-
Stamp Act
declared allegiance to the King and “all due subordination” to Parliament, but also reasserted the idea that colonists were entitled to the same rights as native Britons. Those rights included trial by jury, which had been abridged by the Sugar Act, and the right to only be taxed by their own elected representatives -
Intolerable Acts
with the intent to suppress unrest in colonial Boston by closing the port and placing it under martial law. -
The Declaration Of Independence
Between the proposal and vote, a committee had been named to draft a declaration in case the resolution passed. Virginian Thomas Jefferson drafted the document, with edits being made by his fellow committee members John Adams and Benjamin Franklin, and then again by the Congress as a whole. The famous preamble went beyond the arguments about the rights of British subjects under the British Constitution, instead referring to natural law. -
Battle of Yorktown
In October, Washington marched his troops from New York to Virginia in an effort to trap the British southern army. Cornwallis had dug his men in at Yorktown awaiting supplies and reinforcements from New York. However, the Continental and French armies arrived first, quickly followed by a French navy contingent, encircling Cornwallis’s forces and, after laying siege to the city, forcing his surrender. -
Treaty of Paris
Peace negotiations took place in France and the war came to an official end on September 3 1783 -
Constitutional Convention
The point of the event was decide how America was going to be governed. Although the Convention had been officially called to revise the existing Articles of Confederation, many delegates had much bigger plans. -
Naturalization Act
Naturalization Act defined citizenship in stark racial terms. To be a citizen of the US republic, an immigrant had to be a “free white person” of “good character.” By excluding slaves, free blacks, Native Americans, and Asians from citizenship, the act laid the foundation for the United States as a republic of white men -
Fugitive Slave Act
The former guaranteed a right for a slaveholder to recover an escaped slave.
