The Great War for American

Independence

America

• Land transfer between Britain and France

• British debt

• Proclamation of 1763

The French and Indian War

Boston MASSACRE

• March 5, 1770• “Snowballs and debris”

Taxation Without Representation

• Unjust, Intolerable Acts, 1773– Boston Port Act & Mass. Governing Act = Closed the port and gave political control

to royal appointees– Administration of Justice Act …MURDER ACTS = royal officials had trials in Britain– Quartering Act = Soldiers had to be housed– Quebec Act = Catholics!!!!

• Subterfuge and Samuel “Mohawk Indian” Adams

State Constitutions

• Take the power back

Continental Congress – I & II1st Continental Congress, 1774

• 12 of 13 colonies represented

•Gathered after the Intolerable/Coercive Acts

• 1st US Flag

2nd Continental Congress, 1775

• Issued the Declaration of Independence

• Raised the Continental Army

• Made Treaties

• De Facto Government

• Wrote the Articles of Confederation

The Continental Army - 1775

• Patriots eager to enlist

• “….our countrymen have all the folly of the ass and all the passiveness of the sheep…”

• Organized disparate militias

Loyalists

• Traitors

Patriots

• Democratic, political equality

Benedict Arnold• Perfidious Traitor

• Surrendered West Point

• Narrowly escaped when Washington found out

• Gout = died in 1801

Declaration of Independence

• “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.”

The Shot Heard Round the World"By the rude bridge that arched the flood,Their flag to April's breeze unfurled,Here once the embattled farmers stoodAnd fired the shot heard round the world."

-R.W. Emerson

• Paul Revere, William Dawes and others

• “One if by land, two if by sea”

• “The British are coming!!!!!!”

War Begins

• Concord and Lexington

• Brits march to Boston (guerrilla warfare)

Articles of Confederation• Governing agreement of the 13 colonies

• First mention of “The United States of America”

• Adopted by the 2nd Continental Congress, 1777

• Beginning of the debate between a strong central government and state’s rights.

Battles

•Battle of Lexington and Concord •Capture of Fort Ticonderoga •Battle of Bunker Hill •Invasion of Quebec, Canada •Battle of Long Island •Battle of White Plains •Battle of Fort Washington •Washington crosses the Delaware•Battle of Trenton •Battle of Princeton •Battle of Brandywine •Battle of Germantown

•Battle of Oriskany •Battle of Bennington •Battle of Saratoga •Battle of Monmouth •Valley Forge •Battle of Savannah •Battle of Charleston •Battle of Camden •Battle of King's Mountain •Battle of Cowpens •Battle of Guilford •Battle of Eutaw Springs •Battle of Yorktown

Washington Crosses the Delaware

• Christmas 1776

• Washington kills Hessians = mercenaries = private contractors

• Washington moves to Valley Forge as British loyalists show themselves

Yorktown, 1781 = End of War

• French support aids victory

• 17,000 Franco-American troops force Cornwallis’ surrender

• Britain cedes all land west to the Mississippi – Treaty of Paris, 1783

Victory!

• French fell ito debt, leading to the French Revolution of 1789

• An estimated 25,000 American Revolutionaries died during active military service. About 8,000 of these deaths were in battle; the other 17,000 deaths were from disease, including about 8,000 who died while prisoners of war.

• Other voices and perspectives????

ZinnSocial Order:“It was a complex chain of oppression in Virginia. The Indians were plundered by white frontiersmen, who

were taxed and controlled by the Jamestown elite. And the whole colony was being exploited by England, which bought the colonists' tobacco at prices it dictated and made 100,000 pounds a year for the King.”

“…the upper class was getting most of the benefits and monopolized political power. A historian who studied Boston tax lists in 1687 and 1771 found that in 1687 there were, out of a population of six thousand, about one thousand property owners, and that the top 5 percent- 1 percent of the population-consisted of fifty rich individuals who had 25 percent of the wealth. By 1770, the top 1 percent of property owners owned 44 percent of the wealth.”

