- BEGINNING OF A NEW ERA
In 1764 Americans identified themselves as British subjects of King George III. Twenty years later, in 1788 they create a new country forged by revolution and war. The changes were significant. Thirteen states become a single independent federal state. The King and Parliament are abolished and replaced by the President, Senate and House of Representatives. Women get their first rights, and for black slaves, the revolution brought more freedoms, while in Massachusetts and Vermont, slavery was finally abolished.
The results of the American revolution were certainly many, but perhaps for many they were not enough. In reality many of the goals of the revolutionaries were never realized. The American Revolution was not only a conflict between American colonists and the British Empire for independence, but it was also a battle between different opinions within the revolutionaries. A battle over what the structures will be for building the new society.
The problems begin at the end of the "Seven Years' War" (1756 - 1763). The British defeat the French, while on the battlefields of the "New World" they also had the support of the American colonists, who participated as paramilitary groups alongside the "Red Coats". With the end of the war the British Empire seems to have achieved more than a military victory in its conquest. On the one hand, it put an end to the French threat to North America, and on the other hand, it seems that it also has the support of the American colonists.
But the "Seven Years' War" also had a high cost to the British Empire which someone would have to pay and obviously that "someone" was by no means the ruling class. In short the "Sugar Act" of 1764, the Stamp Act of 1765, the Townshend Taxes of 1767 and the "Tea Act" of 1773 essentially meant the transfer of American wealth to the American ruling class.
The American colonists continued to pay the British Empire and economic stagnation first and then underdevelopment inevitably ensued. The said development was against the slogan "No taxation if there is no representation". Thus the American colonists demand the right to participate in decisions. Between 1764 and 1775 the reactions against British taxation intensified.
Although only one in twenty American colonists lived in a city, a mass movement of resistance against the taxes imposed by the British Empire was gradually taking shape. The first episodes break out and the local collaborators of the British are terrified. In some cases British administrative buildings are destroyed. A part of the society also starts the boycott, while the most important personalities of the activist movement are organized in the "Sons of Liberty".
The organization spreads to at least fifteen cities and the episodes sometimes expand and the conflicts are fierce and bloody. Initially, the British seem to maintain a more passive attitude to the unrest, however, the final rupture occurs when in 1773 activists, posing as Native Americans, empty into the sea all the quantities of tea that had been loaded on an "East India Company" ship. .
Britain did not leave this action unanswered and sends troops to suppress the rebels by enforcing the law of the Empire. The throne requested that the perpetrators be transferred to London for trial. At the same time the Congress, which consisted of representatives of thirteen states, who were large landowners and merchants, decided to continue the tea boycott. The decision would be promoted by the local committees, while the militia is mobilized to support the said decision.
The "Revolution of the Elite" soon evolves into a "Revolution of the Middle Class". Revolution requires mass action to support radical demands. The elite have a lot to lose and their fear is a brake on the promotion of more revolutionary actions, as they are dependent on the current economic system and the profit it provides them. But this is not the case for the other classes. So the "trick" of the American elite is to keep up with the movement and maybe in this way it could limit its dynamics by calming the reactions.
American Revolution, 1775-1781: Lexington to Yorktown | American Independence, US Colonial History
He either sided with the political and military commanders of the King or with the movement as advanced by the Congress. In essence, the revolution takes place with these two options. "Dual Power", two rival authorities vie for power and political subjugation is unquestioned. Everyone will now have to choose which authority to submit to and everyone will have to take part. The first bullets were fired at Lexington, Massachusetts on April 19, 1775.
British soldiers (Red Coats) kill eight American militiamen and injure ten more. The war had just begun and the British army found itself besieged in Boston. The militias are soon supplemented by a "Continental Army," funded by Congress and commanded by George Washington. This body will develop into the military expression of the embryonic US. Militias defend their territories, but the "Continental Army" is waging a national war.
The British army wins most battles, with notable exceptions such as the battles of Saratoga in 1777 and Yorktown in 1781, yet the war is lost. This contradiction is due to three main reasons.
1) The first is the geographical one. The American colonies consisted of vast tracts of uncharted wilderness. These actually led to a significant logistical burden on the British and at the same time constituted ideal grounds for the resistance of the revolutionaries.2) Second, the revolutionaries have significant support from France, which initially supplies them with weapons and then carries out military operations both on land and at sea. As a result, a large part of the British forces had to be employed in maintaining the vulnerable sea line of supply.3) Third, the revolutionaries organized themselves politically and militarily for total war. The core of the rebels dominated the local committees and militias. On the contrary, the British could control areas only with the presence of the army.
Ordinary citizens fought for their ideals, freedoms and rights. The American Revolution was fueled by the vision of American citizens to create a "moral economy" and a "radical democracy" where the poor would have the same rights as the rich. The ideals of 1776 would be lost about a decade later in 1788. The "Declaration of Independence" (1776) recognized the equality of men and the inalienable rights of every citizen, such as life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
However, the Constitution of 1788 does not enshrine a "radical democracy" and a "moral economy", only property, the free market and the interests of the landed elite, merchants and bankers. The bourgeois revolution remained incomplete. Less than a century later hundreds of thousands of Americans would be killed on the battlefields of an even greater war, this time civil, for the right of equality among men.
The American Revolution essentially marked the beginning of a new era of world revolution. A year after the US Constitution was ratified, Parisians stormed the Bastille and the French Revolution had begun.
History: The American Revolution 1776 Documentary
The term American Revolution or War of Independence of the USA defines the war between Great Britain and its 13 colonies on the American continent (1775 - 1783). The armed struggle of the colonies against the oppressive metropolis was the culmination of the political processes of the second half of the 18th century. The English taxed their colonies heavily, which caused the discomfort of the inhabitants, especially the wealthiest who wanted to escape the financial tutelage of Great Britain.
The discomfort with the tax measures initially but mainly with the tax on tea which was maintained for reasons of prestige after the first reactions of the colonists, led the Americans not only to stop buying tea but also to destroy large cargoes of tea, throwing them into the sea, in Boston Harbor on December 16, 1773. The British responded by sending 4,000 troops to occupy Boston.
When English forces were sent to take military supplies from the town of Concord, Massachusetts on April 19, 1775, they met resistance from the Massachusetts militia at Lexington and then at Concord. The Americans managed to stop the British and force them back to Boston with heavy losses. The conflict had begun. All the colonies then mustered their militias and sent them to Boston.
The American forces surrounded Boston from the North, South and West, but left the port under English control, as a result of which reinforcements and munitions arrived. Many battles followed between the Continental army of the revolted colonies, of which George Washington was appointed commander-in-chief, and the English forces. The siege ended on March 17, 1776 with the victory of the colonial forces and the evacuation of the city by the English.
The English army, led by General Cornwallis, finally surrendered at Yorktown, Virginia on October 19, 1781. The war officially ended with the Treaty of Paris on September 3, 1783, in which England ceded its territories to the United States. The last English troops left the continent on November 25, 1783.
- ECONOMIC AND SOCIAL SITUATION OF THE COLONIES
During the period 1607 - 1732, 13 colonies were established on the eastern coast of North America under English control. The settlers were mainly English, but also French, German and Swedish. Craftsmen and ruined small businessmen, victims of religious persecution and convicts, all were looking for a better fortune. The northern colonies had, in 1763, about 1,000,000 inhabitants, of which about 40,000 were black slaves.
In economic conditions similar to those of western Europe, a dynamic agricultural economy had developed, while trade flourished with centers in the large cities of Boston, New York and Philadelphia. The first universities (Harvard, Yale, Princeton) were places for spreading the ideas of the Enlightenment. The southern colonies had, in 1763, about 750,000 inhabitants, about 300,000 of whom were black slaves. The economy was based on large plantations of tobacco, rice and cotton. The owners of the plantations were exclusively European settlers, who dominated economic and social life.
