VII. Conclusion The American Revolution freed colonists from British rule and offered the first blow in what historians have called “the age of democratic revolutions.” The American Revolution was a global event.53 Revolutions followed in France, then Haiti, and then South America. The American Revolution meanwhile wrought significant changes to the British Empire. Many British historians even use the Revolution as a dividing point between a “first British Empire” and a “second British Empire.” At home, however, the Revolution created a new nation-state, the United States of America. By September 1783, independence had been won. What the new nation would look like, however, was still very much up for grabs. In the 1780s, Americans would shape and then reshape that nation-state, first with the Articles of Confederation, ratified in 1781, and then with the Constitution in 1787 and 1788. Historians have long argued over the causes and character of the American Revolution. Was the Revolution caused by British imperial policy or by internal tensions within the colonies? Were colonists primarily motivated by constitutional principles, ideals of equality, or economic self-interest? Was the Revolution radical or conservative? But such questions are hardly limited to historians. From Abraham Lincoln’s use of the Declaration of Independence in the Gettysburg Address to twenty-first-century Tea Party members wearing knee breeches, the Revolution has remained at the center of American political culture. Indeed, how one understands the Revolution often dictates how one defines what it means to be American. The Revolution was not won by a few founding fathers. Men and women of all ranks contributed to the colonies’ most improbable victory, from the commoners who protested the Stamp Act to the women who helped organize boycotts against the Townshend duties; from the men, Black and white, who fought in the army to the women who contributed to its support. The Revolution, however, did not aim to end all social and civic inequalities in the new nation, and, in the case of Native Americans, it created new inequalities. But over time, the Revolution’s rhetoric of equality, as encapsulated in the Declaration of Independence, helped highlight some of those inequalities and became a shared aspiration for future social and political movements, including, among others, the abolitionist and women’s rights movements of the nineteenth century, the suffragist and civil rights movements of the twentieth century, and the gay rights movement of the twenty-first century.

Approximately sixty thousand loyalists ended up leaving America because of the Revolution.

Many Native American groups, such as the Shawnee, Creek, Cherokee, and Iroquois, had sided with the British.

republican mothers.

The Continental Congress ratified the Articles of Confederation in 1781.

popular sovereignty,

As the leader of the state militia during the Revolution, Mary Silliman’s husband, Gold, was absent from their home for much of the conflict. On the morning of July 7, 1779, when a British fleet attacked nearby Fairfield, Connecticut, it was Mary who calmly evacuated her household, including her children and servants, to North Stratford.

In 1775, Peter Salem’s enslaver freed him to fight with the militia. Salem faced British Regulars in the battles at Lexington and Bunker Hill, where he fought valiantly with around three dozen other Black Americans.

So he developed his own logic of warfare that involved smaller, more frequent skirmishes and avoided major engagements that would risk his entire army.

The Continental Army defeated Burgoyne’s men at Saratoga, New York

The largest expeditionary force in British history, including tens of thousands of German mercenaries known as Hessians

Fifty-one women in Edenton, North Carolina, for example, signed an agreement

Lexington and Concord.

“Continental Association.”

Colonists, however, referred to them as the Intolerable Acts.

Merchants resisted the Tea Act because they resented the East India Company’s monopoly. But like the Sugar Act, the Tea Act affected only a small, specific group of people.

nonimportation

Britain’s failed attempts at imperial reform in the 1760s created an increasingly vigilant and resistant colonial population and, most importantly, an enlarged political sphere—both on the colonial and continental levels—far beyond anything anyone could have imagined a few years earlier. A new sense of shared grievances began to join the colonists in a shared American political identity.

Colonies formed Committees of Correspondence to keep each other informed of the resistance efforts throughout the colonies.

New forms of resistance emerged in which elite, middling, and working-class colonists participated together.

By November 16, all of the original twelve stamp distributors had resigned, and by 1766, groups calling themselves the Sons of Liberty were formed in most colonies to direct and organize further resistance.

Men and women politicized the domestic sphere by buying and displaying items that conspicuously revealed their position for or against parliamentary actions.

Resistance to the Stamp Act took three forms, distinguished largely by class: legislative resistance by elites, economic resistance by merchants, and popular protest by common colonists.

Resistance to the Stamp Act took three forms, distinguished largely by class: legislative resistance by elites, economic resistance by merchants, and popular protest by common colonists.

Parliament had never before directly taxed the colonists.

The Royal Proclamation of 1763 was Britain’s first major postwar imperial action targeting North America.

Proclamation

reform

Britain finally began to implement a program of imperial reform that conflicted with colonists’ understanding of the empire and their place in it.

Colonists with disposable income and access to British markets attempted to mimic British culture.

Whitefield told his listeners that salvation could only be found by taking personal responsibility for one’s own unmediated relationship with God, a process that came to be known as a “conversion” experience.

Education would produce rational human beings capable of thinking for themselves and questioning authority rather than tacitly accepting tradition.

Patriots would need to be ever vigilant against the rise of conspiracies, centralized control, and tyranny.

These assemblies assumed many of the same duties as the Commons exercised in Britain, including taxing residents, managing the spending of the colonies’ revenue, and granting salaries to royal officials.

This success, they believed, resulted partly from Britain’s hands-off approach to the colonies, an approach that has been called salutary neglect.

They saw themselves as British subjects “entitled to all the natural, essential, inherent, and inseparable rights of our fellow subjects in Great-Britain.”

Old Whigs and their Tory supporters envisioned an authoritarian empire, based on conquering territory and extracting resources.

Two factors contributed to these failures.

To successfully rebel against Britain, however, required more than a few dozen “founding fathers.”

A revolution fought in the name of liberty allowed slavery to persist.

And yet, in a little over a decade, those same colonists would declare their independence and break away from the British Empire.

Throughout the eighteenth century, colonists had developed significant emotional ties with both the British monarchy and the British constitution.