstrous idea" (p. 204).
Merchants in port cities organized nonimportation agreements. They refused to buy goods from Britain. The goal was to hurt British merchants, who would then press Parliament to repeal the act (pp. 204–205).
For example, in New York City over two hundred leading merchants agreed not to import, sell or buy British goods. Philadelphia merchants promised not to import until the Stamp Act was repealed (p. 205). The plan worked. By January 1766, London merchants wrote to Parliament that the act and the boycotts threatened them with ruin (pp. 205–206).
Popular protest was perhaps the most important form. In August 1765, Boston crowds burned Andrew Oliver, the stamp distributor for Massachusetts, in effigy and tore down a building he owned. Oliver resigned the next day. A crowd then attacked the home of Lieutenant Governor Thomas Hutchinson, who had argued for obeying the law, and destroyed much of it (p. 206).
Threats and violence spread. In New York City, notices warned that anyone who used or distributed stamped paper should protect his house and person. By November 16, all twelve original stamp distributors had resigned. By early 1766, groups called the Sons of Liberty existed in most colonies to direct further resistance. With no one willing to sell the stamps, the act could not be enforced (p. 206).
Under this pressure, Parliament repealed the Stamp Act in February 1766. On the same occasion it passed the Declaratory Act. This law said Parliament could make laws binding the colonies "in all cases whatsoever." Parliament wanted to save face and prevent similar trouble later (p. 206).
Colonists were too busy celebrating to pay much attention to it. New Yorkers even put up a large lead statue of King George III. Colonists may never have felt prouder to be part of the British Empire than in 1766. But the Declaratory Act kept Parliament's claimed right to impose direct taxes, and Britain still wanted colonial revenue. That meant more conflict was coming (pp. 206–207).
After the Stamp Act was repealed, Britain still wanted money from the colonies. Colonists had said, in pamphlets and in letters to Parliament, that Parliament could regulate trade. So in June 1767 Parliament tried a new route: the Townshend Acts. These laws put customs duties on everyday goods such as lead, glass, paint and tea, rather than creating a direct tax (p. 208).
The acts also built a stronger system of enforcement:
This gave officials a reason to find people guilty. It also weakened the colonial assemblies. For years, the assemblies had held power over governors because they paid the governors' salaries. Now that money came from somewhere else (p. 208).
Colonial writers still called the duties "taxes." Their reasoning was about purpose. A duty meant to regulate trade was acceptable. A duty meant mainly to raise money from the colonies was a tax. John Dickinson made this case in his "Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania." He said colonists had to buy these goods from Britain, so special duties aimed only at them, and meant to raise revenue, were just as much taxes as the Stamp Act. Writers also asked a worrying question: if colonists accepted one new tax, what would stop Britain from adding more and larger ones? (p. 208)
Resistance to the Townshend Acts drew in people from every level of society. Merchants brought back nonimportation agreements. Ordinary colonists went further with nonconsumption, which meant promising not to use the taxed goods. Lists of people who pledged not to buy British goods were passed around and often printed in newspapers. Printing the names honored those who signed and pressured those who did not (p. 208).
Women took part to an unprecedented degree. They circulated subscription lists and collected signatures, and the first political commentaries by women appeared in newspapers. With British cloth no longer coming in, colonists wore plain homespun clothing. Women formed spinning clubs, meeting in each other's homes to make cloth for their families and even for the wider community (pp. 208, 210).
These boycotts changed how colonists felt about Britain. Homespun clothing became a sign of virtue and patriotism. British luxuries that people once wanted now stood for tyranny (p. 210).
Two kinds of committees helped the boycotts work and helped the colonies feel united.
The best example of this "continental conversation" followed the Boston Massacre. Britain had sent regiments to Boston in 1768 to help enforce the acts and calm the resistance. On the evening of March 5, 1770, a crowd outside the Custom House threw insults and snowballs, and perhaps more, at a young sentry. When a few soldiers came to help him, the crowd grew angrier and the soldiers fired. Five people died, including Crispus Attucks, a formerly enslaved mixed-race man who had become a free dockworker and was one of the ringleaders (p. 210).
The soldiers were tried in Boston and acquitted, helped by their defense lawyer, John Adams. Even so, the news traveled fast through the new communication networks. An engraving first circulated by Paul Revere showed grinning, bloodthirsty soldiers shooting into a peaceful crowd. It was reprinted across the colonies and stirred sympathy for Boston and anger at Britain. The scene did not really happen as Revere drew it. He meant the picture as propaganda, not as a record (pp. 210–211).