The land was farmed by black slaves who lived in miserable conditions. There were few large cities. Each state was governed by a governor, appointed by England. At the same time, there was an assembly of colonists that had a say in passing laws and approving taxes. Only some of the wealthy settlers had the right to elect and be elected to this assembly. The colonists were not represented in the English Parliament. Also, the foreign trade of the colonies was completely controlled by England.
The rapid growth of the colonies made many colonists, especially the wealthiest, resent England's financial tutelage. After the Seven Years' War of 1756 - 1763, England not only forbade the Americans to exploit Canada and Florida, which it had just captured, but also demanded new taxes from them to cover part of the war expenses. Colonists reacted by stopping buying English goods. England abolished most of the new taxes but retained, perhaps for prestige reasons, the tax on tea.
The colonists, however, were adamant, not only stopped buying tea from England but also proceeded to destroy English tea shipments. In response, England imposed trade restrictions on the port of Boston. Then, the Americans convened the Philadelphia Congress (convention) in September 1774, in which representatives from all the colonies participated. However, while the majority of Congress showed a willingness to compromise, the English King George III chose armed conflict.
The victory of American forces at the Battle of Lexington in April 1775 marked the final rupture. At the same time, militant pamphlets were circulating, written by radical intellectual followers of the Enlightenment, such as Thomas Paine, who argued that England had no right to exercise power over the colonies. At the same time, as the colonists realized their common elements, the American national consciousness was being born.
In this context, the Philadelphia Congress passed the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776, a text that echoed the ideas of the Enlightenment and was drafted by Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin. The war that followed became known as the American Revolution or War of Independence. At first, the Americans, led by George Washington, faced problems.
After 1778, however, taking advantage of the opposition between the European powers, they made alliances with France, Spain and the Netherlands, which sought to limit England. The arrival of French troops in America affected the outcome of the conflict. The defeat of the English in the battle of Yorktown, in October 1781, also marked the end of the war.
Battle of Trenton 1776 - American Independence War DOCUMENTARY
The typical image of the American colonist as a man constantly moving through space in search of his "promised land" in the vastness of the American continent, is far from the reality that prevailed in the Colonies in the 17th and the first half of the 18th century. The vast majority of those settling in the British North American Colonies moved very slowly beyond the familiar environment of the eastern seaboard.
This fact, combined with the increased birth rate of families in the Colonies, created explosive situations in the second half of the 18th century. While settlers averaged 100 to 200 acres of land during the period of early settlement, by the last third of the 18th century available land in most parts of New England had dwindled to 40 acres. The fall in the average area of occupied estates indicates a gradual widening of social inequalities.
As available studies of the distribution of land and income in the British North American Colonies in the 17th and 18th centuries show, at the end of the colonial period the wealthy settlers were richer and more numerous than in the past, but the poor were also poorer and more than in the past. Widening social inequalities limited the opportunities for the participation of the "lower classes" in politics.
The debates over the qualifications of electors that characterized the political history of Massachusetts – and other Colonies – in the last third of the 18th century echo this concern of the poor about possible exclusion from politics. Indeed, estimates of taxable income in Suffolk County for 1786 reveal that 20% of city dwellers did not own enough property to be eligible to vote in state elections under the 1780 Constitution.
In this sense, US westward expansion "consolidated the image that had been formed of America as the land of mobility and opportunity at a time when it was beginning to be neither." If the growth of the colonial population in the first half of the 17th century was driven by immigration, the great demographic increase in the 18th century was mainly fueled by high birth rates. In 1607, when the first permanent settlement was established in Virginia, England had 4.3 million inhabitants.
Half a century later its population had reached 5.2 million, while at the end of the century, after a series of epidemics and bad harvests, it had been reduced to 5 million inhabitants. During the 18th century, however, demographic figures will recover: The English population reached 5.7 million in 1750, 6.7 million in 1775 and 8.6 million in 1800. During the same period, the Colonies were developing at a faster rate. From the 300 inhabitants of Jamestown, Virginia in 1610, the settlers had already reached 50,000 in 1650 and had exceeded 250,000 in 1700.
However, towards the end of the colonial period, when high fertility was the determining factor in the age and sex distribution, the ratio between the two sexes was more balanced. The first US national statistics showed that in 1790 the total population was 51% male and that the average American family consisted of 5.7 free persons (7 including slaves). Most of this population lived in rural communities while only 5% resided in cities with more than 8,000 inhabitants.
Urban centers such as New York and Philadelphia gathered already from the end of the 17th century 25 - 30% of the total population of the colony of New York and Pennsylvania respectively, although no colonial city could compare with London which gathered, as early as 1700, 11.5% of the total population of England. In the mid-18th century, Boston, the largest American city with a population of 15,000, was the eighth largest city in the British Empire.
In 1800, however, New York and Philadelphia, already over 60,000, could be compared to England's largest urban centers – only London, Manchester, Liverpool and Birmingham had more population. Benjamin Franklin (Benjamin Franklin, 1706 - 1790) attributed the great increase in the colonial population in the mid-18th century to favorable economic conditions in the New World – especially available land – which encouraged early marriage.
Estimating that for every marriage in Europe there were two marriages in the Colonies, and for every four births in Europe there were eight births in the Colonies, he predicted, not arbitrarily, a doubling of the population of the Colonies every twenty years. Franklin, however, did not think that immigration contributed much to population growth and downplayed the importance of non-England immigration to America.
Today we know that at the beginning of the American Revolution only half of the colonists had English roots – the other half consisted of Germans, Irish, Scots, and slaves from Africa. The latter, despite their increased mortality and the unfavorable working conditions for natural reproduction to which they were subjected, will follow after 1740 the general upward trend that characterized the white population, reaching, in 1770, 20% of the total population of Colonies.
In the second half of the 18th century, indentured laborers coexisted in the Colonies "with indentured servants, apprentices, domestic workers who were usually paid in kind, sailors forcibly conscripted into the British Navy and certain areas the commercial growers'. Indentured servants constituted "the majority of the non-slave labor force" before the American Revolution, "making up nearly half of the immigrants arriving in America from England and Scotland."
Available data, such as those concerning the arrivals of German immigrants in the port of Philadelphia between 1772 and 1835, indicate a great decline in recourse to the indentured labor system after 1820. In 1772, however, 56% of German immigrants who arriving in America via Philadelphia had signed "voluntary servitude" contracts with which they defrayed the costs of their passage to America. This figure, already extremely large, was reduced to 38% in 1785, rising again to 42% in 1815.
However, by the 1820s this institution had already withered away, representing less than 10% of Germans immigrants arriving in the US. The majority of the non-slave population were landowners who cultivated their land with family labor and with the help of indentured servants and slaves. In the colonial cities wage labor was widespread and steadily expanded after 1750. This was due to "population growth, limited access to rural classes, and the completion of indentured servants' time."
The economic depression that followed the end of the Seven Years' War "seems to have convinced many employers that the flexible working conditions of wage laborers, who could be hired and fired at will," was "economically preferable to investing in slaves or servants." . The exclusion of the Dutch from trade with British America, the Navigation Acts, which guaranteed the shipbuilders and shipowners of the Colonies the same privileges as their colleagues in England, and the abundance of raw materials, contributed to the flourishing of shipbuilding industry of New England.
If the large plantations are excluded, "most of the semi-skilled workers working on specialized lines of production under one employer were concentrated in the furnaces and forges." The factory complex founded by Peter Hasenclever in 1766 in New Jersey, which employed 500 German workers, included six blast furnaces, seven forges, an ore breaker, three sawmills, and a flour mill. Indicative of the development of metallurgy in the Colonies is the fact that in 1776, 14% of the world's crude iron production came from them.
Agreements not to import English products, with which the colonists reacted to the change in the taxation and customs regime of the Empire, facilitated in the 1760s the establishment of several industrial and craft units. Although the joint-stock company was not a common practice for financing industry, joint-stock companies in secondary production grew in the 1760s and 1770s.
Even though the real wages of workers in the Colonies exceeded their wages by 30% to 100% English, working conditions were not rosy. The seasonal nature of employment, particularly in New England, where fishermen, sailors, longshoremen, and artisans were forced to cease work for much of the year, compounded the problems created by fluctuations in the import trade.
