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Embassy of the United States |
4th of July, 1776
Independence Day
An Outline of American History
The Road to Independence | A New Colonial System | | Taxation Without Representation | Townshend Act | Samuel Adams
Boston "Tea Party" | The Coercive Acts | The Revolution Begins | Common Sense and Independence | Franco-American Alliance
The British Move South | Victory and Independence
The Formation of a National Government | State Constitutions | Articles of Confederation | The Problem of Expansion
Constitutional Convention | Debate and Compromise | Ratification and the Bill of Rights | Presidential Election
Hamilton vs. Jefferson | Citizen Genet and Foreign Policy | Adams and Jefferson
George Washington Biography | John Adams Biography | Thomas Jefferson Biography
The Declaration of Independence: A History | The Declaration of Independence | The Constitution | The Bill of Rights
George Washington's Farewell Address | Famous American Patriots Quotations | Thirteen United States of America
How the Fourth of July was Designated as an Official Holiday | Photo Gallery
"The Revolution was effected before the war
commenced. Although some believe that the history of the American Revolution began long
before the first shots were fired in 1775, England and America did not begin an
overt parting of the ways until 1763, more than a century and a half after the
founding of the first permanent settlement at Jamestown, Virginia. The colonies
had grown vastly in economic strength and cultural attainment, and virtually all
had long years of self-government behind them. In the 1760s their combined
population exceeded 1,500,000 -- a sixfold increase since 1700. In the aftermath of the French and Indian War, Britain needed a new imperial
design, but the situation in America was anything but favorable to change. Long
accustomed to a large measure of independence, the colonies were demanding more,
not less, freedom, particularly now that the French menace had been eliminated.
To put a new system into effect, and to tighten control, Parliament had to
contend with colonists trained in self-government and impatient with
interference. One of the first things that British attempted was the organization of the
interior. The conquest of Canada and of the Ohio Valley necessitated policies
that would not alienate the French and Indian inhabitants. But here the Crown
came into conflict with the interests of the colonies. Fast increasing in
population, and needing more land for settlement, various colonies claimed the
right to extend their boundaries as far west as the Mississippi River. The British government, fearing that settlers migrating into the new lands
would provoke a series of Indian wars, believed that the lands should be opened
to colonists on a more gradual basis. Restricting movement was also a way of
ensuring royal control over existing settlements before allowing the formation
of new ones. The Royal Proclamation of 1763 reserved all the western territory
between the Alleghenies, Florida, the Mississippi River and Quebec for use by
Native Americans. Thus the Crown attempted to sweep away every western land
claim of the 13 colonies and to stop westward expansion. Though never
effectively enforced, this measure, in the eyes of the colonists, constituted a
high-handed disregard of their most elementary right to occupy and settle
western lands. More serious in its repercussions was the new financial policy of the British
government, which needed more money to support its growing empire. Unless the
taxpayer in England was to supply all money for the colonies' defense, revenues
would have to be extracted from the colonists through a stronger central
administration, which would come at the expense of colonial self-government. The first step in inaugurating the new system was the replacement of the
Molasses Act of 1733, which placed a prohibitive duty, or tax, on the import of
rum and molasses from non-English areas, with the Sugar Act of 1764. This act
forbade the importation of foreign rum; put a modest duty on molasses from all
sources and levied duties on wines, silks, coffee and a number of other luxury
items. The hope was that lowering the duty on molasses would reduce the
temptation to smuggle it from the Dutch and French West Indies for processing in
the rum distilleries of New England. To enforce the Sugar Act, customs officials
were ordered to show more energy and effectiveness. British warships in American
waters were instructed to seize smugglers, and "writs of assistance," or
warrants, authorized the king's officers to search suspected premises. Both the duty imposed by the Sugar Act and the measures to enforce it caused
consternation among New England merchants. They contended that payment of even
the small duty imposed would be ruinous to their businesses. Merchants,
legislatures and town meetings protested the law, and colonial lawyers found in
the preamble of the Sugar Act the first intimation of "taxation without
representation," the slogan that was to draw many to the American cause against
the mother country. Later in 1764, Parliament enacted a Currency Act "to prevent paper bills of
credit hereafter issued in any of His Majesty's colonies from being made legal
tender." Since the colonies were a deficit trade area and were constantly short
of hard currency, this measure added a serious burden to the colonial economy.
