Revolution in the Atlantic World: The American Revolution and the Road to 1789

A colonial revolt becomes a world event

In 1763, most colonists in British North America were proud of the British Empire that had just defeated France. Thirteen years later, thirteen colonies declared independence. Twenty years after that, their example had helped bring revolution to France, inspired enslaved people in Saint-Domingue and pushed thousands of Loyalists north into what would become Canada.

This lesson connects many earlier lessons: Locke and Montesquieu's ideas, the debts of the Seven Years' War, the Royal Proclamation, mercantilist trade laws, slavery and Indigenous diplomacy all meet here.

Causes: from 1763 to 1775

Long-term causes

• Colonies had long run their own elected assemblies and grown used to self-government.
• After 1763 the French threat was gone, so colonists depended less on British protection.
• Britain had a huge war debt and kept troops in America; it decided the colonies should help pay.
• The Royal Proclamation blocked settlement west of the Appalachians, angering land speculators and settlers.
• Enlightenment ideas (Locke's natural rights, Montesquieu's separation of powers) gave colonists a language of rights.

Short-term triggers

• The Stamp Act (1765) taxed printed paper. Colonists protested: no taxation without representation. It was repealed in 1766.
• The Townshend duties (1767) taxed imports such as glass, paper and tea; boycotts followed.
• In the Boston Massacre (1770) British soldiers killed five colonists.
• To help the struggling East India Company, the Tea Act (1773) lowered the price of Company tea but kept the tax. On 16 December 1773 colonists dumped the tea into Boston harbour (the Boston Tea Party).
• Britain responded with the Coercive Acts (1774), closing Boston's port. The Quebec Act (1774) angered Protestant colonists because it allowed Catholic worship and extended Quebec's boundaries into the Ohio Valley.
• Fighting began at Lexington and Concord in April 1775.

Ideas: Common Sense and the Declaration

In January 1776 Thomas Paine's pamphlet Common Sense argued in plain language that it was absurd for an island to rule a continent and that monarchy itself was illegitimate. It sold in huge numbers.

On 4 July 1776 the Continental Congress adopted the Declaration of Independence, drafted mainly by Thomas Jefferson. Its best-known sentence reads:

"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."

The Declaration goes on to say that governments get their just powers from the consent of the governed, and that people may alter or abolish a government that destroys these rights. You can hear Locke clearly. Most of the document is a list of grievances against King George III; one of them uses a racist description of Indigenous peoples.

War and many perspectives

The American victory at Saratoga (1777) convinced France to ally with the United States in 1778; Spain and the Dutch Republic also joined the war against Britain. With French troops and a French fleet, the Americans forced a British army to surrender at Yorktown (1781). In the Treaty of Paris (1783) Britain recognized American independence and gave up the lands south of the Great Lakes, without consulting its Indigenous allies.

Not everyone experienced the war the same way:

• Loyalists were harassed, had property seized and, after the war, tens of thousands left, many for Nova Scotia (New Brunswick was created for them in 1784) and Quebec (later Upper Canada).
• Enslaved people saw the war as a chance for freedom. Lord Dunmore's Proclamation (1775) offered freedom to enslaved men owned by rebels who joined the British. Thousands escaped to British lines. About 3000 Black Loyalists went to Nova Scotia, where many were denied the land they were promised; in 1792 nearly 1200 sailed to found Freetown in Sierra Leone.
• The Haudenosaunee Confederacy split. Most Mohawk, Seneca, Cayuga and Onondaga sided with Britain; many Oneida and Tuscarora sided with the Americans. In 1779 an American army destroyed dozens of Haudenosaunee towns and crops. The Mohawk leader Joseph Brant (Thayendanegea) and his sister Molly Brant (Konwatsi'tsiaienni) were key British allies. In 1784 the Haldimand Proclamation granted land along the Grand River to the Six Nations; the Six Nations of the Grand River community near Brantford, Ontario, traces its history to this grant.
• Women ran farms and businesses and organized boycotts. Abigail Adams urged her husband John, in a 1776 letter, to "remember the ladies" in the new laws. Women gained few political rights, although New Jersey allowed some property-owning women to vote from 1776 until 1807.

The Constitution of 1787

The first American government, under the Articles of Confederation, was weak. In 1787 delegates in Philadelphia wrote the US Constitution, which created:

• A federal system dividing power between national and state governments.
• Three branches with checks and balances, following Montesquieu: Congress, a president and a supreme court.
• A way to amend the Constitution; the first ten amendments, the Bill of Rights, were added in 1791.

The Constitution also protected slavery. The three-fifths clause counted three-fifths of enslaved people for representation, giving slaveholding states more power, and Congress could not ban the slave trade before 1808. The new republic proclaimed liberty while keeping about 700 000 people enslaved (first federal census, 1790).

On the eve of 1789

France had spent heavily to help the Americans. By the late 1780s the French crown was close to bankruptcy, and the nobles and clergy resisted paying more taxes. In 1788 King Louis XVI agreed to call the Estates-General, which had not met since 1614, for May 1789. French officers such as Lafayette returned from America with ideas about rights and republics. That story begins the next unit, The World, 1789–1900.