Resistance worked again. In March 1770 Parliament repealed all the new duties except the one on tea. Like the Declaratory Act, the tea duty was kept partly to save face and to show that Parliament still claimed the right to tax the colonies (p. 210).
The way colonists resisted had changed since 1765:
Britain's failed reforms of the 1760s left colonists watchful and ready to resist. Most importantly, they widened the political sphere in the colonies and across the continent. Shared grievances began to build a shared American political identity (p. 212).
Tensions eased for a while after the Boston Massacre, and the economy improved. Some Sons of Liberty wanted to keep up nonimportation, but a door-to-door poll in New York showed most people wanted it ended. Britain, however, still wanted to reform how it ran the empire (p. 212).
In April 1773 Parliament passed two acts to help the failing East India Company. The company was behind on payments to Britain and had almost fifteen million pounds of unsold tea in warehouses. The Regulating Act effectively put the company under government control. The Tea Act let it sell tea directly in the colonies without paying the usual export tax in London, which made the tea much cheaper for colonists (pp. 212–213).
Colonists resisted anyway. Merchants disliked the company's monopoly, but like the Sugar Act, the Tea Act hurt only a small group. Broad support for resistance came from principle. The tea still carried a duty, so buying it, even at a lower price, meant paying the duty and implicitly accepting Parliament's right to tax. A Pennsylvania newspaper warned that Lord North was trying to trick colonists into accepting a measure that would later be cited as a precedent for any other imposition (p. 213).
The Tea Act required the duty to be paid when a ship unloaded. Through the summer of 1773, newspapers in the main port cities debated what to do when the ships arrived. In November, the Boston Sons of Liberty, led by Samuel Adams and John Hancock, resolved to stop the tea from being landed, sold or taxed, even at risk to their lives and property. They posted men to guard the wharves so the tea stayed on board until the ships returned to London (p. 213).
This worked at first, but by December 16 the ships were still in port and the duty was due. A town meeting was held at the Old South Meeting House. Afterward, dozens of men disguised as Mohawks went to the wharf and, in under four hours, emptied 342 chests of tea into the sea. Reports said no damage was done to the ships or any other property. The news inspired other patriots. Tea was dumped or seized in Charleston, Philadelphia and New York, and many smaller "tea parties" followed through 1774 (p. 213).
By 1774, protest against British policy had spread through every level of colonial society. Women joined in, mostly as consumers and producers. In Edenton, North Carolina, fifty-one women signed a pledge to support the boycotts, and newspapers in many places printed it (p. 214). Women often decided what a household bought, so when they refused British goods, a boycott had real force. A boycott could not succeed without them (p. 214).
Some women went further and joined crowd actions. They took part in grain riots, raids on the offices of royal officials, and protests against impressment, the forced taking of men into naval service (p. 214). All this unrest pushed both Britain and the colonial elites to respond (p. 214).
Britain answered quickly. In spring 1774 Parliament passed four laws that the British called the Coercive Acts and the colonists called the Intolerable Acts. Britain saw Boston as openly in rebellion and wanted to end it firmly (p. 214). The four measures were:
(p. 214)
The Crown expected Massachusetts to stand alone. Instead, the other colonies rallied to it. Colonists collected food to send to Boston, and Virginia's House of Burgesses called a day of prayer and fasting in sympathy (p. 214). The reasoning was simple. If Parliament could dissolve one colony's government, it could dissolve any colony's. So the acts strengthened the shared identity that had been growing for ten years (p. 214).
Colonists also took political control. In Massachusetts, patriots formed a Provincial Congress and took over local and county governments and courts during 1774. In New York, voters chose committees to direct the response, including a Mechanics' Committee of middling colonists (p. 214). By early 1774, every colony except Georgia had Committees of Correspondence or extralegal assemblies, and through the year these bodies took over powers from the royal governments (pp. 214–215).
The Committees of Correspondence agreed to send delegates to a Continental Congress to coordinate a response across colonies. It first met on September 5, 1774. Over about six weeks, elite delegates from every colony except Georgia produced several documents (p. 215). One was the Declaration of Rights and Grievances. It restated what colonists had argued since 1765: they kept all the rights of native-born Britons, including taxation only by their own elected representatives and trial by jury (p. 215).
