American Revolution Events

Chapter 4

Sam Adams

1st Continental Congress

The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere 

by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow1807-1882

• Listen my children and you shall hearOf the midnight ride of Paul Revere,

On the eighteenth of April, in Seventy-five;Hardly a man is now alive

Who remembers that famous day and year.

Israel Bissell

Independence Hall – 2nd Continental Congress

John Adams - Radical

John Dickinson - Moderate

John Dickinson - Moderate

Should I Stay or Should I go? Reasons to be a Patriot or a Loyalist

Patriot Loyalist

Hessian Soldiers

Patrick Henry

Patrick Henry

• There is no retreat but in submission and slavery! Our chains are forged! Their clanking may be heard on the plains of Boston! The war is inevitable²and let it come! I repeat it, sir, let it come.

• Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!

Thomas Paine

Commonsense

• Society in every state is a blessing, but government even in its best state is but a necessary evil; in its worst state an intolerable one…

• Why is it that we hesitate? From Britain we can expect nothing but ruin. If she is admitted to the government of America again, this continent will not be worth living in.

The Crisis

• December 23, 1776• THESE are the times that try men's souls. The

summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands by it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph.

Benjamin Franklin

Richard Henry Lee

Thomas Jefferson

Dec. of Independence - Explanation

• When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation

WOWSERS!!!

• We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.-

Bad Governments

• That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

List against George III

• For protecting them, by a mock Trial, from punishment for any Murders which they should commit on the Inhabitants of these States:

• For cutting off our Trade with all parts of the world