Equally objectionable from the colonial viewpoint was the Quartering Act, passed
in 1765, which required colonies to provide royal troops with provisions and
barracks. The last of the measures inaugurating the new colonial system sparked the
greatest organized resistance. Known as the "Stamp Act," it provided that
revenue stamps be affixed to all newspapers, broadsides, pamphlets, licenses,
leases or other legal documents, the revenue (collected by American customs
agents) to be used for "defending, protecting and securing" the colonies. The Stamp Act bore equally on people who did any kind of business. Thus it
aroused the hostility of the most powerful and articulate groups in the American
population: journalists, lawyers, clergymen, merchants and businessmen, North
and South, East and West. Soon leading merchants organized for resistance and
formed non-importation associations. Trade with the mother country fell off sharply in the summer of 1765, as
prominent men organized themselves into the "Sons of Liberty" -- secret
organizations formed to protest the Stamp Act, often through violent means. From
Massachusetts to South Carolina, the act was nullified, and mobs, forcing
luckless customs agents to resign their offices, destroyed the hated stamps. Spurred by delegate Patrick Henry, the Virginia House of Burgesses passed a
set of resolutions in May denouncing taxation without representation as a threat
to colonial liberties. The House of Burgesses declared that Virginians had the
rights of Englishmen, and hence could be taxed only by their own
representatives. On June 8, the Massachusetts Assembly invited all the colonies
to appoint delegates to the so-called Stamp Act Congress in New York, held in
October 1765, to consider appeals for relief from the king and Parliament.
Twenty-seven representatives from nine colonies seized the opportunity to
mobilize colonial opinion against parliamentary interference in American
affairs. After much debate, the congress adopted a set of resolutions asserting
that "no taxes ever have been or can be constitutionally imposed on them, but by
their respective legislatures," and that the Stamp Act had a "manifest tendency
to subvert the rights and liberties of the colonists." TAXATION WITHOUT REPRESENTATION The issue thus drawn centered on the question of representation. From the
colonies' point of view, it was impossible to consider themselves represented in
Parliament unless they actually elected members to the House of Commons. But
this idea conflicted with the English principle of "virtual representation,"
according to which each member of Parliament represented the interests of the
whole country, even the empire, despite the fact that his electoral base
consisted of only a tiny minority of property owners from a given district. The
rest of the community was seen to be "represented" on the ground that all
inhabitants shared the same interests as the property owners who elected members
of Parliament. Most British officials held that Parliament was an imperial body representing
and exercising the same authority over the colonies as over the homeland. The
American leaders argued that no "imperial" Parliament existed; their only legal
relations were with the Crown. It was the king who had agreed to establish
colonies beyond the sea and the king who provided them with governments. They
argued that the king was equally a king of England and a king of the colonies,
but they insisted that the English Parliament had no more right to pass laws for
the colonies than any colonial legislature had the right to pass laws for
England. The British Parliament was unwilling to accept the colonial contentions.
British merchants, however, feeling the effects of the American boycott, threw
their weight behind a repeal movement, and in 1766 Parliament yielded, repealing
the Stamp Act and modifying the Sugar Act. However, to mollify the supporters of
central control over the colonies, Parliament followed these actions with
passage of the Declaratory Act. This act asserted the authority of Parliament to
make laws binding the colonies "in all cases whatsoever." The year 1767 brought another series of measures that stirred anew all the
elements of discord. Charles Townshend, British chancellor of the exchequer, was
called upon to draft a new fiscal program. Intent upon reducing British taxes by
making more efficient the collection of duties levied on American trade, he
tightened customs administration, at the same time sponsoring duties on colonial
imports of paper, glass, lead and tea exported from Britain to the colonies. The
so-called Townshend Acts were based on the premise that taxes imposed on goods
imported by the colonies were legal while internal taxes (like the Stamp Act)
were not. The Townshend Acts were designed to raise revenue to be used in part to
support colonial governors, judges, customs officers and the British army in
America. In response, Philadelphia lawyer John Dickinson, in Letters of a
Pennsylvania Farmer, argued that Parliament had the right to control imperial
commerce but did not have the right to tax the colonies, whether the duties were
external or internal. The agitation following enactment of the Townshend duties was less violent
than that stirred by the Stamp Act, but it was nevertheless strong, particularly
