The War of Independence

Introduction

This paper is about the American War of Independence that led to the formation of the United States of America as we know today.

I have chosen to write about the war of independence because war stories from all over the world have always fascinated me.

My paper about the American War of Independence is divided into four chapters containing information about the things that started the war, the years of battle and how the war ended.

The first chapter of my paper is named “THE AMERICAN COLONIES”.

This chapter contains information about the colonies formed on the northern American continent by the British Empire. It contains information about the most important colonies, from which the war had begun.

The second chapter of my paper entitled “THINGS THAT LEAD TO THE WAR” presents the things that pushed the colonists on the verge of war.

One of the most important causes of this war is that the British Empire only raised those colonies for their resources and to have a market outside the British Empire to sell their goods. Another important thing that made the colonists start the war was that the greed of the British government was no longer accepted by the people. They were already paying expensive taxes, but the British added some other taxes like the “Stamp Act”.

The third chapter of my paper is named “THE YEARS OF BATTLE”.

The eight years of battle between the colonists and the British army are presented. The war started in 1775 in Massachusetts and the commander of this colony was General Thomas Gage. He was the governor of Massachusetts and the commander-in-chief of all the British troops in North America. The fighting began with a relatively minor skirmish. On 19th of April 1775 Gage dispatched a column to seize an arms cache thought to be at the town of Concord, only 16 miles from Boston. Another important figure of this war and an important figure of America was George Washington. On the 15th of June 1775, Washington was appointed commander of the new Continental army.

On 4th of July 1776 the most important event of the war happened: the “Declaration of Independence” was signed. This declaration is the most important document in the United States , this document gave confidence and belief that the British colonies could obtain their independence.

The end of the war came in 1782 on the 27th of February. The decision was taken by the British government, seeing that their soldiers were running low on fighting moral and they were loosing ground in the fight with the colonists. Finally a document was signed between the Americans and the British Empire, where the British would acknowledge the independence of America. This document was announced on 30th of November 1782.

The forth chapter of my paper is named “THE END OF THE WAR”. In this last chapter of my paper, the end of the war and some events that took place after the war in the newly formed territory are presented. On 27 February 1782 the British Parliament decided to stop the war and to call their troops home. On 30th November 1782 the Anglo-American treaty was announced. The treaty acknowledged American independence, and gave them both of their main territorial desires - a western border on the Mississippi, and control of the old North West, an area south of the Great Lakes that Canada also had a good claim to.

Another event that occurred after the war ended was the one on 30th of April 1789 when George Washington was elected as the first president of the newly formed United States of America.

CHAPTER ONE - THE AMERICAN COLONIES

It is always difficult in history to mark the beginning and end of a period. Events keep rushing on and do not pause to be divided into chapters; or, in other words, in the history which really takes place, a new chapter is always beginning long before the old one is ended. The divisions we make when we try to describe it are merely marks that we make for our own convenience. In telling the story of the American Revolution we must stop somewhere, and the inauguration of President Washington is a very proper place. We must also begin somewhere, but it is quite clear that it will not do to begin with the Declaration of Independence in July, 1776, or even with the midnight ride of Paul Revere in April, 1775. For if we ask what caused that "hurry of hoofs in a village street," and what brought together those five-and-fifty statesmen at Philadelphia, we are not simply led back to the Boston Tea-Party, and still further to the Stamp Act, but we find it necessary to refer to events that happened more than a century before the Revolution can properly be said to have begun.

In the middle of the eighteenth century there were four New England colonies. Massachusetts extended her sway over Maine, and the Green Mountain territory was an uninhabited wilderness, to which New York and New Hampshire alike laid claim. The four commonwealths of New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Rhode Island had all been in existence, under one form or another, for more than a century. The men who were in the prime of life there in 1750 were the great-grandsons and great-great-grandsons of the men who crossed the ocean between 1620 and 1640 and settled New England. Scarcely two men in a hundred were of other than English blood. About one in a hundred could say that his family came from Scotland or the north of Ireland; one in five hundred may have been the grandchild of a Huguenot. There were no cities; and from Boston, which was a town with 16,000 inhabitants, down to the smallest settlement in the White Mountains, the government was carried on by town-meetings at which, almost any grown-up man could be present and speak and vote. Except upon the sea-coast nearly all the people lived upon farms; but all along the coast were many who lived by fishing and by building ships, and in the towns dwelt many merchants grown rich by foreign trade. In those days Massachusetts was the richest of the thirteen colonies, and had a larger population than any other except Virginia.