Background
The thirteen British North American colonies — approximately 2.5 million people in 1775, distributed along the Atlantic seaboard from Massachusetts to Georgia — had a substantial tradition of self-government within the British imperial framework. Each colony had an elected legislature; the colonies levied their own internal taxes; cooperation with the British government was negotiated rather than imposed. The post-1763 British attempt to impose new direct taxation on the colonies to defray the cost of the Seven Years’ War broke this established pattern.
The political crisis built through ten years of escalating disputes: the Stamp Act (1765, repealed 1766), the Townshend Acts (1767–1770), the Boston Massacre (5 March 1770), the Boston Tea Party (16 December 1773), the Coercive Acts (1774), and the First Continental Congress (September–October 1774). Both sides progressively committed to incompatible positions. The colonial position — that Parliament had no constitutional authority over internal colonial taxation without colonial representation in Parliament — could not be reconciled with the British position that Parliament was constitutionally sovereign over the entire British world.
The war
The Revolutionary War began on 19 April 1775 with the British attempt to seize colonial military stores at Concord, Massachusetts, and the running skirmish at Lexington Green earlier that morning. The Second Continental Congress, meeting at Philadelphia from May 1775, organized a Continental Army under George Washington and progressively committed to formal independence. The Declaration of Independence, principally drafted by Thomas Jefferson, was approved by the Congress on 4 July 1776.
The war lasted eight years. The major phases were:
The early defensive phase (1775–1776), in which the Continental Army was driven out of New York, Long Island, and most of New Jersey by superior British forces. Washington’s surprise counter-attack at Trenton (26 December 1776) and Princeton (3 January 1777) stabilized the military position and preserved colonial political morale.
The northern campaigns (1777), culminating in the Battle of Saratoga (September–October 1777), at which an American army under Horatio Gates destroyed a British army under John Burgoyne. The Saratoga victory persuaded France to enter the war on the American side (February 1778). French naval, military, and financial support would prove decisive.
The southern campaigns (1778–1781), as the British strategic emphasis shifted to the Loyalist-rich southern colonies. The British army under Lord Cornwallis was eventually trapped at Yorktown, Virginia, by combined American and French land forces and a French fleet under Admiral de Grasse that controlled Chesapeake Bay. Cornwallis surrendered on 19 October 1781 with approximately 7,000 troops. The military war was effectively over.
The Treaty of Paris (3 September 1783) ended the war on terms favourable to the new United States: full British recognition of independence, generous western boundaries (the Mississippi River), and fishing rights off Newfoundland. France, which had spent itself into financial collapse supporting the American cause, would face its own revolution within six years.
The Constitution
The political institutions of the new United States went through two phases. The Articles of Confederation (drafted 1777, ratified 1781) established a weak national government with limited taxing and military authority. The arrangement proved insufficient for the post-war political and economic crises (Shays’s Rebellion of 1786–1787 was the trigger). The Constitutional Convention at Philadelphia (May–September 1787), chaired by Washington, drafted the United States Constitution that became the foundation of the federal system. The constitution was ratified by the required nine states by June 1788 and went into effect on 4 March 1789. The Bill of Rights (the first ten amendments) was ratified in 1791.
Washington was elected first president and inaugurated on 30 April 1789.
Legacy
The American Revolution produced the first independent state in the European-colonized Americas, the first sustained republican government on a continental scale, and a written constitution that has been continuously in force longer than any other (235+ years). The constitutional model — federalism, separation of powers, written rights, judicial review, indirect election of the executive — has been the most-imitated political institution in subsequent constitutional history.
The Revolution was also one of the major political-philosophical events of the European Enlightenment. The American Declaration of Independence’s enumeration of natural rights, the Constitution’s mechanisms for popular sovereignty under representative government, and the explicit institutional separation of religious establishment from state authority were direct applications of Enlightenment political theory (particularly Locke and Montesquieu) on a scale that the European theorists themselves had not contemplated.
The Revolution’s example proved politically combustible across the rest of the European colonial world. The French Revolution of 1789, the Haitian Revolution (1791–1804), and the Latin American independence movements of 1808–1833 all explicitly invoked the American precedent. The pattern of post-Enlightenment anti-colonial revolution that began at Lexington in 1775 has continued in modified forms to the present.