United States of America

A

8

The American War of Independence

Parliamentary reaction to the events in Boston was swift and harsh. By enactments adopted in March 1774, Parliament closed the port of Boston, prohibited town meetings everywhere in Massachusetts, and imposed other penalties. Intercolonial indignation over this legislation, popularly known as the Intolerable Acts, paved the way for the convocation, in September 1774, of the First Continental Congress. The Congress drafted a petition to the British sovereign, George III, for a redress of grievances, called for intensification of the boycott on trade with Great Britain, and completed plans for a new Congress to assemble in May 1775, in the event of British refusal to grant its demands.

The king rejected the Congress’s petition and characterized the colonial protest movement as rebellion. Less than four months after that news was received in America, armed conflict broke out in Massachusetts when the royal governor, General Thomas Gage, dispatched troops against Concord, where the leaders of the resistance had concentrated arms and ammunition. On April 19 British regulars fired on a formation of patriot militia at Lexington, precipitating the first battle of the American War of Independence (see also Concord, Battle of).

The Second Continental Congress convened at Philadelphia on May 10, 1775. The Congress proclaimed American determination to resist British aggression with armed force, provided for establishment of a Continental army, appointed George Washington Commander-in-Chief, authorized the issue of paper money, and assumed other prerogatives of executive authority over the colonies. Congress also appealed to the British government for a peaceful solution of the crisis, but in August, George III responded with a proclamation exhorting his “loyal subjects” to “suppress rebellion and sedition” in North America. Meanwhile, British-held Fort Ticonderoga had fallen to Ethan Allen and the Green Mountain Boys, and American troops had inflicted severe casualties on a large force of British regulars at Charlestown, Massachusetts. (See Bunker Hill, Battle of.) More than a year later, on July 2, 1776, the Second Continental Congress declared independence, and two days afterwards adopted a formal statement of principle written by Thomas Jefferson justifying that action.

B

The Growth of the Nation

With the signing of the Treaty of Paris (1783), ending the war with Great Britain, the United States was confronted with new problems, chief of which was devising a form of government that would bind the 13 states into a strong and efficient union.

B

1

The Articles of Confederation

From 1776 to 1781 the states had been governed by the Continental Congress, which assumed certain executive powers—such as raising an army, borrowing money from foreign countries, and concluding treaties—in order to carry on the struggle against Great Britain. These powers were codified shortly after independence in an agreement known as the Articles of Confederation. The articles were approved by the Congress in 1777 and were ratified successively by the various states, concluding with Maryland in 1781.

B

2

The Lack of Central Power

Under the Articles of Confederation, the states explicitly retained their sovereign power, which meant that their individual legislatures remained supreme in matters of taxation and administration of justice, as provided by their own constitutions. Congress was a body in which only the states, not the people, were represented; it functioned as a large plural executive, not as a legislature. Thus, Congress could only ask the states for money to run the government, and the states might contribute or withhold funds at their pleasure. In the unstable financial climate of post-independence America, these limitations on its power prevented the Congress from keeping domestic peace or inspiring respect abroad.

During the period in which the articles were in force, nationalists such as Washington, James Madison, and Alexander Hamilton worried that rivalries between the states and social conflicts within them threatened the ability of the United States to survive as a political entity.

An uprising in Massachusetts known as Shays’ Rebellion convinced them that there could be no security for people or property without a central government to exert authority over, and within, the states.

B

3

The Constitution

The more ardent nationalists, including Madison and Hamilton, believed that the Articles of Confederation would have to be discarded, but it was with the intention of revising them that Congress agreed in 1787 to permit a convention of delegates from all the states to propose amendments to the system. Meeting at Philadelphia from May to September, with George Washington as its president, the convention drew up the Constitution of the United States. In general, this laid the foundations for an efficient national union by making the people, not the states, the parties to the agreement. Largely the work of Madison, James Wilson, Roger Sherman, and other nationalist delegates, the Constitution substituted a fully articulated government of three branches—executive, legislative, and judiciary—for the weak, quasi-governmental Confederation Congress.

The Constitution became law in 1788, after 9 states (the required two thirds) had ratified it; 12 states ratified the document by the end of 1788. (Rhode Island, which had sent no delegates to the Philadelphia convention, did not join the Union until it ratified the Constitution in May 1790.) On March 4, 1789, the first Congress of the United States elected under the Constitution assembled in New York, the then national capital. On April 30 George Washington, who had been unanimously elected the first President of the United States, was inaugurated in New York.