Washington's War (Full Movie) - General George Washington and the Revolutionary War
The New World, from 1739 to 1763, was the scene of continuous wars between Great Britain, France and, secondarily, Spain (the War of the Austrian Succession 1744 - 48, the Seven Years' War, or as it was called in America, War against the French and the Indians 1756 -1763). In these confrontations the colonists fought either for the preservation of the lands they already possessed, or for the conquest of new territories in the interior of America.
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On the eve of the Seven Years' War, the Americans and British had wrested from friendly Indian tribes, such as the Iroquois of Western Pennsylvania, large tracts of land, which were taken over by companies such as the Ohio Company from Virginia, the Susquehanna Company of Connecticut and other "investors".
A condition, however, for the success of their plans was the repulsion of the French and Indians who refused to recognize their claims to the fertile lands of the Ohio, which, according to a Pennsylvania Gazette columnist, "could prove richer than the mining of Mexico". The end of hostilities found the victors of the war in a constant tug-of-war over the division of spoils and the organization of new territories, a tug-of-war that would only be finally resolved by a new war.
The need for the British administration to intervene in American affairs became more pressing when the British realized that the colonists were oriented towards a form of association which would enable them, on the one hand, to defend themselves more effectively against French penetration of the continent and, on the other hand, to deal with the Indians on the western frontier. John Adams (1735 - 1826) recalled that in 1756 "some were of opinion that we could defend ourselves better without England than with her, if we would only be permitted to unite and exercise the strength, courage, and skill us".
A fact that revealed the desire of the colonists to tackle this sensitive issue regardless of the aspirations of the Imperial government. The president-general of the government, to be appointed by the Crown and a colonial parliament, could "declare war or peace with the Indian nations", regulate trade and "all purchases of Indian lands not within the boundaries of the individual colonies" , and to provide for the "new establishments until the Crown shall think fit to form them into separate governments."
Three years later, young George Washington, a colonel in the Virginia militia, in the midst of the French and Indian war, pointed out to Francis Fauquier, assistant governor of Virginia, the need to regulate "the trade with Indians," so that the colonists would assume "a large share of the fur trade, not only with the Ohio Indians, but in time with the numerous nations possessing the inland regions," and, at the same time, "to thwart all attempts of individual Colonies which weaken the general system".
These views did not lead to tangible results, and conflicts between colonists and Indians made it imperative to maintain British troops on the frontier even after the end of the Seven Years' War. In one of these rebellions, in 1763, Indian tribes led by Pontiac, unhappy that their old allies and war losers, the French, had ceded their lands to the British and land-hungry settlers, destroyed in 1763 nearly all British outposts west of the Appalachian Mountains creating havoc in Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Virginia.
The prospect of the removal of the French from the continent meant for the colonists the beginning of a new period, where, undistracted by the rivalries of the European powers, they would concentrate on the exploitation of the hinterland. However, the more perceptive saw in the stronger military and political presence of the British in America the seeds of future problems. In 1758, when the colonists were planning to expel the French from the Quebec area, John Choate, a member of the Massachusetts House of Representatives and a militia captain, wished for the failure of the operation.
Shortly after the introduction of search warrants, the Court of Common Pleas in London outlawed the use of general warrants that could include those of the American Colonies. John Dickinson (John Dickinson, 1732 - 1808), in his famous Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania (1767 - 1768), called this provision "destructive to liberty, and clearly contrary to the common law, which always regarded a man's house as his fortress, or a place of absolute security.'
Although the colonists had not yet realized the necessity of joint action against the "violations" of the metropolis, when this action led the relations of the metropolis and the Colonies to an impasse, the transition from findings to practice turned out to be particularly painful. In this respect, the different course of action followed by John Adams and John Dickinson against the new reality marked by the armed conflict is characteristic.
In the 1760s, the British North American Colonies were the scene of intense internal conflicts even before they were colored by the reactions against the colonial policy of the British governments after the end of the Seven Years' War. The rivalry between the wealthy families of New York, the Anglicans de Lancey (De Lancey) and the Dissenters (the "disputing" with the official Anglican Church) Livingston (Livingston), the confrontations of the Quakers with the Party of Proprietors.
And all along with the Irish and Scottish immigrants of Pennsylvania, the disputes in Massachusetts between Thomas Hutchinson and James Otis the Younger, to mention only a few typical cases, contributed to the political and moral delegitimization of the dominant social groups in local communities.
However, more importantly, the mobilization of the popular element through mass political rallies and the systematic use of the press in shaping public opinion caused "a profound change in the traditional patterns of political behavior". Both the disenfranchised and the disenfranchised "became more active on the political stage than ever before, even if that activity often amounted to cheering decisions made by a few leaders."
After the end of the Seven Years' War, the British government was faced with a serious dilemma. All the indications—the great public debt, the relations of the Indians with the settlers, and of the latter with the metropolis—pointed to the necessity of a permanent military corps in the Colonies, much larger than that which existed before the commencement of the war.
British commander-in-chief Jeffrey Amherst, who had "distinguished himself" in suppressing the "Pontiac Conspiracy" by offering the Indians bedding from the smallpox hospital, estimated 10,000 soldiers were needed to keep the peace with the Indians and to deal with land encroachments, smuggling and robbery. On the other hand, the social conditions in the metropolis did not allow the imposition of new tax measures for the maintenance of the Colonial army, and this was shown in 1763 by the resort to the use of the army to collect the Cider Tax intended to cover part of the war expenses.
The colonists, however, did not intend to comply with the instructions of the Imperial government. Moreover, a series of concessions made by the unstable British governments of the period to land speculators created the belief that the reforms were temporary and that the more energetic of the colonists should establish claims on the lands of the West in order to later reap the benefits.
Characteristic of the way in which these prohibitions were treated is the fact that Washington, in September 1767, confided to his fellow soldier and land appraiser William Crawford that "I never considered the proclamation of 1763 but a temporary measure to pacify the Indians, which must naturally subside in a few years especially when the Indians consent to our possession of the lands.' In this context he advised him not to "neglect the existing possibility of locating good lands and registering them as his own".
Washington, who claimed large tracts of land near the Ohio River that had been granted to officers of the Seven Years' War, aimed to "secure a good deal of land" ("my plan is to secure a good deal of land"), a plan that at the same time it represented the dream of many settlers. In the meantime, the Crown, with a series of economic and administrative reforms, attempted to increase the revenue it derived from the colonies and create a structure capable of administering them.
Final Battle - The Patriot
In this context, the British governments did not only impose duties on products imported into the Colonies - this was attempted, for example, with the Sugar Act (1764) which taxed clothing, sugar, tobacco, coffee and wine - but also in other more "direct" burdens such as the famous Stamp Act (1765), i.e. the law that imposed the stamp tax. The most oppressive provision of the Sugar Act for the colonists was the reduction of the duty on molasses imported from the British West Indies.
This measure, aimed at cracking down on smuggling and thereby increasing customs revenue, upset those who imported duty-free molasses from the French and Spanish West Indies to make rum. Colonists' rum was traded on the coast of West Africa for slaves, who were sold in the West Indies for sugar and molasses, which was imported into the Colonies to fuel this "infamous triangular trade" but also the colonial economy with its precious metal currency , before the latter was channeled to England against industrial and other products.
The metropolis aimed not only at curbing the smuggling of molasses, but also tea, whose import monopoly was held by the East India Company. The tax on tea, one of the Crown's main incomes, was reduced when it was re-exported to America. The fact, however, that the price of English tea was twice that of Dutch tea, which was imported into the Netherlands from its colonies duty-free, favored the smuggling of this valuable product.
The government of Lord Chatham (William Pitt the elder, 1st Earl of Chatham, 1708 - 1778) abolished in 1767 all taxes on tea re-exported to America, but which would be subject to a three-pence duty paid to the American customs. This measure was intended to increase customs revenue by restricting smuggling but also to regain control of all transit trade to and from the Colonies from the Royal Navy, an objective of strategic importance, as already pointed out in 1765 by Thomas Whately (Thomas Whately), the then British Chancellor of the Exchequer.
