The founding of the United States of America

Contents

I.  The egalitarian revolution

“The Apotheosis of Washington,” located in the U.S. Capitol Building’s Rotunda (visitor center). “Painted in 1865 by Constantino Brumidi, the fresco is suspended 180 feet above the Rotunda floor and covers an area of 4,664 square feet,” according to the Architect of the Capitol. “In the central group of the fresco, Brumidi depicted George Washington rising to the heavens in glory, flanked by female figures representing Liberty and Victory/Fame. A rainbow arches at his feet, and thirteen maidens symbolizing the original states flank the three central figures. . . . Some hold a banner with the motto ‘E Pluribus Unum,’ meaning ‘Out of Many, One.'” Around the perimeter are six groups representing War, Science, Marine, Commerce, Mechanics, and Agriculture. Each scene combines classical gods and goddesses, figures from American history, and the latest 19th-century inventions. Brumidi was an Italian who emigrated to the United States in 1852. (Architect of the Capitol; Wikimedia) Click to enlarge.

II.  The American crisis and failure of conciliation

• Protest and conciliation, 1763-1773
• Tea parties
• The growing divide with Great Britain
• Internal divisions
• First signs of war and British voices for peace
• The war in 1775

III.  Declarations of independence

• Tom Paine’s Common Sense
• Steps toward independence
• Writing the Declaration of Independence
• The meaning of the Declaration – in three parts
• The limits of democracy

IV.  The vicissitudes of war

V.  The global context of the War for Independence

• Imperial priorities
• U.S. imperial ambitions
• Relations with Native American nations
• Costs of war

IV.  E Pluribus Unum:  What unites the American people?

• Political society
• George Washington’s Farewell Address, 1796

VII.  History, heritage, and progress

Endnotes

About the authors

Recommended resources

I.  The egalitarian revolution

Thomas Jefferson (portrait by Charles Wilson Peale, 1791; Independence National Historical Park Collection)

The short answer is that a replacement was needed for “the rights of Englishmen” which heretofore had been the rallying cry of colonial protesters.  Indeed, in 1774, Thomas Jefferson penned an essay titled A Summary View of the Rights of British America in which he leveled many of the same charges against British rule that later appeared in the Declaration of Independence.^[4]  No doubt, it would have been awkward for the signers to justify their break with Great Britain on the basis of upholding British rights.  The expansive phrase, “all men are created equal,” served as a substitute.  Combined with “consent of the governed,” it suggested that the government-in-formation would listen to the common people and serve their interests, an enticement for men of lower ranks to join the rebellion.

Racial equality

Prince Hall’s grave marker in the Copp’s Hill Burial Ground, North End Boston (Bay State Banner)

The egalitarian idealism surrounding the American Revolution was not lost on African Americans.  In January 1777, a contingent of free Blacks led by Prince Hall presented a petition to the Massachusetts legislature arguing that slavery violated the “natural & inalienable right to that freedom, which the great parent of the Universe hath bestowed equally on all Mankind.”  The petition failed, but three years later, the state adopted a new constitution that declared “all men are born free and equal and have . . . the right of enjoying and defending their lives and liberties.”^[8]  This statement became the basis for a decision in 1783 by the Massachusetts Judicial Supreme Court “that perpetual servitude can no longer be tolerated in our government.”  Slavery in the state thus ended.^[9]

Women’s equality

“Declaration of Sentiments,” Women’s Rights Convention, 1848 (National Park Service)

A sustained movement for women’s equal rights began in 1848 with the first national women’s rights convention, held in Seneca Falls, New York.  Some 300 participants approved a “Declaration of Sentiments” that mimicked the Declaration of Independence except for adding two words:  “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men and women are created equal . . .” (italics added).^[19]  Seventy-two years later, women’s suffrage became a reality in the United States.  The struggle for equality continued in other realms, with women and their allies challenging “male-only” professions, unequal pay, and cultural stereotypes.

Economic equality

Thomas Paine (portrait by French artist Laurent Dabos, 1792; Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery)

Thomas Paine, the English-born author of Common Sense (1776), envisioned another alternative.  In The Rights of Man, published in 1791, he broadly outlined the creation of a social welfare state in which the government would act in the interest of the poor and middle class rather than the rich.  Specifically, he called for an end to imprisonment of the poor, higher taxes on the rich, free public education for children, and pensions for the elderly.^[24]  Although both the United States and Great Britain embraced all of these measures in later years, in the immediate, the British government banned the book and convicted Paine (in absentia) of seditious libel.

Our country has long nurtured a strain of anti-egalitarianism, especially when it comes to the economy. . . . Later in the 19^th century, as industrial capitalism led to the emergence of startling new concentrations of wealth, new arguments about the inevitability of inequality began to circulate.  The Yale political economist William Graham Sumner, who argued that the concentration of wealth that results from capitalist competition was inescapable, maintained that “the assertion that all men are equal is perhaps the purest falsehood in the dogma that was ever put into human language.”^[27]

Syracuse Cultural Workers poster

In 1944, President Franklin D. Roosevelt sought to expand the social welfare state by proposing an Economic Bill of Rights in which the federal government would guarantee to all citizens the right to employment, sufficient income, access to decent housing and healthcare, free public education, and economic security in old age, sickness, accident, and unemployment.^[29]  Some of these “rights” have since been achieved while others remain part of the nation’s progressive political agenda.

The global dimension

Thus began a long period of U.S. support for repressive regimes abroad – and the overthrow of some democratic ones.^[37]  Just as U.S. leaders in an earlier era had carved out an exception to their democratic idealism for slavery, so U.S. leaders during the Cold War did so in the interest of establishing a U.S.-led world order, or global hegemony.  Among the casualties was a democratically elected government in Iran.  In 1951, Iranian Prime Minister Muhammad Mossadegh delivered a speech at Independence Hall in Philadelphia in which he compared Iran’s efforts to control its own natural resources to the U.S. struggle for political independence in 1776.^[38]  Two years later, he was overthrown by U.S. and British intelligence agencies.

Eleanor Roosevelt holding a poster of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Lake Success, New York. November 1949 (FDR Presidential Library & Museum)

Since the mid-20th century, the idea that “all men are created equal” has been translated into the language of human rights, best articulated in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights issued by the United Nations General Assembly on December 10, 1948 (Human Rights Day).  Eleanor Roosevelt, diplomat, activist, and former First Lady, helped draft the declaration, which includes political, social, and economic rights.  The preamble recognizes “the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family” as “the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world.”  Economic rights include “the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services.”  The United States, having championed political rights, now lags behind other nations in securing economic rights for its citizens.^[39]

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II.  The American crisis and failure of conciliation

George Washington in uniform as a colonel in the Virginia Regiment (portrait by Charles Willson Peale, 1772; Mount Vernon)

The thought of rebellion was not on anyone’s mind in 1763.  The colonists celebrated the British victory over the French in the French and Indian War (1754-1763).  Colonial militia, including a regiment led by George Washington, had fought side by side with British regiments.  In the Treaty of Paris ending the war, Great Britain gained sovereignty over a huge swath of land in North America – French Canada, Spanish Florida, and the vast Trans-Appalachian region (populated by Native Americans).  The war also left the British government with an enormous national debt of more than 122 million pounds.^[43]

Protest and conciliation, 1763-1773

RESOLVED that the Claim lately assumed and exercised by the British Parliament of making all such Laws as they think fit, to govern the People of these Colonies, and to extort from Us our Money without our Consent, is not only diametrically contrary to the first Principles of the Constitution, and the original Compacts by which We are dependent upon the British Crown and Government; but is totally incompatible with the Privileges of a free People, and the natural Rights of Mankind; will render our own Legislatures merely nominal and nugatory, and is calculated to reduce Us from a State of Freedom and Happiness, to Slavery and Misery.^[45]

Bostonians reading the Stamp Act in 1765 (drawing by J. H. Stark, 1882; New York Public Library)

Notwithstanding colonial protests, Parliament passed a more onerous act in March 1765 that imposed direct taxes on the colonists.  The Stamp Act required colonists to purchase government-issued stamps for a wide variety of items, ranging from court documents to newspapers to playing cards.  A similar tax had been in existence in Great Britain since 1694, but it had been approved by the House of Commons, whereas the Stamp Act had no such approval from colonial legislatures.

Widespread protests in the colonies ensued, some turning violent.  A mob in Boston ransacked the home of Thomas Hutchinson, the lieutenant governor of Massachusetts.  Hutchinson had family roots in Massachusetts dating back to the early 17^th century.  He personally opposed the Stamp Act, but the Boston Sons of Liberty viewed him as a representative of the British government.  Protesters across the colonies threatened tax collectors with “tar and feather” torture, forcing many to resign.^[47]

Dozens of Members of Parliament in the House of Commons and peers in the House of Lords voiced their criticisms of the policies of successive British ministries that aroused widespread resentment in the American colonies.  Three political groups, in particular, were staunch critics of British attempts to tax the American colonists and to impose British authority in the colonies by legislative measures, executive or judicial action, and eventually by force:  the supporters of William Pitt the Elder, Earl of Chatham; the Rockingham Whigs and Edmund Burke in particular; and the supporters of the small group around the Earl of Shelburne, especially David Hartley. . . .

When the American colonies united in opposition to the Stamp Act of 1765, which was the first attempt to impose an internal tax on the colonies by parliamentary legislation in order to raise revenue to help meet the costs of imperial defence, Pitt supported its repeal on the grounds that Parliament could not tax the colonies without the consent of the colonists themselves.  He endorsed the American protests in support of the demand for ‘no taxation without representation’, regarding it as a principle enshrined in the British constitution and even in the law of nature.^[49]

Edmund Burke (portrait by Joshua Reynolds, 1774; National Galleries Scotland)

In lieu of taxing the colonists, Whig leaders insisted that Prime Minister George Grenville should focus on encouraging the growth of trade.  Britain’s manufacturers and merchants largely agreed.  Edmund Burke, notes Dickinson, “advised Parliament to be content with the economic benefits that Britain garnered by her monopoly of trade with the American colonies, to abandon any attempt to tax the American colonists, and to repeal all the oppressive legislation passed by Parliament since 1763 that was so resented by the Americans.”^[50]

The political solution had been offered by the Continental Congress in 1774 and again in 1775.  Three years later, after the disastrous [British] defeat at Saratoga, Lord [Frederick] North proposed essentially the same solution:  freedom from Parliament’s authority over colonial domestic affairs in return for continued economic membership in the British Empire.  But by then it was too late.  This principle of shared or overlapping sovereignty between the home government and peripheral states eventually became the political framework for the British Commonwealth, and before that the federal idea at the core of the American Constitution.  By embracing it in 1775 the British government would have prolonged American membership in the British Empire well into the next century and avoided the American Revolution.^[56]

• the Stamp Act of 1765 was repealed in March 1766;
• the American Revenue Act of 1764, or Sugar Act, was repealed in June 1766;
• the Quartering Act of 1765 – which required local colonial assemblies to fund barracks and provide provisions for British soldiers – was nullified in March 1767;
• the Proclamation of 1763 – which prevented Anglo-American settlers from gaining title to lands in the Trans-Appalachian region – was modified to allow for settlement in certain areas following a treaty with the six nations of the Iroquois in November 1768; and
• the Townshend Acts of 1767-68 – which added duties on certain commodities, increased enforcement against smugglers, and transferred the prosecution of smugglers from colonial to admiralty courts – were repealed in April 1770 except for a duty on tea.

According to the Library of Congress: “The engraving by Paul Revere (1735-1818) of the massacre was derived from the work of future Loyalist, Henry Pelham (1749-1806). A masterpiece of anti-British propaganda, it inflamed American sentiments.” Revere sold the copperplate prints at his shop in Boston beginning in late March, just three weeks after the event. Copies were widely reproduced and sent across the colonies, appearing in local publications. (Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History)

The infamous “Boston Massacre,” in which nervous British soldiers fired into a crowd and killed five people on March 5, 1770, could have sparked violent retaliation, but instead the matter was handled in a court of law, deescalating the crisis.  The killings took place outside the Boston Customs house which was guarded by Captain Thomas Preston and eight British soldiers.  Owing to previous incidents, a crowd of about fifty people formed and began pelting the guards with snowballs, oyster shells, sticks, and stones.  When a large stick struck Private Hugh Montgomery, knocking him down, his musket discharged, quite possibly by accident.  The soldiers then fired into the crowd, striking eleven people.  Three died on the scene, and another two succumbed to injuries.  The Boston Sons of Liberty labeled the incident the “Boston Massacre” and Paul Revere produced a memorable engraving of the event that depicted well-armed British soldiers being ordered to fire into a nonthreatening Boston crowd.^[58]

Tea parties

Green Dragon Tavern in Boston, where the Sons of Liberty planned the “Boston Tea Party” (1898 photo copy of an original engraving, Wikipedia)

In each of the four cities, news of the impending arrival of the ships impelled colonists to meet and discuss what to do.  Four options emerged.  One was to pressure the consignees to resign their posts, thereby preventing payment of the duties – a strategy that succeeded in Charleston, Philadelphia, and New York but not in Boston.  A second option was to prevent the cargo from being unloaded or sold, which happened in Charleston (customs officials seized and stored the tea, never sold).  A third was to persuade ship captains to return to Britain with their cargo intact, which succeeded in Philadelphia and New York.  Finally, some suggested a general boycott of East India Company tea, a strategy that was later incorporated into a general boycott of all British goods.

Depiction of the “Boston Tea Party” published in W. D. Cooper’s The History of North America (London, 1789), Library of Congress.

Not all colonists, however, thought that the destruction of property in Boston was a wise or proper way to press the British government for their political rights.  In Freetown, Massachusetts, residents warned of “a Spirit of Anarchy, Disorder and Confusion prevailing in some Parts of this Province.”^[65]  The town of Marshfield, Massachusetts, passed a resolution denouncing the destruction of the tea as “illegal and unjust and of a dangerous Tendency,” and urged those “who were acting aiding and assisting, or conniving at the Destruction of said Teas pay for the same.”^[66]

Benjamin Franklin (portrait by Charles Willson Peale, 1785; Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts)

Benjamin Franklin, then residing in London as an agent of the Massachusetts colony, wrote to Samuel Adams, John Hancock, and other members of the colony’s Committee of Correspondence to urge a “speedy Reparation” for the destroyed tea.  “I am truly concern’d, as I believe all considerate Men are with you, that there should seem to any a Necessity for carrying Matters to such Extremity, as, in a Dispute about Publick Rights, to destroy private Property,” wrote Franklin.  Acts such as this, if “unrectified,” could lead to war, he warned.  “Making voluntarily such Reparation can be no Dishonour to us or Prejudice to our Claim or Rights.”^[69]  His plea fell on deaf ears.

William Temple Franklin (portrait by Mather Brown, 1782; Gilcrease Collections)

Benjamin Franklin’s son, William, who served as royal governor of New Jersey (1763-1776) and never wavered in his loyalty to the Crown, wrote to his father in London on July 3, 1774:  “I cannot but think it very extraordinary that neither the assembly of Massachusetts Bay nor the town of Boston have so much as intimated any intention or desire of making satisfaction to the East India Company and the officers of the customs, when by doing those two things, which are consistent with strict justice . . . they might get their port opened in a few months.”^[74]

The growing divide with Great Britain

King George III (painting by Benjamin West; 1779; Royal Collection Trust)

King George and the hardliners in Parliament, for their part, saw a conspiracy in colonial defiance of British rule – and they intended to extinguish this defiance.  As the king wrote to his prime minister, Lord North, on September 11, “The dye is now cast, the Colonies must either submit or triumph. . . . we must not retreat; by coolness and an unremitted pursuit of the measures that have been adopted I trust they will come to submit.”^[81]

Internal divisions

Committees of safety learned about suspicious individuals in various ways.  Neighbors denounced neighbors, sometimes anonymously, often openly.  If a committee decided to act on eyewitness accounts or hearsay, it typically interrogated a suspect, heard witnesses, and possible intercepted the defendant’s mail or searched his home for incriminating evidence.  When a majority of committee members believed the charges against an individual were justified, they often pressured him to recant and apologize.  If at that point a suspect was unwilling to undergo the required rituals of apology and reintegration into the community, the rebels typically shamed him publicly and asked the community to cut off all contact.