in the cities of the Eastern seaboard. Merchants once again resorted to
non-importation agreements, and people made do with local products. Colonists,
for example, dressed in homespun clothing and found substitutes for tea. They
used homemade paper and their houses went unpainted. In Boston, enforcement of
the new regulations provoked violence. When customs officials sought to collect
duties, they were set upon by the populace and roughly handled. For this
infraction, two British regiments were dispatched to protect the customs
commissioners. The presence of British troops in Boston was a standing invitation to
disorder. On March 5, 1770, antagonism between citizens and British soldiers
again flared into violence. What began as a harmless snowballing of British
soldiers degenerated into a mob attack. Someone gave the order to fire. When the
smoke had cleared, three Bostonians lay dead in the snow. Dubbed the "Boston
Massacre," the incident was dramatically pictured as proof of British
heartlessness and tyranny. Faced with such opposition, Parliament in 1770 opted for a strategic retreat
and repealed all the Townshend duties except that on tea, which was a luxury
item in the colonies, imbibed only by a very small minority. To most, the action
of Parliament signified that the colonists had won a major concession, and the
campaign against England was largely dropped. A colonial embargo on "English
tea" continued but was not too scrupulously observed. Prosperity was increasing
and most colonial leaders were willing to let the future take care of
itself. During a three-year interval of calm, a relatively small number of radicals
strove energetically to keep the controversy alive, however. They contended that
payment of the tax constituted an acceptance of the principle that Parliament
had the right to rule over the colonies. They feared that at any time in the
future, the principle of parliamentary rule might be applied with devastating
effect on all colonial liberties. The radicals' most effective leader was Samuel Adams of Massachusetts, who
toiled tirelessly for a single end: independence. From the time he graduated
from Harvard College in 1740, Adams was a public servant in some capacity --
inspector of chimneys, tax-collector and moderator of town meetings. A
consistent failure in business, he was shrewd and able in politics, with the New
England town meeting his theater of action. Adams's goals were to free people from their awe of social and political
superiors, make them aware of their own power and importance and thus arouse
them to action. Toward these objectives, he published articles in newspapers and
made speeches in town meetings, instigating resolutions that appealed to the
colonists' democratic impulses. In 1772 he induced the Boston town meeting to select a "Committee of
Correspondence" to state the rights and grievances of the colonists. The
committee opposed a British decision to pay the salaries of judges from customs
revenues; it feared that the judges would no longer be dependent on the
legislature for their incomes and thus no longer accountable to it -- thereby
leading to the emergence of "a despotic form of government." The committee
communicated with other towns on this matter and requested them to draft
replies. Committees were set up in virtually all the colonies, and out of them
grew a base of effective revolutionary organizations. Still, Adams did not have
enough fuel to set a fire. In 1773, however, Britain furnished Adams and his allies with an incendiary
issue. The powerful East India Company, finding itself in critical financial
straits, appealed to the British government, which granted it a monopoly on all
tea exported to the colonies. The government also permitted the East India
Company to supply retailers directly, bypassing colonial wholesalers who had
previously sold it. After 1770, such a flourishing illegal trade existed that
most of the tea consumed in America was of foreign origin and imported,
illegally, duty- free. By selling its tea through its own agents at a price well
under the customary one, the East India Company made smuggling unprofitable and
threatened to eliminate the independent colonial merchants at the same time.
Aroused not only by the loss of the tea trade but also by the monopolistic
practice involved, colonial traders joined the radicals agitating for
independence. In ports up and down the Atlantic coast, agents of the East India Company
were forced to resign, and new shipments of tea were either returned to England
or warehoused. In Boston, however, the agents defied the colonists and, with the
support of the royal governor, made preparations to land incoming cargoes
regardless of opposition. On the night of December 16, 1773, a band of men
disguised as Mohawk Indians and led by Samuel Adams boarded three British ships
lying at anchor and dumped their tea cargo into Boston harbor. They took this
step because they feared that if the tea were landed, colonists would actually
comply with the tax and purchase the tea. Adams and his band of radicals doubted
their countrymen's commitment to principle. A crisis now confronted Britain. The East India Company had carried out a
parliamentary statute, and if the destruction of the tea went unpunished,
Parliament would admit to the world that it had no control over the colonies.