Indentured Servants:“During the journey the ship is full of pitiful signs of distress-smells, fumes, horrors, vomiting, various

kinds of sea sickness, fever, dysentery, headaches, heat, constipation, boils, scurvy, cancer, mouth-rot, and similar afflictions, all of them caused by the age and the high salted state of the food, especially of the meat, as well as by the very bad and filthy water.. .. Add to all that shortage of food, hunger, thirst, frost, heat, dampness, fear, misery, vexation, and lamentation as well as other troubles.... On board our ship, on a day on which we had a great storm, a woman about to give birth and unable to deliver under the circumstances, was pushed through one of the portholes into the sea....”

Boston Massacre:“The crowd at the Massacre was described by John Adams, defense attorney for the British soldiers, as "a

motley rabble of saucy boys, negroes, and mulattoes, Irish teagues and outlandish jack tarrs."

Creating Support:

“In Virginia, it seemed clear to the educated gentry that something needed to be done to persuade the lower orders to join the revolutionary cause, to deflect their anger against England. …Patrick Henry's oratory in Virginia pointed a way to relieve class tension between upper and lower classes and form a bond against the British. This was to find language inspiring to all classes, specific enough in its listing of grievances to charge people with anger against the British, vague enough to avoid class conflict among the rebels, and stirring enough to build patriotic feeling for the resistance movement.

Thomas Paine, Common Sense:

"A French bastard landing with an armed Bandits and establishing himself king of England against the consent of the natives, is in plain terms a very paltry rascally original. It certainly hath no divinity in it." – Challenge to divine right of kings

Declaration of Independence:

To say that the Declaration of Independence, even by its own language, was limited to life, liberty, and happiness for white males is not to denounce the makers and signers of the Declaration for holding the ideas expected of privileged males of the eighteenth century. Reformers and radicals, looking discontentedly at history, are often accused of expecting too much from a past political epoch-and sometimes they do. But the point of noting those outside the arc of human rights in the Declaration is not, centuries late and pointlessly, to lay impossible moral burdens on that time. It is to try to understand the way in which the Declaration functioned to mobilize certain groups of Americans, ignoring others. Surely, inspirational language to create a secure consensus is still used, in our time, to cover up serious conflicts of interest in that consensus, and to cover up, also, the omission of large parts of the human race.

State Constitutions:

“The new constitutions that were drawn up in all states from 1776 to 1780 were not much different from the old ones. Although property qualifications for voting and holding office were lowered in some instances, in Massachusetts they were increased. Only Pennsylvania abolished them totally. The new bills of rights had modifying provisions. North Carolina, providing for religious freedom, added "that nothing herein contained shall be construed to exempt preachers of treasonable or seditious discourses, from legal trial and punishment." Maryland, New York, Georgia, and Massachusetts took similar cautions.”

Constitution:

“The inferior position of blacks, the exclusion of Indians from the new society, the establishment of supremacy for the rich and powerful in the new nation-all this was already settled in the colonies by the time of the Revolution. With the English out of the way, it could now be put on paper, solidified, regularized, made legitimate, by the Constitution of the United States, drafted at a convention of Revolutionary leaders in Philadelphia.”

“Thus, [Charles Beard, An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution] Beard found that most of the makers of the Constitution had some direct economic interest in establishing a strong federal government: the manufacturers needed protective tariffs; the moneylenders wanted to stop the use of paper money to pay off debts; the land speculators wanted protection as they invaded Indian lands; slaveowners needed federal security against slave revolts and runaways; bondholders wanted a government able to raise money by nationwide taxation, to pay off those bonds.”

“Four groups, Beard noted, were not represented in the Constitutional Convention: slaves, indentured servants, women, men without property. And so the Constitution did not reflect the interests of those groups.”

Problems with the Articles of Confederation

1) Under the Articles there was only a unicameral legislature so that there was no separation of powers.

2) The central government under the Articles was too weak since the majority of the power rested with the states.

3) Congress, under the Articles, did not have the power to tax which meant that they could never put their finances in order.

4) In order to change or amend the Articles, unanimous approval of the states was required which essentially meant that changes to the Articles were impossible.

5) For any major laws to pass they had to be approved by 9 or the 13 states which proved difficult to do so that even the normal business of running a government was difficult.

6) Under the Articles, Congress did not have the power to regulate commerce which will cause competition between states as well as diplomatic issues.