When the Anglo-American crisis escalated, Patriots targeted both their outspoken opponents and the as-yet uncommitted – and they did so not just with moral suasion but also with threats and physical violence. . . . The Revolution’s noble ideals aside, violent incidents were not the unfortunate exceptions to an orderly, restrained revolution.  Rather, and especially where Loyalists were concerned, they were the norm.^[86]

London print, Feb. 16, 1775, showing Virginia loyalists being forced to sign a Patriot pledge under threat of tarring and feathering (sack of feathers and barrel of tar in upper right). Art Museums of Colonial Williamsburg

In Massachusetts, the center of revolutionary agitation, rebel Patriots set their sights on forcing the resignation of government officials appointed by General Gage, particularly the thirty-six mandamus councillors.  In one instance, on August 22, 1774, a large group from Worcester and surrounding towns confronted Timothy Paine, a councillor, and made him run through a gauntlet (in which men struck him as he passed), then forced him to repeatedly acknowledge his “error and repentance” in serving the Crown.  In another instance, on September 1, Patriots from Cambridge shattered the windows of Attorney General Jonathan Sewall’s mansion.  His wife, Esther, managed to talk the mob into leaving the house intact in exchange for the contents of Sewall’s well-stocked wine cellar.  The next day, mobs marched on the Cambridge courthouse in Harvard Square and exacted resignations from two Tory judges serving as mandamus councillors.^[87]

Joseph Galloway, member of Congress, 1774 (New York Public Library)

Another Loyalist, Joseph Galloway, a fourth generation American, led the Pennsylvania delegation in the First Continental Congress in Philadelphia in 1774.  As Congressional leaders moved toward rebellion, Galloway resigned from the Pennsylvania Assembly and refused election to the Second Continental Congress in May 1775.  He opposed the adoption of the Declaration of Independence the following year.  In the fall of 1776, Galloway fled to New York and became a top advisor to General Howe.  He served as de facto mayor of Philadelphia city during the British occupation from September 1777 to June 1778.  When the British abandoned the city, Galloway left for England with his teenage daughter, while his wife, Grace, remained behind in order to defend the family’s property from seizure by the Patriot government.  According to the historian Kimberly Nath, the diary Grace kept reveals the “loneliness, anxiety, and longing” she felt during this time (she never rejoined her husband) and speaks to “the emotional cost” of a revolution which left her family “irreparably damaged.”^[90]

This illustration depicts John Lamb, a leader in the New York Sons of Liberty, reading the text of the Tea Act in 1773 (New York Public Library Digital Collections)

Although “liberty” was a constant rallying cry of the leading Patriot group, the Sons of Liberty, liberty for the enslaved was not on its agenda.  Indeed, the New York Sons of Liberty adopted the hyperbolic language of the slave-holding elite in Virginia in denouncing the Tea Tax as part of a “diabolical project of enslaving America.”  In a statement issued on December 15, 1773, the group declared that the “execution of that act involves our slavery, and would sap the foundation of our freedom, whereby we should become slaves to our brethren and fellow subjects” in Great Britain.^[92]

Gentlemen . . . Your petitioners apprehend that liberty, being founded on the law of nature; is as necessary to the happiness of an African as to the happiness of an Englishman; and as much to be desired by the former as it can possibly be by the latter . . . We would therefore humbly pray, that whilst you are consulting, asserting, and maintaining your own natural rights against the arbitrary designs of those who would subject you to slavery, that you would think on our unhappy case, who have been long groaning under the insupportable burden.^[93]

Dr. Benjamin Rush (portrait by Charles Willson Peale, 1783; Winterthur Museum)

Among those connecting the principle of “liberty” to the abolition of slavery was Benjamin Rush, a prominent physician and civic leader in Philadelphia.  In January 1773, he published An Address to the Inhabitants of the British Settlements in America, upon Slave-Keeping which became one of the foundational texts of the American abolitionist movement.  The next year, Rush founded the Pennsylvania Abolition Society in Philadelphia.  Also in 1774, the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting of the Society of Friends adopted a resolution forbidding its members from buying or selling slaves.

First signs of war and British voices for peace

First shots of the American War for Independence? William & Mary Raids, Dec. 14-15, 1774 (Historical Marker Database)

On December 14, a local militia in New Hampshire went a step further and attacked a six-man British garrison at Fort William and Mary (at New Castle), seizing 100 barrels of powder and 16 cannons.  Shots were fired but no one was killed.  The commander of the fort, John Cochran, along with his wife, Sarah, were taken prisoner but released a few hours later.^[97]

General Thomas Gage (portrait by John Singleton Copley, 1788; Paul Mellon Collection)

Military operations in the colonies, meanwhile, continued down the path toward war.  In February 1775, General Gage ordered 240 British troops under Lt. Col. Alexander Leslie to seize cannons stored at a colonial armory in Salem.  From Boston, they traveled by boat to Marblehead, then marched four miles to the edge of Salem where they were met by armed rebels who refused to lower the drawbridge and allow them to pass.  Recognizing that any attempt to take the armory would lead to bloodshed, Col. Leslie negotiated a strategic retreat with Loyalist minister Thomas Barnard.  His troops marched fifty feet past the bridge (as required by Leslie’s orders), then turned around and went home empty-handed.

Wood engraving of the Battle of Lexington made by John Warner Barber for Charles Goodrich’s History of the United States, 1824 (The American Crisis)

The next time British soldiers were sent out to capture arsenals, they did not retreat from the prospect of battle.  On April 18, an expedition of 700 British soldiers set out late in the evening to seize a Patriot arsenal at Concord.  The following morning, they were met by 77 local militiamen gathered on the Lexington Town Green.  Accounts differ as to who fired the first shot, but a volley by the British Regulars resulted in eight Americans dead and ten wounded, while the British suffered one wounded.  The British troops proceeded to Concord where Patriots had already removed most of the powder, ammunition, and weapons.  This time, the British faced a formidable force of some 350 Minutemen at the North Bridge of Concord.  Fighting broke out and the British troops soon retreated.  Their 16-mile march back to Boston turned into a bloody rout, as thousands of militiamen fired on the soldiers from behind stone walls and trees.  This single day of combat resulted in 300 British and 93 American casualties.^[103]  The war had begun.

The war in 1775

US invasion of Canada: Gen. Montgomery prepares to depart from Crown Point, New York, for Montreal, August 31, 1775 (1902 print, Library of Congress)

While there were strategic reasons for the American invasion of Canada, it changed the nature of the war from defending communities to an offensive action against a neighboring colony.  Beginning on August 21, about 2,000 American soldiers under General Richard Montgomery (who replaced Gen. Schuyler) laid siege to Fort St. Jean, near Montreal, forcing a surrender on November 3 and allowing Montgomery to take control of Montreal.  In anticipation of taking Quebec, Gen. Washington dispatched another 1,100 soldiers under the command of Benedict Arnold to help Montgomery.

Topographical view of the burning of Falmouth, drawn by Lt. Henry Mowat on Oct 18, 1775 (Osher Map Library, Univ. of Southern Maine)

In retaliation for these attacks, British Captain Henry Mowat led six warships to Falmouth (present-day Portland, Maine).  Upon arrival on October 17, he gave notice to the townspeople that he intended to “execute a just punishment” the following morning and would allow two hours after sun-up for residents to evacuate.  A delegation from the town asked the captain for mercy and was told that their town would be spared only if they swore allegiance to the king and surrendered their weapons and ammunition.  The townspeople decided to evacuate.  The next day, Mowat’s ship, the Canceaux, fired incendiary cannonballs for eight hours, setting fire to most of the town’s buildings.  One person was killed, another wounded, and more than 1,000 people were left homeless.^[114]  The Patriot press denounced Mowat as a monster.  The New-England Chronicle editorialized the following day that Britain was “fully determined with fire and sword, to butcher and destroy, beggar and enslave the whole American people.  Therefore we expect soon to break off all kinds of connection with Britain, and form into a Grand Republic of the American Colonies.”^[115]

John Murray, 4th Earl of Dunmore (portrait by Joshua Reynolds, 1765; National Galleries of Scotland)

Fearing for his life, Dunmore abandoned Williamsburg and took refuge on a warship.  He sailed into the Norfolk harbor and made a nearby shipyard his headquarters.  In short order, he declared martial law, called on Loyalists to defend him and the authority of the Crown, threatened to confiscate the property of rebels, and, on November 7, 1775, issued an emancipation proclamation that freed “all indentured servants, Negroes, or others” under the control of rebels if “able and willing to bear arms” for the British.  One week later, Dunmore led a force of Loyalists on a mission to seize arms and ammunition at Kemp’s Landing (Virginia Beach).  A Patriot militia ambushed the column but was routed and chased down by Dunmore’s men.  Patriot leader Col. Joseph Hutchings was wounded and captured by one of his former slaves.

Lord Dunmore’s Proclamation, Nov. 7, 1775

Enslaved women and children also escaped to Norfolk where Royal Navy vessels were stationed off the coast.^[119]  Tensions mounted as Patriots onshore took potshots at people on ship decks and refused to allow British troops access to the shore to gather supplies.  Dunmore ordered his officers to destroy the sniper posts.  British Captain Henry Bellew first warned the townspeople to remove out of danger all “women, children and innocent persons,” then, on January 1, 1776, ordered the 28-gun Liverpool to rake the waterfront with cannon fire.  By the afternoon, several warehouses were in flames, and by the end of three days, much of the town lay in ashes.

The official report concluded that “very few of the houses were destroyed by the enemy”; indeed, most houses that were set on fire could have been saved.  Instead, the Patriot soldiers “most wantonly set fire to the greater part of the houses within the town, where the enemy never attempted to approach, and where it would have been impossible for them to have penetrated.”  In total, American troops devastated some 863 structures worth over £110,000.  The British destroyed 54 buildings and personal property valued at barely over £5,000.  In other words, the British were responsible for less than 6 percent of the destroyed buildings and 4.5 percent of the value of total losses.  The Revolutionaries suppressed this inconvenient report for the duration of the war; it was in fact first published in 1836.^[121]

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III.  Declarations of Independence

Far from seeking independence, the patriots took up arms to restore the previous status quo.  George III may have condemned them as rebels.  But even after fighting broke out at Lexington and Concord on April 19, 1775, colonists still issued writs for town meetings in “his Majesties name,” and the Continental Congress, professing themselves “faithful subjects,” sought reconciliation with Britain in an elaborate display of “the utmost deference” known as the Olive Branch Petition. . . . Only in spring 1776 did public sentiment tilt in favor of independence.[124]

Tom Paine’s Common Sense

Steps toward independence

The rebellious 13 colonies (American Battlefield Trust)

The American colonies took definitive steps toward political independence in the spring of 1776.  Hundreds of local and provincial assemblies wrote new charters and constitutions, instructed their representatives to vote for independence, and issued resolutions and declarations explaining why separation from Great Britain was necessary.  Massachusetts led the way with fifty-seven towns calling for independence, with only one opposed.[132]

When dissensions first arose, we felt our hearts warmly attached to the King of Great Britain and the Royal family; but now the case is much altered.  At that time we wished to look upon the Ministry and Parliament as the only fountains from which the bitter waters flowed, and considered the King as deceived and misguided by his counsellors; and [we] were therefore led to think that he might, in a proper time, open his eyes, and become a mediator between his contending subjects.  The measures, however, still pursued against America leave no room to expect such an interposition from motives of goodness and affection, or with concessions, which may be justly required.^[135]

A sense of unprovoked injuries will arouse the resentment of the most peaceful.  Such injuries these colonies have received from Britain.  Unjustifiable claims have been made by the king and his minions to tax us without our consent; these claims have been prosecuted in a manner cruel and unjust to the highest degree.  The frantic policy of administration hath induced them to send fleets and armies to America; that, by depriving us of our trade, and cutting the throats of our brethren, they might awe us into submission, and erect a system of despotism in America . . . This plan was brought to a crisis upon the ever memorable nineteenth of April.  We remember the fatal day!^[136]

Comte de Vergennes (portrait by Antoine-François Callet, 1780; Palace of Versailles)

By the end of June, all of the delegations, voting as states, had approved Lee’s resolution except South Carolina and New York.  On July 1, South Carolina voted “no” on the proposition.  The next day, however, it reversed its position and Congress adopted the resolution for independence by a 12-0 vote.  New York abstained at that time, still awaiting new instructions, but joined in on July 9, making the vote for independence unanimous.^[139]  July 2, 1776, is the date that the Continental Congress voted for independence, but their statement declaring independence would not be issued until July 4.

Writing the Declaration of Independence

The Declaration writing committee, as depicted by Currier & Ives, 1876 (Library of Congress)

The process of writing a national declaration began on June 11, 1776, when Congress appointed a five-person committee – composed of Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Robert Livingston, and Roger Sherman – to produce a draft.  The committee chose Jefferson to write it and offered editing advice along the way.^[142]  Jefferson had a number of models to guide him, as many localities and provinces had issued resolutions and declarations.  The most important was the Virginia Declaration of Rights, largely written by George Mason, a draft of which was published in the Pennsylvania Gazette on June 12.  The first paragraphs of the Virginia declaration read as follows:

Section 1.  That all men are by nature equally free and independent and have certain inherent rights, of which, when they enter into a state of society, they cannot, by any compact, deprive or divest their posterity; namely, the enjoyment of life and liberty, with the means of acquiring and possessing property, and pursuing and obtaining happiness and safety.

Section 3.  That government is, or ought to be, instituted for the common benefit, protection, and security of the people, nation, or community; of all the various modes and forms of government, that is best which is capable of producing the greatest degree of happiness and safety and is most effectually secured against the danger of maladministration.  And that, when any government shall be found inadequate or contrary to these purposes, a majority of the community has an indubitable, inalienable, and indefeasible right to reform, alter, or abolish it, in such manner as shall be judged most conducive to the public weal.^[143]

First newspaper printing of the Declaration of Independence: Pennsylvania Evening Post, July 6, 1776 (PR Newswire)

That evening, the document was taken to John Dunlap, the official printer of the Continental Congress, who printed 200 broadsides (the full text on one large sheet) for wide distribution.  The Declaration appeared in the Pennsylvania Evening Post on July 6, and at least thirty other newspapers during the month.  On July 8, a German translation was published by another printer for the benefit of some 100,000 German-speakers across the nation.^[145]  That same day, Congress instructed that copies be sent aboard the Navy brig Dispatch to King Louis XVI of France with instructions to share it with other European courts, including Spain.  A master parchment copy was later produced and signed on August 2 by forty-nine delegates, with seven more signing over the next four months.^[146]

Thomas Hutchinson (1750 oil painting; Old State House Museum in Boston)

The Loyalist response was relatively muted.  Thomas Hutchinson, the American-born former governor of Massachusetts who had moved to London for his safety, wrote a 32-page pamphlet that decried the hypocrisy of Patriots who declare that “all men are created equal” and “endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights,” yet deprive more than a “hundred thousand Africans of their rights to liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, and in some degree to their lives.”^[148]   Loyalists in New York City created a “Loyalist Declaration of Dependence” that was signed by 547 New Yorkers from all walks of life.  The signing took place at Fraunces Tavern in Lower Manhattan on November 28, 1776.  The declaration lamented the Patriot rebellion as “the most unnatural, unprovoked Rebellion that ever disgraced the annuls of time,” and furthermore called attention to the fact “that many of our Fellow-Citizens, who have firmly adhered their loyalty, have been driven from their Habitations, and others sent [as] Prisoners into some of the neighbouring Colonies.”^[149]

The meaning of the Declaration – in three parts

Philosopher John Locke, 1632-1704 (portrait by Godfrey Kneller, 1697; Hermitage Museum in Saint Petersburg, Russia)

The invocation of “natural laws” was in keeping with the spirit of the times, the so-called Age of Reason.  For the past century, Newtonian “laws” had been challenging religious dogma and superseding religious authority in explaining physical reality; and social philosophers such as John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Montesquieu had been contesting long-held beliefs and traditions that extolled monarchs as divinely ordained or naturally superior to others by virtue of their royal genealogy.  These Enlightenment philosophers postulated a theoretical equality of “all men” in the past, and an alternative “social contract” theory for the future in which free citizens in a given political society would choose their own leaders and write their own rules of government sans royalty.^[152]

“Pulling Down the Statue of George III at Bowling Green,” New York, July 9, 1776 (oil on canvas painting by WIlliam Walcutt, 1857; Lafayette College Art Collection)

Part three.  The third part of the Declaration of Independence makes the case that persistent appeals by the colonies for redress have been repeatedly rebuffed by the king, marking him as “a Tyrant” who “is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.”

We, therefore, the Representatives of the united States of America, in General Congress, Assembled . . . and by the Authority of the good People of these Colonies, solemnly publish and declare, 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, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain, is and ought to be totally dissolved . . .^[158]

The limits of democracy

It is certain in Theory that the only moral Foundation of Government is the Consent of the People.  But to what an Extent Shall We carry this Principle?  Shall We Say that every Individual of the Community, old and young, male and female, as well as rich and poor must consent expressly to every Act of Legislation?  No, you will Say.  This is impossible.  How then does the Right arise in the Majority to govern the Minority against their Will?  Whence arises the Right of the Men to govern Women, without their Consent? . . .

There will be no End of it.  New Claims will arise.  Women will demand a Vote.  Lads from 12 to 21 will think their Rights not enough attended to, and every Man who has not a Farthing will demand an equal Voice with any other in all Acts of State.  It tends to confound and destroy all Distinctions and prostrate all Ranks to one common Level.^[164]

Abigail and John Adams (National Gallery of Art)

While John Adams was in Philadelphia attending to the business of the Continental Congress, he received a letter from his wife, Abigail, dated March 31, 1776.  Commenting on the “new Code of Laws” under consideration, she wrote:

I desire you would Remember the Ladies, and be more generous and favourable to them than your ancestors.  Do not put such unlimited power into the hands of the Husbands.  Remember all Men would be tyrants if they could.  If perticuliar care and attention is not paid to the Laidies we are determined to foment a Rebelion, and will not hold ourselves bound by any Laws in which we have no voice, or Representation.^[166]

Patrick Henry (Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery)

Some of these leaders were queasy about writing the principle of equality into their state constitutions.  In May 1776, Patrick Henry served on a committee that drafted the Virginia Declaration of Rights which stated in the first article that “all men are born equally free and independent.”  The delegates as a whole were distressed by these words and instructed the committee “to vary the language, as not to involve the necessity of emancipating the slaves.”  The committee did so, rewriting the phrase with a critical addition:  “all men are born equally free and independent when they enter into a state of society.”  As enslaved persons were deemed outside the “state of society,” the problem was apparently solved.^[172]

Our revered Founders – intent on rallying mass support for a revolt intended to replace one set of colonial elites with another – indulged in egalitarian rhetoric that most of them did not believe.  What redeemed the Revolution is the fact that so many common Americans took that rhetoric literally.  Over the centuries, various outgroups have agitated to expand the frontiers of freedom, and their efforts have made this country a fitter place to live.  If we think of the Revolution as an ongoing process rather than a sanitized relic to be cloaked by myth, that movement can still serve as a positive force in American society and its professed principles remain worthy of celebration.^[174]

All communities divide themselves into the few and the many.  The first are the rich and well born, the other the mass of the people.  The voice of the people has been said to be the voice of God; and however generally this maxim has been quoted and believed, it is not true in fact.  The people are turbulent and changing; they seldom judge or determine right.  Give therefore to the first class a distinct, permanent share in the government. They will check the unsteadiness of the second, and as they cannot receive any advantage by a change, they therefore will ever maintain good government.  Can a democratic assembly, who annually revolve in the mass of the people, be supposed steadily to pursue the public good?  Nothing but a permanent body can check the imprudence of democracy.^[175]

The global history of the Declaration of Independence is a story of the spread of sovereignty and the creation of states more than it is a narrative of the diffusion and reception of ideas of individual rights.  The far flung fortunes of the Declaration remind us that independence and popular sovereignty usually accompanied each other, but also that there was no necessary connection between them: an independent Mexico became an empire under a monarchy between 1821 and 1823, Brazil’s independence was proclaimed by its emperor, Dom Pedro II in 1822, and . . . Ian Smith’s Rhodesian government threw off parliamentary authority while professing loyalty to the British Crown.^[176]

IV.  The vicissitudes of war

SIR:  This is to inform you are this evening drafted as one of the Continental men to go to General Washington’s headquarters, and you must go or find an able-bodied man in your Room, or pay a fine of twenty pounds in law, money in twenty-four hours.  —  [Signed] Samuel Clark, Capt.