Official opinion in Britain almost unanimously condemned the Boston Tea Party as
an act of vandalism and advocated legal measures to bring the insurgent
colonists into line. Parliament responded with new laws that the colonists called the "Coercive or
Intolerable Acts." The first, the Boston Port Bill, closed the port of Boston
until the tea was paid for -- an action that threatened the very life of the
city, for to prevent Boston from having access to the sea meant economic
disaster. Other enactments restricted local authority and banned most town
meetings held without the governor's consent. A Quartering Act required local
authorities to find suitable quarters for British troops, in private homes if
necessary. Instead of subduing and isolating Massachusetts as Parliament
intended, these acts rallied its sister colonies to its aid. The Quebec Act, passed at nearly the same time, extended the boundaries of
the province of Quebec and guaranteed the right of the French inhabitants to
enjoy religious freedom and their own legal customs. The colonists opposed this
act because, by disregarding old charter claims to western lands, it threatened
to hem them in to the North and Northwest by a Roman Catholic-dominated
province. Though the Quebec Act had not been passed as a punitive measure, it
was classed by the Americans with the Coercive Acts, and all became known as the
"Five Intolerable Acts." At the suggestion of the Virginia House of Burgesses, colonial
representatives met in Philadelphia on September 5, 1774, "to consult upon the
present unhappy state of the Colonies." Delegates to this meeting, known as the
First Continental Congress, were chosen by provincial congresses or popular
conventions. Every colony except Georgia sent at least one delegate, and the
total number of 55 was large enough for diversity of opinion, but small enough
for genuine debate and effective action. The division of opinion in the colonies
posed a genuine dilemma for the delegates. They would have to give an appearance
of firm unanimity to induce the British government to make concessions and, at
the same time, they would have to avoid any show of radicalism or spirit of
independence that would alarm more moderate Americans. A cautious keynote
speech, followed by a "resolve" that no obedience was due the Coercive Acts,
ended with adoption of a set of resolutions, among them, the right of the
colonists to "life, liberty and property," and the right of provincial
legislatures to set "all cases of taxation and internal polity." The most important action taken by the Congress, however, was the formation
of a "Continental Association," which provided for the renewal of the trade
boycott and for a system of committees to inspect customs entries, publish the
names of merchants who violated the agreements, confiscate their imports, and
encourage frugality, economy and industry. The Association immediately assumed the leadership in the colonies, spurring
new local organizations to end what remained of royal authority. Led by the
pro-independence leaders, they drew their support not only from the less
well-to-do, but from many members of the professional class, especially lawyers,
most of the planters of the Southern colonies and a number of merchants. They
intimidated the hesitant into joining the popular movement and punished the
hostile. They began the collection of military supplies and the mobilization of
troops. And they fanned public opinion into revolutionary ardor. Many Americans, opposed to British encroachment on American rights,
nonetheless favored discussion and compromise as the proper solution. This group
included Crown-appointed officers, many Quakers and members of other religious
sects opposed to the use of violence, many merchants -- especially from the
middle colonies -- and some discontented farmers and frontiersmen from Southern
colonies. The king might well have effected an alliance with these large numbers of
moderates and, by timely concessions, so strengthened their position that the
revolutionaries would have found it difficult to proceed with hostilities. But
George III had no intention of making concessions. In September 1774, scorning a
petition by Philadelphia Quakers, he wrote, "The die is now cast, the Colonies
must either submit or triumph." This action isolated the Loyalists who were
appalled and frightened by the course of events following the Coercive Acts. General Thomas Gage, an amiable English gentleman with an American-born wife,
commanded the garrison at Boston, where political activity had almost wholly
replaced trade. Gage's main duty in the colonies had been to enforce the
Coercive Acts. When news reached him that the Massachusetts colonists were
collecting powder and military stores at the town of Concord, 32 kilometers
away, Gage sent a strong detail from the garrison to confiscate these
munitions. After a night of marching, the British troops reached the village of
Lexington on April 19, 1775, and saw a grim band of 70 Minutemen -- so named
because they were said to be ready to fight in a minute -- through the early
morning mist. The Minutemen intended only a silent protest, but Major John
Pitcairn, the leader of the British troops, yelled, "Disperse, you damned
rebels! You dogs, run!" The leader of the Minutemen, Captain John Parker, told
his troops not to fire unless fired at first. The Americans were withdrawing
when someone fired a shot, which led the British troops to fire at the
