The American Civil War

The American Revolution short summary

The Britain started a series of 13 colonies (Connecticut, Delaware, Georgia, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New York, New Jersey, Virginia, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, and South Carolina) with different founding dates in the United States. Virginia was the oldest among them. It was colonized in 1607. Britain declared independence to Rhode Island first. In 1776 the British declared independene to Virginia but really didn't achieve it until 1783. The British rule lasted for 170 years in America.

The American Revolution was a colonial revolt that took place between 1765 and 1783. The American Patriots in the Thirteen Colonies won independence from Great Britain, becoming the United States of America. They defeated the British in the American Revolutionary War in alliance with France and others.

In the 1760 s the British passed new laws that made colonists pay taxes on sugar, tea, and other things. ... The American Revolution began. Colonists wanted independence from Britain. The Revolutionary War began with the confrontation between British troops and local militia at Lexington and Concord, Massachusetts, on 19 April 1775. The conflict lasted a total of seven years, with the major American victory at Yorktown in 1781 marking the end of hostilities.

The Treaty of Paris, signed in Paris by representatives of King George III of Great Britain and representatives of the United States of America on September 3, 1783, ended the American Revolutionary War.

British ministers, and the king, rebuffed the Americans, and started to treat them as open enemies, making many of the colonists think that independence was the only option. 

The  revolution presented the Americans as staunch defenders of liberty and the British as a threat to that liberty. But for enslaved people in the colonies, it was the British who represented liberty, not the white Americans. 

The British nearly won the war in 1776. By mid-December, many British officers assumed that the rebellion was on the verge of collapse. But just after Christmas, Washington boldly counter-attacked, reviving American spirits and ensuring that the war continued. Contemporaries blamed General Howe, the British commander, for not seizing the opportunity to crush the rebellion when he had the chance.

A significant number of white Americans remained loyal to the British crown. somewhere around a fifth of white colonists refused to accept a complete break with Britain. Some of these loyalists took up arms on the British side, and many of them migrated to Canada at the end of the war. The French government helped the American rebels almost from the beginning of the war. The rebels first received French arms and ammunition; these vital supplies were followed by large injections of cash, which continued throughout the war.

When the French formally intervened in 1778, the struggle became a global war. The Spanish and Dutch joined the war in 1779 and 1780. The French and Spanish fleets combined outgunned the Royal Navy.

In the summer of 1779, a Franco-Spanish armada controlled the Channel. At the end of 1780, the Dutch joined the conflict, too. While they posed little threat to the British on their own, their involvement extended the geographical range of the war even further. General Cornwallis’s British army was trapped by American and French troops and cut off from relief by the French navy. Cornwallis’s surrender effectively ended the war in America.

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