War in the North

During the whole night, at intervals of a quarter or half an hour, the enemy would let off all their pieces, and . . . in spite of all our precautions, cut up some of us. . . . We had a thirty-two pound cannon in the fort, but had not a single shot for it. . . . When the firing had in some measure subsided and I could look about me, I found the fort exhibited a picture of desolation.  The whole are of the fort was as completely ploughed as a field.  The buildings of every kind hanging in broken fragments, and the guns dismounted, and how many of the garrison sent to the world of spirits, I knew not.  If ever destruction was complete, it was here.

The red coat was standard for British soldiers, while German auxiliaries and some Loyalist units had blue or green coats (AmericanRevolution.org)

The British army caused enormous disruptions wherever it went.  People fled as it approached, fearful of armed confrontation or military rule.  The population of New York City dropped from 21,000 to 5,000 when the British took over; Boston went from over 15,000 to 3,500.  Thousands of refugees had to find other places to live and some means of employment, while those who remained, like most of the residents of Queens, had to adjust to military occupation.  The British, like the Americans, demanded oaths of allegiance, reasoning that anybody who signed would have a vested stake in British victory.

We were absolutely, literally starved.  I do solemnly declare that I did not put a single morsel of victuals in my mouth for four days and as many nights, except a little black birch bark which I gnawed off a stick of wood, if that can be called victuals.  I saw several of the men roast their old shoes and eat them, and I was afterwards informed by one of the officers’ waiters, that some of the officers killed and ate a favorite little dog.

Beginning in early 1779 and continuing through 1783, two years after the British surrender at Yorktown, dozens of minor mutinies plagued the Continental Army.  Most followed a similar pattern:  hungry and frustrated men who had received no pay made a show of force, gained the attention of officers or politicians who offered them promises, and then backed off.  Joseph Plumb Martin, still a private, defiantly joined with the protesters in January of 1779, growing weary of “our old Continental line of starving and freezing.”  Martin and his colleagues “concluded that we could not or would not bear it any longer.  They decided to parade in front of their huts with no orders, a clear violation of military rule.  The officers “endeavored to soothe the Yankee temper . . . with an abundance of fair promises,” but “hunger was not to be so easily pacified.”  Although the protesters disbanded, they harassed the officers through the night by the firing of arms, “making void the law.”  Rations improved slightly over the next few days, “but it soon became an old story and the old system commenced again as regular as fair weather to foul.”

The men were so exasperated beyond endurance; they could not stand it any longer.  They saw no alternative but to starve to death, or break up the army, give all up and go home.  This was a hard matter for the soldiers to think upon.  They were truly patriotic, they loved their country, and they had already suffered everything short of death in its cause; and now after such extreme hardships to give up all was too much, but to starve to death was too much also.  What was to be done?  Here was the army starved and naked, and there their country sitting still and expecting the army to do notable things while fainting from sheer starvation.

War in the South

Charleston, South Carolina

Historic marker (front and back)

Having failed to advance into the interior of the northern or middle states, the British commanders turned their attention to the South, where they expected to receive support from local loyalists – reportedly more numerous than in New England – and perhaps even from slaves, who had every reason to fight against their Whig masters.  In 1776 the British had tried to take Charleston, but they had been repelled by patriots who built a fort with palmetto logs capable of absorbing the force of heavy artillery.  This time, in 1778, the British determined to launch a much heavier assault, more like their move against New York.  At the end of year they took Savanna, the southernmost rebel port.  During the following year they advanced into the interior of Georgia and South Carolina, and by the spring of 1780 a force of 10,000 men, ninety transport ships, and fourteen war ships combined to force the capitulation of Charleston, the only major city in the South.  Over 5,000 Americans laid down their arms.

The dead and wounded lay scattered in every direction over the field; numbers lay stretched cold and lifeless; some were yet struggling in the agonies of death, while here and there lay others, faint with the loss of blood, almost famished for water, and begging for assistance.  The scene before me, I could not reconcile with my feelings. . . . Well, thought I, if this be the fate of war, I would willingly be excused.  I devised several plans to get out of the scrape, but . . . the thing had gone too far, and there was no safety in retreating.

By this time, the right and left had gained the top of the cliff; the enemy was completely hemmed in on all sides, and no chance of escaping – a besides, their leader had fallen.  They soon threw down their arms and surrendered.  After the fight was over, the situation of the poor Tories appeared to be really pitiable; the dead lay in heaps on all sides, while the groans of the wounded were heard in every direction.  I could not help turning away from the scene before me, with horror, and though exulting in victory, could not refrain from shedding tears.  — “Great God!” said I, “Is this the fate of mortals, or was it for this cause that man was brought into the world?”

Next morning, which was Sunday, the scene became really distressing; the wives and children of the poor Tories came in, in great numbers.  Their husbands, fathers, and brothers, lay dead in heaps, while others lay wounded or dying; a melancholy sight indeed! While numbers of the survivors were doomed to abide the sentence of a court martial, and several were actually hanged.  As regard the numbers that fell, authors have disagreed; yet none have overrated the number.  I know our estimate at the time was something over three hundred.

Such scenes of desolation, bloodshed and deliberate murder I never was a witness to before!  Wherever you turn the weeping widow and fatherless child pour out their melancholy tales to wound the feeling of humanity.  The two opposite principles of whiggism and toryism have set the people of this country to cutting each other’s throats, and scarce a day passes but some poor deluded tory is put to death at this door.  For the want of civil government the bands of society are totally disunited, and the people, but copying the manners of the British, have become perfectly savage.^[182]

Gen. Cornwallis surrenders his sword to Gen. Washington, memorialized in a sculpture by Charles O’Hara on the facade of the Capitol Building in Washington (Wikipedia)

By the fall of 1781, 7,000 British soldiers found themselves trapped inside of Yorktown by almost 17,000 French and Americans, including Joseph Plumb Martin.  Deprived of food, shelled by heavy artillery, and weakened by an outbreak of smallpox within their ranks, the British could be saved only by relief from the sea, but twenty-four French battleships under the command of the Comte de Grasse delivered the coup de grace by turning away the British navy.  On October 17, Lord Cornwallis ordered a white flag to be raised, and the following day the defeated soldiers lay down their arms.  Although the British maintained control of New York, Charleston, and a handful of other seaports, the ruling politicians back in London, threatened at home by France and Spain, soon abandoned their efforts to reestablish control over the American colonies.

Pacifists and the war

I ________ do Swear (of affirm) that I renounce & refuse all Allegiance to George the Third King of Great Britain his Heirs & Successors; and that I will be faithful & bear true Allegiance to the Common Wealth of Pennsylvania as a free & independent State.

Painting of a Quaker Meeting by an unknown British artist, circa 1790 (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston)

When to comply and when to resist – this fundamental question had to be faced not only by individuals but by communities.  Most of the pacifistic sects experienced internal dissension over where to draw the line.  The vast majority of Moravians chose not to submit.  “The Test Act,” claimed one of the brethren, “is a restraint upon conscience; were I to abjure the King through fear, contrary to the promptings of my heart, I should suffer from a bad conscience [and] bear false witness against myself.”  When the Moravians and many others failed to step forward to declare their allegiance, the assembly clamped down.  Any white male aged sixteen or over who appeared “hostile to the freedom and independence of the country” could be summoned to appear before a Justice to take the oath and, should he refuse, he was to be imprisoned.

all their said personal estate, even their beds, bedding, linen, Bibles and books, were taken from them and sold by the Sheriff to the amount of about forty thousand pounds.  That from some of them all their provisions were taken and even not a morsel of bread left them for their children.  That as all their iron stoves were taken from them, . . . they are deprived of every means of keeping their children warm in the approaching winter, especially at nights, being obliged to lie on the floor without any beds; that some of the men’s wives were pregnant and near the time of deliverance, which makes their case the more distressing.

African Americans and the war

Uniform of British Ethiopian Regiment during the war (National Park Service)

The runaways, of course, expected to be liberated once they reached the British army.  Like Lord Dunmore before him, General Henry Clinton issued a proclamation:  “every NEGRO who shall desert the Rebel Standard” would enjoy the “full security to follow within these Lines, any Occupation which he shall think proper.”  Unlike Dunmore, however, Clinton stopped short of proclaiming emancipation; he was trying to lure slaves without giving too much offense to white slaveowners.  But neither masters nor slaves read the fine print.  Whites took offense in any case, while slaves once again assumed that if they made it to the British they would be free.

Patriot “Soldiers at the Siege of Yorktown,” by Jean-Baptiste-Antoine DeVerger, 1781 (Library of Congress). De Verger was a French artist who fought in the American Revolution in a French regiment and kept an illustrated journal. L-R: a Black soldier of the First Rhode Island Regiment, a New England militiaman, a frontier rifleman, and a French officer.

By the end of the year, however, Washington suddenly reversed this decision.  During the final two months of 1775, the dynamics of the war had changed significantly in two important respects:  only half the expected number of American soldiers had volunteered to reenlist, and Lord Dunmore had issued his proclamation offering freedom to any slaves who joined the British service.  Facing a shortage of manpower, and fearing that Dunmore’s proclamation would influence slaves in the North as well as the South, Washington acted expediently to rescind his exclusion of African Americans.  On January 16, 1776, Congress reluctantly resolved “that the free negroes who have served faithfully in the army at Cambridge, may be re-inlisted therein, but no others.”

Women and the war

1909 memorial dedicated to Margaret Corbin and her compatriots in Fort Tryon Park, Manhattan (Wikipedia)

Camp followers were not the only women making military contributions.  Female civilians gave aid in many ways.  They hid men and weapons.  They moved provisions through hostile territory.  They spied, spreading valuable information which they overheard from the British officers who had taken over their homes.  They carried messages, moving about freely through a countryside sometimes dominated by the enemy.  A few women fought on the battlefields.  The most famous was Deborah Sampson, alias Robert Shurtless, who enlisted in the army disguised as a male.  Sampson served for at least seventeen months before her identity was discovered.  Margaret Corbin fought alongside her husband at Fort Washington on November 15, 1776; when he fell, she is said to have continued to fire his two-gun battery.  Because she was wounded in the same battle, Corbin received the first U.S. Army pension awarded to a woman for a disability.

Peace and the difficulty of reconciliation

You are hereby notified to Depart this County by the first day of September [1783], as you are considered an Enemy to your Country – therefor take your all, and your Family, and follow your Friends to that Country that the King, your Master, has provided for those of your Character; or Else you may expect the Blood of your injured Country will fall on your head.^[185]

V.  The global context of the War for Independence

1782 British cartoon: The British Lion engaging four powers – top to bottom, Spain, France, America (the snake) and Netherlands (British Museum collection)

The United States could not have won its war for independence without global allies.  Not only did France, Spain, and the Netherlands (Dutch) provide military and financial aid to the thirteen rebellious colonies, but all three fought Great Britain in the other parts of the world, diverting British military resources from the North American theater.  France declared war on Great Britain in July 1778 and Spain did so in June 1779.  In December 1780, Great Britain declared war on the Netherlands after Dutch merchants continued to sell war materiel to the Americans and the French.

Battle of the Virginia Capes, Sept. 5, 1781, in which a French fleet of warships prevented a British fleet from resupplying Cornwallis at Yorktown (painting, US Navy Naval History and Heritage Command)

In the decisive Battle of Yorktown (Virginia) in September-October 1781, French troops outnumbered American troops and the French fleet secured the American-French victory from the sea.  The battle pitted 10,800 French troops under the command of Comte de Rochambeau and 9,000 American troops under General Washington against 8,000 British and German troops under the command of General Charles Cornwallis.  The French and American troops surrounded Cornwallis’s army and bombed them into submission.  At sea, twenty-nine French warships under Admiral Comte de Grasse prevented a British fleet commanded by Admiral Thomas Graves from resupplying or evacuating the British and German troops.  Following this defeat, British leaders all but abandoned the war in America, sending ships and troops to the West Indies to shore up other parts of the British empire.

Imperial priorities

British Empire in the Caribbean (Maproom)

The Caribbean colonies of Great Britain – Jamaica, Barbados, Grenada, St. Vincent, Dominica, the Bahamas, Turks & Caicos, and the Leeward Islands (Antigua, St. Kitts, Nevis, and Montserrat) – did not join the thirteen rebellious colonies of North America, mainly because the white slave-owning elites who ruled these colonies needed the British army to deter and quell slave rebellions.  They were quite willing to pay stamp taxes and sugar duties in exchange for this service.  In mid-July 1776, a planned insurrection by enslaved people in Jamaica was uncovered and thwarted.  The plot involved an estimated 8,600 enslaved individuals on forty estates.  Six Black leaders were quickly tried and hanged to death.

Map of the Transatlantic Slave Trade (National Endowment for the Humanities)

Capitalism and imperialism thrived on the transatlantic slave trade.  The British, French, Dutch, and Portuguese all competed with each other for monopoly trade rights in the coastal slave-trading posts of West Africa.  The number of kidnapped and enslaved Africans imported into the Americas during the 18th century is estimated at 5.2 million people.^[188]  With the founding of the Royal African Company in 1660, Great Britain took the lead in shipping enslaved Africans across the Atlantic to the Caribbean and North America.  The state and city of New York were named after the head of this slave trading company, James Stuart, the Duke of York.

King Louis XVI (1780 portrait by Joseph-Siffred Duplessis; Palace of Versailles)

The French court, under Louis XVI, accepted the loss of its North American empire (from Canada to Louisiana) in the Paris Peace Treaty of 1763, but continued to compete with Great Britain for colonial possessions and trade rights in the Caribbean and India.  Beginning in 1778, the French fleet under Admiral d’Estaing captured the British colonies of Dominica, Grenada, St. Vincent, Montserrat, Tobago, St. Kitts, and Turks and Caicos.  The French were most intent on keeping their highly profitable colony of Saint-Domingue (Haiti), where hundreds of thousands of enslaved people grew sugar cane and coffee.^[189]

British attack on the Dutch island of St. Eustache (1781 painting by Gestochen von Johann Baptist Bergmüller; Library of Congress)

Admiral Rodney’s fleet was later sent to the Caribbean, where it attacked the Dutch island of St. Eustatius on February 3, 1781.  With fifteen warships and a landing force of 3,000 soldiers, the invasion took less than an hour.  British soldiers ransacked some 600 warehouses and captured fifty American trade vessels.  Sir Rodney subsequently attacked other Dutch supply centers on the islands of Surinam and Curacao.  He missed a chance to confront Admiral de Grasse’s French fleet on its way to the Chesapeake – where American and French forces would defeat British General Cornwallis in October 1781 – which could have altered the outcome of the North American war.  Six months later, the two fleets clashed near the French island colony of Guadeloupe.  The British came out victorious in this naval Battle of the Saintes.  De Grasse, the hero of Yorktown, was captured along with his flagship, Ville de Paris, and thousands of sailors.

U.S. imperial ambitions

Esek Hopkins’ statue in Providence, Rhode Island. Because of Hopkins’ role as captain of the slave ship Sally, community groups successfully pushed to remove his name from a nearby public middle school. (Wikipedia)

At the time Franklin wrote this, U.S. forces were already engaged in wider operations.  In addition to the failed invasion of Canada in late 1775, a U.S. force of 2,500 men under Major Generals Charles Lee and Robert Howe set out to capture St. Augustine in East Florida in August 1776.  The attempt failed, as did two more attempts during the war.  On March 3, 1776, Commodore Esek Hopkins, commander-in-chief of the newly formed Continental Navy, led 200 marines and fifty sailors in an assault on New Providence Island.  The Americans held the island for two weeks before leaving with a stash of cannons and gunpowder, and taking prisoner the governor of the Bahamas, Montfort Browne.  In October 1776, Silas Deane, the U.S. envoy to France, urged Congress to authorize U.S. military and naval forces to take control of the Bahama islands and Bermuda (located 650 miles east of North Carolina).  A majority of the delegates rejected the idea, as resources for the war were already strained to the breaking point.

