Empire, Revolution & Independence — Print · U.S. & New York History: Indigenous Nations to Reconstruction, Grade 7

Part 1 · Why the nations chose France

Most Native nations in the Ohio country and the Great Lakes sided with France, and the reason was straightforward: the French came to trade and the British came to settle. New France held perhaps 70,000 European inhabitants against well over a million in the British colonies, and a thin population of traders and soldiers does not take your farmland. French officials married into Native families, learned the languages, and dealt through gift-giving and alliance in ways the nations recognised.

The Haudenosaunee were the great exception and played a harder game. Their long-standing policy was neutrality between the two empires — leaning toward the British at Albany for trade while avoiding commitment that would make them anyone's auxiliary. Holding that line for decades is why they mattered so much to both sides, and it eventually broke under the pressure of this war.

Alliance also meant obligation in both directions, and the nations expected it honoured. Gifts of powder, cloth, kettles and tools were not bribes but the recognised form of a continuing relationship, renewed at councils where speeches and wampum did the work a signed treaty did in Europe. When the British took the French posts in 1760 and their commander Jeffery Amherst cut gift-giving as wasteful expense, he was not economising on a courtesy — he was ending the relationship, and Pontiac’s War followed within three years.

Colonial attempts to co-ordinate failed. At the Albany Congress of 1754, delegates from seven colonies met partly to secure the Haudenosaunee alliance and partly to discuss union; Benjamin Franklin proposed the Albany Plan and published the *Join, or Die* cartoon. Every colonial assembly rejected it. Twenty-two years before independence, the colonies could not agree to combine even when a war had started.

Part 2 · A war that became a world war

The early years went badly for Britain. In 1755 General Braddock marched on Fort Duquesne with regulars trained for European lines and was destroyed in the woods, losing nearly a thousand men and his own life; Washington, serving as his aide, had two horses shot under him and helped lead the survivors out.

Britain's fortunes turned when William Pitt took charge of the war effort and committed money on a scale nobody had attempted — subsidising Prussia in Europe, paying colonial assemblies to raise troops, and sending the navy to strangle French reinforcement. Quebec fell in 1759 and Montreal in 1760.

The scale was unlike anything the continent had seen. Britain sent regular regiments across the Atlantic in numbers never previously attempted, and colonial assemblies raised thousands of provincial troops alongside them; Massachusetts alone put a substantial share of its military-age men into service across the war years. Paying for it is what put the colonial assemblies in debt too, and why they felt they had already contributed when Parliament came asking in 1764.

Colonists fought in large numbers and formed views. They saw British regulars as arrogant and their officers as contemptuous of provincial troops; British officers regarded colonial militia as undisciplined and the colonial assemblies as grudging about paying for their own defence. Both impressions were partly fair, and both were remembered.

Part 3 · Victory, debt and a line on the map

Winning cost more than anyone had planned. Britain's national debt stood near £72 million in 1754 and about £133 million by 1763 — nearly doubled in nine years — and servicing it consumed a large share of annual revenue. On top of that, holding the new territory required a standing force of roughly ten thousand troops in America, at something like £220,000 a year.

Parliament's conclusion was that the colonies, who had been defended at this expense and now enjoyed the security, should contribute. The Sugar Act followed in 1764 and the Stamp Act in 1765. From London this was obvious fairness. From Boston it looked like a new kind of taxation imposed by a body in which nobody from Boston sat.

Then came the Proclamation of 1763, forbidding settlement west of the Appalachian crest. London's motive was practical: Pontiac's War had erupted that year as Native nations across the Great Lakes attacked British posts, and another frontier war was unaffordable. But colonists had just fought a war substantially about access to the Ohio country, and were now told they could not go there. Washington himself called the line a temporary expedient and went on acquiring western land.

Part 4 · Two reasonable readings of the same nine years

It helps to see that both sides had a defensible case, because the quarrel that follows is otherwise just villainy. Parliament had spent an enormous sum defending the colonies, had acquired territory the colonies wanted, and was asking them to carry a modest share of the ongoing cost. British taxpayers at home paid considerably more per head than colonists did, and knew it.

