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Unit 3
10–17% of examIn less than fifty years, Britain's American colonies went from fighting beside Britain in the French and Indian War to breaking away and building a new nation. This unit follows that path: new British taxes and colonial resistance, the ideas and fighting of the Revolution, the weak Articles of Confederation, the Constitution, and the first arguments over what the new government should do. Many debates that started here, over federal power, rights, slavery and the West, run through the rest of US history.
Longer videos that cover the whole unit. Good for a first pass or a final review.
By 1754, British colonists were used to running their own local affairs with little interference from London, and they were pushing west into land claimed by France and by Native nations. Knowing that setting, along with the Great Awakening and Enlightenment ideas from Period 2, helps you explain why Britain's efforts to tighten control after 1763 met such strong resistance.
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British colonists moving into the Ohio River Valley threatened French trade networks and Native control of the land, and fighting there in 1754 grew into a worldwide war between Britain and France. Britain won French Canada and French lands east of the Mississippi in the Treaty of Paris (1763) but ended up deeply in debt, and when it issued the Proclamation of 1763 to keep colonists east of the Appalachians, colonists were angry, while Native nations, as in Pontiac's Rebellion, fought to stop settlers taking their land.
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To pay its war debts and run a bigger empire, Parliament passed new taxes on the colonies, such as the Sugar Act (1764), Stamp Act (1765) and Townshend Acts (1767). Colonists protested that only their own elected assemblies could tax them. Resistance grew through boycotts, the Sons and Daughters of Liberty, the Boston Massacre (1770) and the Boston Tea Party (1773); Britain answered with the Coercive (Intolerable) Acts in 1774, and fighting broke out at Lexington and Concord in 1775.
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Enlightenment thinkers like John Locke argued that people have natural rights to life, liberty and property and that government rests on the consent of the governed, and many Americans came to value talent over inherited rank. Thomas Paine's Common Sense (January 1776) made a plain-spoken case for independence and a republic, and the Declaration of Independence (July 1776), written mainly by Thomas Jefferson, put these ideas into words later Americans returned to again and again.
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Many colonists stayed loyal to Britain, and Britain had a far stronger army, navy and treasury, yet the Patriots won. Colonial militias and the Continental Army under George Washington, the Patriots' determination, French help after the American victory at Saratoga (1777) and Britain's trouble fighting far from home led to the British surrender at Yorktown (1781) and independence in the Treaty of Paris (1783).
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The Revolution's language of liberty pushed some Americans to call for more: Pennsylvania passed a gradual abolition law in 1780 and other northern states followed, and many people wanted wider political democracy. Women's work for the war and their appeals for a bigger role led to the ideal of republican motherhood, which gave women the job of raising good citizens without giving them political rights, and the Revolution's ideals also inspired revolutions in France, Haiti and Latin America.
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New state constitutions gave most power to elected legislatures but often kept property requirements for voting, and the Articles of Confederation (in force from 1781) created a weak national government that could not tax, regulate trade between states or enforce its laws. Its biggest success was the Northwest Ordinance (1787), which set rules for creating new states, supported public education and banned slavery in the Northwest Territory, but money troubles and Shays' Rebellion (1786–1787) convinced many leaders the country needed a stronger central government.
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At the Philadelphia convention in 1787, delegates compromised: the Great Compromise gave states equal votes in the Senate and votes by population in the House, the Three-Fifths Compromise counted three of every five enslaved people for House seats and taxes, and Congress could not ban the international slave trade before 1808. Federalists, whose case was made in the Federalist Papers by Alexander Hamilton and James Madison (with John Jay), pushed for ratification, while Anti-Federalists feared a distant, powerful government; a promised Bill of Rights helped win approval and was added in 1791.
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The Constitution set up a limited but flexible national government built on federalism, the sharing of power between the national and state governments, and on a separation of powers among Congress, the president and the courts. Checks and balances let each branch limit the others, and the amendment process lets the document change over time.
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Presidents George Washington and John Adams set precedents for the new government. Fights over Alexander Hamilton's financial plan, including a national bank, and over foreign policy split leaders into the first parties: Hamilton's Federalists and the Democratic-Republicans of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison. War between Britain and France tested American neutrality and led to Jay's Treaty (1794), while Pinckney's Treaty with Spain (1795) opened the Mississippi River to American trade. The Alien and Sedition Acts (1798) sparked the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions, and Washington's Farewell Address (1796) warned against political factions and permanent foreign alliances.
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After independence, Americans worked to build a national culture of their own, seen in art, writing and buildings that celebrated the new republic, such as Charles Willson Peale's portraits of Revolutionary leaders, Noah Webster's American spelling book and government buildings modeled on ancient Greece and Rome. At the same time, strong regional differences between New England, the Middle states and the South continued.
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As settlers poured across the Appalachians, Native nations kept shifting their alliances with Britain, Spain, other tribes and the United States to protect their land. A Native confederacy led by Little Turtle and Blue Jacket beat US armies in 1790 and 1791, then lost at Fallen Timbers (1794) and gave up most of Ohio in the Treaty of Greenville (1795). Frontier settlers often clashed with the government in the East, as in the Whiskey Rebellion (1794) against a federal tax on whiskey, and as slavery spread into the Deep South while antislavery feeling grew in the North, the regions began to see slavery differently.
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This skill topic asks what changed and what stayed the same from 1754 to 1800. The colonies became an independent republic with a written Constitution, but slavery continued and spread in the South, women still could not vote, and Native nations kept losing land to settlers. Strong answers name a clear turning point, like 1763 or 1776, and explain both the change and the continuity around it.
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