Relations with Native American nations

Proclamation of 1763 line, restricting western settlement (Library of Congress)

When the French gave up their fight against the British in 1763, ending the French & Indian War, they did so without consulting their Native American allies.  Ottawa war chief Pontiac chose to continue the fight, organizing a six-month siege of Fort Detroit.  Lacking the money and troops to continue the war, the British Crown issued the Proclamation of 1763, drawing a boundary line along the ridge of the Appalachian Mountains that forbade colonial settlements west of it.  The proclamation appeased Native warriors and enraged would-be American settlers – another cause for rebellion against British rule.  The proclamation was repeatedly violated by defiant settlers, trappers, and land speculators.  This, in turn, led to anxious appeals by Native leaders to British authorities.

Molly Brant – Canadian stamp depicting the three faces Molly Brant – Iroquois, Loyalist, and European (Niagara-on-the-lake Museum)

Mohawk leader Molly Brant and her brother Joseph Brant played leading roles in persuading northern tribes and factions to resist American advances.  By the start of 1778, the British could claim allies among the Delaware, Mingo, Shawnee, Ottawa, Wyandot, Ojibwe, Creek, Chickasaw, Choctaw, and Cherokee, as well as four tribes of the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) Confederacy – Mohawk, Cayuga, Onondaga, and Seneca.  A smaller number of tribes and factions were aligned with the United States, including the Catawba, Stockbridge, Oneida, and Tuscarora.

Throughout the war, patriot settlers and soldiers often exceeded their Native foes in the use of terror tactics, tearing down longhouses and plundering graves. . . . Patriots destroyed Indigenous villages every chance they got and burned their crops so that ordinary families starved in great numbers. . . . Consider, for instance, the 1779 Sullivan Campaign, an assault on the Haudenosaunee organized personally by General Washington.  Its goal, he explained, was “to carry the war into the heart of the country of the Six Nations, to cut off their settlements, destroy their next year’s crops, and do them every other mischief.”  Washington sent four thousand Continental Army soldiers to wage that campaign, placing them under the command of Major General John Sullivan. . . . Over six weeks that summer, they would cut a swath through Iroquoia, destroying forty Native settlements spread across the Finger Lakes, killing cattle, chopping down orchards, and burning more than five thousand tons of corn.^[195]

Costs of war

Monument in Fort Greene Park, Brooklyn, to the thousands who died on prisoner “zombie” ships in the harbor during the war (author’s photos)

The number of civilians who died as a result of the war was likely in the tens of thousands, which included many African Americans who escaped to British lines only to succumb to contagious diseases.  Disease was also the major cause of death for between 8,500 and 18,000 American prisoners of war.  Most of these men were incarcerated on de-masted British “zombie” ships anchored in the New York and Charleston harbors.  More than 1,000 captured American privateers were held at the Mill Prison in southern England.  Under the Treason Act passed by Parliament in March 1777, American prisoners were to be treated as traitors rather than prisoners-of-war, and thus could be held indefinitely.^[199]  Relatively few were exchanged for British prisoners or paroled (releasing a captured soldier on condition that he promise not to fight or perform military duties against the captors).

If American soldiers and sailors were going to suffer on British prison ships, then British prisoners would endure the same fate. Five of the 13 states established floating prisons on which the conditions were every bit as bad as aboard British ships. Compounding the problem, Congress refused to exchange POWs, and after the victories at Saratoga and Yorktown, the Revolutionaries possessed thousands of prisoners who the British were eager to get back. Under intense pressure from furious constituents, Congress instead ordered the men to be confined in ramshackle barracks and fed bare subsistence rations. The mortality of British soldiers captured at Yorktown exceeded 30 percent – higher than that of Union POWs at the Civil War’s infamous Andersonville Prison.^[201]

VI.  E Pluribus Unum:  What unites the American people?

First great seal of the United States (National Archives)

On July 4, 1776, just a few hours after adopting the Declaration of Independence, the Continental Congress appointed a committee made up of Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and John Adams to design a seal for the United States.  It took six years and three more committees before Congress officially adopted a seal in June 1782.  The design features a bald eagle holding an olive branch in one talon and thirteen arrows in the other.  Displayed across the eagle’s breast are thirteen vertical red and white stripes, representing the states, against a background of blue, signifying virtue.  In the eagle’s beak is a scroll inscribed with the Latin phrase, E Pluribus Unum, meaning “out of many, one.”^[204]

Mercy Otis Warren (portrait by John Singleton Copley, 1763, Museum of Fine Art Boston)

In Mercy Otis Warren’s account of the American Revolution, published in 1805, Henry Laurens, the President of the Provincial Congress of South Carolina in 1775-1776, is described as having “uniform virtue and independence of spirit . . . conspicuously displayed.”  The fact that Laurens grew rich from the sale of kidnapped and enslaved Africans is not mentioned, nor his role in the South Carolina militia’s attack on a slave refuge on Sullivan’s Island in December 1775.  Patriots in general, “both the statesman and peasant,” are said to have discovered in themselves “a most unconquerable magnanimity of spirit. . . . Americans were everywhere decisive in council and determined in action.  There appeared that kind of enthusiasm which sets danger at defiance and impels the manly arm to resist, until the warm current that plays round the heart, is poured out as a libation of the shrine of freedom.”^[210]

Dr. David Ramsay (portrait by Rembrandt Peale, 1796; Independence National Historical Park, Philadelphia)

Another Patriot historian, David Ramsay, was more circumspect about the effects of the rebellion on the nation.  “War never fails to injure the morals of the people engaged in it,” he writes.  “The American war, in particular, had an unhappy influence of this kind.  Being begun without funds or regular establishments, it could not be carried on without violating private rights; and in its progress, it involved a necessity for breaking solemn promises, and plighted public faith.”  He goes on to list the debilitating consequences of the war, including a decline in economic prosperity, civil liberties, and public order, and “public worship of the Deity.”  The overthrow of an established government “unhinges many of those principles, which bind individuals to each other.  A long time, and much prudence, will be necessary to reproduce a spirit of union and that reverence for the government, without which society is a rope of sand.”^[214]  Ramsay, from South Carolina, served as a surgeon in the Continental Army and after the war, was elected as delegate to the Continental Congress  under the Articles of Confederation.  His book, The History of the American Revolution, in Two Volumes, was published in Philadelphia in 1789.

Political society

James Wilson (portrait by Jean Pierre Henri Elouis, 1792; Smithsonian American Art Museum)

The Declaration of Independence declared that the “pursuit of happiness” was the inalienable right of all Americans (white men), but it was not clear if this meant individual happiness or collective happiness, the latter implying the pursuit of the common good, shared benefits, and the well-being of all.  James Wilson, one of the architects of the Constitution and a Supreme Court justice, argued for the latter interpretation, writing that “the happiness of the society is the first law of every government.”^[216]  This view was explicitly stated in the Massachusetts Constitution of 1780:  “Government is instituted for the common good; for the protection, safety, prosperity and happiness of the people; and not for the profit, honor, or private interest of any one man, family, or class of men.” The authors of the Massachusetts Constitution nonetheless deemed their statement of principle inadequate to secure the common good, and thus they instructed parishes and precincts “to make suitable provision . . . for the support and maintenance of public protestant teachers of piety, religion and morality.”^[217]

An 1884 illustration by Howard Pyle from Harper’s Magazine, “Shays’ mob in possession of a court-house” (New York Public Library)

One reason for discarding the Articles of Confederation was a perceived need to maintain order amid a severe economic downturn in the 1780s.  The downturn was due in large part to the United States losing its lucrative trade with the British Caribbean colonies and losing access to the rich North Atlantic fisheries, both resulting from the break with Great Britain.  With federal and state governments deeply in debt, some state governments raised land taxes to gain revenue.  Massachusetts, for one, raised its land taxes by more than 60 percent between 1783 and 1786.  The response of cash-poor farmers in 1786 was to form armed groups and stand in front of courthouses in order to prevent judges from holding court and thus seizing their farms.  Daniel Shays, a former captain in the Revolutionary War and the reputed leader of this farmers’ rebellion, was initially charged with treason and sentenced to death but later received a full pardon.^[221]  The new Constitution empowered the president to suppress such rebellions.  When the Whiskey Rebellion broke out in western Pennsylvania in July 1794, sparked by a federal tax on whiskey, President Washington assembled a force of 13,000 militiamen to march into the region and arrest rebel leaders.  Two were convicted of treason but later pardoned by the president.^[222]

George Washington’s Farewell Address, 1796

George Washington (portrait by Gilbert Stuart, 1797; Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art)

On September 17, 1796, less than three weeks before national elections, President George Washington issued his “Farewell Address to the People of the United States.”  Written with the assistance of Alexander Hamilton and James Madison, the address earnestly appealed for national unity amid growing factionalism, offered advice on the conduct of U.S. foreign policy, and announced that the president would not seek a third term.  The address was published two days later in the Philadelphia Daily American Advertiser and in many other newspapers across the country thereafter.  In the following passage, Washington urges Americans to cherish their national government and their unique American identity:

The unity of government which constitutes you one people is also now dear to you.  It is justly so, for it is a main pillar in the edifice of your real independence, the support of your tranquility at home, your peace abroad; of your safety; of your prosperity; of that very liberty which you so highly prize.  But as it is easy to foresee that, from different causes and from different quarters, much pains will be taken, many artifices employed to weaken in your minds the conviction of this truth; as this is the point in your political fortress against which the batteries of internal and external enemies will be most constantly and actively (though often covertly and insidiously) directed, it is of infinite moment that you should properly estimate the immense value of your national union to your collective and individual happiness . . . . indignantly frowning upon the first dawning of every attempt to alienate any portion of our country from the rest, or to enfeeble the sacred ties which now link together the various parts.

The name of American, which belongs to you in your national capacity, must always exalt the just pride of patriotism more than any appellation derived from local discriminations.  With slight shades of difference, you have the same religion, manners, habits, and political principles.  You have in a common cause fought and triumphed together; the independence and liberty you possess are the work of joint counsels, and joint efforts of common dangers, sufferings, and successes.

Silhouette of Ona Judge who escaped from enslavement in the Washington household in Philadelphia in May 1796 and was pursued by Washington’s agents but never caught (Mount Vernon)

During the first two decades of the nation’s history, northern states either eliminated slavery or enacted gradual abolition laws while southern states resisted this reform.  The growing divide pitted a conservative form of national unity, in keeping with the founders’ acceptance of the contradiction between the ideal of liberty and the practice of slavery, against a progressive form of national unity that embraced the gradual abolition of slavery, toward realizing the founding principles of “created equal,” liberty, and “consent of the governed.”

Observe good faith and justice towards all nations; cultivate peace and harmony with all.  Religion and morality enjoin this conduct; and can it be, that good policy does not equally enjoin it?  It will be worthy of a free, enlightened, and at no distant period, a great nation, to give to mankind the magnanimous and too novel example of a people always guided by an exalted justice and benevolence. . . .

The great rule of conduct for us in regard to foreign nations is in extending our commercial relations, to have with them as little political connection as possible.  So far as we have already formed engagements, let them be fulfilled with perfect good faith. Here let us stop.  Europe has a set of primary interests which to us have none; or a very remote relation.  Hence she must be engaged in frequent controversies, the causes of which are essentially foreign to our concerns.  Hence, therefore, it must be unwise in us to implicate ourselves by artificial ties in the ordinary vicissitudes of her politics, or the ordinary combinations and collisions of her friendships or enmities. . . .

*          *          *         *          *

VII.  History, heritage, and progress

Dr. Carter G. Woodson in his library (circa 1948, photo courtesy of the Association for the Study of African American Life and History)

The American Historical Association, which formed in 1884 and was officially chartered by an act of Congress in 1889, allowed women to join, but their status in the profession remained low.  Of the AHA’s 2,519 individual members in 1928, 19 percent were women.  Participation dropped to 15 percent in 1950 and remained at that level until 1973.^[241]  The AHA also permitted African Americans to join, but their status remained even lower – until the 1960s.  Carter G. Woodson, an African American historian who earned his Ph.D. in history from Harvard University in 1912, joined the AHA soon after graduation, but he was prohibited from attending the association’s annual conferences.  Not to be deterred, Woodson went on to found the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History in 1915, The Journal of Negro History in 1916, and Negro History Week in 1926, the precursor to Black History Month.^[242]

Black History Month in February, L-R: Maya Angelou, Frederick Douglass, Rosa Parks, Harriet Tubman, Martin Luther King, Jr. (North Star News, Skokie, IL)

In a sense we’ve come to our nation’s capital to cash a check. When the architects of our Republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir.  This note was a promise that all men – yes, black men as well as white men – would be guaranteed the unalienable rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.^[245]

Women’s History Month in March (Everstand poster)

One of the pet peeves of this rightist movement is that the founders of the nation are not being properly venerated by “woke” Americans.  Why is this important?  Because criticism of the injustices and imperfections of the founders leads to recognition of the need for progressive reform, historically and in the present, and thus to supporting and honoring the reformers.  While it is unlikely that Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Martin Luther King, Jr. will ever supplant George Washington and Thomas Jefferson in the pantheon of American heroes, their addition to this exclusive club opens the way to validating progressive reform and giving credibility to the left (before progressive reforms become mainstream they are often labeled leftist or radical).

Native American Heritage Month in November (Stark Library poster, Canton, Ohio)

MAGA supporters accuse the “left” of besmirching the nation, but their real target is a progressive model of patriotism in which citizens take pride in the nation’s progress toward egalitarian ideals, and recognize themselves as agents of change.

The politics of heritage

As someone who has spent much of my career as a historian working with museums, K-12 teachers and the media to make the history of slavery and race accessible to the general public, I know how important listening to and reading these kinds of histories is. It is easy to correct facts; it is much harder to correct a worldview that consistently ignores and distorts the role of African Americans and race in our history in order to present white people as all powerful and solely in possession to the keys of equality, freedom and democracy.  At least that is the corrective history toward which the 1619 Project is moving, if imperfectly.^[250]

The Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities at Bard College actively explores Critical Race Theory.

Critical Race Theory is a theory taught in university law schools that provides an intellectual framework for examining the systematic ways in which racism has manifested in U.S. institutions.  It was virtually unknown outside of these schools until being publicly attacked.^[251]  The relative obscurity of the theory allowed right-wing groups to define it as they liked.  According to the Heritage Foundation, CRT “does not seek equality or justice.  Instead, it categorizes people.  One’s gender, race, or sexual orientation posits you as the oppressed or an oppressor – a status from which you are freed only when all existing societal structures, which are inherently racist, are overthrown.”^[252]

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis announces the “Stop W.O.K.E. Act” on Dec. 15, 2012 (Tampa Bay Times)

Making sense of this call to arms requires some background.  The so-called “left” in this case is the educational establishment.  The idea that teachers are infiltrating the court system refers to a successful legal challenge by the American Civil Liberties Union, on behalf of Florida’s teachers and students, to the “Stop WOKE Act” (Stop Wrongs Against Our Kids and Employees Act), passed by the Republican-led Florida legislature in April 2022.  The act outlawed the teaching of eight so-called “woke” concepts.  On November 17, 2022, U.S. District Judge Mark Wallace issued a stay that blocked enforcement of the act, stating that the WOKE Act was “antithetical to academic freedom and has cast a leaden pall of orthodoxy over Florida’s state universities.”^[257]  The state appealed the decision, but the 11^th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled against the state.  Judge Britt C. Grant wrote, “Forcing an official government line – in a college classroom of all places – is exactly the ‘pall of orthodoxy’ that the First Amendment will not tolerate.”^[258]

Over the past decade, Americans have witnessed a concerted and widespread effort to rewrite our Nation’s history, replacing objective facts with a distorted narrative driven by ideology rather than truth.  This revisionist movement seeks to undermine the remarkable achievements of the United States by casting its founding principles and historical milestones in a negative light. . . . Rather than fostering unity and a deeper understanding of our shared past, the widespread effort to rewrite history deepens societal divides and fosters a sense of national shame, disregarding the progress America has made and the ideals that continue to inspire millions around the globe.^[260]

The permanent exhibit, “Freedom and Slavery in Making a New Nation” was unveiled in Philadelphia’s historic district on Dec. 15, 2010, home to presidents George Washington and John Adams when Philadelphia was the nation’s capital (AP Photo)

Among the parks targeted by the Trump administration is Philadelphia’s Independence National Historical Park, the site of the Liberty Bell and of George Washington’s residence while serving as president. Displays on the walls at the historic site describe the lives of nine enslaved people who lived in the house with the president between 1790 and 1797. On January 22, 2026, however, the displays were abruptly removed by federal workers on order of President Trump.

Workers remove display panels about slavery at the Presidents’ House Site in Independence National Historical Park, Jan. 22, 2026 (Philadelphia Inquirer)

In March 2026, the administration’s Domestic Policy Council took aim at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of History, alleging that “Museum leadership has explicitly adopted an ideological framework that no longer treats the American story as a shared national inheritance to be taught or celebrated, but as a political instrument to divide, dispirit, and discourage our citizens.”^[264]

Who decides what is taught in classrooms?

From school board meetings to the halls of state legislatures and front-page news, the politicization of the teaching and writing of United States history is reshaping what can and cannot be taught in our nation’s classrooms at all levels.  Rooted in the sentiment that there is only a singular narrative explaining the American experiment, past and present, these efforts seek to take us back to an earlier era characterized by a limited, celebratory vision that ignores the core conflict of our national story: that the United States was founded on radical notions of liberty, freedom, and equality, but built on systems of slavery, exploitation, and exclusion.^[271]

To understand what is being lost, it helps to remember what has been achieved over the past two or three generations in history professionals’ understanding of U.S. history.  Through most of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, this history was largely a chronicle of statesmen, generals, and captains of industry – great white men doing great things, even divinely destined things – strung together into a story of seemingly uncontestable American exceptionalism.  That began to change in the 1960s, when civil rights activists, labor organizers, Indigenous communities, feminists, environmentalists, and a New Left inspired by these social movements pushed historians to ask different questions.  What was it like to be enslaved?  To organize a union?  To be pushed off tribal land?  To fight for the vote?  To survive the closet?  “History from below,” as it came to be called, did not dismiss or discard the founders or presidents. But it did insist that the country’s history has also been composed of, and driven by, ordinary Americans – and should belong to them. . . .