Attempts to enforce the law and restrict tea smuggling so that the East India Company would become the sole supplier of tea to the American Colonies was a constant source of confrontation between the colonists and the metropolis until the start of the Revolution. However, the disturbance caused by the imposition of the Stamp Act 1765 first shaped the social and political conditions in which the colonists became aware of their power and began to discuss the possibility of separation from the metropolis.
The reactions caused by the Stamp Act were such that the moderate Boston lawyer and politician Thomas Cushing (1725 - 1788) warned Massachusetts Assistant Governor Thomas Hutchinson a few months after its enactment that "a spirit of equalization ( ``levellism'') seems to run throughout the country and there is little distinction between high-ranking and low-ranking officials."
In the fall and winter of 1765 demonstrations against the Stamp Act swept every city in North America, and tax collectors were under such pressure that they often fled to other Colonies for fear of their lives. Those rulers who tried to enforce the law faced the wrath of the "mob".
Under these circumstances Colden, like most officials in the Colonies, did what seemed to them the most prudent solution: he did not apply the law. In Boston, where the "lower classes" of the city had formed a common front against the enforcement of the law, which forced the more moderate middle classes to join them, the intensity of the popular reaction was such that Governor Bernard (Francis Bernard, 1712 - 1779) observed that the "mob" sought not only the abolition of the law, but also of all "distinction between rich and poor."
The momentum of the protests in Boston is also due to the fact that the Stamp Act found the city in the throes of a long depression that had hit its middle and poorer classes, especially those employed in the shipbuilding industry. Large increases in spending on the poor and delays in tax collection were signs of this recession.
After all, the popularity enjoyed by Samuel Adams (Samuel Adams), orchestrator of the popular reaction against British policy, was also due to the fact that as a tax collector he had shown special tolerance towards his fellow citizens. In Philadelphia, by contrast, where unity among small merchants, artisans, and "laborers" had not been achieved until at least 1770, the reactions were less acute and effective than their counterparts in Boston.
The colonists believed that the very monopoly of colonial trade, to which the metropolis owed a significant part of its power, was unjust regardless of any individual fiscal regulation. This, after all, had been pointed out in pamphlets published in the Colonies in the 1760s. In 1763, James Otis the Younger (1725 - 1783), who resigned as Solicitor General in the Boston Admiralty Court because of the issuance of search warrants for the confiscation of contraband, he answers those who recalled the great expenses incurred by the metropolis for the protection of her Colonies as follows:
“The last conquests in America, afford the Colonies only a security against the disastrous raids of the French and Indians. Altogether our trade has not benefited one shilling," on the contrary, he emphasizes, "the income of the Crown from American exports to Great Britain is colossal. No manufactures of Europe except British may be imported. In his pamphlet with the characteristic title The Rights of the British Colonies Assured and Proved (1763) he points out the absurdity of the distinction between internal and external taxation.
The clarity with which he sets forth the relationship between representation and taxation recalls Locke's Second Treatise on Government: The colonists, living under the protection of "the best (state) of all that is now on earth" , enjoy certain fundamental rights, such as that they cannot be taxed without their consent, and that they "must be represented in some proportion to their population and property in the great Legislature of the nation."
JOHN ADAMS 2008
Nevertheless, Otis was not ready for a more active policy, such as the colonists would attempt in the late 1760s. If his countrymen declared in 1776 that "the history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injustices and usurpations which had for their immediate object the establishment of an absolute tyranny in these States," Otis recognized in 1763 as a "principle" that "every good subject is bound to believe that his King does not intend to commit no evil."
This", he concludes, "is a Constitution! To maintain what has cost oceans of blood and money in every age from external or internal enemies.' Otis protests not because America is under the yoke of the British Constitution, as many colonists were a decade later, but because that Constitution does not apply to the Colonies. His analysis of the British Constitution is taken seriously during the arduous process that would lead in the late 1780s to the drafting of the American Constitution.
Two careful readers of it in the political juncture of the 1780s are Madison and Hamilton. What causes them terror is not the arbitrariness of a tyrannical power, but the anarchy of "democratic" passions. What cost "oceans of blood and money in every age" are property rights, especially those in their most "material" and "earthly" form.
Otis, after all, states in 1763, in a paragraph reminiscent of the Federalist, that in some Colonies "the operation of the executive power has not been successful" and that "the people are represented as factional, seditious, and having a particular inclination towards democracy, so that it has refused passive submission to the edicts of the Colony, as happens in the provinces of a Turkish Pasha."
Otis defended "the natural and almost mechanical loyalty (of the colonists) to Great Britain" regarding the prospect of "an independent Legislature, or State" in the American Colonies as the "greatest rebellion" that could ever occur. "If the choice could be offered between Independence or submission to Great Britain on terms of absolute slavery", the colonists, he assured, "would accept the latter".
If Otis, in declaring the right of the colonists to judge of the propriety of an Act of Parliament, does not question the right of Parliament to legislate for its subjects, Silas Downer boldly declares that "the Parliament of Great Britain (does not) has any legal right to make any laws that bind us, for there is no source from which such a right can be derived."
Therefore, "the people must not be governed by laws in the creation of which they have had no part, nor their money taken from them without their consent. This privilege is internal and cannot be granted by anyone but the Almighty.' The British Constitution, in fact, in which "the possession of property, especially immovable property, gave the subject the right to participate in the government", made the participation of the colonists more imperative in the passing of the laws of Parliament.
“The Americans,” he observes, “have such property and estates, but they are not represented. It is therefore clear' that Parliament 'can pass no law binding us, but that we must be governed by our own parliaments in which we may participate either in person or by representatives'. If Otis focuses his attention on the negative effect that the British laws had on the commercial relations of the colonists with the metropolis, Downer emphasizes the detrimental effect of the regulations on the industries of the Colonies:
"We have been forbidden to buy any goods or manufactures from Europe except from Great Britain, and to sell ours to foreigners, with the exception of certain trifling goods. But in trade between us they can set prices, which amounts to a tax in their favor." He considers equally absurd in a country where "iron abounds" the prohibition of Parliament "to process it for the manufacture of plates and bars in factories." These restrictions," he concludes, "constitute violations of people's natural rights and are utterly void."
Some years later, in February 1775, when armed conflict between the Colonies and the metropolis seemed very likely, John Adams pointed out that “America will never consent to Parliament having any jurisdiction to alter in any way its constitutions. If America", he underlined, "has a population of 3,000,000 and the total possessions (of Great Britain) of 12,000,000, it must send a quarter of all members to the House of Commons", while one of its four sessions it must be done in the Colonies. Otherwise, he warns, "Great Britain will lose her Colonies."
The tension in metropolitan-Colonial relations observed in the 1760s was not simply a side effect of the new British fiscal policy after the end of the Seven Years' War, thus a return to the pre-1763 regime, which would have left unchanged the structures of trade with the Colonies, it was not enough to solve the problems on both sides. Even those who were willing to accept the "old regime" of British privilege were equally unwilling to compromise the control mechanisms promoted by the metropolis.
On the other hand, the British governments were not prepared to accept in the name of the colonists' invocation of their fundamental rights as English citizens any "massive violations of the laws of trade", which undermined "the integrity of the mercantile system itself". Colonial reactions against this system were seen in Great Britain as a denial of its right to exist as a colonial power.
It is no coincidence that in 1699, the British Board of Trade prohibited the immigration of workers employed in the woolen industry, while similar restrictions on the immigration of skilled artisans were imposed in the textile industry (1750, 1774, 1781), machine building (1782 ), the iron industry and coal mining. From the middle of the 17th century the initially prevailing perception of the colonies as places to settle England's surplus and socially undesirable population was replaced by the belief, expressed in 1768 by the commander-in-chief Thomas Cage, that "it would be good to emigrate from Great Britain, Ireland and the Netherlands to be prevented.
