Recently I was assigned at work a small writing project to create one-page summaries of the history of the Declaration of Independence and the Revolutionary War for a pop-up exhibit kit for libraries. These documents were improved by the editing of one of my colleagues, though still substantially as I had drafted them.
The Revolutionary War
The American Revolutionary War was an armed conflict between the Kingdom of Great Britain against 13 of its North American colonies. The war started on April 19, 1775, when British troops clashed with colonial militia at Lexington and Concord, near Boston, Massachusetts. The colonies declared independence from Britain in July, 1776, as the United States. Battles in North America were fought as far north as Quebec and as far south as South Carolina.
The war was the culmination of more than a decade of growing tensions between Britain and the 13 colonies. Britain and the colonists’ victory against France in the French and Indian War of 1754-63 seemed to secure the colonies’ future, but the war saddled Britain with enormous debts that it sought to repay through increased taxes and better tax enforcement, particularly in the North American colonies.
Protests against various taxes and attempts to collect them gradually became a movement for full independence. For the British government it seemed that the colonists were unlawfully refusing to pay their rightful share of the costs of their own defense and the defense of the Empire they were a part of. The colonists, on the other hand, resented paying taxes passed by the British Parliament, which they had no say in electing. The slogan “no taxation without representation” became a popular rallying cry among the colonists (though in the colonies at the time, as in Britain, only a fraction of the white male population could vote for representatives).
The colonists’ victory was far from certain. When the war began, the colonies had no central government, no navy, and no army apart from the part-time colonial militias. Britain was a leading European power, had a professionally-trained and veteran army, and the largest navy in the world. Luckily, though Britain sent a large army and fleet to subdue the colonies in 1776, the colonies won some key victories in the war’s early years and they received crucial help from other European powers. France allied with the colonies in 1778, Spain in 1779, and in 1780 the Netherlands began a separate war against Britain. Britain had difficulty defending all of its global interests at once.
The colonial army gradually grew in size and skill and, with crucial help from a French army and fleet, defeated a British army at Yorktown, Virginia, in October, 1781. Peace negotiations began soon after, and the war was formally ended by the Treaty of Paris in 1783. Great Britain was forced to recognize the United States as an independent country.
Sources: Encyclopedia Britannica, Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, Library of Congress
The Declaration of Independence
On July 4, 1776, delegates of the Second Congressional Congress adopted and signed what became known as the Declaration of Independence.[1] This document declared the 13 former British colonies independent states and established the United States of America.[2]
The colonies had struggled against what they saw as British oppression for more than a decade by the time open war broke out in 1775. But for most of the rebels, it was their traditional rights as Englishmen that they struggled for. Their protests to King George emphasized their loyalty to him, even as they deplored the actions of his government. Even after the war began, only a minority of the rebelling colonists supported independence.
But the British government showed no interest in reconciling with the colonies, and the rebels realized they needed support from other powers, like France and Spain, which was unlikely if the colonies were to remain part of the British Empire. Thomas Paine’s wildly popular 1776 pamphlet Common Sense argued for independence and a republic rather than hereditary government, and many state and local assemblies began to pass resolutions supporting independence.
The Declaration of Independence was drafted primarily by Thomas Jefferson, working with a Committee of Five that included John Addams and Benjamin Franklin.[3] The document consists of a preamble describing the philosophy of government based on natural rights–that is, not rights given or granted by a hereditary sovereign or other government–and reasons why a people might justly rebel against their government.
There follows a lengthy recitation of grievances against the British government, showing how it has repeatedly violated the precepts of just government. It concludes, therefore, that “That these United Colonies are, and of Right ought to be, Free and Independent States; that they are absolved from all Allegiance to the British Crown.”
Once approved, the Declaration was immediately printed for distribution throughout the colonies, and abroad. It was intentionally printed on a single one-sided sheet, so that it could easily be posted.
The Declaration of Independence was vitally important in the immediate circumstances of the war, and it became an inspiration for subsequent declarations in other countries. But after the war the Declaration faded in significance. It was only many years later, in the early 1800s and, especially, in the turbulent years before the US Civil War of 1861-65, that the Declaration came to be viewed as a statement of fundamental US political principles.
In this later reassessment of the Declaration, it was the eloquent second sentence of the preamble–“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”– that was paramount. Abraham Lincoln, and others, recast the Declaration as the moral foundation of our government–the goal toward which more prosaic instruments of government, like the Constitution, were striving to achieve.
[1] The word “independence,” though, does not appear in the document.
[2] Other significant dates might also be used to mark the birth of our country: when the American Revolutionary War began, on April 19, 1775; when the Second Continental Congress approved an independence resolution on July 2, 1776; when the united colonies formed their first government under the Articles of Confederation on March 1, 1781; when the Constitution was approved on September 17, 1787; when the Constitution went into effect after New Hampshire became the ninth state to ratify it on June 21, 1788.
[3] Years later, Jefferson remembered the work as being primarily his own. Adams remembered it as more the product of the committee.
Sources:
Britannica Editors. “Declaration of Independence.” Encyclopedia Britannica.
Pauline Maier, “American Scripture: The Making of the Declaration of Independence,” The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History.
Rosen, Jeffrey, and David Rubenstein. “The Declaration, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights.” National Constitution Center.