notes, documents, and dates from a lifetime of reading about the United States
Covering 1763 to 1789. If you want the primary sources themselves, the excerpts now live on the documents page. Last major rewrite of this page: March 2021.
Here is the strange thing about the American Revolution, the thing I used to spend a whole first lecture on: in 1763 the colonists were proud to be British. They had just helped Britain win the French and Indian War. They celebrated the victory, sang the songs, and toasted the king. George Washington served as a British officer in the war that started it. Twenty years later the same colonies would declare the same king a tyrant who was "unfit to be the ruler of a free people." The road between those two feelings is the whole story.
Britain won, and winning was expensive. The war left the government in London with a enormous debt and a new empire to administer, including thousands of square miles east of the Mississippi that needed garrisoning. The colonists, in London's view, had benefited from all this and could help pay for it. The colonists, in their own view, had already paid, in blood and in taxes that were, by some measures, already higher than what people paid in Britain itself.[1]
Two decisions in 1763 mattered more than any tax. The Proclamation Line drew a boundary along the Appalachians and told settlers to stay east of it (it was meant to prevent more expensive wars with the nations of the interior; settlers heard it as an insult and mostly ignored it). And the decision to keep a standing army in the colonies created the thing that would eventually be quartered in Boston living rooms. Remember the sequence: the army comes first, the quarrels follow.
Everyone remembers "no taxation without representation," but the slogan only makes sense if you know what the actual taxes were, and what happened to each one. The short answer is: every one of them either got repealed or exploded, and the explosion usually taught both sides the wrong lesson.
| Act | Year | What it did | How it ended |
|---|---|---|---|
| Sugar Act | 1764 | Lowered the molasses tax but enforced it, with customs officers and vice-admiralty courts (no jury) | Protests, mostly commercial; toned down in 1766 |
| Stamp Act | 1765 | Tax on printed paper: newspapers, legal documents, playing cards. First direct internal tax | Riots and a boycott; repealed 1766, paired with the Declaratory Act |
| Townshend Acts | 1767 | Duties on glass, paint, paper, tea; writs of assistance to enforce them | Boycotts; most duties repealed 1770, the tea duty kept, on principle |
| Tea Act | 1773 | Not a new tax. Gave the East India Company a monopoly on tea sales, undercutting colonial merchants | Boston Harbor, 342 chests of tea, the night of December 16, 1773 |
| Coercive Acts | 1774 | Closed Boston's port, altered the Massachusetts charter, allowed quartering of troops | The colonies called them "Intolerable" and called a Congress. Which was the point |
Two details worth remembering. The Stamp Act crisis produced the Stamp Act Congress, the first time the colonies acted together (nine of them sent delegates). And the Tea Act was not a tax increase at all: it made tea cheaper, to save the East India Company, and the merchants of Boston understood perfectly well that cheap monopoly tea was a bigger threat than expensive tea. Revolutions run on economics dressed up as principle, and on principle dressed up as economics, and honest history keeps both in view.
The Boston Massacre of March 5, 1770 left five dead, and Paul Revere's engraving of it (copied from Henry Pelham's drawing, a plagiarism that still annoys me on Pelham's behalf) did more work than the shooting did. The tea followed, and then the Coercive Acts, and the other colonies finally saw London's punishment of Massachusetts as a preview of their own future. In September 1774, twelve colonies (all but Georgia) sent delegates to the First Continental Congress in Philadelphia.
In April 1775 the British marched on Concord looking for arms. The shot fired at Lexington on the morning of April 19 nobody has ever identified (each side insisted the other fired first, which is its own lesson about sources). By the time the British got back to Boston, they had lost 73 dead and the countryside was in arms. Bunker Hill in June cost the British over 1,000 casualties and taught them what taking a hill from Americans behind earthworks was going to cost for the next eight years.
For the first year of fighting almost nobody was talking about independence. Then in January 1776 a failed English tax collector and corset maker named Thomas Paine published Common Sense, a forty-seven-page pamphlet that sold something like 150,000 copies in a few months and said out loud what people had only been muttering: hereditary monarchy is absurd, and the colonies should just be a country. Pamphlets did the work that a century of parliamentary petitions had not. I make my students read a few pages every year and they are always surprised that the language is still funny.
On July 2, 1776, the Continental Congress voted for independence. On July 4 it approved the wording of the Declaration. (John Adams thought the second of July would be the anniversary everyone celebrated. He was right about the significance and wrong about the date, a very Adams outcome.) The passage everyone remembers is the second paragraph, but the document is mostly a legal brief: a long list of charges against the king, written to convince a watching world, and France especially, that this was a lawful revolution and not a riot. See the excerpts.
The military story is simpler than it looks, and that is the point. Washington's job was not to win the war. It was to keep an army in existence, and he did it with a combination of pure stubbornness, small victories timed for morale, and an understanding that the British had to win and he merely had to not lose. The British took New York and kept it. The British took Philadelphia and gave it back. Saratoga in October 1777, where an entire British army surrendered, convinced France to enter the war as an ally (the treaties came in 1778), and that alliance turned a colonial rebellion into a world war, which is the single fact that decided everything.
The last major land battle in the north, Yorktown, in October 1781, was won by a Franco-American army with the French navy keeping the Chesapeake sealed behind it. Cornwallis surrendered on October 19. The band played "The World Turned Upside Down," or so everyone's favorite legend says. Peace negotiations dragged on, and the Treaty of Paris finally signed in September 1783 recognized the independence of the United States and set the Mississippi as the western boundary.
The Articles of Confederation, the country's first constitution, lasted barely a decade and had almost no power: no taxes worth the name, no way to regulate commerce, no executive. In the summer of 1787, fifty-five men met in Philadelphia, voted to keep the windows shut and the proceedings secret, and wrote a replacement. The Constitution they produced (see the documents page for the parts that matter most) is a machine of checks and balances built by men who distrusted each other's interests and their own government's power. The first ten amendments, the Bill of Rights, were added by 1791, mostly to satisfy the people who thought the new government was the bigger danger.
The country that ratified the Constitution in 1788 was small, coastal, and uncertain of itself, with about four million people, roughly one in five of them enslaved. It was also an experiment that had no working precedent. Nothing quite like it had been tried, and everyone involved knew it. The arguments they started in Philadelphia we are still having, which is either the failure of the document or the whole point of it, depending on which founder you ask and at what hour of the night.
Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (1967); Pauline Maier, American Scripture (1997); David Hackett Fischer, Washington's Crossing (2004); Gordon Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution (1992); and the National Archives' Founding Documents for the texts themselves.