And that our new Colonies be inhabited by the population of the old, as a means of weakening them, that they may have less power to do Evil.' Although the metropolis continued to send the unemployed, the poor and convicts to the Colonies, as it saw conflict looming it erected greater barriers to immigration, indeed in 1774 it imposed a tax of £50 on prospective settlers from Great Britain and Ireland effectively forbidding further migration to the New World.
George Washington" (1984) - Complete George Washington Biographic Mini-Series
The tariffs imposed by Townsend in 1768 - 1769 were met by the colonists with a boycott of British goods, which caused their sales in the Colonies to drop dramatically. In February 1768, the colony of Massachusetts, which had initiated the policy of "non-importation" from Great Britain, issued a circular declaring the Townsend Tariffs unconstitutional. When the Legislature refused her recall, the new Colonial Secretary, Lord Hillsborough, dissolved it.
George Washington II: The Forging of a Nation (1986) - Complete George Washington Mini-Series
This measure aggravated the already explosive atmosphere in Boston and forced Crown officials to seek the help of the army to enforce the recent laws. The seizure, in 1768, of the ship Liberty, which belonged to the wealthy merchant and prominent figure in the anti-tariff movement Townsend, John Hancock, caused "the most terrible demonstrations in the history of Boston." In the late 1760s, a military force of 4,000 armed men settled permanently in Boston, fueling the colonists' fears.
When a group of soldiers terrified by the settlers' protests opened fire on them, killing five civilians, "the Boston Massacre," which would be depicted in hundreds of prints, engravings, and engravings, inflamed passions across America. In the meantime, the government of Lord North (Frederick North, 1732 - 1792), unable to collect the estimated sums from the new tax measures, revoked the Townsend duties in 1770 leaving only the tax on tea "as a sign of the superiority of Parliament and clear declaration of his right to govern the Colonies'.
Despite the two years of relative calm that followed the withdrawal of tariffs, the sinking of the British schooner "Gaspee" off Rhode Island in 1772 and the news of the transfer to Britain of all suspects for trial brought the fears of the colonists for violating normal court procedures. The confrontation came to a head the following year when the British Parliament granted the financially struggling East India Company the exclusive right to sell tea in America.
The passing of the so-called Coercive Acts (31-3-1774), which affected colonial trade (blocking the port of Boston until compensation was paid for the damaged tea) and created an authoritarian political framework (strengthening the executive power and the now Crown-appointed Upper House of Massachusetts, confiscating houses for the soldiers' barracks and entrusting the new Governor, General Thomas Cage, with the appointment of judges and police).
It pushed the colonists toward the option that few had been willing to accept in the past, that of armed confrontation with the metropolis. The news of the substantial abolition of the colonial charter of Massachusetts, which had established a broad framework of self-government since 1691, and the prohibition of any public assembly without the approval of the Authorities shocked America. Even the conservative Presbyterian clergy of North Carolina protested at this unwarranted display of authoritarianism on the part of the Imperial power.
In June of the same year, the Quebec Act, which secured the religious rights of the Catholic inhabitants of Canada and "transferred to the province of Quebec the control of the Indian trade in the vast region between the Ohio and Mississippi rivers", made noise those who looked after the lands and trade of the region, but also the zealots of the Protestant faith. This concern was vividly described in October 1774 by New Hampshire's general and representative in Congress, John Sullivan, who considered this law "the most dangerous to American liberties."
"For," he explains, "if we remember what a perilous condition the Colonies were in at the commencement of the last war (Seven Years' War) with a number of these Canadians in our south, assisted by powerful Indian nations, determined to exterminate the Protestant race from America, and think that (Canada) may become a refuge for Roman Catholics who will always favor the privileges of the Crown, we must suppose our situation now to be infinitely more dangerous than it was then.'
- CAUSES AND CONDITIONS OF THE REVOLUTION
1) Political dependency of England (Administrative dependency).2) Economic dependence on England (They were obliged to have trade relations only with the metropolis i.e. England, imposition of taxes and other restrictions. The English government forbade the colonists to economically exploit the new territories that England won from France and Spain i.e. Canada and Louisiana..Additional taxation on a number of products).3) The colonist bourgeoisie strengthened4) Enlightenment (Freedom of thought, expression, economic liberalism)5) Rivalry of France, England (the French help the revolutionaries).
- THE EVENTS DURING THE REVOLUTION
1) 1773: Riots in Boston2) 1774: Representatives of the thirteen colonies gathered in Philadelphia and sent the King of England a declaration of rights.3) July 4, 1776: The Philadelphia convention passes the Declaration of Independence based on the political ideas of the Enlightenment. Protagonists in drafting the Declaration were Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson.4) September 1783: Treaty of Versailles: Complete independence of the 13 colonies.5) 1787: The Constitutional Congress succeeds in bringing together the two opposing tendencies in the assembly (strong central authority - autonomy of each state) and passes the United States Constitution.
The War of Independence lasted seven years and was initially very difficult for the disorganized colonial army.
In the end, the Americans won thanks to:
1) The abilities of General George Washington.
2) The attitude of France that declared war against England.
3) The declaration of war by Holland and Spain against England.
4) The attitude of Russia, Denmark and Sweden which denied England the right to inspect the ships of neutral countries for enemy cargo.
- THE MILITARY STRUGGLE
From the War in the North (1775 - 1780)
1) Campaign in Boston, Massachusetts in 1775
- THE MILITARY STRUGGLE
From the War in the North (1775 - 1780)
1) Campaign in Boston, Massachusetts in 1775
2) Invasion of Canada: Quebec 1775
3) Campaign in New York and New Jersey in 17764) Battles of Saratoga and Philadelphia in 1777
- THE RESULTS AND CONSEQUENCES OF THE REVOLUTION
A. Constitution - Presidential Democracy
1) A Federal central government responsible for foreign policy, defense and finance.2) Each state retains legislative and executive authority over local government, police, justice and education.3) Legislative power is vested in Congress, which consists of the House and the Senate.4) Each state is represented in Parliament by a number of representatives proportional to its population. 5) Each state is represented in the Senate by two representatives regardless of its population.6) Executive power is exercised by the President who is elected by voters for four years and has the right to be re-elected once more. George Washington was elected the first president of the United States.7) The Judiciary headed by the Supreme Court is independent.
B. The national particularities of the colonists were set aside and thus not only a new state but also a new nation was created.
C. The American revolution was the first example of a successful outcome of a revolution that was followed by the Spanish colonies in Latin America but also states in Europe such as Switzerland, the Netherlands, Belgium and of course France.
D. The new state developed very rapidly in all areas and developed into a great power.
- THE FINANCIAL SITUATION IN THE REVOLUTION AND THE BANKING POLICY
But let's see in more detail how the Bank of England influenced the British economy and how, later, it was the one that caused the American Revolution. In the middle of the 18th century the British Empire was approaching the height of its power throughout the world. Britain since the creation of the central private Bank of England had participated in four wars in Europe. The cost was high though.
The British Parliament to finance these wars instead of issuing its own debt free currency borrowed huge sums from the bank. At that time the debt of the British government reached the exorbitant sum of £140,000,000. The government was therefore forced to vote on a scheme to raise public revenue, through the American colonies, to be able to pay the interest, at least, on the loans to the bank. In America the situation was different.
The heyday of a private central bank had not yet arrived, although the Bank of England had made efforts to impose its pernicious influence on the American colonies since 1694. Four years earlier, in 1690, the colony of Massachusetts had issued its own paper money. , the first in America. It was followed by the colony of South Carolina in 1703 and shortly thereafter by the rest of the colonies.
In the mid-18th century, pre-revolutionary America was still relatively poor. There was a serious shortage of gold and silver coins that could be used in trade and the purchase of goods, so that the early colonists were forced to experiment by issuing their own local paper money. Some attempts were successful. Also in some colonies they successfully used tobacco as a medium of trade.
In 1720 every colonial Royal Governor was ordered, usually unsuccessfully, to curtail the issue of colonial currency. In 1742 the British Resumption Act, which required payment of taxes and other debts in gold, caused an economic depression in the colonies, many properties were seized or confiscated from the rich for a tenth of their value. Benjamin Franklin was one of the biggest supporters of issuing colonial currency. In 1757 Franklin was sent to London to advocate for colonial currency.