The colonial case was not mainly about the amount. It was that these taxes were voted by a Parliament containing no colonial member, while the colonists' own assemblies had been voting their taxes for a century. The principle they appealed to — that an Englishman is taxed only by a body he has a hand in choosing — was not invented for the occasion, as you saw in the last chapter.

The war also removed the reason the colonies had needed Britain. For a century a French Canada on the northern border had made British protection worth accepting almost any terms for. After 1763 France was gone from the mainland, and the colonies were suddenly far safer — and far less dependent. Victory dissolved the common interest that had held the empire together, which is among the reasons a quarrel about taxes could escalate as fast as it did.

What made it insoluble was that both were right about different things. Parliament was right that the colonies were lightly taxed and well defended. The colonists were right that they had a long practice of self-taxation that was now being set aside. Neither argument answers the other, which is usually the shape of a quarrel that ends in a war.

Part 1 · The Stamp Act, and the shape of the objection

The Sugar Act of 1764 tightened duties on molasses and — more alarmingly — tried smuggling cases in vice-admiralty courts, which sat without juries. The Stamp Act of 1765 went further: a tax on paper itself, payable on newspapers, legal documents, licences, almanacs and playing cards. It was the first direct internal tax Parliament had ever laid on the colonies, and it fell hardest on the two groups best able to make a noise about it, printers and lawyers.

The response was immediate and organised. Nine colonies sent delegates to a Stamp Act Congress in New York in October 1765 — the first time most of them had agreed to meet about anything. Crowds calling themselves Sons of Liberty made it impossible for stamp distributors to work; most resigned before the act took effect, so in much of America it was never collected at all.

The objection was carefully stated, and worth getting right. Colonists did not claim that taxation was illegitimate, nor that Parliament had no authority at all over them — most accepted its power to regulate imperial trade. They distinguished between external duties that regulated commerce and internal taxes levied purely for revenue, and argued that only a body containing their own representatives could impose the second. British ministers answered that the colonies were virtually represented, since members of Parliament served the whole empire rather than their own constituents. Colonists found that argument absurd, and said so at length.

Parliament repealed it in 1766 and, on the same day, passed the Declaratory Act asserting its authority to bind the colonies “in all cases whatsoever.” Colonists celebrated the repeal and largely ignored the declaration. Both sides had conceded the practical point and kept the principle, which meant the argument had not been settled but postponed.

Part 2 · Boycotts, and who actually carried them

The Townshend duties of 1767 taxed glass, lead, paint, paper and tea, and colonists answered with non-importation: merchants agreeing to stop ordering British goods, and households agreeing to stop buying them. Between 1768 and 1770 British exports to the colonies fell sharply, and British merchants began lobbying Parliament for repeal, which is precisely what the boycott was designed to make them do.

A boycott of household goods is enforced in households, which put women at the centre of it. Groups calling themselves Daughters of Liberty met publicly to spin thread and weave homespun cloth in place of British textiles, held spinning bees at ministers' houses, and gave up tea — which in a tea-drinking culture was a daily, visible sacrifice. Newspapers printed the names of women who had pledged, and of merchants who broke ranks.

Enforcement was informal and often ugly. Committees inspected merchants’ books and published the names of those who kept importing; crowds visited shops, and tarring and feathering, though rarer than later legend suggests, did happen. A boycott held together by neighbours watching each other is effective precisely because it is hard to escape, and it also meant that by 1770 a great many ordinary colonists had taken a public side in a way that would be awkward to walk back.

This matters for more than fairness in the telling. It was the first time large numbers of colonists who could not vote, hold office or sit in an assembly took direct political action, and they were effective: Parliament repealed all the Townshend duties except the one on tea in 1770. A movement that had begun with lawyers and printers had become something much wider.