At once pluralistic and professional, the decentralized historical enterprise that has taken shape over the last half-century largely came to share a commitment to democratizing history. It did so not by replacing one mythological grand narrative with another, so much as by widening the range of questions, voices, and sources through which the past can be understood.^[272]

• The ideal of “created equal” has been progressive realized, if not yet in full, over the course of the nation’s history. It has underpinned movements for civil rights and equal rights, economic justice, LGBTQ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer) rights, Native American Tribal sovereignty, and disabled persons rights.  A vision has been put forth – and partly realized – of a multi-cultural, multi-racial society in which tolerance and appreciation of differences reign.

• Progress has been made in realizing the ideal of “consent of the governed,” or democracy, as men and women of all races and without regard to religion have won the right to vote and hold office.

• The Bill of Rights of 1791 was a mark of progress in its time; the political and legal rights stated therein have been incorporated into the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948).

• The idea that governments should serve the “general welfare,” or common good, has taken root in the establishment of free pubic education at the state and local level, and in the creation of social welfare programs such as Social Security at the federal level; President Franklin D. Roosevelt set forth a vision for extending such programs, including guaranteed employment and decent wages, in his 1944 “Economic Bill of Rights” proposals.

• The United States helped found the United Nations in 1945, an agency dedicated to ending “the scourge of war.” The UN also operates numerous programs aimed at helping refugees, reducing global poverty, enforcing basic human rights, and addressing environmental threats, including climate change.  Although U.S. leaders have backed away from the UN in recent decades, the institution remains the best alternative to an imperial world order.

*          *          *         *          *

ENDNOTES

[1] On the peace history framework, see Section One in Roger Peace, “Introduction: The Fifth Estate,” United States Foreign Policy History and Resource Guide website, 2020 (updated May 2026), https://peacehistory-usfp.org/intro.

[2] At least twenty-five historians are quoted in this essay and over fifty are cited in the endnotes.  The author also recognizes the essential work of archivists at the National Archives, Library of Congress, and museums in preserving primary source material and original works of art, and making these available online; and also Wikipedia and Wikimedia for identifying works in the public domain.  Special thanks to readers and contributors to this essay:  Ray Raphael, author of eight books on the American Revolution; Margot Minardi, Professor of History and Humanities, Reed College; Alan Singer, Director, Secondary Education Social Studies Teaching Learning Technology, Hofstra University; Tom Clark, independent social science scholar; and Anne Meisenzahl, educator, poet, and novelist.  In addition to the 47,000+ words in this essay, there are roughly 8,500 words in the endnotes.

[3] “Declaration of Independence: A Transcription,” America’s Founding Documents, National Archives, https://www.archives.gov/founding-docs/declaration-transcript.

[4] Pauline Maier, American Scripture: Making the Declaration of Independence (New York: Vintage Books, 1998), 112; and Thomas Jefferson, A Summary View of the Rights of British America, August 1774, The Avalon Project, Yale Law School, https://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/jeffsumm.asp.  Ten years earlier, James Otis, Jr. published The Rights of the British Colonies Asserted and Proved (Boston, July 1763), a 120-page booklet that addressed many of the same topics as Jefferson’s thesis.  James Otis, “The Rights of the British Colonies Asserted and Proved,” 1763, Online Library of Liberty, https://oll.libertyfund.org/pages/1763-otis-rights-of-british-colonies-asserted-pamphlet.

[5] John Locke, Second Treatise of Government, published in 1690, reprinted by Jonathan Bennett, 2017, https://www.earlymoderntexts.com/assets/pdfs/locke1689a.pdf.  Page references: “a state of equality” (3); “the only lawful basis for government” is “the consent of the people” (Preface); “the consent of any number of free men capable of a majority” (33); “political society . . . preserve the property” (28); and “set up whatever form of government they think fit” (35).

[6] Gordon S. Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution (New York: Vintage Books, 1993), 7.

[7] See Julie Zauzmer Weil, Adrián Blanco Ramos, and Leo Dominguez, “More than 1,800 congressmen once enslaved Black people,” The Washington Post, December 3, 2022.

[8] “Petition to the Massachusetts Legislature (1777),” National Constitution Center, https://constitutioncenter.org/the-constitution/historic-document-library/detail/prince-hall-petition-to-the-massachusetts-legislature; and “Massachusetts Constitution and the Abolition of Slavery,” Mass.gov, https://www.mass.gov/guides/massachusetts-constitution-and-the-abolition-of-slavery.

[9] “Instructions to the Jury in the Quock Walker Case, Commonwealth of Massachusetts v. Nathaniel Jennison (1783),” National Constitution Center, https://constitutioncenter.org/the-constitution/historic-document-library/detail/william-cushing-instructions-to-the-jury-in-the-quock-walker-case-commonwealth-of-massachusetts-v-nathaniel-jennison-1783.

[10] Maier, American Scripture, 198.

[11] “Vermont Constitution – 1777,” Official Vermont Government Website, https://sos.vermont.gov/vsara/learn/constitution/1777-constitution; and “An Act for the Gradual Abolition of Slavery – March 1, 1780,” Pennsylvania Historical & Museum Commission, https://www.phmc.state.pa.us/portal/communities/documents/1776-1865/abolition-slavery.html.

[12] “Slave, Free Black, and White Population, 1780-1830,” University of Maryland, Baltimore County, https://userpages.umbc.edu/~bouton/History407/SlaveStats.htm; and Alan Taylor, The Internal Enemy: Slavery and War in Virginia, 1772-1832 (New York: W. W. Norton, 2013), 36.

[13] Gary B. Nash, The Forgotten Fifth: African Americans in the Age of Revolution (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006), 103.  Lafayette named his son after Washington:  Georges Washington Louis Gilbert de La Fayette.

[14]Taylor, The Internal Enemy, 37.

[15] Nash, The Forgotten Fifth), 76, 87.   The phrase, “in order to form a more perfect Union,” is stated in preamble of the U.S. Constitution.

[16] U.S. Census figures provided in “Free and Slave Populations by State (1790),” https://teachingamericanhistory.org/resource/the-constitutional-convention-free-and-slave-populations-by-state-1790; and “Population by Color and Status: U.S. Slave States, 1860,” https://terpconnect.umd.edu/~sfmiller/population%20statistics,%201860.htm.

[17] Quoted in Jamelle Bouie, “The Supreme Court Doesn’t Own the Constitution,” New York Times (op-ed), June 14, 2026.

[18] Joshua Drasin and Erin Geiger Smith, “New Jersey’s Constitution Allowed Women to Vote in the 1700s,” State Court Report, August 18, 2025, https://statecourtreport.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/new-jerseys-constitution-allowed-women-vote-1700s.

[19] “Declaration of Sentiments,” (Women’s Rights Convention, Seneca Falls, July 19-20, 1848), National Park Service, https://www.nps.gov/wori/learn/historyculture/declaration-of-sentiments.htm.

[20] Political and economic inequality were seen as part of one system by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who wrote in 1754 that the “inequality which prevails in all civilised societies” is “plainly contrary to the law of nature, however defined,” evident in the fact that “the privileged few should gorge themselves with superfluities, while the starving multitude are in want of the bare necessities of life.”  Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Discourse on the Origin of Inequality (1754), translated by G. D. H. Cole, page 47, International Relations and Security Network,  https://www.files.ethz.ch/isn/125494/5019_Rousseau_Discourse_on_the_Origin_of_Inequality.pdf.

[21] Thomas Jefferson, in a letter to John Adams on October 28, 1813, opined that “there is a natural aristocracy among men” based on “virtue and talents.”  This “natural aristocracy” should not be mistaken for the “artificial aristocracy” distinguished by wealth and birth.  The latter, he wrote, “is a mischievous ingredient in government, and provision should be made to prevent it’s ascendancy.”  Luke G. Mayville, “Fear of the Few: John Adams and the Power Elite,” Polity, January 2015, page 12, https://www.academia.edu/11328144/_Fear_of_the_Few_John_Adams_and_the_Power_Elite_Polity_January_2015.

[22] See Madison Hoff, “Many of the Founding Fathers were incredibly wealthy. Here’s a look at some of their fortunes.” Business Insider, July 4, 2020, https://www.businessinsider.com/comparing-wealth-of-each-founding-father-2020-6; and Ray Raphael, “Why Did George Washington Become a Revolutionary?” Journal of the American Revolution, February 16, 2015, https://allthingsliberty.com/2015/02/why-did-george-washington-become-a-revolutionary.

[23] Taylor, The Internal Enemy, 43.  The Virginia legislature abolished entails in 1776 and primogeniture in 1785.  While modestly democratizing land ownership over the course of generations, the division and sale of large estates increased the sorrows of enslaved families, as families were broken up and members were sold with the partial estates.

[24] Thomas Paine, Rights of Man: Being an Answer to Mr. Burke’s Attack on the French Revolution. (London: J. S. Jordan, 1791), https://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/paine-the-rights-of-man-part-i-1791-ed.

[25] Jeffrey G. Williamson and Peter Lindert, “Unequal gains: American growth and inequality since 1700,” VoxEU Column, Centre for Economic Policy Research, June 16, 2016, https://cepr.org/voxeu/columns/unequal-gains-american-growth-and-inequality-1700.  The authors note, “A long steep rise in US inequality took place between 1800 and 1860.”

[26] “Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad Co.,” 118 U.S. 394 (1886), Justia, https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/118/394.

[27] Kim Phillips-Fein, “The Nation’s Founding Creed Has Always Had Its Critics,” New York Times (op-ed), June 14, 2026.  See also, Kim Phillips-Fein, Country of Lords: Neo-Aristocrats, Social Darwinists, Tech Utopians, and the Long Fight against Equality in America (New York: W. W. Norton, 2026).

[28] Williamson and Lindert, “Unequal gains: American growth and inequality since 1700.”

[29] “State of the Union Message to Congress,” January 11, 1944, Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum, http://www.fdrlibrary.marist.edu/archives/address_text.html.

[30] Daniel Mandell, “The Founders Knew Great Wealth inequality Could Destroy Us,” Time Magazine, July 7, 2025, https://time.com/7297269/founders-wealth-inequality-could-destroy.

[31] Some but not all of the wealthy elite in the United States have underwritten the push toward authoritarianism led by President Donald Trump.  See David Schultz, “A Second Bill of Particulars: Donald Trump and the Assault on American Democracy,” Minnesota State Bar Association, November 24, 2025, https://mnbars.org.  On the Supreme Court ruling, see Daniel I. Weiner, “Citizens United, Explained,” Brennan Center for Justice, January 29, 2025, https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/citizens-united-explained.

[32] Mike Baker and Steven Rich, “The Scale of Billionaires’ Campaign Donations is Overwhelming U.S. Politics,” New York Times, May 7, 2026.  See also, Larry M. Bartels, Unequal Democracy: The Political Economy of the New Gilded Age (New York: Princeton University Press, 2008).

[33] On Jefferson and his contradictions, see Annette-Gordon Reed, Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1998).  After Jefferson’s wife, Martha, died, he began a decades-long relationship with Sally Hemings, an enslaved woman who was also the half-sister of his wife (both Martha and Sally had the same father, John Wayles).  Together, Thomas and Sally had six children.  Sally Hemings was just 14-years-old when they began their relationship.

[34] Emma Rothschild, Economic Sentiments: Adam Smith, Condorcet, and the Enlightenment (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001), 6.

[35] France, after losing its valuable sugar-producing colony, forced Haiti to make excessive reparation payments to former slave owners in Haiti, impoverishing the nation.  It took Haiti more than a century to pay off its reparation debts.  The United States did not recognize Haiti as a nation until 1862, and only then because President Abraham Lincoln was considering expelling freed Blacks to Haiti following the Civil War.

[36] Ho Chi Minh, “Vietnam Declaration of Independence (September 2, 1945),” in Marvin E. Gettleman, Jane Franklin, Marilyn B. Young, and H. Bruce Franklin, eds., Vietnam and America: A Documented History (New York: Grove Press, 1995), 26.  See Roger Peace, John Marciano, and Jeremy Kuzmarov, “The Vietnam War,” United States Foreign Policy History and Resource Guide website, 2017 (updated April 2026), https://peacehistory-usfp.org/vietnam-war.

[37] See Lindsey A. O’Rourke, Covert Regime Change: America’s Secret Cold War (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2018); and Roger Peace, “Cold War interventionism, 1945-1990,” United States Foreign Policy History and Resource Guide website, 2019 (updated March 2026), https://peacehistory-usfp.org/cold-war.

[38] “Mossadegh Evokes Liberty In Philadelphia,” The Associated Press, October 22, 1951, reprinted in The Mossadegh Project, May 14, 2012, https://www.mohammadmossadegh.com/news/ap-associated-press/october-22-1951.

[39] “Universal Declaration of Human Rights,” United Nations, https://www.un.org/en/about-us/universal-declaration-of-human-rights.  The political rights quoted are in Articles 17-20.  Included in social rights is the right to free public education for children.  Article 26 also advises that education be “directed to the full development of the human personality and to the strengthening of respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms.  It shall promote understanding, tolerance and friendship among all nations, racial or religious groups, and shall further the activities of the United Nations for the maintenance of peace.”

[40] “’Inequality defines our time’: UN chief delivers hard-hitting Mandela day message,” United Nations News, July 18, 2020, https://news.un.org/en/story/2020/07/1068611; and “Full Statement of the President of Ghana, His Excellency John Dramani Mahama, to the 81st Session of the United Nations General Assembly; New York, 24 September 2026,” https://gadebate.un.org/sites/default/files/gastatements/81/gh_en.pdf.

[41] See John Bellamy Foster, The Ecological Revolution: Making Peace with the Planet (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2009).

[42] Justin du Rivage, Revolution Against Empire: Taxes, Politics, and the Origins of American Independence (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017), 12.  Other historians have suggested that the amount of taxes paid by the British colonists in North America was even less, equivalent to about one shilling per person per year as compared to 26 shillings.  Mark Maloy, “’No Taxation Without Representation’: The Evolution of the Historic Phrase,” American Battlefield Trust, https://www.battlefields.org/learn/articles/no-taxation-without-representation.

[43] “British Reforms and Colonial Resistance (1763-1766),” Virginia Commonwealth University, https://socialwelfare.library.vcu.edu/eras/colonial-postrev/british-reforms-and-colonial-resistance-1763-1766.

[44] Samuel Adams, “Samuel Adams to the Representatives of Boston, May 24, 1764,” in The Writings of Samuel Adams vol I 1764-1769, edited by Harry Alonzo Cushing (G.P. Putnum, 1904) 5; cited in “Samuel Adams,” National Park Service, https://www.nps.gov/people/samuel-adams.htm.

[45] “Fairfax County Resolves, 18 July 1774,” Founders Online, National Archives, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Washington/02-10-02-0080.

[46] Rivage, Revolution Against Empire, 121; and John Adams, “A Dissertation on the Canon and the Feudal Law,” No. 4, 21 October 1765, Papers of John Adams, volume I, Massachusetts Historical Society, https://www.masshist.org/publications/adams-papers/view?id=ADMS-06-01.

[47] The tar and feather treatment was a form of vigilante “justice” in which the victim was stripped down to his or her underwear (males were more often targeted), coated in hot pine tar, covered with feathers, and paraded through town in order to humiliate and intimidate the victim into making public apologies, recanting beliefs, or, in the case of tax collectors, forcing them to resign.  The hot pine tar was exceedingly painful and difficult to remove.

[48] “Benjamin Franklin and the Stamp Act Crisis, 1766,” Digital History, https://www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/disp_textbook.cfm?smtID=3&psid=152; and Rivage, Revolution Against Empire, 18.

[49] H. T. Dickinson, “The Failure of Conciliation: Britain and the American Colonies, 1763-1783, The Kyoto Economic Review, Vol. 79, No. 2 (December 2010), 3-4.  Whigs and Tories were the two major opposing political factions in England starting in the late 17th century.  The Whigs called for a greater role of Parliament in the British government while the Tories defended the prerogatives of the Crown and the Church.  The British colonists of North America did not fit neatly into either category, but those who remained loyal to the British government (Parliament and Crown) were often labeled “Tories” as well as “Loyalists.”

[50] Dickinson, “The Failure of Conciliation,” 10-11, 6, 9.

[51] Dickinson, “The Failure of Conciliation,” 17.  William Blackstone was the author of Commentaries on the Laws of England (1765).

[52] The Declaratory Act was officially titled, “An act for the better securing the dependency of his majesty’s dominions in America upon the crown and parliament of Great Britain.”  “Great Britain: Parliament – The Declaratory Act; March 18, 1766,” The Avalon Project, Yale Law School, https://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/declaratory_act_1766.asp.

[53] Bob Ruppert, “An Economist’s Solution to the War: Adam Smith and the Rebelling Colonies,” Journal of the American Revolution, March 31, 2020, https://allthingsliberty.com/2020/03/an-economists-solution-to-the-war-adam-smith-and-the-rebelling-colonies.

[54] James Otis, Jr., in The Rights of the British Colonies Asserted and Proved (1763), discussed the benefits and deficits of colonial representation in Parliament.  The latter outweighed the former, in his view, as Parliament was seen as too remote to govern the colonies well.

[55] Dickinson, “The Failure of Conciliation,” 10.

[56] Joseph J. Ellis, His Excellency, George Washington (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2004), 88-89.