He ended up staying eighteen years, almost until the start of the American Revolution. During this period most American colonies ignored Parliament and began issuing their own currency called "Colonial scrip". The effort was successful but had notable exceptions. Colonial currency provided a reliable medium of exchange and helped create a sense of unity among the colonies.
Let us remember that most colonial currencies were merely paper but debt-free currency issued in the public interest and not backed by gold and silver reserves. In other words it was "real money". Bank of England officials asked Franklin how he could explain the recent economic boom in the colonies. Without hesitation he answered them:
It is simple, in the colonies we issue our own currency called "Colonial Wallet". We issue the due ratio required by trade and industry to enable a comfortable exchange of products between the producer and the consumer. In this way we create for ourselves, our own currency, we control its purchasing power and we do not have to pay any interest. This was common sense to Franklin. But can you imagine the impact it had on the Bank of England?
America had discovered the secret of money and this genie needed to go back into its bottle as soon as possible. As a result, Parliament quickly passed the Currency Act of 1764, which prohibited colonial officials from issuing their own currency and ordered them to pay all future taxes in gold or silver coins. In other words, it obliged the colonies to join the gold and silver standard.
Thus began the first fierce act of the First Banking War in America, which ended with the defeat of the Moneylenders. A defeat caused by the Declaration of Independence and the subsequent peace agreement, the Treaty of Paris of 1783. Those who believe that a gold standard is the solution to America's modern monetary problems should look at what happened then, immediately after it was passed Currency Act of 1764. Franklin in his autobiography notes:
Within a year we found ourselves in the reverse situation, which marked the end of economic prosperity and the beginning of a deep and widespread economic depression, which drove armies of the unemployed into the streets of the colonies. Franklin is sure that this was the main cause of the American revolution. As he writes in his autobiography: The Colonies would gladly have accepted a small tax on tea and other products if England had not forbidden them to issue their paper money which created unemployment and discontent.
In 1774 Parliament passed the Stamp Act which required a stamp to be affixed to every article of trade as proof of payment of the tax in gold, which once again threatened the existence of colonial paper money. In less than two weeks the Massachusetts Committee of Safety passed a resolution ordering the issuance of more colonial paper money and accepting the coins of the other colonies.
On June 10 and 22, 1775, the Congress of the Colonies resolved by resolutions to issue $2,000,000 in return for the commercial and political loyalty of the "United Colonies". This constituted an act of defiance towards England, a refusal to accept a monetary system that was unfair to the citizens of the colonies. For this reason, the objects of commercial credit (bills of credit), i.e. paper money, which historians out of ignorance and prejudice have underestimated as objects of risky economic policy, were really the cause and occasion for the Revolution.
And it was much more than that, it was the Revolution itself. By the time the first shots were fired in Concord and Lexington, Massachusetts on April 19, 1775, the colonies were drained of gold and silver coins due to British taxation, leaving the continental government with no choice but to issue the its own paper money to finance the war. At the beginning of the revolution the American colonial money supply reached $12,000,000. By the end of the war it was close to $500,000,000.
In part this was due to mass counterfeiting by the British. But it had the effect that the money had essentially become worthless. The shoes sold for $5,000 a pair. As George Washington complained: A wagon full of money would scarcely buy a wagon full of supplies for the army. Earlier the colonial currency system was successful because only what was necessary to facilitate trade was issued and counterfeiting was minimal.
Today those who support a currency based on the gold standard focus on this period, during the revolution, to demonstrate the evils of "real paper money". But remember that the same currency had worked so well for twenty years, during peacetime, that the Bank of England asked Parliament to declare it illegal. Also during the war the British deliberately attempted to erode it by counterfeiting it in England and shipping it "by the pound" to the colonies.
- The Bank of North America
Toward the end of the revolution the Continental Congress met in Independence Hall in Philadelphia frantically trying to raise money. In 1781 he allowed Robert Morris, Treasurer of the Treasury, to establish a private central bank in the hope that they would succeed. Incidentally Morris was a financially well-to-do man who had become wealthy during the Revolution trading in war supplies.
The new bank, the Bank of North America as it was called, was modeled after the Bank of England. It was allowed, or rather not prohibited, to operate with minimal cash reserves, that is, to lend money it did not have and charge interest on it. If you or I did that we would be convicted of fraud, which is a felony. Few were aware of this practice at the time and of course it was kept secret from the people and politicians as much as possible.
Moreover, the bank was given the monopoly of issuing banknotes, which were also accepted in payment of taxes. The bank's charter invited private investors to participate in the initial capital of $400,000. But when Morris couldn't raise the money, he shamelessly used his political influence to have gold deposited in the bank, gold that France had lent to America. He then lent that money to himself and his friends to reinvest in the bank's stock.
The Second American Banking War had already begun. Soon the danger was clear. The value of the US currency continued to plummet. Four years later, in 1785, the contract with the bank was not renewed, effectively eliminating the threat from the bank's power. Thus the Second American Banking War ended very quickly with the defeat of the Moneylenders. The leader of the successful effort to close the bank was a patriot named William Findlay of Pennsylvania.
He explained the problem in the following way: This institution having no other priority than avarice will never diverge from its object...to monopolize all the wealth, power, and influence of the state. The plutocracy once established will corrupt the legislature so that laws are made in its favor and the Department of Justice will favor the rich. But the people behind the Bank of North America—Alexander Hamilton, Robert Morris, and the bank's president, Thomas Willing—didn't give up.
Only six years later, Hamilton, then Secretary of the Treasury, and his mentor Morris created a new private central bank, the First Bank of the United States, through the new Congress. Thomas Willing again served as the bank's president. The players were the same, just her name? bank had changed.
- The Constituent Assembly
In 1787 the leaders of the colonies gathered in Philadelphia to replace and amend the problematic articles of the "Charter of the Union". As we predicted, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, both unconvinced, opposed the creation of a private central bank because they saw the problems created by the Bank of England. They wanted none of that, and as Jefferson later put it:
If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issuance of their currency, first by inflation and then by deflation, the banks and businesses that will grow around these will deprive the people of their property until their children wake up homeless on a continent conquered by their fathers.
During the public debate over the future monetary system, another of the founders of the United States, Governor Morris, headed the committee that drew up the final draft of the Constitution and was well aware of the bankers' motives.
Along with his old boss, Robert Morris and Alexander Hamilton, they had presented the original plan for the Bank of North America to the Continental Congress during the last year of the Revolution.
In a letter he wrote to James Madison on July 2, 1787, he revealed what was really going on. The rich will fight for the prevalence of their sovereignty and the exandrapodism of the rest. This is how they always do and this is how they want it to be... The result here will be the same as elsewhere if we do not keep them with the power of the government in their proper field of action. Despite the defection of Governor Morris from the bank faction, Hamilton, Robert Morris and Willing and their European supporters were not going to back down.
They succeeded in persuading most of the delegates to the Constitutional Convention not to authorize Congress to issue paper money. Most dealers were still reeling from the massive inflation caused by paper money during the Revolution. They had forgotten how well colonial paper money had worked before the war. But the Bank of England had not forgotten. The Moneymakers did not accept the possibility that America would issue its own paper money again.
Many believe that the Tenth Amendment to the Constitution, which reserved powers to the states not represented in the federal government, made the issuance of paper money by the federal government unconstitutional, since the power to issue paper money was not expressly stated as a power of the federal government by the Constitution. The Constitution remains silent on this point. However, the Constitution expressly forbids the States from issuing paper money.
Most of the congressmen intended the Constitution to be silent on this point so as not to give the federal government "absolute power" to issue paper money. Indeed in the paper of the Assembly, on the sheet of August 16th, we read the following: The deletion of the words "prohibition of bank notes" was seconded, and the motion passed in the affirmative.
