The Founding of the United States of America

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A little less than 500 years ago, North America was a vast wilderness inhabited by Indians who, perhaps 20, 000 years earlier, traveled across a land bridge from Asia to America where the Bering Strait is today. Icelandic Viking Leif Ericson sailed to America around the year 1000. Then in 1492, Christopher Columbus discovered a " New World". For the next 100 years, English, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch and French explorers sailed forth looking for the New World for gold and riches, for honor and glory.

But the North American wilderness yielded little glory and less gold so most explorers did not stay.

In 1607 a daring band of English settlers built the first permanent village, which they called Jamestown in commemoration of their charter from King James I of England. Bleak, hard and lonely as life was in this wilderness, more and more people began to make the difficult ocean journey and immigrants soon founded colonies all along the Atlantic Coast from Massachusetts to Georgia.

Adventurers and rogues, religious believers and practical builders— all came. Over time, settlers from many other nations joined the English in America.

By 1733 European settlers occupied 13 colonies along the Atlantic Coast. The French controlled Canada, Louisiana and the entire watershed of the Mississippi River. A series of conflicts between the British and the French culminated in the French and Indian War (1754-1763) in which Britain with its American colonial allies emerged victorious.

In the following years, the British started imposing new taxes on sugar, coffee, textiles and other imported goods. Under the Quartering Act, the British required the colonists to house and feed British soldiers; under the Stamp Act, they issued special tax stamps to be attached to all newspapers, pamphlets, legal documents and licenses.

These measures seemed quite fair to British politicians who had spent large sums of money to defend their American colonies during the French and Indian War. But the Americans feared that the new taxes would make trading difficult, and that British troops stationed in the colonies might be used to crush civil liberties which the colonists had heretofore enjoyed. Speaking as free born Englishmen, colonial Americans insisted that they could be taxed only by their own colonial assemblies: " No taxation without representation" was their rallying cry. Parliament heeded their protests and repealed the Stamp Act; however it enforced the Quartering Act, enacted taxes on tea and other goods and sent customs officers to Boston to collect these tariffs. When the colonists refused to obey, the British sent soldiers to Boston.

Soon all British taxes were removed except for a tax on tea. In protest, on December 16, 1773, a group of Americans disguised as Indians boarded British merchant ships and tossed 342 crates of tea into Boston Harbor. Parliament responded to the " Boston Tea Party" with the " Coercive" or " Intolerable Acts". The independence of the Massachusetts colonial government was sharply curtailed and the port of Boston was closed to shipping, Instead of isolating Massachusetts, the Coercive Acts helped to unite moderates among the colonist.

Opposed to what was perceived as British oppression, colonial leaders held the first Continental Congress in 1774 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The leaders urged Americans to disobey the Coercive Acts and to boycott British trade. Colonists began to organize militias and to collect and store weapons and ammunition. On April 19, 1775, 700 British soldiers left Boston, determined to capture a colonial arms depot at Concord and forestall a colonial rebellion. At the village of Lexington they confronted 70 colonial militiamen. Someone — no one knows who — fired a shot and the American War of Independence began.

In May 1775, a second Continental Congress met in Philadelphia and began to assume the function of a national government. It founded a Continental army and navy under the command of George Washington, printed paper money and opened diplomatic contacts with foreign powers. On July 2, 1776, the Congress finally resolved " that these United Colonies are, and of right ought to be free and independent states". Thomas Jefferson of Virginia drafted a Declaration of Independence, which the Congress adopted on July 4, 1776.

The Declaration presented a public defense of the American Revolution, including a lengthy list of grievances against the British king, George III. It explained the philosophy behind the revolution — that men have a natural right to " Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness"; that governments can rule only with " the consent of the governed"; that any government may be dissolved when it fails to protect the rights of the people.

At first the war went badly for the Americans. The British captured New York City in September 1766 and Philadelphia a year later. The tide turned in October 1777, when the British army surrendered at Saratoga, in northern New York. Encouraged by that victory France seized an opportunity to humble Britain her traditional enemy. A Franco-American alliance was signed in February 1778. Although American troops generally fought well with few provisions and little training, they might have lost the war if they had not received aid from the French Treasury and the powerful French navy.

After 1778 the fighting shifted largely to the South. In 1781, 8, 000 British troops under Lord Cornwallis were surrounded at Yorktown, Virginia by a French fleet and a combined French-American army under George Washington's command. Cornwallis surrendered, and soon afterward the British government asked for peace. The Treaty of Paris signed in September 1783, recognized the independence of the United States and granted the new nation all the territory north of Florida, south of Canada and east of the Mississippi River.

The colonies were now free but they had not yet forged a united nation. The first national constitution, the Articles of Confederation and Perpetual Union, had been adopted by the Continental Congress in 1777, but was not ratified by the states until 1781. Moreover under the Articles, the crucial powers of regulating commerce and levying taxes — indeed the power to make laws — remained with the states. In fact the Articles of Confederation declared that each State retains its sovereignty". The federal government could declare war and peace, make foreign treaties and coin and borrow money — but only with the consent of two-thirds of the states. And the Articles provided no method of enforcement.

By 1787 it was widely believed that the superficial unity imposed by the Articles of Confederation would disintegrate. The Congress had difficulty negotiating international commerce because any one state could render a treaty ineffectual. The states themselves were constantly involved in commercial or territorial disputes. Small farmers throughout the country, in debt and pressed for payment by merchants petitioned state legislatures for paper money. When the Massachusetts legislature-refused, debt ridden farmers organized a revolt in 1786-1787 known as Shay's Rebellion.

In May 1787, 55 of the most highly regarded American leaders including George Washington, Benjamin Franklin and James Madison opened a Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania that had been called specifically for revising the Articles of Confederation. But the delegates boldly decided to throw the Articles out and instead began drafting a new constitution. The meeting, which went on for four long months and is sometimes called " the second American revolution", resulted in the Constitution of the United States. This Constitution established not merely a league of independent states but a strong central government that exercises authority directly over all the citizens of the nation.