The American Revolution

The story

Thirteen colonies and a distant king

In the middle of the 18th century, on the Atlantic coast of North America, there were thirteen British colonies, home to about a million and a half people in the mid-century, and more than two million on the eve of the revolution, mostly settlers who had come from England and other European countries, alongside a large number of enslaved Africans and the native peoples. The colonies had local assemblies, courts and newspapers, and the colonists felt free. But they were governed by a distant king, George III, and by a Parliament in London in which the colonists had no representative at all.

In 1763 Great Britain had won a long war against France, the Seven Years' War, but was deep in debt. The government thought it fair to make the colonists pay part of the cost, since they had been defended, and brought in new taxes: in 1765 the stamp tax, a stamp required on newspapers, documents and playing cards, then others on glass, paper and tea. The colonists protested with a cry that was to become famous: “No taxation without representation!”. They were not against taxes as such, but against having to pay them without having a say.

From tea to arms

Tensions grew. In 1770, in Boston, British soldiers fired on a crowd and killed five people: it was called the “Boston Massacre”. In December 1773, to protest against a tax on tea, a group of colonists disguised as Native Americans boarded three ships in Boston harbour and threw 342 chests of tea into the sea: this is the “Boston Tea Party”. The British government reacted with very harsh laws, which the colonists called the “Intolerable Acts”, and the colonies, for the first time, united, sending delegates to a Congress in Philadelphia.

On 19 April 1775, at Lexington and Concord, near Boston, British soldiers and armed colonists clashed: the first shot of the war was fired, later called “the shot heard round the world”. Congress named as commander of the colonists' army a landowner from Virginia, George Washington.

4 July 1776

At first, many colonists only wanted more rights, not to break away from Great Britain. But in January 1776 an English writer who had emigrated to America, Thomas Paine, published a short book, “Common Sense”, in which he argued in plain words that it was absurd for a great continent to be ruled by a distant island, and that independence was the right path. Hundreds of thousands of copies were sold.

Congress appointed five delegates to write a declaration. It was written mainly by a young lawyer from Virginia, Thomas Jefferson, with the help of Benjamin Franklin and John Adams. The text was approved by Congress on 4 July 1776, in Philadelphia. The “Declaration of Independence” stated: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” If a government violates these rights, the people have the right to change it.

Those words were far ahead of their time, but they were also full of contradictions: many of the signatories, Jefferson himself among them, owned slaves, and women and Native Americans had no political rights. In the following decades the word “equal” would be used precisely to criticise these injustices.

The war and the victory

The war lasted eight years. The British army was stronger, but Washington, with a poorly equipped army of volunteers, held out even through harsh winters, like that of 1777–78 at Valley Forge. The turning point was the victory at Saratoga, in 1777, which persuaded France, England's enemy, to ally with the colonists, sending money, ships and soldiers. Among the French was the young Marquis de Lafayette, who became a friend of Washington. Some Italians also took part in the cause: Filippo Mazzei, a Tuscan doctor and friend of Jefferson, contributed ideas and writings.

The decisive battle was at Yorktown, in Virginia, in October 1781, when the French and Americans surrounded the army of the British general Cornwallis, who surrendered. With the Treaty of Paris of 1783 Great Britain recognised the independence of the United States of America.

A new nation

In 1787, in Philadelphia, delegates wrote the Constitution of the United States, which sets up a government with three separate powers: Congress, the President and the judges. In 1789 Washington was elected the first President. In 1791 the first ten amendments were added to the Constitution, the “Bill of Rights”, which guarantees freedom of speech, of the press and of religion, and the right to a fair trial.