The most important document was the Continental Association. It blamed the crisis on a harmful system of colonial rule begun by the British ministry around 1763 and said this system was meant to enslave the colonies (p. 215). It had three main parts:
(pp. 215–216)
The committees were made up mostly of ordinary colonists. They policed their communities and published the names of people who opposed the Association, so those people would be known as enemies of liberty (pp. 215–216). This is why the Association counts as one of the most radical documents of the period. It tried to unite twelve revolutionary governments, set economic and moral policy, and give common people unusual local political power (p. 216).
Not every colonist backed the patriots. Many stayed loyal to the king and Parliament, and many others stayed neutral (p. 216). Those most tied to Britain were the least eager to resist: elite merchants who traded mainly with Britain, Anglican clergy, and holders of royal offices. They received privileges from the connection (p. 216). At first they tried to calm the resistance committees. After the Association, some began to fear the movement was too radical and was heading toward independence. Like most colonists, they still expected peaceful reconciliation, and they grew suspicious of the resistance (p. 216).
War began before the Continental Congress met again in May 1775. On April 19, British troops set out to seize militia weapons and gunpowder at Lexington and Concord. The Lexington militia met them on the town green. Someone fired a shot, the British fired a volley, and the fighting continued on to Concord (p. 216). News spread fast. Militiamen called minutemen turned out and caused heavy British losses as they chased the troops back to Boston. About twenty thousand militiamen then besieged the city (p. 216).
In June the militia fortified Breed's Hill above Boston. In the misnamed Battle of Bunker Hill, the British charged head-on and finally took the hill, but they lost many men doing it (p. 216).
Meanwhile the Second Continental Congress was divided. Radical Massachusetts delegates such as John Adams, Samuel Adams, and John Hancock wanted Congress to supply the militia at Boston. Many delegates from the Middle Colonies wanted another try at reconciliation. Some southern moderates, such as the Rutledges of South Carolina, feared that backing the militia would amount to declaring war (pp. 216–217).
Congress compromised. It adopted the militia as a Continental Army under Virginian George Washington and issued a declaration explaining why colonists were taking up arms. At the same time, it approved the moderates' Olive Branch Petition, which assured the king the colonists wanted harmony with Britain (p. 217). Benjamin Franklin expected it to be treated like earlier petitions and to be the last. Congress was raising an army while asking for peace (p. 217).
The king never gave the petition a chance. It reached England on August 13, 1775, but he had already issued a proclamation against rebellion and sedition, accusing colonists of being misled by dangerous men (pp. 217–218). In October he told Parliament that the resistance aimed at an independent empire (p. 218). By early 1776, talk of independence was growing and hope of reconciliation was fading (p. 218).
In early 1776, independence became a topic of popular debate for the first time. Town meetings passed resolutions favoring it. But moderates held on, and Congress did not formally vote for independence until months later (p. 218). Thomas Paine, a recent immigrant from England, caught the mood in Common Sense, a forty-six-page pamphlet published in Philadelphia. He attacked monarchy and the logic of the empire, arguing that it was absurd for an island to rule a continent forever (p. 218). His plain language, biblical references, and passionate style made it spread quickly. Tavern conversations across the colonies filled with political arguments and battlefield rumors (p. 218).
By early 1776, the war was already under way, and one of its most important turns involved enslaved people in the South. In Virginia, the royal governor Lord Dunmore declared martial law in 1775. He promised freedom to enslaved people and indentured servants who left their enslavers and joined the British side. Only about 500 to 1,000 people joined his "Ethiopian regiment," but thousands more fled to British lines later in the war. They risked capture and punishment to do it. Most did not fight. They worked as laborers, skilled workers and spies, often in units called Black Pioneers. The British had practical reasons, not humanitarian ones: they wanted to weaken their enemies. Even so, it was the first mass emancipation in American history. (p. 218)
This offer pushed some white southerners toward independence. In 1772, in Somerset v Stewart, an English court freed James Somerset and weakened the legal basis for slavery on the British mainland. Dunmore's proclamation then added to the fear that Britain was turning against slavery. Some enslavers began to think an independent nation would protect slavery better than the empire would. They also reacted with force. Virginia threatened to ship rebellious enslaved people to the West Indies or execute them. Many enslavers moved enslaved people inland, away from British ships and armies, and this often split up families. (pp. 218–219)
Formal independence came in steps, not in a single moment.