Hamilton and his banker friends saw this silence as an opportunity to keep the government out of issuing paper money, which they hoped to monopolize themselves. Thus the bankers and agents who were against them, each for different motives on his part, argued to leave the right of the federal government to issue paper currency outside the provisions of the Constitution, by a majority of four to one. This challenge opened the way for the Silversmiths, just as they had planned.
Of course the paper money itself was not the main problem. Lending with minimal reserves was a bigger problem because it multiplied any rate of inflation caused by excessive paper money issuance several times over. So the delegates were left with the thought that banning paper money was a good idea. By banning any kind of paper money they would probably also limit the minimum reserve banking that was practiced, as the use of checks was negligible and if it had been brought up for discussion would it have been banned as well?
Bank loans created by accounting entries in the books were not reported and thus not prohibited. It was thus considered that the issuance of paper money by the Federal and State governments was prohibited while the same was not meant for banks. It is disputed that this power of who has the right to issue by not being expressly prohibited to the government was reserved as a future right of citizens and the people (including legal entities such as banks).
An opposing view said that the banking companies were organs and agents of the states, since they recognized their legitimacy, and thus were not subject to the ban on issuing bank notes, as was the case for the states themselves. This argument was ignored by the bankers who proceeded to issue bank notes against minimum reserves and lost all ground when the US Supreme Court ruled that the federal government could establish a bank that could issue money.
Ultimately only the States were banned from issuing paper currency, and this ban was not imposed not only on banks but not even on municipalities and communities (as was the case during the 1929 economic depression in four hundred cities throughout the US).
Another mistake that is not often noticed has to do with the power given to the Federal Government to "mint currency" and "fix its value there and then".
Determining the value of the coin (i.e. its purchasing power or its value relative to other things) is not related to its quality or content (eg so many grams of gold and so many copper etc.) but to the quantity, the stock of money. It is the quantity that determines the value, and Congress has never legislated to set a specific quantity of money in the US. Legislating a specific amount of money (including coins, checks, and bank reserves) means in practice determining the value of each dollar (purchasing power).
A legislative act that defines the rate of increase of the money stock implies the determination of its future value. Congress has decided neither, although it clearly has the constitutional right to do so. He has relinquished that power to the Federal Reserve and the 10,000-plus banks that create our monetary reserve.
- INDEPENDENCE AND NEW STATE
England was forced to recognize the 13 colonies in the Treaty of Paris in 1783 as an independent state under the name of the United States of America (USA). The US constitution, which was drawn up in 1787 and is still in effect today, declared the country a union (Confederation) of states and was based on the principle of separation of powers. The central government decides on the economy, defense and foreign policy.
The states themselves regulate matters of local government, justice, education and policing. Legislative power is exercised by Congress through the Senate and the House of Representatives. Each state is represented in the Senate by two senators, regardless of its population. In the House of Representatives, however, the states are represented by a number of deputies proportional to their population.
Executive power is exercised by the President, who is elected every four years by an electorate and can be re-elected only once. The first president of the USA was elected, in 1789, George Washington. In his honor the US capital was later named after him. Finally, the judiciary was defined as independent and elected.
- KEY TO THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
The American Revolution (1775 - 1783) against the British had begun before the "unanimous declaration of the 13 United States of America" on July 4, 1776, which has been celebrated every year since then as US Independence Day. At first it was a struggle between Great Britain and its thirteen colonies in America, which opposed British legislation and sought their independence.
But it was also a struggle between the colonists as several Americans, mainly from England, who were called Loyalists (Law-abiding) or Tories (after the English Conservatives), sided with Great Britain against the colonial rebels. The American Revolution was still a continuation of the colonial wars between France and England. The French supported, first secretly and then openly, the American patriots.
The French Minister of Foreign Affairs of the monarchist government, Count Verzine, made sure to send munitions to the American revolutionaries, which were of particular importance as the rebels had no artillery and mainly lacked gunpowder. When the colonies proved their fighting ability, France recognized their independence, signed a treaty of alliance with them, and in 1778 entered the war on the side of the Americans.
One of the American patriots, the publicist Thomas Paine, whose book captivated North American revolutionaries, expressed views very similar to those of Riga the Bold and the French revolutionaries or philosophers. Paine wrote that "society is a great good, but power, in whatever form, is an evil. An honest man alone is more valuable than all the crowned rascals of the world. On the other hand, it is absurd for someone to claim that an island (Britain) can indefinitely dominate an entire continent."
The French and American revolutions set a positive precedent for enslaved Greece. And of course the political rights and freedoms provided for in the Regime of Riga Feraios, as in the first Greek constitutions, are borrowed from the "Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen of the French Revolution".
- DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE OF THE USA
- THE INDEPENDENCE OF THE USA
From the beginning of the 17th century, the east coast of North America began to be steadily colonized by Europeans, mainly of British, Dutch, German and French descent. In the same context, the establishment of colonies also began, with the result that by 1732 13 colonies had been formed. The economy of these colonies was basically agricultural with vast arable lands.
Of course, while in the poorer South the pillar of the economy was the plantations of rice, corn, cotton and tobacco, in the developed North trade through maritime communications and with centers in the ports of New York, Boston and Philadelphia dominated. However, a point of friction between metropolitan England and the developing American region was the taxation policy of the former.
Specifically, in the first phase, the costly Anglo-French war (1756 - 1763) created the need to find resources and thus pushed the English government to overtax the colonies, a measure that created resentment. In 1765 a tax had been imposed on sugar while with the "Stamp Act" the English imposed a stamp on every legal document, newspaper, magazine and even on playing cards. Specifically, it was about the increase in customs duties on certain English products imported into America.
In Boston, colonists clashed with English troops who had been sent to suppress local rebellions. The failure of the metropolis to calm the inflamed spirits led to its folding. Further metropolitan-regional friction was caused by England's insistence on maintaining tea taxation, culminating in the blockade by some Bostonians of 3 English ships carrying tea in the local port. Successive developments led to the Transatlantic mission of a squadron of the English fleet to enforce order.
Meanwhile the "Philadelphia Assembly", the supreme governing body of the colonists, published the "Declaration of the Rights of Man" with explicit reference to the abolition of the imposed English taxation. Now everything was leading to the conflict, a fact that was confirmed when, in the following days, the colony of Massachusetts, with Boston as its capital, decided to set up a regular army, made up of the local militia, with George Washington, a landowner from Virginia, as its commander-in-chief.
The relatively underpowered English forces and the significant proportion of mercenaries uncoordinated the cohesion of the metropolitan forces leading to the eventual predominance of the colonial forces. The most important battles took place in Lexington and Concord in 1775 - 1776, in Saratoga in 1777 and in York Town in 1781, a battle where against the British, they sided with the colonists and French forces resulting in the defeat of the metropolis.
England officially, with a treaty signed with the new American parliament, recognized on September 3, 1883 the independence of the United States, which in the meantime had already declared its independence from metropolitan England on July 4, 1776, through the "Assembly of Philadelphia". The above date marks the national anniversary of the United States. In the years that followed, the war became more general. The British were constantly sending reinforcements and the Americans were trying to keep the revolution alive.
France sent financial aid to the rebellious Americans as well as troops. The English army, led by General Cornwallis, finally surrendered at Yorktown, Virginia on October 19, 1781. The war officially ended with the Treaty of Paris on September 3, 1783, in which England ceded its territories to the US. The last English troops left the continent on November 25, 1783.
The Declaration of Independence of the USA (officially The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America) was the founding declaration of independence of thirteen States of America from British colonialism.
It was drafted by Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin, and was approved around August 2, 1776 (but symbolically on July 4, 1776) by Congress. It is considered as the founding act of the state of the United States of America. On July 4, 1776, a convention of Americans is convened in Philadelphia, where the Declaration of Independence is voted, which is based on the political ideas of the Enlightenment. Protagonists in drafting the Declaration were Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson.
- HISTORICAL CONTEXT
Britain, considering the thirteen States (States) of North America as colonies of the British Crown, meant to treat them as it did to all its other colonies: it imposed its own Government employees, different taxation from that which applied in Britain, restrictive terms on trade, freedom of expression, political activity, etc. King George III had, in fact, established the "five intolerable Laws" in the American colonies (1774). This could not be accepted by the "settlers", who felt oppressed.
