American Revolution
Thirteen British colonies declared independence in 1776 and won it in 1783 with French money, ships and troops. The quarrel began over taxation after the Seven Years' War, when Britain, having doubled its national debt defending North America, decided that the colonies should contribute — the Stamp Act of 1765, the Townshend duties, and the tea tax that survived when the rest were repealed. The colonial objection was constitutional rather than fiscal. Englishmen were taxed by their own representatives, and colonists had none at Westminster. Boston was the flashpoint throughout: the massacre in 1770, the tea thrown into the harbour in 1773, and the Coercive Acts that closed the port in reply. Fighting began at Lexington and Concord in April 1775, and the Declaration of Independence followed fifteen months later. The war was won by not losing. Washington kept an army in the field through defeats at New York, Brandywine and Germantown and a winter at Valley Forge, and the British could take any city they wanted and hold none of the countryside. Saratoga in 1777 brought France in openly, then Spain and the Dutch, and Britain found itself fighting a global war without an ally. Yorktown in 1781 was decided by a French fleet holding the Chesapeake for three weeks. The peace gave the new republic everything east of the Mississippi and said nothing about its Indigenous inhabitants or the enslaved fifth of its population. The revolution was also a civil war. Perhaps a fifth of the colonists remained loyal, some 60,000 left for Canada, Britain and the Caribbean when it ended, and tens of thousands of enslaved people escaped to British lines on offers of freedom and were largely abandoned at the peace.
- Year: 1775 CE
- Category: Political