Part 3 · Five dead on King Street

Troops had been stationed in Boston since 1768, which is a provocative thing to do to a town of about 16,000 people. Soldiers competed for casual work in their off-duty hours, undercutting local wages, and scuffles were constant. On the evening of 5 March 1770 a crowd gathered around a sentry outside the Custom House, throwing snowballs, ice and insults; soldiers came to his aid; shots were fired without a clear order; five men died, among them Crispus Attucks, a sailor of African and Wampanoag descent who is usually counted the first killed.

What happened next is the part worth knowing. Paul Revere produced an engraving showing a line of soldiers firing on an orderly crowd at an officer's command — effective, widely copied, and not what the evidence showed. And John Adams, a leading patriot, defended the soldiers at trial on the grounds that a fair hearing mattered more than the cause. Six were acquitted and two convicted of manslaughter.

Both of those facts belong in the same lesson. The same movement produced propaganda that misrepresented an event and a defence lawyer who risked his standing to see the accused fairly tried. Adams later called it one of the best things he ever did.

Part 4 · The tea, and the point of no return

After 1770 the quarrel cooled for three years. The Tea Act of 1773 restarted it, and the reason reveals the whole dispute. The Act lowered the price of legal tea while leaving the Townshend duty on it in place, which meant a colonist who bought the cheap tea would be paying a tax levied without colonial consent. It was, as some saw it, a bribe to concede the principle.

So the tea went into the water, and Parliament's response converted a Massachusetts quarrel into a continental one. The Coercive Acts of 1774 — called the Intolerable Acts in America — closed the port of Boston until the tea was paid for, rewrote the Massachusetts charter to make the council appointed rather than elected, allowed officials accused of capital crimes to be tried in England, and quartered troops.

Shutting a city's port to punish a town and cancelling an elected council frightened colonies with no interest in tea. Twelve of them sent delegates to the First Continental Congress in September 1774. The following April, British troops marching to seize munitions at Concord met militia at Lexington, and the argument about who could tax became a war.

Part 1 · What Paine did that petitions could not

Paine's achievement was partly argument and partly register. Where colonial pamphlets cited Magna Carta, common law precedent and the rights of Englishmen, Paine used the Bible, plain analogy and insult. He called George III “the Royal Brute of Britain.” He observed that there was something absurd in supposing a continent to be perpetually governed by an island.

He also moved the target. As long as the quarrel was with Parliament, reconciliation remained logically possible — a bad ministry can be replaced. By attacking monarchy as an institution and the king as a person, Paine made independence not a last resort but the obvious conclusion, and he said so in language a farmer could repeat.

The timing mattered as much as the argument. Paine published in January 1776, nine months after Lexington, when colonists had been fighting a war while formally professing loyalty — Congress had sent the Olive Branch Petition in July 1775 and George III had rejected it and declared the colonies in rebellion. People were already living a contradiction, and Common Sense named it. That is usually when a pamphlet changes minds: not when it tells readers something new, but when it says plainly what their own position had become.

The commercial facts tell you how far it travelled. Paine took no profit, assigning his royalties to the Continental Army, and the pamphlet was pirated widely, so the 120,000 figure is an estimate rather than a sales record. Against a population of 2.5 million, including the enslaved and the very young, that is a pamphlet reaching something like one household in five.

Part 2 · A document built in three parts

Congress appointed a Committee of Five in June 1776 and the drafting fell to Thomas Jefferson, thirty-three years old. What he produced has a clear structure, and reading it as three documents stitched together makes it far easier to follow.

First, a preamble of political philosophy: that people have rights no government grants, that governments exist by consent to secure those rights, and that a people may alter a government which destroys them. Second — and much the longest — a list of twenty-seven grievances, each a specific charge against the king by name, from dissolving assemblies to quartering troops to cutting off trade. Third, a short conclusion dissolving allegiance and claiming the powers of independent states.

The proportions matter. The philosophy everyone quotes occupies a few sentences; the bulk is a bill of particulars, because the document's job was legal as much as inspirational. It had to show a candid world that this was a justified response to a pattern of conduct and not a rebellion of convenience — which also meant addressing France, whose help the war could not be won without.