(pp. 219–220)
The famous preamble shifted the argument. Earlier protests focused on the rights of British subjects under the British constitution. The preamble instead appealed to natural law. It said all men are created equal and have unalienable rights, including life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. It said governments get their just powers from the consent of the governed, so people may change or abolish a government that destroys those rights. The rest of the document lists grievances about British policies of the 1760s and 1770s. (pp. 219–220)
The limits of these ideals show in what was cut. An early draft blamed Britain for the slave trade. Delegates from South Carolina and Georgia, along with Northern delegates whose states profited from the trade, objected, and the passage was removed. Economic interests tied to slavery held back the Revolution's language of liberty. (p. 220)
The war had started at Lexington and Concord, more than a year before independence. In summer 1776, Britain brought the largest expeditionary force in its history to New York, including tens of thousands of German mercenaries called Hessians. New York was a good target for two reasons. Britain could use it to seize the Hudson River and cut New England off from the other colonies, and the city had many loyalists. In October the British attacked Brooklyn and Manhattan. The Continental Army took heavy losses and retreated across New Jersey. (p. 220)
Washington needed a victory to lift morale and persuade soldiers to re-enlist. On Christmas Day he led his few thousand remaining men across the Delaware River at night and surprised the Hessian camp at Trenton. The win brought badly needed supplies and new confidence. (pp. 220–221)
The bigger turning point came in 1777. British General John Burgoyne marched south from Canada to control the Hudson and expected to meet part of General William Howe's army from Manhattan. Howe dropped that plan without telling him and sailed to capture Philadelphia, the American capital. Burgoyne was defeated at Saratoga, New York. France had hesitated to back a cause that looked unlikely to win. The victory changed its mind, and Benjamin Franklin secured the Treaty of Amity and Commerce on February 6, 1778. Soon Britain and France were fighting in Europe and India, so a colonial rebellion became a global war. (pp. 221–222)
European armies usually fought head-on battles to capture major cities. In 1777, though, Britain held both Philadelphia and New York and still ended up weaker. Washington saw after New York that his mostly untrained army could not beat professional British troops in open battle. He chose smaller, more frequent skirmishes and avoided fights that risked his whole army. His logic was simple: as long as the army survived, the war went on, no matter how many cities Britain took. (pp. 222–223)
In 1778 the British turned to the South, believing loyalist support was stronger there. Their campaigns from Virginia to South Carolina and Georgia captured major cities. But they lacked enough soldiers to hold the territory. When they left, patriots and loyalists fought bitterly, sometimes against relatives, so the southern war was in effect a civil war. (p. 223)
By 1781 Britain was also fighting France, Spain and Holland, and public support at home was fading. In October, Washington marched from New York to Virginia to trap General Cornwallis, who had dug in at Yorktown waiting for supplies and reinforcements. French and American armies arrived first, then a French fleet, and together they surrounded Cornwallis and besieged the town. He surrendered. Britain then had no new strategy and little public backing, and peace talks in France led to the official end of the war on September 3, 1783. (pp. 223–224)
Victory was costly. At Valley Forge in the winter of 1777–1778, over 2,500 Americans died from disease and exposure, since soldiers had few supplies. The war also devastated communities, especially in the South, and left thousands of women widowed. (pp. 224, 227)
Women on the home front took over work usually done by men. Abigail Adams ran the family farm in Braintree, Massachusetts. She managed planting and harvest during labor shortages and inflation, dealt with tenants, raised her children and made household goods. To support the family while John was away, she also invested in speculative ventures and sold imported goods. (pp. 224–225)
Other women met the war directly. Mary Silliman's husband Gold led the Connecticut militia and was often away. When the British attacked Fairfield on July 7, 1779, she evacuated her children and servants to North Stratford. After loyalists captured Gold, she wrote letters seeking his release while six months pregnant. When those failed, she worked with Governor John Trumbull on a plan to capture a prominent Tory leader to trade for him. (p. 225)
Black Americans, enslaved and free, took part on both sides. The British were the first to recruit Black regiments, starting with Dunmore's 1775 proclamation. Washington, an enslaver, first refused to let Black men join the Continental Army but eventually gave in. Peter Salem's enslaver freed him in 1775 so he could fight with the militia. He fought British regulars at Lexington and Bunker Hill, and his service earned him control over his own life. Many more enslaved people used the chaos of war to escape on their own. Historians estimate that between 30,000 and 100,000 left their enslavers during the war. (pp. 225–226)
Once the colonies declared independence in 1776, they had to build new governments. The most immediate result was a burst of state constitution writing in 1776 and 1777. These documents were written down. That was a real change from Britain, whose constitution was never collected in one text (p. 227).
