The American Revolution was a political upheaval that took place between 1765 and 1783 during which colonists in the Thirteen American Colonies rejected the British monarchy and aristocracy, overthrew the authority of Great Britain, and founded the United States of America.
Starting in 1765, members of American colonial society rejected the authority of the British Parliament to tax them and to create other laws affecting them without colonial representatives in the government. During the following decade, protests continued to escalate by colonists (known as Patriots), as in the Boston Tea Party in 1773, during which patriots destroyed a consignment of taxed tea from the Parliament-controlled and favored East India Company.[1] The British responded by imposing punitive laws on Massachusetts in 1774 known as the Coercive Acts, following which Patriots in the other colonies rallied behind Massachusetts. In late 1774, the Patriots set up their own alternative government to better coordinate their resistance efforts against Great Britain, while other colonists preferred to remain aligned to the British Crown, known as Loyalists.
Tensions escalated to the outbreak of fighting between Patriot militia and British regulars at Lexington and Concord in April 1775. The conflict then developed into a global war, during which the Patriots (and later their French, Spanish, and Dutch allies) fought the British and Loyalists in what became known as the American Revolutionary War (1775–1783). Patriots in each of the thirteen colonies formed Provincial Congresses that assumed power from the old colonial governments and suppressed Loyalism, and from there built a Continental Army under the leadership of General George Washington. The Continental Congress determined King George III's rule to be tyrannical and infringing the colonists' "rights as Englishmen", and declared the colonies free and independent states in July 1776. The Patriot leadership professed the political philosophies of liberalism and republicanism to reject monarchy and aristocracy, and proclaimed that all men are created equal. Congress rejected British proposals requiring allegiance to the monarchy and abandonment of independence.
The British were forced out of Boston in 1776, but then captured and held New York City for the duration of the war. They blockaded the ports and captured other cities for brief periods, but failed to defeat Washington's forces. A British army was captured at the Battle of Saratoga in late 1777 after a failed patriot invasion of Canada, following which the French openly entered the war as allies of the United States. The war later turned to the American South, where the British captured an army at South Carolina but failed to enlist enough volunteers from Loyalist civilians to take effective control. A combined American–French force captured a second British army at Yorktown in 1781, effectively ending the war in the United States. The Treaty of Paris in 1783 formally ended the conflict, confirming the new nation's complete separation from the British Empire. The United States took possession of nearly all the territory east of the Mississippi River and south of the Great Lakes, with the British retaining control of Canada and Spain taking Florida.[2][3]
Among the significant results of the revolution was the creation of a new Constitution of the United States. The 'Three-Fifths Compromise' allowed the southern slaveholders to consolidate power and maintain slavery in America for another eighty years,[4] but the elected government became responsible to the will of the people through the expansion of voting rights and liberties over subsequent decades.[5] The new Constitution established a relatively strong federal national government that included an executive, a national judiciary, and a bicameral Congress that represented states in the Senate and population in the House of Representatives.[6][7]