Part 3 · What Congress struck out

Jefferson's draft went through Congress line by line, and he sat through it in considerable discomfort. The most consequential cut was a long passage blaming George III for the Atlantic slave trade — calling it a “cruel war against human nature itself” and charging the king with keeping open a market in men.

It was removed at the insistence of South Carolina and Georgia, and, as Jefferson noted, with the quiet agreement of northern delegates whose constituents profited by carrying enslaved people in their ships. The passage was also, on its own terms, a piece of evasion: it blamed a distant king for an institution American colonists had built by statute over eighty years and were actively continuing. Striking it removed a dishonest argument for a dishonourable reason.

Notice what the cut means for the sentence that survived. “All men are created equal” was adopted by a body that had just declined to say anything against slavery, in a country where roughly one person in five was enslaved, drafted by a man who enslaved more than six hundred people over his lifetime. The contradiction is not a later discovery; it was visible to contemporaries and remarked on at the time.

Part 4 · Who noticed the gap immediately

The contradiction was pointed out at once, and not only by the enslaved. In March 1776 Abigail Adams wrote to her husband asking him to “remember the ladies” in any new code of laws, warning that women would not hold themselves bound by laws in which they had no voice. John Adams replied that he could not help laughing. She was making exactly the argument the Declaration would make three months later.

Enslaved and free Black Americans pressed the point harder and in the same language. Petitions for freedom went to the Massachusetts legislature during these years arguing from natural rights; Lemuel Haynes, a Black veteran of Lexington, wrote an essay extending the Declaration's own premise to slavery. Elizabeth Freeman, known as Mum Bett, sued for her freedom in Massachusetts in 1781 on the ground that the new state constitution said all men are born free and equal, and won.

The borrowing continued for centuries and is worth tracing. The Seneca Falls convention of 1848 wrote a Declaration of Sentiments on Jefferson’s exact frame, adding two words: all men and women are created equal. Frederick Douglass built his address of 1852, asking what the Fourth of July meant to the slave, on the gap between the promise and the practice. Lincoln opened at Gettysburg in 1863 by dating the nation to 1776 rather than 1787, which put the Declaration’s claim rather than the Constitution’s compromises at the country’s foundation.

This is why the Declaration matters beyond 1776. It put a universal claim into the founding document of a society that did not practise it, and everyone excluded could afterwards quote it back. Frederick Douglass, the Seneca Falls convention and Lincoln all did precisely that, which you will meet in later chapters.

Part 1 · The campaign that nearly ended it

Britain sent the largest expeditionary force it had ever despatched — some 32,000 troops and hundreds of ships — to take New York in the summer of 1776, days after independence was declared. At the Battle of Long Island in August, Howe outflanked the American position and drove it back to Brooklyn Heights with the East River behind it.

What saved the army was a night evacuation. Over the dark hours of 29 August, Marblehead fishermen under John Glover ferried roughly nine thousand men across the river in small boats, with a providential fog holding into the morning. Washington is said to have left in the last boat. Nothing was won; everything that mattered was preserved.

The British held New York City for the rest of the war, until 1783 — seven years, the longest occupation of any American city. It became the base for operations, the refuge for tens of thousands of Loyalists, and the port from which the British finally sailed. Washington's attacks on the Hessian garrison at Trenton on the night after Christmas 1776 and at Princeton days later were small in scale and enormous in effect, because they came at the moment enlistments were expiring and the cause looked finished.

Part 2 · Saratoga, and a world war again

The British plan for 1777 was to cut the colonies in half along the Hudson: Burgoyne south from Canada, a second force east through the Mohawk valley, Howe north from New York. If New England were severed from the rest, the rebellion could be defeated in pieces.

It failed comprehensively. The Mohawk valley column was stopped at Oriskany and Fort Stanwix; Howe went to Philadelphia instead; Burgoyne, slowed to a crawl in forested country and short of supplies, was surrounded and surrendered his whole army of nearly six thousand at Saratoga in October 1777.