[57] Just before the American War for Independence, Great Britain took a notable step toward banning slavery within the British Isles.  In the case of Somerset v. Stewart in June 1772, Chief Justice William Mansfield declared that chattel slavery had no basis in English common law and thus a master could not deport a slave against his or her will.  While narrow in scope, the judgment effectively ended slavery within the British Isles and encouraged movements to abolish the transatlantic slave trade and slavery in British colonies.

[58] “Paul Revere’s engraving of the Boston Massacre, 1770,” The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, https://www.gilderlehrman.org/history-resources/spotlight-primary-source/paul-reveres-engraving-boston-massacre-1770.  The engraving of the “Boston Massacre” by Paul Revere, a silversmith and prominent member of the Sons of Liberty, was copied from a sketch by a young artist named Henry Pelham.

[59] “Boston Massacre Trial,” National Park Service, https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/boston-massacre-trial.htm.

[60] Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), 118.

[61] “The Philadelphia Resolutions; October 16, 1773,” The Avalon Project, Yale Law School, https://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/phil_res_1773.asp.

[62] Mary Beth Norton, 1774: The Long Year of Revolution (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2020), 7.

[63] See Norton, 1774, Chapter One; and “American Revolution in Massachusetts: 1773: The Boston Tea Party,” Boston Public Library, https://guides.bpl.org/c.php?g=800717&p=10389855.

[64] “John Adams diary 19:  1773. DECR. 17TH,” Massachusetts Historical Society, https://www.masshist.org/digitaladams/archive/doc?id=D19&bc=%2Fdigitaladams%2Farchive%2Fbrowse%2Fdiaries_by_number.php.

[65] Norton, 1774, 54.

[66] The Massachusetts Gazette; and the Boston Post-Boy and Advertiser View, January 31-February 7, 1774, page 2, Massachusetts History Society Collections Online, https://www.masshist.org/database/viewer.php?item_id=410&mode=large&img_step=1&pid=2&br=1#page1.

[67] Norton, 1774, 34-35 and 36-37.

[68] Norton, 1774, 53-54.

[69] Letter from Benjamin Franklin, in London, to Thomas Cushing, Samuel Adams, John Hancock, and William Phillips, dated February 2, 1774, in “Benjamin Franklin’s Views on The Boston Tea Party,” Boston Tea Party: A Revolutionary Experience, https://www.bostonteapartyship.com/tea-blog/benjamin-franklins-views-on-the-boston-tea-party.

[70] Parliament also passed the Quebec Act of 1774, which transferred control over the Ohio River Valley to the Quebec province and also guaranteed religious freedom and legal status for French Catholics (resented by many Protestants).  This is sometimes included in the Coercive Acts, but it was less of a direct punishment than a transfer of power to a more loyal administrative entity in Quebec.

[71] Letter from John Adams to James Warren, April 9, 1774, in John Adams Papers, 2:83, quoted in Norton, 1774, 77.

[72] Joseph J. Ellis, The Cause: The American Revolution and Its Discontents, 1773-1783 (New York: Liveright Publishing, 2021), 21.

[73] Norton, 1774, 81-82.

[74] William Franklin to Benjamin Franklin, July 3, 1774, quoted in H. W. Brands, Our First Civil War: Patriots and Loyalists in the American Revolution (New York: Anchor Books, 2021), 228.

[75] Norton, 1774, 96.

[76] “George Washington and Slavery,” George Washington’s Mount Vernon, https://www.mountvernon.org/education/for-teachers/lessonplans/civic-learning/washington-s-complex-views-on-slavery/timeline-george-washington-s-complex-views-on-slavery.

[77] Jefferson, A Summary View of the Rights of British America.

[78] Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, xiii.

[79] James Wilson, “Considerations on the Nature and Extent of the Legislative Authority of the British Parliament,” 1774 [1768], https://wisc.pb.unizin.org/ps601/chapter/james-wilson-considerations-on-the-nature-and-extent-of-the-legislative-authority.  Wilson had written a draft of the essay six years (1768), but did not publish it.

[80] Thomas Jefferson, A Summary View of the Rights of British America.

[81] “King George III to Lord North, September 11, 1774,” Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/exhibitions/two-georges/about-this-exhibition/british-beginnings/the-stamp-act-and-the-start-of-resistance/the-dye-is-now-cast.

[82] Quoted in Ray Raphael, A People’s History of the American Revolution (New York: New Press, 2001; 2016), 40.

[83] Raphael, A People’s History of the American Revolution, 45.  Black powder, which was made from saltpeter (potassium nitrate), charcoal, and sulfur, was needed to fire muskets and rifles.  It was highly combustible and thus required storage in a secure building, or magazine, to prevent accidental explosions.  Muskets as compared to rifles had smooth bores rather than spiraled bores, loaded more quickly (it took 15-20 seconds versus 1-2 minutes to ram a ball down the barrel), could be fitted with bayonets, and were less accurate than rifles.  Because of the latter, the British Army lined up its soldiers in two formations, firing volleys one after the other to overwhelm an enemy.  More accurate rifles were used to pick off the enemy from a longer distance.  Cannons required a small crew to load and fire.  A paper bag of black powder was pushed down the barrel, followed by either a solid iron ball, grapeshot, or a canister of small lead or iron balls.

[84] “Declaration and Resolves of the First Continental Congress, October 14, 1774,” American Battlefield Trust, https://www.battlefields.org/learn/primary-sources/declaration-and-resolves-first-continental-congress.

[85] Holger Hoock, Scars of Independence: America’s Violent Birth (New York: Crown, 2017), 18.

[86] Hoock, Scars of Independence, 31-32.  See also Gregg Frazier, God against the Revolution: The Loyalist Clergy’s Case against the American Revolution (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2018).

[87] Thomas B. Allen, Tories: Fighting for the King in America’s First Civil War (New York: HarperCollins, 2010), 30-31.

[88]Allen, Tories, 25-26.

[89] Allen, Tories, 36-37; and Bill Daley, “Timothy Ruggles – The Rise and Fall of a Massachusetts Loyalist,” Sandwich Historical Commission, 2021, https://sandwichhistory.org/timothy-ruggles-the-rise-and-fall-of-a-massachusetts-loyalist..

[90] Kimberly Nath, The Loyalist Experience and Aftermath in Revolutionary Philadelphia (Brookline, MA: Brookline Books, 2026), 52.  On the Loyalist diaspora, see Maya Jasanoff, Liberty’s Exiles: American Loyalists in the Revolutionary World (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2011).  See also, John Ferling, The Loyalist Mind: Joseph Galloway and the American Revolution (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1977).

[91] “Pacifists’ Appeals in the American Revolution,” America in Class, https://americainclass.org/sources/makingrevolution/rebellion/text5/religiouspacifists.pdf.

[92] “Resolves of the New York Sons of Liberty, December 15, 1773,” Teaching American History, https://teachingamericanhistory.org/document/resolves-of-the-new-york-sons-of-liberty.

[93] Claire Morgan, “Bristol Lambee,” Voices of the American Revolution,” https://www.hnn.us/article/declaring-revolution.  Some Sons of Liberty did see the light.

[94] Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, 242-44.

[95] Steve Fithian, “Slavery in Colonial Connecticut: From Indigenous Captivity to Gradual Emancipation,” Otis Library, February 1, 2022, https://otislibrarynorwich.org/2022/02/01/slavery-in-colonial-connecticut-from-indigenous-captivity-to-gradual-emancipation.

[96] Allen, Tories, 30-31.

[97] Thomas F. Kehr, “The Raid on Fort William and Mary in 1774,” New Hampshire Sons of the American Revolution, June 2012, https://nhsar.org/the-raid-on-fort-william-and-mary-in-1774.

[98] “Plan offered by the Earl of Chatham, to the House of Lords, entitled, A provisional act, for settling the troubles in America, and for asserting the supreme legislative authority and superintending power of Great Britain over the colonies: which was rejected, and not suffered to lie upon the table” (February 1, 1775), Internet Archive, https://archive.org/details/cihm_20498/page/n12/mode/2up.

[99] George H. Nash, III, “From Radicalism to Revolution: The Political Career of Josiah Quincy, Jr.,” American Antiquarian Society, https://www.americanantiquarian.org/proceedings/44497984.pdf, page 281.

[100] Dickinson, “The Failure of Conciliation,” 14; and “Conciliatory Resolution,” Grokipedia, https://grokipedia.com/page/conciliatory_resolution.

[101] Brands, Our First Civil War, 158.

[102] Allen, Tories, 51.

[103] Lexington and Concord,” American Battlefield Trust, https://www.battlefields.org/learn/revolutionary-war/battles/lexington-and-concord.

[104] Hoock, Scars of Independence, 65.

[105] Richard Bell, The American Revolution and the Fate of the World (New York: Riverhead Books, 2025), 52; and Richard Price, Observations on the nature of civil liberty, the principles of government, and the justice and policy of the war with America (London, March 1776), from The Pamphlet Debate on the American Question in Great Britain, 1764-1776: A Digital Collection, edited by Jack P. Greene (Carmel, IN: Liberty Fund, 2024), The Online Library of Liberty, https://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/price-observations-on-the-nature-of-civil-liberty.

[106] Bell, The American Revolution and the Fate of the World, 53-57.

[107] Brands, Our First Civil War, 184-85; and “Olive Branch Petition, July 5, 1775,” American Battlefield Trust, https://www.battlefields.org/learn/primary-sources/olive-branch-petition.

[108] “By the King, a Proclamation, For suppressing Rebellion and Sedition,” August 23, 2775, Massachusetts Historical Society, https://www.masshist.org/database/viewer.php?item_id=818&pid=2.

[109] Robert Francis Seybolt, “A Note on the Casualties of April 19, and June 17, 1775,” The New England Quarterly, Vol. 4, No. 3 (July 1931), 525.

[110] Hoock, Scars of Independence, 75.

[111] “Fort Ticonderoga (1775),” American Battlefield Trust, https://www.battlefields.org/learn/revolutionary-war/battles/fort-ticonderoga-1775.

[112] Fleming, 1776, 63.

[113] “American Revolution in Massachusetts: Battle of Machias,” Boston Public Library, https://guides.bpl.org/c.php?g=800717&p=10418673.

[114] “American Revolution in Massachusetts: Burning of Falmouth,” Boston Public Library, https://guides.bpl.org/c.php?g=800717&p=10424695.

[115] Hoock, Scars of Independence, 88.

[116] “Sir, As the Committee of Safety is not sitting, I take the liberty to enclose you a copy of the proclamation issued by Lord Dunmore . . .[Signed P. Henry. Head Quarters, Williamsburg, November 20, 1775], Library of Congress,  https://guides.bpl.org/c.php?g=800717&p=10418673.

[117] Brands, Our First Civil War, 245.

[118] Edward Rutledge to Ralph Izard, December 8, 1775, cited in Jill Lepore, These Truths: A History of the United States (New York: W. W. Norton, 2018), 94.

[119] Brands, Our First Civil War, 241-43; and Andrew Lawler, “Lord Dunmore’s Ethiopian Regiment,” Journal of the American Revolution, February 11, 2025, https://allthingsliberty.com/2025/02/lord-dunmores-ethiopian-regiment.

[120] Andrew Lawler, “In January 1776, Virginia’s Port City of Norfolk Was Set Ablaze, Galvanizing the Revolution. But Who Really Lit the Match?” Smithsonian magazine, November 2025, https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/january-1776-virginia-port-city-norfolk-set-ablaze-galvanizing-revolution-who-lit-match-180987460; Fleming, 1776, 162; and “Journal and Reports of the Commissioners Appointed by the Act of 1777, to Ascertain the Losses Occasioned to Individuals by the Burning of Norfolk and Portsmouth, in the Year 1776,” Encyclopedia Virginia, https://encyclopediavirginia.org/primary-documents/journal-and-reports-of-the-commissioners-appointed-by-the-act-of-1777-to-ascertain-the-losses-occasioned-to-individuals-by-the-burning-of-norfolk-and-portsmouth-in-the-year-1776.

[121] Hoock, Scars of Independence, 98-100.

[122] John Hancock to George Washington, January 6, 1776; cited in Hoock, Scars of Independence, 100.

[123] Ray Raphael, Founders: The People Who Brought You a Nation (New York: The New Press, 2009), 224-26; and Nic Butler, “Declaring Independence in 1776 Charleston,” Charleston Public Library, July 5, 2019, https://www.ccpl.org/charleston-time-machine/declaring-independence-1776-charleston.

[124] Robert A. Gross, “Declaring ‘Revolution,’” History News Network, https://www.hnn.us/article/declaring-revolution

[125] Tom McGrath, “The Most Impactful, Influential Philadelphian Who Ever Lived,” Citywide, June 6, 2026,  https://www.phillymag.com/news/2026/06/26/thomas-paine-philadelphia.

[126] “His Majesty’s most gracious speech to both houses of Parliament, on Friday, October 27, 1775,” Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/resource/rbpe.10803800/?st=text.

[127] Richard Bell, in The American Revolution and the Fate of the World, writes (pp. 40-41):  “Hardly the all-powerful despot conjured in the Declaration, George was one of the least potent rulers anywhere in Europe.  His constitutional powers had strict limits, the result of major checks on the sovereign’s authority put in pace during the English Civil War in the 1640s and the Glorious Revolution of 1688.  As king of Great Britain, George could make war and peace, appoint government ministers, and try to steer the agenda.  Yet he could not dictate to them.  The country’s constitution was very clear about that: the legislature in Westminster [Parliament] held the power of the purse and wrote the laws. . . . It was these lawmakers who actually crafted and executed the policies that turned so many American colonists into die-hard patriots.”

[128] Thomas Paine, Common Sense (January 1776), edited by Edward Larkin, Broadview Editions, online: https://unboundlibrary.org/assets/downloads/history/common-sense-by-thomas-paine.pdf.  Pages referenced:  “Britain hath not manifested” (69); “the king is not to be trusted” (70); “To say that the Constitution of England” (50); “In short, monarchy and succession” (60); “trade of America . . . to ruin” (66); “America is an asylum” (64); “hath stirred up the Indians and Negroes to destroy us” (76); “But admitting that we were all of English descent” (65); “the equal rights of nature” (53); “Mankind being originally equals,” (52); “Charter of the United Colonies” (74); and “there is something absurd” (69).  Paine continued to serve the Patriot cause during the war years by publishing a series of sixteen pamphlets under the heading “The American Crisis.”  He received no royalties from Common Sense, but was belatedly awarded a 277-acre farm in New Rochelle in 1784 that had been confiscated from a Loyalist by the state of New York.

[129] “George Washington to Lieutenant Colonel Joseph Reed, 1 April 1776,” Founders Online, National Archives, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Washington/03-04-02-0009; and Jett Conner, “George Washington and Thomas Paine: Friendship in a Revolutionary Age,” Journal of the American Revolution, March 6, 2025, https://allthingsliberty.com/2025/03/george-washington-and-thomas-paine-friendship-in-a-revolutionary-age.

[130] “Plain Truth by James Chalmers (Candidus),” Baltimore Country History Labs Program, https://www2.umbc.edu/che/tahlessons/pdf/historylabs/Should_the_Colo_student:RS07.pdf.

[131] John Adams offered his views in a pamphlet entitled Thoughts on Government, published anonymously in April 1776.  He outlined a three-part government that included an elected governor for the executive, a two-house legislature, both being elected, and an independent judiciary.  Jett Conner, “Adams vs. Paine: A Critical Debate,” Journal of the American Revolution, July 14, 2015, https://allthingsliberty.com/2015/07/adams-vs-paine-a-critical-debate.

[132] Raphael, Founders, 250.  The various declarations are discussed in Maier, American Scripture, Chapter Two.  Provinces refer to former colonies and future states – e.g., Maryland, Pennsylvania, etc. – during a time of transition.

[133] Maier, American Scripture, 82-83.

[134] Thomas Paine, Common Sense (January 1776), 76.

[135] “Virginia: Buckingham, 13, May 1776: American Scripture: Making the Declaration of Independence,” Quill Project, Pembroke College, https://www.quillproject.net/resource_collections/411/resource_item/36207.  Freeholders were adult men who owned enough property to vote for representatives in the House of Burgesses.

[136] “Malden Town Instructions,” May 27, 1776, Malden Massachusetts, https://www.cityofmalden.org/690/Malden-Town-Instructions.

[137] “Lee Resolution” (June 7, 1776), Milestone Documents, National Archives, https://www.archives.gov/milestone-documents/lee-resolution; and Raphael, Founders, 248.

[138] “Second Continental Congress: June 8, 1776,” Journals of the Continental Congress, The American Founding, https://americanfounding.org/entries/second-continental-congress-june-8-1776.

[139] Maier, American Scripture, 37, 48-49, 63, 68.

[140] “How did the French Alliance help win American Independence?” Jamestown Settlement, American Revolution Museum at Yorktown, https://www.jyfmuseums.org/learn/research-and-collections/essays/how-did-the-french-alliance-help-win-american-independence.

[141] Maier, American Scripture, 95-96.

[142] “On this day, a committee forms to write the Declaration of Independence,” National Constitution Center, June 11, 2023, https://constitutioncenter.org/blog/on-this-day-a-committee-forms-to-write-the-declaration-of-independence.

[143] “The Virginia Declaration of Rights,” America’s Founding Documents, National Archives, https://www.archives.gov/founding-docs/virginia-declaration-of-rights.

[144] Jefferson refashioned Mason’s statement, “that all men are by nature equally free and independent and have certain inherent rights,” to read:  “that all men are created equal & independent, that from that equal creation they derive rights inherent & inalienable.”  The latter sentence was subsequently pared down to read:  “that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights.”  “Declaring Independence: Drafting the Documents,” Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/exhibits/declara/ruffdrft.html.

