How did Britain lose America? What did Britain do to the US? Why were the colonists not justified? Did the colonists have the right to declare independence?
Why did the 13 colonies want independence? What were the reasons the colonists gave for not wanting to declare their independence? How did Britain react to the declaration of independence? Is Canada still under British rule? Why was it dangerous for the colonists to declare independence from Britain? What taxes did Britain put on the colonies?
Does Queen Elizabeth own land in Canada? Does Canada still pay the queen? Does England own Australia? Does Australia pay money to England? Who is the Queen of Australia ? Who is the king of Australia?
Can the Queen fire the Australian government? Can the Queen dismiss the Australian prime minister? Can the Queen overrule the prime minister? How rich is the Queen? Why do royals sleep in separate beds? Who is the richest royal? The British defeated the French in North America in seventeen sixty-three.
As a result, the British took control of lands that had been claimed by France. Britain now was responsible for almost two million people in the thirteen American colonies and sixty thousand French-speaking people in Canada. In addition to political and economic responsibilities, Britain had to protect all these colonists from different groups of Indians. This would cost a lot of money.
Britain already had spent a lot sending troops and material to the colonies to fight the French and Indian War. It believed the American colonists should now help pay for that war. The colonists in North America in seventeen sixty-three were very different from those who had settled there more than one hundred years before.
They had different ideas. They had come to consider their colonial legislatures as smaller, but similar to the British Parliament in London. These smaller parliaments had helped the colonists rule themselves for more than one hundred years. The colonists began to feel that their legislatures should also have the powers that the British Parliament had. The situation in England had changed as well. In the year seventeen-seven, the nation became officially known as Great Britain.
Its king no longer controlled Parliament as he had in the early sixteen hundreds. Then, the king decided all major questions, especially those concerning the colonies. But power had moved from the king to the Parliament. It was the legislature that decided major questions by the time of the French and Indian War, especially the power to tax. The parliaments in the colonies began to believe that they too should have this power of taxation. The first English settlers in America considered themselves citizens of England.
They had made a dangerous trip across the ocean to create a little England in a new place, to trade with the mother country and to spread their religion. By seventeen sixty-three, however, the colonists thought of themselves as Americans. Many of their families had been in North America for fifty to one hundred years.
They had cleared the land, built homes, fought Indians and made lives for themselves far away from Britain. They had different everyday concerns than the people in Britain. Their way of life was different, too. They did not want anyone else to tell them how to govern themselves. The people in Britain, however, still believed that the purpose of a colony was to serve the mother country. The government treated British citizens in the colonies differently from those at home.
It demanded special taxes from the colonists. It also ordered them to feed British troops and let them live in their houses. Britain claimed that the soldiers were in the colonies to protect the people.
But the people asked, "Protect us from whom? After the French were gone -- following their defeat in the French and Indian War -- the colonists felt they no longer needed British military protection. But the ideal of "government by the citizens and for the citizens" was the fuel that fired the revolutionary vision of a just society. It is the ideal that allows for change when the people desire change. For example, in those days, only free men who owned a certain amount of property were allowed to vote.
But since then, the requirement of owning property has been dropped. Women are allowed to vote. Slavery was abolished.
Now all adult citizens of the United States with the exception of those who have committed serious crimes are allowed to vote. Expanding suffrage—the right to vote—to a greater number of people means that citizens have greater power over their own government. Many Tar Heels living in would be horrified to see that everyone has the right to vote.
Other revolutionaries of the time would be pleased that the democratic government they created has become strong and works so well. The great legacy of the American Revolution is that a government was established that allowed for debate and differences of opinion. This government is able to develop and improve as society progresses. It seems strange and wrong to us today that the men at Halifax could talk about personal freedom and a better government while holding African Americans in slavery and denying voting and other rights to women and to men without property.
But the dramatic fight for constitutional rights in the s was staged by an all-white, all-male cast. However much we may question the ideas of some of the founders, we must acknowledge the importance of what they achieved.
They adopted the United States Constitution, which created a government based on written principles with the possibility of amendments. Thus, they established a method to achieve fundamental changes in the future, such as the abolition of slavery and the expansion of the right to vote. North Carolina Civic Education Consortium.
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Skip to main content. Is anything in this article factually incorrect? Please submit a comment. Reasons behind the Revolutionary War by William S.
North Carolina and the Continental Congress In June , the Massachusetts legislature issued a call for all of the colonies to meet at Philadelphia to consider these problems. Halifax Resolves While soldiers fought the war on the field, North Carolina's public leaders fought for independence, too.
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