American Independence

Between 1776 and 1783, thirteen British colonies on the North Atlantic coast of North America declared their independence, won a war to secure it, and gained recognition as a new nation, the United States. The episode mattered far beyond America. It showed that a colonial population could break from a European empire, and it put into practice ideas about representative government and popular sovereignty that would echo through later revolutions.

The roots of the conflict lay in the aftermath of the Seven Years' War, which ended in 1763. Britain emerged victorious but deeply in debt, and Parliament sought new revenue from the colonies through measures such as the Stamp Act of 1765 and the Townshend duties. Many colonists objected that they were being taxed by a body in which they had no elected representatives. Protests, boycotts, and confrontations followed, including the Boston Massacre of 1770 and the Boston Tea Party of 1773. Britain's punitive response, the Coercive Acts, pushed the colonies toward united action, and delegates met in the First Continental Congress in 1774.

Fighting began in April 1775 at Lexington and Concord in Massachusetts. As the war widened, the Second Continental Congress created a Continental Army under George Washington. After months of debate, Congress adopted the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776. Drafted chiefly by Thomas Jefferson, it justified separation by listing grievances against King George III and asserted that governments derive their authority from the consent of the governed. Its language about equality sat uneasily with the existence of slavery, a contradiction noted at the time and debated ever since.

The war itself was long and uncertain. The Continental Army suffered serious defeats, and survived hard winters such as that at Valley Forge. The American victory at Saratoga in 1777 helped persuade France to enter the war as an ally in 1778, bringing money, troops, and naval power. Spain and the Dutch Republic also fought Britain. The decisive campaign came in 1781, when a combined American and French force trapped a British army under Lord Cornwallis at Yorktown, Virginia. The Treaty of Paris, signed in 1783, recognized American independence and set generous territorial boundaries extending west to the Mississippi River.

The consequences were significant and unfinished. The new states first operated under the Articles of Confederation, a weak framework that led to the drafting of the Constitution in 1787. Independence did not extend equal rights to enslaved people, women, or Native Americans, many of whom had sided with Britain or suffered from American expansion. Loyalists left in large numbers for Canada and Britain. Historians still debate how radical the revolution was, but its influence on later movements, including the French Revolution and Latin American independence struggles, is widely acknowledged.