Minutemen. The British then charged with bayonets, leaving eight dead and 10
wounded. It was, in the often quoted phrase of Ralph Waldo Emerson, "the shot
heard 'round the world." Then the British pushed on to Concord. The Americans had taken away most of
the munitions, but the British destroyed whatever was left. In the meantime,
American forces in the countryside mobilized, moved toward Concord and inflicted
casualties on the British, who began the long return to Boston. All along the
road, however, behind stone walls, hillocks and houses, militiamen from "every
Middlesex village and farm" made targets of the bright red coats of the British
soldiers. By the time the weary soldiers stumbled into Boston, they suffered
more than 250 killed and wounded. The Americans lost 93 men. While the alarms of Lexington and Concord were still resounding, the Second
Continental Congress met in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on May 10, 1775. By May
15, the Congress voted to go to war, inducting the colonial militias into
continental service and appointing Colonel George Washington of Virginia as
commander-in-chief of the American forces. In the meantime, the Americans would
suffer high casualties at Bunker Hill just outside Boston. Congress also ordered
American expeditions to march northward into Canada by fall. Although the
Americans later captured Montreal, they failed in a winter assault on Quebec,
and eventually retreated to New York. Despite the outbreak of armed conflict, the idea of complete separation from
England was still repugnant to some members of the Continental Congress. In
July, John Dickinson had drafted a resolution, known as the Olive Branch
Petition, begging the king to prevent further hostile actions until some sort of
agreement could be worked out. The petition fell on deaf ears, however, and King
George III issued a proclamation on August 23, 1775, declaring the colonies to
be in a state of rebellion. Britain had expected the Southern colonies to remain loyal, in part because
of their reliance on slavery. Many in the Southern colonies feared that a
rebellion against the mother country would also trigger a slave uprising against
the planters. In November 1775, in fact, Lord Dunmore, the governor of Virginia,
offered freedom to all slaves who would fight for the British. However,
Dunmore's proclamation had the effect of driving to the rebel side many
Virginians who would otherwise have remained Loyalist. The governor of North Carolina, Josiah Martin, also urged North Carolinians
to remain loyal to the Crown. When 1,500 men answered Martin's call, they were
defeated by revolutionary armies before British troops could arrive to help. British warships continued down the coast to Charleston, South Carolina, and
opened fire on the city in early June 1776. But South Carolinians had time to
prepare, and repulsed the British by the end of the month. They would not return
South for more than two years. In January 1776, Thomas Paine, a political theorist and writer who had come
to America from England in 1774, published a 50-page pamphlet, Common Sense.
Within three months, 100,000 copies of the pamphlet were sold. Paine attacked
the idea of hereditary monarchy, declaring that one honest man was worth more to
society than "all the crowned ruffians that ever lived." He presented the
alternatives -- continued submission to a tyrannical king and an outworn
government, or liberty and happiness as a self-sufficient, independent republic.
Circulated throughout the colonies, Common Sense helped to crystallize the
desire for separation. There still remained the task, however, of gaining each colony's approval of
a formal declaration. On May 10, 1776 -- one year to the day since the Second
Continental Congress had first met -- a resolution was adopted calling for
separation. Now only a formal declaration was needed. On June 7, Richard Henry
Lee of Virginia introduced a resolution declaring "That these United Colonies
are, and of right ought to be, free and independent states...." Immediately, a
committee of five, headed by Thomas Jefferson of Virginia, was appointed to
prepare a formal declaration. Largely Jefferson's work, the Declaration of Independence, adopted July 4,
1776, not only announced the birth of a new nation, but also set forth a
philosophy of human freedom that would become a dynamic force throughout the
entire world. The Declaration draws upon French and English Enlightenment
political philosophy, but one influence in particular stands out: John Locke's
Second Treatise on Government. Locke took conceptions of the traditional rights
of Englishmen and universalized them into the natural rights of all humankind.
The Declaration's familiar opening passage echoes Locke's social-contract theory
of government:
In the Declaration, Jefferson linked Locke's principles directly to the
situation in the colonies. To fight for American independence was to fight for a
government based on popular consent in place of a government by a king who had
"combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our
constitution, and unacknowledged by our laws...." Only a government based on
popular consent could secure natural rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of
happiness. Thus, to fight for American independence was to fight on behalf of
one's own natural rights. In France, enthusiasm for the American cause was high: the French
intellectual world was itself in revolt against feudalism and privilege.