Valley Forge belongs in the same year and is usually remembered wrongly. The winter of 1777–78 was not unusually cold; the disaster was supply, and roughly two thousand men died of disease and malnutrition in camp. What came out of it was an army that could manoeuvre: Baron von Steuben, a Prussian officer, spent the winter drilling the Continentals into troops who could form line, change front and use the bayonet. The army that marched out in June 1778 was a different instrument from the one that marched in.

The consequence was diplomatic. France had been supplying the Americans covertly for two years while waiting for evidence they could win. Saratoga was the evidence. In February 1778 France signed treaties of alliance and commerce, and what had been a colonial rebellion became a global war, with Spain joining in 1779 and the Dutch in 1780. Britain now had to defend the Caribbean, Gibraltar and India, and could no longer concentrate on America.

Part 3 · The Confederacy divided

For the Haudenosaunee the war was a catastrophe of a different kind. The Confederacy's rule was that the six nations acted together or not at all, and on this question they could not agree. The Oneida and Tuscarora largely sided with the Americans — Oneidas carried corn to Valley Forge and fought at Oriskany — while the Mohawk, Seneca, Cayuga and most Onondaga sided with the British, under leaders including Joseph Brant.

In 1777 the council fire at Onondaga was covered, the formal sign that the Confederacy could not reach a common decision. At Oriskany that August, Oneida and Mohawk fighters met on opposite sides, which is precisely what the Great Law had been founded to prevent.

Brant is worth knowing as a person rather than a label. A Mohawk leader educated at a colonial school, fluent in English and several Iroquoian languages, he travelled to London in 1775, was received at court, and judged that the colonists’ hunger for land was the greater threat to his people than the Crown. That was a reasoned calculation about which side would respect the Proclamation line, and the Treaty of Paris proved him right about the Americans and wrong about British protection.

The American response to frontier raids came in 1779, when Washington sent General Sullivan with orders to destroy Haudenosaunee capacity to make war. The expedition burned around forty towns, cut down orchards and destroyed stored corn before winter. Thousands fled to British posts at Niagara, where many died in the hard winter that followed. The Oneida, who had fought for the Americans, lost their towns too — burned by British-allied forces in reprisal.

Part 4 · How it ended, and on whose terms

The last phase moved south. Britain hoped Loyalist support in the Carolinas would let it roll the rebellion up from below; the campaign bled it instead, in a vicious partisan war. Cornwallis moved into Virginia and fortified a position on the coast at Yorktown in 1781.

The trap that closed on him was mostly French. A French fleet under de Grasse drove off the Royal Navy at the Chesapeake, cutting off escape by sea, while Washington and Rochambeau marched south from New York. Of the roughly 19,000 troops besieging Cornwallis, about half were French. He surrendered in October 1781.

New York mattered to the end. The British evacuated the city on 25 November 1783, a date New Yorkers kept as Evacuation Day for more than a century, and Washington rode in the same afternoon. The Hudson had been the strategic spine of the whole war — it was to seize control of it that Benedict Arnold tried in 1780 to hand over West Point, the fortress guarding the river, in the most famous act of treason in American history.

The Treaty of Paris of 1783 recognised independence and set generous boundaries — west to the Mississippi, which no American army had taken and which Britain's Native allies had not been consulted about. The nations who had fought alongside the British, and those who had fought for the Americans, discovered that their land had been assigned by two European-descended powers at a table in Europe.

Part 1 · Twenty thousand decisions

Dunmore's proclamation of 1775 was followed by the broader Philipsburg Proclamation of 1779, offering freedom to any enslaved person who left a rebel master, whether or not they would fight. Escaping was dangerous and often fatal — disease killed many in the crowded British camps, and those recaptured faced savage punishment — and still they came in thousands.

At the war's end the question was whether Britain would keep its word. Washington pressed for the return of escaped people as property under the peace terms. The British commander, Sir Guy Carleton, refused to hand over anyone who had reached his lines on a promise of freedom, and instead compiled the Book of Negroes, a register of about three thousand names, ages and former enslavers, as a record of those evacuated.

