American Revolution, The

Abstract

The term ‘revolution’ has been applied by American historians for over 200 years to what happened in the majority of Britain's North American mainland colonies between the end of the Seven Years War in 1763 and George Washington's election as the first president of the USA in 1789. In order to finance the war debt, new consumer taxes were levied throughout the UK; in the colonies they triggered a chain reaction of declarations of principles of free government, boycotts, mob actions against representatives of royal government, organized military confrontation, secret diplomatic contacts with France, and finally the unilateral declaration of independence on July 4, 1776. A war of attrition forced the largest naval power of the time to acknowledge, in 1783, the sovereignty of the most important of its former colonies. Organizing the war was accompanied by the establishment of a new regime of republican state governments and a weak confederate structure under the Articles of Confederation. Only with the ratification of the Constitution of the US in 1788 did many of the rebels of 1776 consider their revolution to have come to a happy conclusion. The American Revolution had its specifics as a particularly successful war of colonial liberation of European settlers against their country of origin. Its actors shared the intense experience of creating a new political order by violent means with other revolutionaries. The American as well as the French revolution was part of the ‘Age of the Democratic Revolution’ (Palmer 1959) that developed on both sides of the Atlantic after 1760, when the enlightenment principle of popular sovereignty, based on the natural equality of rights of all human beings, increasingly undermined the legitimacy of unelected dynastic rulers. Political philosopher Mannah Arendt wanted to reserve ‘revolution’ as an analytical term to constellations, ‘where change occurs in the sense of a new beginning, where violence is used to constitute an altogether different form of governement, to bring about the formation of a new body politic, where the liberation from oppersion aims at least at the constitution of freedom, can we speak of revolution’ (Arendt 1963, p. 28). Hence for Arenolt, the American Revolution was the ideal Revolution.