However, the Crown lent its support to the colonies for geopolitical rather than
ideological reasons: the French government had been eager for reprisal against
Britain ever since France's defeat in 1763. To further the American cause,
Benjamin Franklin was sent to Paris in 1776. His wit, guile and intellect soon
made their presence felt in the French capital, and played a major role in
winning French assistance. France began providing aid to the colonies in May 1776, when it sent 14 ships
with war supplies to America. In fact, most of the gun powder used by the
American armies came from France. After Britain's defeat at Saratoga, France saw
an opportunity to seriously weaken its ancient enemy and restore the balance of
power that had been upset by the Seven Years' War (the French and Indian War).
On February 6, 1778, America and France signed a Treaty of Amity and Commerce,
in which France recognized America and offered trade concessions. They also
signed a Treaty of Alliance, which stipulated that if France entered the war,
neither country would lay down its arms until America won its independence, that
neither would conclude peace with Britain without the consent of the other, and
that each guaranteed the other's possessions in America. This was the only
bilateral defense treaty signed by the United States or its predecessors until
1949. The Franco-American alliance soon broadened the conflict. In June 1778
British ships fired on French vessels, and the two countries went to war. In
1779 Spain, hoping to reacquire territories taken by Britain in the Seven Years'
War, entered the conflict on the side of France, but not as an ally of the
Americans. In 1780 Britain declared war on the Dutch, who had continued to trade
with the Americans. The combination of these European powers, with France in the
lead, was a far greater threat to Britain than the American colonies standing
alone. With the French now involved, the British stepped up their efforts in the
southern colonies since they felt that most Southerners were Loyalists. A
campaign began in late 1778, with the capture of Savannah, Georgia. Shortly
thereafter, British troops drove toward Charleston, South Carolina, the
principal Southern port. The British also brought naval and amphibious forces
into play there, and they managed to bottle up American forces on the Charleston
peninsula. On May 12 General Benjamin Lincoln surrendered the city and its 5,000
troops, the greatest American defeat of the war. But the reversal in fortune only emboldened the American rebels. Soon, South
Carolinians began roaming the countryside, attacking British supply lines. By
July, American General Horatio Gates, who had assembled a replacement force of
untrained militiamen, rushed to Camden, South Carolina, to confront British
forces led by General Charles Cornwallis. But the untrained soldiers of Gates's
army panicked and ran when confronted by the British regulars. Cornwallis's
troops met the Americans several more times, but the most significant battle
took place at Cowpens, South Carolina, in early 1781, where the Americans
soundly defeated the British. After an exhausting, but unproductive chase
through North Carolina, Cornwallis set his sights on Virginia. In July 1780 France's Louis XVI had sent to America an expeditionary force of
6,000 men under the Comte Jean de Rochambeau. In addition, the French fleet
harassed British shipping and prevented reinforcement and resupply of British
forces in Virginia by a British fleet sailing from New York City. French and
American armies and navies, totaling 18,000 men, parried with Cornwallis all
through the summer and into the fall. Finally, on October 19, 1781, after being
trapped at Yorktown near the mouth of Chesapeake Bay, Cornwallis surrendered his
army of 8,000 British soldiers. Although Cornwallis's defeat did not immediately end the war -- which would
drag on inconclusively for almost two more years -- a new British government
decided to pursue peace negotiations in Paris in early 1782, with the American
side represented by Benjamin Franklin, John Adams and John Jay. On April 15,
1783, Congress approved the final treaty, and Great Britain and its former
colonies signed it on September 3. Known as the Treaty of Paris, the peace
settlement acknowledged the independence, freedom and sovereignty of the 13
former colonies, now states, to which Great Britain granted the territory west
to the Mississippi River, north to Canada and south to Florida, which was
returned to Spain. The fledgling colonies that Richard Henry Lee had spoken of
more than seven years before, had finally become "free and independent states."
The task of knitting together a nation yet remained.
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The Revolution was in the hearts and minds of the people."
--
Former President John Adams, 1818
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that
all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain
unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of
Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men,
deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, that whenever any
Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the
People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute a new Government, laying
its foundation on such principles, and organizing its powers in such form, as
to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.
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