[145] Thomas Rogers, “A Declaration That All Menschen Are Created Equal,” New York Times, June 30, 2026.

[146] Maier, American Scripture, 159; and “Creating the Declaration: A Timeline,” America’s Founding Documents, National Archives, https://www.archives.gov/founding-docs/timeline.

[147] Hoock, Scars of Independence, 106-107; and Ellen Wexler, “In 1776, Angry New Yorkers Tore Down a Statue of George III With a Revolutionary Fervor. A New Exhibition Lets You Do It, Too,” Smithsonian magazine, May 27, 2026, https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/in-1776-angry-new-yorkers-tore-down-a-statue-of-george-iii-with-a-revolutionary-fervor-a-new-exhibition-lets-you-do-it-too-180988830.

[148] Thomas Hutchinson, “Strictures Upon the Declaration of Independence of Congress at Philadelphia in a Letter to a Noble Lord,” London, October 15, 1776, The Online Library of Liberty, https://oll.libertyfund.org/pages/1776-hutchinson-strictures-upon-the-declaration-of-independence.  The number of enslaved people in the thirteen rebellious colonies was closer to 450,000 people at the time.  See also, Bernard Bailyn, The Ordeal of Thomas Hutchinson (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1974).

[149] Sandra McNamara, “The Loyalist Declaration of Dependence, 1776,” Journal of the American Revolution, December 20, 2018, https://allthingsliberty.com/2018/12/the-loyalist-declaration-of-dependence-of-1776.

[150] The historian Jack Racove has emphasized this point, writing:  “The original meaning of saying, ‘All men are created equal,’ was to say that Americans, as a collective entity, as a people, had the same rights as other nations . . .” James M. Lindsay (host and interviewer), “The Fourth of July, With Jack Rakove, Council on Foreign Relations,” July 4, 2023, https://www.cfr.org/podcasts/presidents-inbox/fourth-july-jack-rakove.

[151] Maier, American Scripture, 133.

[152] John Locke also argues that, in the “state of nature,” a golden rule of reciprocity operates, whereas Thomas Hobbes, in his 1651 essay, Leviathan, posits that the “state of nature” is one of savagery and war of all against all.  These conflicting views were both hypothetical, as the “laws” of nature with regard to social relations could not be proven in the same way as Newtonian laws of physics.  Here are the relevant quotes from Locke and Hobbes:  Locke:  “The state of nature is governed by a law that creates obligations for everyone. And reason, which is that law, teaches anyone who takes the trouble to consult it, that because we are all equal and independent, no-one ought to harm anyone else in his life, health, liberty, or possessions.”  (John Locke, Second Treatise of Government, Chapter Two, section 6.)  Hobbes:  “During the time men lived without a common power to keep them all in awe, they are in that condition which is called war; and such a war as is of every man against every man,” such that “the life of man [is] solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”  (Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, 1651, 95-96).

[153] The historian Carl Becker coined the phrase about home rule in The History of Political Parties in the Province of New York, 1760-1776 (Madison, 1909), 22.

[154] See Section II in Roger Peace, “Building a continental empire and Native American dispossession,” United States Foreign Policy History and Resource Guide website, 2026, https://peacehistory-usfp.org/ native-american.

[155] “(1776) The Deleted Passage of the Declaration of Independence,” BlackPast, https://blackpast.org/african-american-history/declaration-independence-and-debate-over-slavery.

[156] Maier, American Scripture, 12.  Only one month earlier, on June 1, Congress approved a resolution stating that, “as this Congress has nothing more in view than the defence of these colonies, . . . no expedition or incursion ought to be undertaken or made, by any colony, or body of colonists, against or into Canada.”  That resolution was abandoned four weeks later when Congress instructed General Philip Schuyler to proceed north and take Montreal by force.

[157] According to Richard Bell, in The American Revolution and the Fate of the World (page 41):  In the ten tumultuous years between the passage of the 1765 Quartering Act and the outbreak of fighting at Lexington and Concord in 1775, George usually took the role of peacemaker. . . . George believed instead that new policies promising flexibility, conciliation, and redress of the Americans’ grievances would be in the best interests of the whole British empire.  The king only began to rethink that long-held position in the wake of the 1773 Boston Tea Party.  George considered that act of property destruction to be a provocative piece of domestic terrorism – and it sent him into a spiral of self-doubt.”

[158] “Declaration of Independence: A Transcription,” American’s Founding Documents, National Archives, https://www.archives.gov/founding-docs/declaration-transcript.

[159] Fleming, 1776, 277; and “The Report of a Constitution or Form of Government for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, ca. 28–31 October 1779,” Papers of John Adams, volume 8, pp. 245-46, https://www.masshist.org/publications/adams-papers/index.php/view/ADMS-06-08-02-pb-0235.  The New Jersey state constitution initially allowed women with property to vote (usually non-married women), a policy that lasted until 1807.

[160] “Constitution of South Carolina – March 19, 1778,” The Avalon Project, Yale Law School, https://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/sc02.asp; and Charles F. Vaughan, “South Carolina, Admitted 1788 and Eighth State to Ratify the U.S. Constitution,” Constituting America, https://constitutingamerica.org/south-carolina-admitted-1788-eighth-state-ratify-us-constitution-guest-essayist-charles-f-vaughan.

[161] “Ch. 1.3. State Voting Qualifications, 1776-1855,” Wisconsin University, Madison, https://wisc.pb.unizin.org/ls261/chapter/table-a-1.

[162] “Constitution of Pennsylvania – September 28, 1776,” The Avalon Project, Yale Law School, https://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/pa08.asp.

[163] Ellis, The Cause, 68-69.  James Sullivan to John Adams, April 12, 1776.

[164] “John Adams to James Sullivan, 26, May 1776,” Founders Online, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Adams/06-04-02-0091.

[165] John Adams reiterated his opposition to full democratic participation in his treatise, “A Defence of the Constitutions of Government of the United States of America” (1787-1788), writing that, while the people “are most sensible of their [own] burdens, and are most likely to provide remedies . . . they are not only incapable of managing the executive power, but would be instantly corrupted by it in such numbers, as would destroy the integrity of all elections. . . . The poor and the vicious would instantly rob the rich and virtuous, spend their plunder in debauchery, or confer it upon some idol, who would become the despot; or . . . would plunder the virtuous, and become more rich, until they acquired all the property, or a balance of property and of power, in their own hands, and domineered as despots in an oligarchy.”   The Works of John Adams, Second President of the United States: with a Life of the Author, Notes and Illustrations, by his Grandson Charles Francis Adams (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1856), Vol. 6, https://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/adams-the-works-of-john-adams-vol-6.

[166] “Letter from Abigail Adams to John Adams, 31 March – 5 April 1776,” Massachusetts Historical Society, https://www.masshist.org/digitaladams/archive/doc?id=L17760331aa.  Original spelling is kept.

[167] “Excerpt of Letter by John Adams to Abigail Adams, April 14, 1776, Utah Valley University, Center for Constitutional Studies, https://www.uvu.edu/ccs/docs/jadams_to_aadams_april_1776_excerpt.pdf.

[168] “Abigail Adams to Mercy Otis Warren, 27 April 1776,” Founders Online, National Archives, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Adams/04-01-02-0257.

[169] “Letter from Abigail Adams to John Adams, 7-9 May 1776,” Massachusetts Historical Society, https://www.masshist.org/digitaladams/archive/doc?id=L17760507aa&bc=%2Fdigitaladams%2Farchive%2Fbrowse%2Fletters_1774_1777.php.

[170] “10 Facts: Black Patriots in the American Revolution,” June 14, 2014, https://www.battlefields.org/learn/articles/10-facts-black-patriots-american-revolution.

[171] Heather Sanford and Ibram X. Kendi, “New Study: 48 of 56 Declaration of Independence signers profited from slavery,” Emancipator, July 2, 2026, https://theemancipator.org/2026/07/02/investigations/new-study-48-of-56-declaration-of-independence-signers-profited-from-slavery.

[172] Raphael, Founding Myths, 369.

[173] “Slave, Free Black, and White Population, 1780-1830,” https://userpages.umbc.edu/~bouton/History407/SlaveStats.htm.

[174] Gregory J. W. Urwin, “The Yorktown Tragedy: Washington’s Slave Roundup,” Journal of the American Revolution, October 19, 2021, https://allthingsliberty.com/2021/10/the-yorktown-tragedy-washingtons-slave-roundup.

[175] Robert Yates, Secret Proceedings and Debates of the Convention Assembled at Philadelphia, in the Year 1787, For the Purpose of Forming the Constitution of The United States of America (Albany, 1821), pp. 129–37, Founders Online, National Archives, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Hamilton/01-04-02-0098-0004. Because of a typographical error in the printing of the Secret Proceedings and Debates the proceedings for June 18 appear under the date of “Monday, June 19th, 1787.”

[176] David Armitage, “The Declaration of Independence in Global Perspective,” The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, https://www.gilderlehrman.org/history-resources/essays/declaration-independence-global-perspective.

[177] In this Section IV, for sources of quotations other than those cited in the endnotes, see Ray Raphael, A People’s History of the American Revolution: How Common People Shaped the Fight for Independence (New York: The New Press, 2001).

[178] All quotes of Joseph Martin Plumb, as quoted in A People’s History of the American Revolution, are from Joseph Plumb Martin, Private Yankee Doodle: Being a Narrative of Some of the Adventures, Dangers, and Sufferings of a Revolutionary Soldier, ed. George F. Scheer (Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1962); originally published in 1830 under the title, A Narrative of Some of the Adventures, Dangers and Sufferings of a Revolutionary Soldier, Interspersed with Anecdotes of Incidents That Occurred Within His Own Observations.  Diaries and memoirs of British soldiers and Loyalist civilians and soldiers can be found on the website, Researching the American Revolution, “British Diaries and Memoirs,” https://researchingtheamericanrevolution.com/british-diaries-and-memoirs.

[179] Hessian troops were professional German auxiliary troops hired by Great Britain.  Numbering around 18,000 upon their arrival in New York the summer of 1776, they were easily recognized by their striking blue or green coats and tall brass-faced caps.

[180] Howard H. Peckham, Toll of Independence: Engagements & Battle Casualties of the American Revolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974), 22-26

[181] James Collins, Autobiography of a Revolutionary Soldier, revised and prepared by John M. Roberts, 1858, available on Internet Archive, https://archive.org/details/autobiographyofr00coll/page/n9/mode/1up.

[182] William Pierce to St. George Tucker, July 20, 1781, cited in Sylvia R. Frey, Water from the Rock: Black Resistance in a Revolutionary Age (Princeton University Press, 1991), 133.

[183] A. Roger Ekirch, “Whig Authority and Public Order in Backcountry North Carolina,” in Ronald Hoffman, Thad W. Tate, and Teter J. Albert, An Uncivil War: The Southern Backcountry During the American Revolution (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1985, 107-108.

[184] Mary Beth Norton, Liberty’s Daughters: The Revolutionary Experience of American Women, 1750-1800 (Boston: Little, Brown, 1980), 297.

[185] Quoted in K. G. Davies, Documents of the American Revolution, 1770-1783, Vol. 12:  199-200, available on Internet Archive, https://archive.org/details/documentsofameri0000grea/page/n7/mode/2up.

[186] Bell, The American Revolution and the Fate of the World, 76-78.

[187] Bell, The American Revolution and the Fate of the World, 213, 214.

[188] “Anglo-French competition,” Encyclopaedia Britannica, https://www.britannica.com/place/western-Africa/Anglo-French-competition.

[189] “Haitian Revolution,” Slavery and Remembrance, https://slaveryandremembrance.org/articles/article/?id=A0066.

[190] Andrew Lambert, “The British Grand Strategy,” in David K. Allison and Larrie D. Ferreiro, The American Revolution: A World War (Washington, DC: Smithsonian, 2018), 40.

[191] Alan Taylor, “Global Revolutions,” in David K. Allison and Larrie D. Ferreiro, The American Revolution: A World War (Washington, DC: Smithsonian, 2018), 27.

[192] Ross Nedervelt, “The United States, Security, and Maritime Borders in the Age of the American Revolution,” Diplomatic History, Vol. 50, No. 3 (June 2026), 343, 348, 349, 351, 353-54, 357.

[193] Bell, The American Revolution and the Fate of the World, 88-89; and Gabriel Neville, “The New Dominion: Virginia’s Bounty Land,” Journal of the American Revolution, December 4, 2025, https://allthingsliberty.com/2025/12/the-new-dominion-virginias-bounty-land.

[194] Bell, The American Revolution and the Fate of the World, 90; and “Treaty With the Delawares: 1778” (Article VI), The Avalon Project, Yale Law School, https://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/del1778.asp.  On US-Cherokee relations, see David Narrett, The Cherokees in War and at Peace, 1670-1840 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2025).

[195] Bell, The American Revolution and the Fate of the World, 96-97.

[196] Jeffrey Ostler, “The Great Fear of 1776,” Age of Revolutions: A Journal on Revolutions, Revolutionaries, and the Idea of “Revolution” Itself, September 23, 2019, https://ageofrevolutions.com/2019/09/23/the-great-fear-of-1776.

[197] Bell, The American Revolution and the Fate of the World, 58.

[198] Edward St. Germain, “Revolutionary War Casualties: American & British Deaths,” American Revolution.org, https://www.americanrevolution.org/casualties.

[199] Alan Marsh, “POWs in American History: A Synopsis,” 1998, Andersonville National Historic Site, https://www.nps.gov/ande/learn/historyculture/pow_synopsis.htm; and Bell, The American Revolution and the Fate of the World, 185.

[200] “The Continental Congress and the Problem of Prisoners,” May 21, 2026, History, Art & Archives, U.S. House of Representatives, https://history.house.gov/Blog/2026/May/5-21-Prisoners.

[201] T. Cole Jones, “Washington’s POW Problem,” George Washington’s Mount Vernon, https://www.mountvernon.org/george-washington/the-revolutionary-war/prisoners-of-war.  See also, “The Prison Ship Martryrs,” National Park Service, https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/prison-ship-martyrs.htm.

[202] Hoock, Scars of Independence, 373, 393-94.

[203] Bell, The American Revolution and the Fate of the World, 58.

[204] “Original Design of the Great Seal of the United States (1782),” National Archives, https://www.archives.gov/milestone-documents/original-design-of-the-great-seal-of-the-united-states.

[205] John A. Ragosta, “Why the Founders Fought for the Separation of Church and State, Time Magazine, July 10, 2025,  https://time.com/7297290/founders-separation-church-and-state.

[206] “Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom,” Thomas Jefferson Encyclopedia, https://www.monticello.org/encyclopedia/virginia-statute-religious-freedom.  The First Amendment in the Bill of Rights states, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”

[207] Derek H. David, “Religious Oaths,” Free Speech Center, July 9, 2026, https://firstamendment.mtsu.edu/article/religious-oaths; “Religious Tests and Oaths in State Constitutions, 1776-1784,” Center for the Study of the American Constitution,” University of Wisconsin-Madison, https://csac.history.wisc.edu/religion-and-the-ratification/religious-test-clause/religious-tests-and-oaths-in-state-constitutions-1776-1784; and “Article VI.C3.2.1, Historical Background on Religious Test for Government Offices,” Constitution Annotated: Analysis and Interpretation of the U.S. Constitution,” https://constitution.congress.gov/browse/essay/artVI-C3-2-1/ALDE_00013638/#essay-15.

[208] “Voting Resources:  Voting in the United States: A Timeline,” American University, Washington College of Law, https://wcl.american.libguides.com/voting/history/timeline#:~:text=States%20were%20given%20the%20power,1790.  See also, “Religion and the Founding of the United States,” https://people.smu.edu/religionandfoundingusa/us-constitution-and-first-amendment/religious-tests-for-office-and-voting-in-the-states-revolution-to-constitution/

[209] “H. R. 40, Naturalization Bill, March 4, 1790,” U.S. Capitol Visitor Center, https://www.visitthecapitol.gov/artifact/h-r-40-naturalization-bill-march-4-1790.

[210] Mercy Otis Warren, History of the Rise, Progress, and Termination of the American Revolution: From the Stamp Act to the Ratification of the United States Constitution, in Three Volumes (first published in 1805; republished in 2019 by www.digitalhistorybooks.com), 96-98.

[211] Hoock, Scars of Independence, 392-93.

[212] Hoock, Scars of Independence, 364; and Maya Jasanoff, Liberty’s Exiles: American Loyalists in the Revolutionary World (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2011), 357.  Jasanoff writes (p. 9):  “The majority of refugees headed straight for Britain’s other colonies, taking up incentives of free land, provisions, and supplies.  More than half relocated tothe northern British provinces of Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and Quebec, helping to transform regions once heavily French to the English-dominated Canada of today.  A further six thousand or so migrants, especially from the American south, traveled to Jamaica and the Bahamas – carrying the vast majority of the fifteen thousand exported slaves with them.”

[213] “Dishonored Americans: The Political Death of Loyalists in Revolutionary America,” lecture by Timothy Campeau, January 24, 2024, American Revolution Institute, https://www.americanrevolutioninstitute.org/video/dishonored-americans-the-political-death-of-loyalists-in-revolutionary-america.  See Timothy Campeau, Dishonored Americans: The Political Death of Loyalists in Revolutionary America (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2023).  A number of Loyalists accounts of the American Revolution were published, some posthumously, including The Letters of Thomas Hutchinson (Boston, 1773; London, 1774), an account of the trials and tribulations of the American-born, former royal governor of Massachusetts.  Other personal stories are told in the Narrative of the Exertions and Sufferings of Lieut. James Moody since the year 1776 (London, 1783), which details Moody’s military adventures as a New Jersey Loyalist; in Reminiscences of an American Loyalist, 1738-1789 (Morgantown, PA, 1925) by Jonathan Boucher, an Anglican priest from Maryland who preached against rebellion before returning to Britain tells his story; and in Origin & Progress of the American Rebellion: A Tory View (written in 1781 but not published until 1961), by Peter Oliver, the last chief justice of the Superior Court of Massachusetts before the American Revolution.

