The Revolution- How did it Change America?

1. The Revolution- How did it Change America? • 1775. The Second Continental Congress met in Philadelphia and declared war on Britain. • It organized the Continental Army under George Washington, authorized a navy, and appointed a Committee of Secret Correspondence.

2. 1775- Ethan Allen captures Fort Ticonderoga. 1775-The Battle of Bunker Hill takes place in Boston. 1776-Congress approves the Declaration of Independence and appoints a committee to plan for a permanent Constitution.

3. 1777- General Gates defeats General Burgoyne at Saratoga, the turning point of the War. • Congress approves a draft of the Articles of the Confederation. • 1778-France and the American colonies establish a military alliance.

4. 1779-1781-Spain declares war on Great Britain. • The theater of the war shifts to the Southern Colonies. • The Colonists win the final victory at Yorktown. • The Articles of the Confederation are ratified. • Robert Morse organizes the Bank of North America.

5. 1783-The Treaty of Paris brings full independence. • The Revolutionary War as a Civil War in the sense that it pitted Colonist against Colonist-Loyalist vs. Patriot. • The Revolutionary War created a sense of common nationality. • John Adams, among other moderates, feared that the Revolution which had began as a dispute over governing the colonies was turning into a social revolution.

6. Was the American war for independence a social revolution? • At the end of the Revolution, about 80,000 Loyalists fled America, but Loyalists came from all classes. They were not just the elite. The same was true of Patriots. • There were only minor differences in social standing between those who supported independence and stayed in America and those who fought it and left.

7. The departure of the Loyalists and the redistribution of some property did little to change the social profile of the community or the nature of property holding in America. • But the Revolution did liberalize American life in many ways and made America a more democratic country.

8. The Revolution fostered a growing concern for equity and social justice. The Revolution even weakened slavery. • Some women expected their gender to benefit from the egalitarian spirit of the war. But the aftermath of the Revolution produced “moral mothers” and “Republican motherhood.” Women’s suffrage lay decades in the future.

9. At the end of the Revolutionary War, Americans had to repair the damage of seven years of war and learn how to function as citizens of an independent nation. • The Loyalists who had not fled for good had to be reconciled to the new country. • Several thousand free blacks in the North would have to be absorbed into the larger society.

10. The Revolutionary War itself wasn’t a social revolution. It just hastened the process of moving America toward greater democracy, legal equality and religious toleration. • America did undergo a political revolution. It evolved from 13 English colonies into a political nation. • Textbook author and historian Irwin Unger believes that the American Revolution was primarily a colonial war of independence.

11. The Origins of the ConstitutionBy Popular Demand? • 1781-The new United States ratifies the Articles of the Confederation. • 1785-Congress adopts the land Ordinance of 1785 which is a model for future federal land policy. • 1787-The Ordinance of 1787 prohibits slavery in the Northwest Territory and declares that new states carved from the territory will be fully equal to the original states.

12. 1787-The Constitutional Convention meets at Philadelphia where state delegations approve the completed draft of the Constitution. • 1788- The Constitution is ratified and Congress adopts its first ten amendments as the Bill of Rights. • 1789-George Washington becomes president of the United States of America and John Adams vice president.

13. One of the major questions the framers of the Constitution had to answer was: Were slaves property or were they people? • They answered the question by enacting a fugitive slave law and by compromising to define salves as “three-fifths of all other Persons.” With the “three-fifths” compromise, the Founding Fathers managed to treat a slave both as property and as three-fifths of a person.

14. Between the battle of Yorktown in 1781 and the inauguration of George Washington as president in 1789, America transformed itself into a Constitutional government. • The end of the Revolution brought peace and freedom to Americans, but also declining trade, falling prices, and unemployment. • America was humiliated in foreign affairs and many countries felt free to disregard American rights.

15. Thousands of ordinary people and many of the patriots turned to constitutional revision as their way to more effective government and improving America’s position in the world community. • The Constitution that emerged from the convention at Philadelphia reflected the feelings of the nationalists who blamed weak central government for the problems of the new nation.

16. We don’t know for certain whether the majority of adults in 1788 supported the Constitution, but historian Unger concludes that it is likely that the Federal Constitution was written and adopted “by popular demand.”