The American Revolution was the political upheaval during the last half of the 18th century in which thirteen colonies in North America joined together to break free from the British Empire, combining to become the United States of America. They first rejected the authority of the Parliament of Great Britain to govern them from overseas without representation, and then expelled all royal officials. By 1774, each colony had established a Provincial Congress, or an equivalent governmental institution, to govern itself, but still within the empire. The British responded by sending combat troops to re-impose direct rule. Through representatives sent in 1775 to the Second Continental Congress, the states joined together at first to defend their respective self-governance and manage the armed conflict against the British known as the American Revolutionary War. Ultimately, the states collectively determined that the British monarchy, by acts of tyranny, could no longer legitimately claim their allegiance.
They then severed ties with the British Empire in July 1776, when the Congress issued the United States Declaration of Independence, rejecting the monarchy on behalf of the new sovereign nation separate and external to the British Empire. The war ended with effective American victory in October 1781, followed by formal British abandonment of any claims to the United States with the Treaty of Parisin 1783.The American Revolution was predicated by a number of ideas and events that, combined, led to a political and social separation of colonial possessions from the home nation and a coalescing of those former individual colonies into an independent nation.
The establishment of America as a nation all its own occurred from 19 April 1775 to October 1781. Hostilities were required because the British considered the Thirteen Colonies nothing more than another exclave of the global British Empire, and King George wanted the lion’s share of the entire Colonies’ wealth. America’s Founding Fathers had had enough, and when 8 Minutemen were killed on Lexington Green, the fight was on. The next year, in one of the Continental Congress’s many meetings, Benjamin Franklin, on signing the Declaration of Independence, said, “Now, gentlemen, if we don’t all hang together in this, we’ll all hang separately.” They were traitors to the Crown. The only reason they are not thought of as such today is because George Washington, with a lot of help from the French, won the War. He lost about 6 major battles, and won only about 3, but the three he won were the three that mattered in the end. His primary enemy was Charles Lord Cornwallis, who was more than a match for him many times. But when Washington combined all his American forces with those of the French of Gilbert du Motier, the Marquis de Lafayette, Cornwallis could not overcome them. When he surrendered, The United States of America became a nation all its own. The siege of Yorktown ended with the surrender of a second British army, marking effective British defeat.
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