[214] David Ramsay, The History of the American Revolution, in Two Volumes (Philadelphia, 1789), Vol. II, pp. 324, 323, https://archive.org/details/historyofamerica02rams/page/324/mode/2up.

[215] Abraham Lincoln, “Gettysburg address delivered at Gettysburg Pa.,” Nov. 19, 1863, Library of Congress, www.loc.gov/item/rbpe.24404500.

[216] James Wilson, “Considerations on the Nature and Extent of the Legislative Authority of the British Parliament,” 1774, Political Science 601: Political Theory of the American Revolution, University of Wisconsin-Madison, https://wisc.pb.unizin.org/ps601/chapter/james-wilson-considerations-on-the-nature-and-extent-of-the-legislative-authority.

[217] “Massachusetts Constitution of 1780, Part One” (Articles VII and III), https://press-pubs.uchicago.edu/founders/documents/bill_of_rightss6.html.

[218] “The Virginia Declaration of Rights” (Section 16), America’s Founding Documents, National Archives, https://www.archives.gov/founding-docs/virginia-declaration-of-rights.

[219] “The Delegates Who Didn’t Sign the U.S. Constitution,” ConstitutionFacts.com, https://www.constitutionfacts.com/us-constitution-amendments/those-who-didnt-sign-the-constitution. “In all, 70 delegates were appointed to the Constitutional Convention, but out of that 70 only 55 attended, and only 39 actually signed.”  Some refused, others got sick, still others left early.  For George Mason, Elbridge Gerry, and Edmund Randolph, the main reason for not signing was that the document lacked a Bill of Rights which would protect the rights of States and the freedom of individuals.  Mason and Randolph, it should be noted, were both enslavers.  Mason, the main author of the Virginia Declaration of Rights which served as a model for the Declaration of Independence, owned roughly 300 enslaved individuals who worked on his northern Virginia plantations; he did not free any during his life or in his final will.

[220] On the making and meaning of the Constitution, see Ray Raphael, The U.S. Constitution Explained – Clause by Clause – for Every American Today (New York: Vintage, 2017).

[221] “Shays’ Rebellion,” Digital History, https://www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/disp_textbook.cfm?smtID=3&psid=262.

[222] Michael Hoover, “The Whiskey Rebellion,” U.S. Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau, https://www.ttb.gov/public-information/whiskey-rebellion.

[223] “Alien and Sedition Acts (1798),” National Archives, https://www.archives.gov/milestone-documents/alien-and-sedition-acts.

[224] “Andrew Jackson’s Speech to Congress on Indian Removal,” Second Annual Message, December 6, 1830, National Park Service, https://www.nps.gov/museum/tmc/manz/handouts/andrew_jackson_annual_message.pdf.

[225] Bell, The American Revolution and the Fate of the World, 104.

[226] “Full Statement of the President of Ghana, His Excellency John Dramani Mahama, to the 81st Session of the United Nations General Assembly; New York, 24 September 2026.

[227] “Slave, Free Black, and White Population, 1780-1830,” University of Maryland, Baltimore County, https://userpages.umbc.edu/~bouton/History407/SlaveStats.htm.

[228] “Petition from the Pennsylvania Society for the Abolition of Slavery,” February 3, 1790, https://www.colorado.edu/herbst/sites/default/files/attached-files/brooks_lunch_seminar_day_1.pdf.

[229] “Benjamin Franklin’s Anti-Slavery Petitions to Congress,” The Center for Legislative Archives, National Archives, https://www.archives.gov/legislative/features/franklin.

[230] Ellis, His Excellency, 201-202.

[231] “Washington’s Farewell Address, 1796,” The Avalon Project, Yale Law School, https://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/washing.asp.

[232] George Bancroft (1800-1891) served as the Secretary of the Navy and as U.S. minister to Great Britain and to the German Empire.  His History of the United States of America, From the Discovery of the American Continent (1834-1874), covered U.S. history only to 1789.  According to one reviewer, “Bancroft’s book was successful because in it the present nationalistic ideology of the United States was legibly inscribed back to its prehistory.”  Etsuko Taketani, “The North American Review, 1815—1835: The Invention of the American Past,” American Periodicals 5 (1995), 123.

[233] Sylvester Judd, “A moral review of the Revolutionary War, or some of the evils of that event considered : a discourse delivered at the Unitarian Church, Augusta, Sabbath evening, March 13th, 1842,” published in 1842, https://archive.org/details/wsb13f12_images/wsb13f12; cited in Margot Minardi, “Against Custom: The first peace advocates imagined a new story for the United States,” Oregon Humanities, August 7, 2012, https://www.oregonhumanities.org/rll/magazine/fight-summer-2012/against-custom.

[234] William Jay, A Review of the Causes and Consequences of the Mexican War (Boston: B. B. Mussey & Co., 1849), p. 230, Internet Archive, https://archive.org/details/revmexicanwar00jaywrich.

[235] Henry Cabot Lodge (1850-1924) received PhD degrees in history and government from Harvard University and became a professor of history as well as editor of the North American Review before turning to politics and being elected to the U.S. Senate from Massachusetts.  He authored numerous studies on American history, including one co-authored with Theodore Roosevelt, Hero Tales: American History (1895).  John Fiske (1842-1901), a graduate of Harvard Law School and a popular lecturer in history, wrote the two-volume study, The American Revolution (1891), among other works.

[236] Quoted in Julius W. Pratt, “Manifest Destiny And The American Century.” Current History 29, no. 172 (1955), 333.

[237] Charles Francis Adams, “’Imperialism’ and ’The Tracks of Our Forefathers’,” a paper read before the Lexington, Massachusetts, Historical Society, December 20, 1898, online: https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/16542/pg16542-images.html.  Charles Francis Adams served as president of the American Historical Association (AHA) in 1901.

[238] George W. Williams, History of the Negro Race in America from 1619 to 1880: negroes as slaves, as soldiers and as citizens; together with a preliminary consideration of the unity of the human family, an historical sketch of Africa, and an account of the Negro governments of Sierra Leone and Liberia (1882), Internet Archive digital copy, p. 326.

[239] Max Savelle, “The Imperial School of American Colonial Historians,” Indiana Magazine of History 45, no. 2 (1949), 124.

[240] Matthew Wills, “Mary Beard and the Beginning of Women’s History,” JSTOR Daily, March 15, 2021, https://daily.jstor.org/mary-beard-and-the-beginning-of-womens-history.

[241] Arthur S. Link, “Annual address of the president of the American Historical Association, delivered on December 28, 1984,” American Historical Review 90, no. 1, (Feb., 1985): 1-17, https://www.historians.org/presidential-address/arthur-s-link.

[242] Darlene Clark Hine, “Carter G. Woodson, White Philanthropy and Negro Historiography.” The History Teacher 19, no. 3 (1986): 405–25; and Robert B. Townsend, “The Social Shape of the AHA, 1884-1945,” Perspectives on History, https://www.historians.org/perspectives-article/the-social-shape-of-the-aha-1884-1945-december-2009.  See also, Michael R. Winston, “Through the Back Door: Academic Racism and the Negro Scholar in Historial Perspective, Daedalus, Vol. 100, No. 3 (Summer 1971): 678-719.

[243] See, for example, Thomas A. Bailey, A Diplomatic History of the American People (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 10th printing, 1980; first published in 1940).  For compendium of critiques of how the story of the American Revolution has been told, as of 2013, see Michael McDonnell & all, eds., Remembering the Revolution: Memory, History, and Nation Making from Independence to the Civil War (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2013).

[244] This line of thinking has been put forth by historians Annette Gordon-Reed, Philip Deloria, and others.  See Cristy DeSmith, “Panel featuring filmmaker Ken Burns probes ‘disjunction’ between Declaration of Independence and the Constitution,” The Harvard Gazette, March 27, 2026, https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2026/03/revisiting-americas-vision-statement.  See also, David Adler, “Declaration of Independence: Advancing American Ideals,” South Dakota Humanities Council, July 5, 2023, https://sdhumanities.org/declaration-of-independence-advancing-american-ideals.

[245] “Martin Luther King, Jr., I Have a Dream, delivered 28 August 1963, at the Lincoln Memorial, Washington, D.C.,” American Rhetoric: Top 100 Speeches, https://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/mlkihaveadream.htm.

[246] Zackaray Okun Dunivin, Harry Yaojun Yan, Jelani Ince, and Fabio Rojas, “Black Lives Matter protests shift public discourse,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), March 3, 2022, https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2117320119.

[247] Sarah Schwartz, “Map: Where Critical Race Theory Is Under Attack,” Education Week, January 17, 2023, https://www.edweek.org/policy-politics/map-where-critical-race-theory-is-under-attack/2021/06.

[248] “The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story,” The New York Times Magazine, https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/08/14/magazine/1619-america-slavery.html.

[249] James Brewer Stewart, “Re-Animating the 1619 Project: Teachable Moments Not Turf Wars,” History News Network, February 9, 2020, https://www.historynewsnetwork.org/article/re-animating-the-1619-project-teachable-moments-no.

[250] Leslie M. Harris, “I Helped Fact-Check the 1619 Project. The Times Ignored Me,” Politico, March 6, 2020, https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2020/03/06/1619-project-new-york-times-mistake-122248.  See also, Naomi Schaefer Riley, “The 1619 Project’ Enters American Classrooms,” Education Next News, Vol. 20: 4 (Fall 2020), https://www.educationnext.org/1619-project-enters-american-classrooms-adding-new-sizzle-slavery-significant-cost.

[251] Dustin Hornbeck and Joel R. Malin, “Censorship of Critical Perspectives in American Schools,” Center for Evaluation and Education Policy, Indian University Bloomington, June 2024, https://education.indiana.edu/ceep/education-policy/policy-briefs/2024/censorship-of-critical-perspectives-in-american-schools.html.

[252] “How Leftists’ Critical Race Theory Poisons Our Discussion of Racism,” The Heritage Foundation, June 29, 2020, https://www.heritage.org/civil-society/commentary/how-leftists-critical-race-theory-poisons-our-discussion-racism.

[253] Stephen Sawchuk, “What Is Critical Race Theory, and Why Is It Under Attack, Education Week, May 18, 2021, https://www.edweek.org/leadership/what-is-critical-race-theory-and-why-is-it-under-attack/2021/05.  According to Sawchuk, “One conservative organization, the Heritage Foundation, recently attributed a whole host of issues to CRT, including the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests, LGBTQ clubs in schools, diversity training in federal agencies and organizations, California’s recent ethnic studies model curriculum, the free-speech debate on college campuses, and alternatives to exclusionary discipline—such as the Promise program in Broward County, Fla., that some parents blame for the Parkland school shootings. ‘When followed to its logical conclusion, CRT is destructive and rejects the fundamental ideas on which our constitutional republic is based,’ the organization claimed.”

[254] Tarah Jean, “TCC president signs statement rejecting CRT, diversity initiatives,” Tallahassee Democrat, January 20, 2023, 3A.

[255] The right-wing’s attack on Critical Race Theory has roots in a long-standing, virulent campaign against critical economic theory, often labeled Marxism.  Right-wing groups have work assiduously over many decades to prevent public awareness of specific economic problems from being discussed and understood as part of a larger system – the capitalist system – while portraying this system as either beneficial to all or inevitable, notwithstanding models of democratic socialism in various parts of the world.

[256] John Pacenti, “How Florida’s top cop became state’s ultimate culture warrior,” Tallahassee Democrat, September 1, 20266, 3A.

[257] Jim Saunders, “State seeks go-ahead on race instruction law,” Tallahassee Democrat, December 13, 2022, 3A; and Leah Watson, “Lessons Learned from Our Classroom Censorship Win Against Florida’s Stop W.O.K.E. Act,” American Civil Liberties Union, November 29, 2022, https://www.aclu.org/news/free-speech/lessons-learned-from-our-classroom-censorship-win-against-floridas-stop-w-o-k-e-act; and John R. Vile, “Stop W.O.K.E Act (Florida, 2022),” The First Amendment Encyclopedia, https://www.mtsu.edu/first-amendment/article/2167/stop-w-o-k-e-act.

[258] “Federal appeals court rejects Fla. ‘Stop WOKE Act’,” Free Speech Center at Middle Tennessee State University, July 9, 2026, https://firstamendment.mtsu.edu/post/federal-appeals-court-rejects-fla-stop-woke-act.  The “Stop Woke Act” also conflicted with the Florida Manual on Holocaust Education which mandates that teachers of grades 4-6 “make children aware of the horrors that can accompany racism and intolerance of ethnic and religious differences” in order to “develop respect and appreciation for diversity and human rights.”  Commissioner’s Task Force on Holocaust Education, “State of Florida Resource Manual On Holocaust Education Grades 4-6: A Study in Character Education,” 2004, page 2, https://hdec.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/manual_grades_4_6-rs.pdf.

[259] The Republican-led legislature in Texas proclaimed an alleged threat of Islam, in combination with Marxism, to justify its control over curricula.  According to Alan Singer, “MAGA Republican Congressional Representative Chip Roy accused ‘The Marxist-Islamist alliance’ of mobilizing to ‘remove the current factual standards revealing the truth about the violent, aggressive actions of the promoters of Islam.’”  Alan Singer, “Texas’ New Propaganda Social Studies Standards,” Daily Kos, September 13, 2026, https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2026/9/13/800097779/community/texas-new-propaganda-social-studies-standards.

[260] “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History,” The White House, March 27, 2025, https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/03/restoring-truth-and-sanity-to-american-history.

[261] Rachel Frazin, “Parks and museums emerge as new culture war battlegrounds,” The Hill, August 27, 2025, https://thehill.com/policy/energy-environment/5471588-culture-war-national-parks.

[262] Amy Qin, “Meet the army of amateur archivists racing to save US history in national parks,” The Guardian, August 7, 2026, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2026/aug/07/national-park-trump-administration-censorship.

[263] Laura Fay, Scott Jacobson, “Slavery displays removed from Philadelphia historical site after Trump directive,” CBS News Philadelphia, January 23, 2026, https://www.cbsnews.com/philadelphia/news/presidents-house-independence-mall-slavery-trump; and Fallon Roth and Maggie Prosser, “The slavery exhibits at the President’s House have been removed following Trump administration push,” The Philadelphia Inquirer, January 22, 2026, https://www.inquirer.com/politics/nation/presidents-house-independence-park-exhibits-removed-20260122.html#loaded.

[264] Domestic Policy Council, “Saving America’s Story: How Ideological Capture at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History Erases Our Heritage,” March 27, 2026, Executive Summary, page 2, https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/Smithsonian-Report-Saving-Americas-Story.pdf,

[265] Lonnie G. Bunch III, interviewed on Amanapour & Company, Public Broadcasting Service, August 27, 2025,

[266] “Restoring Trust in the Smithsonian Institution,” The White House, July 24, 2026, https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2026/07/restoring-trust-in-the-smithsonian-institution-e061. https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2026/07/restoring-trust-in-the-smithsonian-institution-e061.

[267] M. Gessen, “Trump Is Trying to Force Americans to Unlearn What We Know,” New York Times, August 3, 2026.

[268] The relationship between past, present, and future was curiously explained by George Orwell in his dystopian novel, Nineteen eighty-four (1949): “Who controls the past controls the future; who controls the present controls the past.” The novel is online at https://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks01/0100021h.html.

[269] “Joint Statement on Legislative Efforts to Restrict Education about Racism in American History (June 2021),” American Historical Association, https://www.historians.org/divisive-concepts-statement.

[270] Rebecca L. West, “Advocacy Briefs: AHA Highlights Importance of Historians and Historical Perspective in Public Debate,” Perspectives on History, Vol. 60: 8 (November 2022), 7.

[271] “Events and Networking Opportunities,” OAH website, https://www.oah.org/meetings-events/oah23/network/#sunday, accessed January 22, 2023.

[272] Beth English and Christopher Sellers, “Who Owns American History?” Dissent Magazine, August 4, 2026, https://dissentmagazine.org/online_articles/who-owns-american-history.

[273] “Federal Judge Rules to Restore National Endowment for the Humanities Funding In Historic Case,” ACLS, May 7, 2026, https://www.acls.org/news/federal-judge-rules-to-restore-national-endowment-of-the-humanities-funding-in-historic-case.  In the 143-page decision, U.S. District Judge Colleen McMahon ruled that the Trump administration’s actions in cutting more than 1,400 grants were “unlawful: and “unconstitutional.”  The plaintiffs included the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS), the Modern Language Association of America, and the American Historical Association.

[274] This idea of reaching the public with a holistic and principled view of the founding of the nation was voiced by the historian David Blight, former president of the Organization of American Historians, in the New York Review of Books on June 11, 2026:  “Many scholars no longer concentrate on such sweeping issues about nations or national identity.  Recent research has tended instead to approach the nation from this or that particular angle: gender and sexuality, colonialism, indigeneity, capitalism, incarceration, the environment, and, with renewed vigor, the long struggles over race and ethnicity.  These subjects – many of them now under attack by Trumpist censors – have greatly enriched our understanding of the United States.  But is there not still reason to study how Americans, from within their infinite chorus of difference and pluralism, have understood their nation as a whole?  If historians don’t, advocates of ‘patriotic’ history will do that work for us.”  David W. Blight, “Dreams of Our Nation,” New York Review of Books, June 11, 2026, pages 32-33.

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