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Battles of Lexington and Concord
The battles of Lexington and Concord, fought on April 19, 1775, kicked off the American Revolutionary War (1775-83). Tensions had been building for many years between the residents of the 13 colonies and british authority for years. -
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Becoming a Nation
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Declaration of Independance
In Congress July 4, 1776 unanimously declared tht the thirteen United States be independant from England. This important document was signed by 56 men, John Adams was the first to sign. -
Battle of Saratoga
Fought eighteen days apart in the fall of 1777, the two Battles of Saratoga were a turning point in the American Revolution. On September 19th, British General John Burgoyne achieved a small, but costly victory over American forces led by Horatio Gates and Benedict Arnold. Though his troop strength had been weakened, Burgoyne again attacked the Americans at Bemis Heights on October 7th, but this time was defeated and forced to retreat. He surrendered ten days later, and the American victory conv -
Articles of Confederation Ratified
On this day in 1781, the Articles of Confederation are finally ratified. The Articles were signed by Congress and sent to the individual states for ratification on November 15, 1777, after 16 months of debate. Bickering over land claims between Virginia and Maryland delayed final ratification for almost four more years. Maryland finally approved the Articles on March 1, 1781, affirming the Articles as the outline of the official government of the United States. The nation was guided by the Artic -
Battle of Yorktown
In the late summer of 1781 when George Washington and Rochambeau heard of Lord Cornwallis' encampment in Yorktown they raced southward from New York to link up with the French fleet under Admiral Comte de Grasse in Chesapeake Bay. Washington arrived just in time to bottle-up the British, who were anticipating reinforcements that never came from either General Henry Clinton or the British fleet. Off shore, the French fleet effectively blocked aid from Cornwallis while Washington made life unbea -
Treaty of Paris
The Treaty of Paris of 1763 (along with the companion Treaty of Hubertusburg) ended the Seven Years’ War, the American counterpart of which was the French and Indian War. In a nutshell, Britain emerged as the world’s leading colonial empire. Her possessions stretched from India to Africa to the West Indies to North America. The British shocked knowledgeable people of the day by choosing to take the barren wasteland of Canada from France, rather than the prosperous West Indian sugar islands of G -
Land Ordinance of 1785
Thomas Jefferson was acutely aware of the great potential benefits offered by lands in the West. A growing population in the original states, now largely free from British interference, was beginning to push into these areas. Jefferson had earlier offered a systematic means to prepare new areas for statehood in his Ordinance of 1784. In the following year, he directed his attention to designing a system for surveying the lands that might avoid the pitfalls of earlier methods of determining bound -
Shay's Rebellion
A wave of farm foreclosures in western Massachusetts swept the young republic to its first episode in class struggle. Demonstrators and rioters protested high taxation, the governor`s high salary, high court costs and the assembly`s refusal to issue paper money (an inflationary measure highly favored by the debtor class). Opposition had coalesced around Daniel Shays, a Revolutionary War veteran. At first, the activity was limited to meetings and petitions to Massachusetts government in Boston. -
Constitutional Convention Opens
The Constitutional Convention took place from May 25 to September 17, 1787, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, to address problems in governing the United States of America, which had been operating under the Articles of Confederation following independence from Great Britain. Although the Convention was intended to revise the Articles of Confederation, the intention from the outset of many of its proponents, chief among them James Madison and Alexander Hamilton, was to create a new government rathe -
Three-Fifths Compromise
The three-fifths compromise was an agreement between Southern and Northern states reached during the Constitutional Convention of 1787 in Philadelphia, during which the basic framework of the United States was established. Under this compromise, only three-fifths of the slave population was counted for the purpose of taxation and representation in Congress. Counting slaves as part of the population rather than as property would give the Southern states more political clout. As all compromis -
Great Compromise
Two plans were put forth during the Constitutional Convention to create the new branches of government. The Virginia Plan wanted a strong national government with three branches. The legislature would have two houses. One would be directly elected by the people and the second would selected by the first house from people nominated by the state legislatures. Further, the president and national judiciary would be chosen by the national legislature. On the other hand, the New Jersey Plan wanted a m -
"Observations on the New Constitution, and on the Federal and State Conventions" is published
Article, once falsely attributed to Elbridge Gerry. First published in 1788. The printed original was 19 pages long. It begins: "Mankind may amuse themselves with theoretick systems of liberty, and trace its social and moral effects on sciences, virtue, industry and every improvement of which the human mind is capable; but we can only discern its true value by the practical and wretched effects of slavery; and thus dreadfully will they be realized, when the inhabitants of the Eastern States are -
Constitution is Ratified by Rhode Island
We the Delegates of the People of the State of Rhode-Island, and Providence Plantations, duly elected and met in Convention, having maturely considered the Constitution for the United States of America, agreed to on the seventeenth day of September, in the year one thousand seven hundred and eighty seven, by the Convention then assembled at Philadelphia, in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania (a Copy whereof precedes these presents) and having also seriously and deliberately considered the present -
Agreed upon date for banning slave trade
We tend to look back at slavery as though people took only two positions on it: pro or con. However, in the century prior to the Civil War, there was a middle position: regulation of slavery. For different reasons, both slave owners and their opponents agreed on measures to regulate slavery and the slave trade. The prohibition of the slave trade is a prime example of this uneasy compromise between slavery and freedom. The U.S. Constitution of 1789 includes a provision on the abolition of the s