Independence

For a long time the colonists thought of themselves as British and were content to be ruled from London. That changed after 1763, when a long war with France ended. Britain had won, but it now had huge debts and a much bigger empire to defend. Parliament, the British lawmaking body, decided the colonies should help pay.

So came the taxes. The Sugar Act of 1764 taxed goods brought into the colonies. The Stamp Act of 1765 put a tax on almost every printed paper, including newspapers, contracts and even playing cards. The Townshend Acts of 1767 taxed glass, paint, paper and tea.

The money itself was not really the point. The colonists had nobody in Parliament, so no lawmaker there had been elected by them or had to answer to them. Their slogan was no taxation without representation. High taxes, or taxation without representation, is an accepted answer on the test.

A second complaint was British soldiers living among them. The law ordered the colonies to house and supply the King's troops, first in barracks, inns and empty buildings, and later in other buildings as well. The old words for this are quartering and boarding. On the test, because the British army stayed in their houses is an accepted answer.

A third complaint was self-government. The colonies had their own assemblies, but Britain appointed many of the governors. Britain could also overrule an assembly, or close it down.

Two protests became famous. In 1770, British soldiers in Boston fired into a crowd and killed five people. That day is remembered as the Boston Massacre. In December 1773, protesters boarded ships and threw hundreds of chests of British tea into Boston Harbor. That night is called the Boston Tea Party.

Parliament punished Massachusetts for the tea. It closed the port of Boston. It also took away much of the colony's power to govern itself. Colonists called these laws the Intolerable Acts.

The test asks for one reason, not a list. High taxes, taxation without representation, British soldiers staying in their houses, and no self-government are all accepted. The 2025 answer key also accepts the name of one of the laws or protests above, such as the Stamp Act or the Boston Tea Party. Learn one reason and learn to say it clearly.

In April 1775 the argument turned into war. British troops marched out of Boston to seize weapons, and colonial militia met them at Lexington and Concord in Massachusetts. A militia was a group of ordinary men, not full-time soldiers, who kept their own weapons and trained to fight when they were needed. The war that followed is called the American Revolution, the Revolutionary War, or the War for Independence. Any of those three names answers the question about the war Americans fought to win independence from Britain.

Three weeks after the shooting started, leaders from the colonies met in Philadelphia as the Second Continental Congress. They created a Continental Army and put George Washington in command in June 1775. That same month, colonial troops fought a costly battle at Bunker Hill, near Boston.

For more than a year the colonies fought without saying plainly what they wanted. In June 1776 Congress asked a small committee to write a statement. Thomas Jefferson of Virginia did the actual writing, with Benjamin Franklin and John Adams among those on the committee with him. If the test asks who wrote the Declaration of Independence, the answer is Jefferson.

Congress adopted the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776. With that document the thirteen colonies declared themselves free of Britain.

The war was long and often went badly for the Americans. At the end of 1776 Washington crossed the icy Delaware River at night and surprised the enemy at Trenton, New Jersey. An American victory at Saratoga in New York in 1777 convinced France to enter the war on the American side. The winter camp at Valley Forge in 1777 and 1778 was cold and short of food. Around two thousand soldiers died there, most of them of disease. The army survived.

The fighting ended at Yorktown, Virginia, in 1781, where the British army was trapped between American and French forces and surrendered. Britain formally recognized American independence in a peace treaty signed in Paris in 1783.

The test may ask you to name one important event of the American Revolution. The 2025 answer key accepts six, and all six are in this lesson. You need only one. Choose the one that stays in your memory. Three of the six are Bunker Hill in 1775, the Declaration of Independence in 1776, and Washington's crossing of the Delaware. The other three are Saratoga in 1777, the winter at Valley Forge, and the British surrender at Yorktown in 1781.

The states had already joined together during the war, under a plan called the Articles of Confederation, in force from 1781. Winning left a hard question: was that plan enough? It gave almost all the power to the individual states. The national Congress could not collect taxes, could not control trade between the states, and could not make anyone obey it.

By the mid-1780s this was clearly failing. The government could not pay its debts or its soldiers. States quarreled over trade and borders. In Massachusetts, farmers took up arms, and leaders saw that nobody could keep order.

In May 1787, delegates from the states met in Philadelphia. They had been sent to repair the Articles of Confederation. Instead they closed the doors and wrote a completely new plan of government. That meeting is called the Constitutional Convention, and what happened there is simple to remember: the Constitution was written, by the men we call the Founding Fathers.

Fifty-five delegates took part, sent by twelve states, because Rhode Island refused to send anyone. George Washington was chosen to preside over the meeting. Benjamin Franklin, at eighty-one, was the oldest man in the room. James Madison kept the fullest record of the debates and shaped so much of the plan that he is called the Father of the Constitution.

The hardest argument was about representation. Large states wanted seats based on population. Small states wanted every state to count equally. The deal that settled it is called the Great Compromise, or the Connecticut Compromise. Seats in the House of Representatives go by population, and every state, large or small, gets two senators.

The delegates signed the finished document on September 17, 1787.

Writing it was not enough. Nine of the thirteen states had to approve, or ratify, the Constitution before it could take effect, and the debate in the states took another year. New Hampshire became the ninth state to agree in June 1788, and the new government began work in 1789. A promise made during that debate was kept in 1791, when the first ten amendments, the Bill of Rights, were added.