Some who left had fought. Black Loyalist units served the British through the war, and others worked as pilots, labourers, cooks and spies for both sides. On the American side too, several thousand Black soldiers served in the Continental Army — Rhode Island raised a regiment in 1778 that promised freedom for enlistment, and by the war’s later years integrated units were common in northern regiments. Black Americans fought on both sides for the same reason: each side was offering something the other was not.

They went to Nova Scotia, where the land promised them was poor and slow in coming, and about twelve hundred later sailed again to found Freetown in Sierra Leone in 1792. Others went to London, the Caribbean and elsewhere. It is among the largest emancipations of the period, carried out by an empire that was simultaneously the world's leading slave trader.

Part 2 · Emancipation in the north, and how slowly

The Revolution's language did real work in the northern states, though mostly gradually. Vermont's constitution of 1777 barred adult slavery outright. Pennsylvania passed a gradual abolition act in 1780: nobody then enslaved was freed, but children born to enslaved mothers afterwards would become free at twenty-eight. Massachusetts ended it through the courts, where Elizabeth Freeman and Quock Walker won freedom suits in 1781 and 1783 arguing from the new state constitution's declaration that all men are born free and equal.

New York, with the largest enslaved population in the north, moved slowly and reluctantly. Its gradual abolition act came in 1799, freeing nobody immediately; final abolition in the state did not arrive until 1827, fifty-one years after the Declaration. Gradual emancipation protected enslavers' property values by making the enslaved wait, and in New York a child born in 1799 could still owe service into the 1820s.

Meanwhile southern slavery grew. The first federal census in 1790 counted nearly 700,000 enslaved people, and the invention of the cotton gin three years later would make the institution more profitable than ever, as the next chapters show. The Revolution set the two halves of the country on diverging paths, which is the deep cause of the crisis seventy years later.

Part 3 · Women, and the law that did not move

Women had sustained the boycotts, run farms and businesses while men served, carried supplies and in some cases fought. The legal result was close to nothing. The doctrine of coverture — under which a married woman's legal personality merged into her husband's, so she could not own property, make a contract or sue in her own name — survived the Revolution untouched in every state.

There was one striking exception. New Jersey's constitution of 1776 gave the vote to all inhabitants worth fifty pounds, and unmarried and widowed women who met the threshold voted for three decades. Married women could not, because coverture meant they owned nothing. The legislature closed the loophole in 1807, and it would be more than a century before women voted there again.

What did emerge was an idea rather than a right: republican motherhood, the argument that a republic depended on virtuous citizens and that mothers raised them, so women needed education. It was a real gain, and it drove the founding of female academies. It was also a justification for teaching women in order to serve their sons, and the women who later met at Seneca Falls in 1848 had grown up inside it.

Part 4 · The clearest losers

Native nations lost most, and lost it in a way that had nothing to do with how they had fought. The Treaty of Paris of 1783 transferred to the United States all British claims east of the Mississippi, and no Native nation was party to the negotiation or mentioned in the text. Nations that had allied with Britain, nations that had allied with the Americans, and nations that had stayed out were treated identically: as inhabitants of territory that had changed owners.

The United States at first asserted it had won the land by conquest. At Fort Stanwix in 1784 commissioners demanded large cessions from the Haudenosaunee, took hostages, and treated with men who lacked authority from the Grand Council. New York State then proceeded to acquire most of the remaining Haudenosaunee land through a series of direct state purchases, despite federal law requiring that such transactions go through Congress — the basis of land claims litigated into the twentieth century.

New York’s acquisitions are the sharpest case because the state knew it was overstepping. The federal Nonintercourse Act required that purchases of Native land be made under the authority of the United States, and New York dealt directly with individual nations anyway, acquiring millions of acres through the 1780s and 1790s. Two centuries later the Oneida brought those transactions before the Supreme Court, which held in 1985 that the state’s purchases had indeed violated federal law.

The Loyalists are the other group displaced. Perhaps 60,000 to 80,000 left, to Canada, Britain and the Caribbean, their property confiscated by state legislatures. Among them were the Mohawk under Joseph Brant, who settled on the Grand River in Ontario, where their descendants remain. A war fought over representation ended by expelling a substantial minority who had chosen the losing side.