The Shot Heard at Lexington: How Thirteen Colonies Became a Nation
A captain in Massachusetts, asked decades later why the colonists had rebelled, gave an answer stranger and simpler than any grievance list: they had always governed themselves, and meant to keep it that way.
For nearly a century after the Glorious Revolution, Britain had left its American colonies largely to their own devices, a policy historians call salutary neglect. Colonies like Pennsylvania and Massachusetts built their own systems of government and religious life, some even experimenting with restrictions on slavery. It was an arrangement that bred a fierce, if largely unspoken, habit of self-rule.
That habit collided with reality after the French and Indian War ended in 1763. Flush with new territory but drained by war debt, the British government decided the colonies should help pay for their own defense, and moved to tighten control over colonial affairs. Parliament's Stamp Act of 1765 taxed paper goods directly, and colonists across the Thirteen Colonies erupted in protest, arguing that taxation without representation violated their rights as Englishmen. Delegates gathered in New York for the Stamp Act Congress to say so formally.
Parliament repealed the Stamp Act, but the reprieve was brief. The Townshend Acts of 1767 reignited the conflict, and King George III sent troops to Massachusetts to keep order, a decision that culminated in the 1770 Boston Massacre. Three years later, the Sons of Liberty answered new tea taxes by dumping British East India Company chests into Boston Harbor in the Boston Tea Party. Parliament's punishing response, the Intolerable Acts, was meant to crush Massachusetts's self-government. Instead, it pushed the colonies toward open revolution.
In 1774, twelve of the Thirteen Colonies sent delegates to the First Continental Congress, building resistance networks atop the old Sons of Liberty structure. By August 1775, King George III had declared Massachusetts in open rebellion. British attempts to disarm colonial militias sparked the Battles of Lexington and Concord, the opening shots of the Revolutionary War. The Second Continental Congress convened that May, formed the Continental Army, and placed George Washington at its head. Boston's British garrison, encircled, evacuated by sea in March 1776.
With royal authority collapsing across the colonies, Congress voted that May to replace Crown government with local rule, and each colony drafted its own constitution. On July 2, 1776, Congress passed the Lee Resolution backing independence, and two days later unanimously adopted the Declaration of Independence, declaring that all men are created equal. Congress then set to work on the Articles of Confederation, seeking a framework to negotiate treaties and prosecute the war as one body rather than thirteen.
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