The new constitutions rested on popular sovereignty: the idea that a government's power and authority come from the people. Colonists had just rejected a king and Parliament, so they wanted rulers who answered to citizens. Most states made the governor weak and the legislature strong. They held elections more often and let somewhat more men vote. Some, such as Virginia, added a bill of rights to protect individuals and limit what the government could do (p. 227).
The states did not all choose the same design. Pennsylvania's first constitution was the most democratic. It had a one-house legislature and an executive council, but no true executive. Every free man could vote, even without property. Massachusetts's 1780 constitution was less democratic in structure. It set up three branches with checks and balances, which foreshadowed the later federal constitution. Yet its adoption was very popular. Towns sent 312 delegates to a convention in Cambridge in 1779, and town meetings then debated the draft and made suggestions (pp. 227–228).
The Articles of Confederation were ratified in 1781. Each state had one vote in Congress. The Articles are best remembered for what they left out: Congress could not tax, could not regulate foreign or interstate trade, and could not create a federal court system. For example, Congress could ask states for money but could not collect it. This left the postwar national government weak and mostly ineffective. That weakness set the stage for the Constitution of 1787–1788 (pp. 228, 231).
Independence made public life more participatory. More people could vote, so representation mattered more. "New men," ordinary citizens rather than old elites, gained influence in local and state government. Society became less deferential and aristocratic and more meritocratic, meaning people rose more by ability (p. 228).
The economy changed too. The Revolution ended mercantilism, the system in which Britain limited colonial trade, settlement and manufacturing. After the war, Americans found new trading partners, settled western lands that created new domestic markets, and began making goods they once bought from Britain (p. 228).
Women had organized boycotts and supported the war, but the Revolution did not give them equal civic standing. Instead, they were partly included through republican motherhood. A republic needs virtuous citizens, so mothers were expected to raise and educate them. This opened some educational opportunities and gave women a recognized civic purpose. They still stayed on the edges of politics and had no political rights (p. 228).
About sixty thousand loyalists left America. They came from every social rank, and many lived the rest of their lives in exile. Some went to England, where they felt like outsiders. More settled in other parts of the empire, such as Nova Scotia, New Brunswick and Quebec. The Treaty of Paris had a clause meant to protect their property and compensate their losses. The states ignored it and kept seizing loyalist property through the 1780s (pp. 228–229).
In 1783, thousands of formerly enslaved people who had joined the British were evacuated. The treaty said British troops should leave such people behind. British commanders instead kept their earlier promises of freedom and carried them to Canada, the Caribbean or Britain. Some, led by the Baptist preacher David George, later settled in Sierra Leone. Black Loyalists still faced marginalization and limits on owning land within the empire (pp. 229–230).
Ideals of liberty led some enslavers to free people, and most new Northern states passed gradual emancipation laws. Some manumissions happened in the Upper South. In the Lower South, some enslavers took back promises of freedom for service, and some freedpeople were forced back into bondage. The language of equality inspired a "revolutionary generation" of Black Americans, and slave revolts began to claim freedom in revolutionary terms. Still, slavery was never reconciled with republican equality. That tension grew until it split the nation in the Civil War era (pp. 230–231).
The Shawnee, Creek, Cherokee and Iroquois largely sided with the British. They hoped a British victory would keep settlers from moving west of the Appalachians. Instead, the American victory, and Native support for Britain, gave the United States an excuse for rapid and often brutal expansion. Native peoples were pushed farther west through the 1800s, so independence began the end of most remaining Native independence (p. 231).
The Revolution opened an "age of democratic revolutions," followed by France, Haiti and South America. It did not end inequality at the time, and it created new inequalities for Native Americans. Even so, the Declaration's language of equality became a shared goal. Later abolitionists, women's rights activists, suffragists and civil rights movements used it to demand fuller equality (pp. 231–232).
