Thirteen Colonies and Independence

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By the 1770's, thirteen colonies contained two and a half million people along the Atlantic coast east of the Appalachian Mountains. In the 1760's the British government imposed a series of new taxes while rejecting the American argument that any new taxes had to be approved by the people.

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Tax resistance, especially the Boston Tea Party (1774), led to punishable laws (the Intolerable Acts) by Parliament designed to end self-government in Massachusetts. American Patriots (as they were called at the time as a term of ridicule) stick to a political ideology called republicanism that emphasized civic duty, virtue, and opposition to corruption, fancy luxuries and aristocracy (highest class in certain societies).

All thirteen colonies united in a Congress that called on the colonies to write new state constitutions. After armed conflict began in Massachusetts, Patriots drove the royal officials out of every colony and assembled in mass meetings and conventions. Those Patriot governments in the colonies unanimously empowered their delegates to Congress to declare independence. In 1776, Congress created an independent nation, the United States of America, the American Patriots won the Revolutionary War.

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