In many American colonists the idea of independence had begun to form and mature. The first really decisive move was made on June 7, 1776 in Philadelphia. There, before Congress, was read a resolution by Richard Henry Lee, a representative of the state of Virginia, which, in broad terms, declared the determination of the "thirteen united colonies" to obtain self-government exempted entirely, as it should be valid, from subjection to Great Britain.
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This resolution did not come out of the blue. Already, after the imposition of the "five intolerable Laws" and the rejection of the requests of the Commission set up for their relief by George III (1775), a movement of independence from the United Colonies had begun: a form of regular army was created, while the first independent "colonial" post offices appeared. Lee's resolution was nothing more than the expression of the will of most colonists for the complete independence of the Colonies.
At the same time, it was learned in the American colonies that King George, not having enough of an army, was negotiating the purchase of mercenaries from Germany to reinforce the English army. This indeed happened later - 30,000 Hesse mercenaries were granted to the English Crown at £7 each. Mercenaries were sent to the colonies, but more than half of them blew it before they even got involved in operations.
At the same time, Thomas Paine published in January 1776 his book "Common Sense", a text in which he listed the reasons and reasons why the colonies should become an independent state. This book was sold by the thousands and laid the groundwork for all "colonists" to realize the necessity of independence.
After Lee's resolution was read in Congress, it created on June 11 a Commission consisting of Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Roger Sherman, and Robert Livingston to draft a Declaration of Independence. Jefferson, at the urging of the Commission, retires to a house on the outskirts of Philadelphia and begins drafting the first Declaration of Independence (June 12 to 27).
On June 28, the draft of the Declaration is read in Congress, where, after discussions and objections, several amendments are made. On July 4, 1776, the final draft of the Declaration was approved by Congress. John Hancock, President of Congress, on July 5, 1776, orders printer Dunlap to print the text. On July 19, Congress orders the formalization of the Declaration document. The official document is printed on January 18, 1777 in Boston and distributed to all the States.
- THE CONTENTS OF THE ANNOUNCEMENT
AT A MEETING OF JULY 4, 1776
The unanimous Declaration
of the thirteen united
States of America
1) When in the Course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bonds which bind them to another, and to assume among the powers of the earth the separate and equal place to which they are entitled by the Laws of Nature and the God of Nature, rudimentary respect for the opinion of mankind compels (this people) to declare the causes which impel it to separation.
2) We accept the following truths as self-evident, that all men are created equal, and are endowed by their Creator with certain inviolable Rights, among which are the right to Life, the right to Liberty, and the right to the pursuit of Happiness.
3 ) How to secure these rights, Governments are established among Men, deriving their reasonable powers from the consent of the governed.
4) That whenever a Form of Government becomes destructive to these purposes, it is the Right of the People to alter or abolish it, and to establish a new Government, laying its foundations on such principles, and organizing its powers in such a form, as shall appear most likely to brings about his Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, dictates that Governments long established should not be changed for trifling and temporary reasons; and accordingly, experience has shown that mankind are more disposed to endure, while the evil endures, than to correct their course by abolishing forms (of government) in which it is learned. But when a long series of abuses and usurpations, continually to the same end, testifies to the subjection (of the People) to absolute Despotism, it is his right, it is his duty, to shake off such Government, and establish new Guardians for its future security.
5) Such has been the patient forbearance of these Colonies; and such is to-day the necessity which compels them to change their former System of Government. The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injustices and usurpations, with the immediate object of establishing an absolute Tyranny in these States. In proof of this, let us quote the facts to the honest world.
6) He (the King) has refused the ratification of the most beneficial and necessary laws for the common good.
7) He has forbidden his Governors to enact Laws of immediate and urgent importance, unless they are conditional upon his consent. And while they are under probation he has utterly disdained to deal with them.
8) He has refused to make any other Laws for the service of the inhabitants of large districts, unless those inhabitants would surrender the right of Representation in the Legislature; a right inestimable to them, and fatal only to tyrants.
9) He has convened legislatures in places unusual, inappropriate, and remote from the places where their Public Records are kept, for the sole purpose of exhausting their members until they comply with his measures.
10) He has repeatedly dissolved Houses of Representatives because they bravely opposed his own counsels against the rights of the people.
11) It has long refused, after such dissolutions, to hold new elections, consequently the legislative power, indestructible in itself, devolved upon the whole people to be exercised by them; the State remained in the meantime exposed to all dangers of invasion by without, and of turmoil within.
12) He has endeavored to prevent the growth of the population of the states; to this end he has obstructed the enforcement of the naturalization laws of aliens; he has refused to approve others to encourage immigration, and has imposed additional conditions on the grant of tracts of land.13) It has obstructed the administration of justice by refusing to sanction laws establishing judicial authorities.14) He has made the Judges dependent only on his Will for their tenure, and the amount and payment of their salary.
15) He has instituted numerous new posts and sent here hordes of officials who oppress our people and drain their possessions.
16) He has maintained among us, in time of peace, a Standing Army without the consent of our legislators.
17) He attempted to make military power independent and superior to political power.
18) He has conspired with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution, and not admissible to our laws; by sanctioning their pretended enactments;
19)To station large bodies of armed soldiers among us.
20) To protect them, by mock Trials, from punishment for the murders they commit against the inhabitants of these States.
21) To cut off all our Transactions with the rest of the World.
22) To impose Taxes on us without our consent.
23) To deprive us, in many cases, of the benefit of a Trial by Jury.
24) To send us across the Oceans to be tried for non-existent offences.
25) To abolish the free System of English Laws in a neighboring Province, he establishes in it an Arbitrary Government, and extends its Limits so as to make it at once a model and a fit instrument for introducing the same absolute power into those Colonies.
26) To gut our Charters, repeal our most precious laws, and fundamentally change the way we govern.
27) To suspend our legislatures, they usurped (the King and his accomplices) the power to legislate for us in any case.
28) He has renounced his right to rule here since he renounced his Protection and is waging war against us.
29) It has plundered our seas, ravaged our shores, burned our cities and destroyed the lives of our people.
30) He is already transporting strong military forces of foreign mercenaries to complete the work of death, desolation and tyranny which he has already begun with Cruelty and Treachery, examples of which could hardly be met with in the most barbarous times, and are wholly unworthy of the leader of a civilized nation.
31) He compelled our fellow-citizens whom he captured on the high seas to take up arms against their country, and either become the executioners of their friends and brothers, or be murdered by them.
32) He raised native insurrections among us, and endeavored to direct against our frontier dwellers, the relentless Savage Indians, whose known method of warfare is the indiscriminate extermination (of men) of all ages, sexes, and social classes.
33) At every stage of this oppression we have petitioned for remedy with the greatest modesty: but our repeated appeals have been answered only with repeated injustices. A Ruler whose character has all the traits befitting a Tyrant, is unfit to be the leader of free men.
34) Nor have we neglected our obligations to our British brethren. We have warned them from time to time of the attempts of their legislatures to extend their arbitrary jurisdiction over our affairs. We reminded them of the circumstances of our immigration and settlement here.
35) We appealed to their innate sense of justice and magnanimity, and appealed to the ties of our common descent to repudiate these acts of usurpation, which would inevitably sever our ties and correspondence. They too turned a deaf ear to the voice of justice and kinship. We must, therefore, yield to the necessity which our separation imposes, and regard them, like the rest of mankind, as enemies in war and friends in peace.
36) Therefore, we, the representatives of the United States of America, having convened a General Assembly, calling upon the Supreme Judge of the world to witness our intentions, solemnly declare and declare, in the name and by authority of the good people of these colonies, that these united Colonies, are and by right ought to be free and independent states, that they are released from all allegiance and subjection to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the British State is dissolved and no longer exists; and that as free and independent states they have full power to declare war, to conclude peace, to enter into alliances, to establish commerce, and to enter into all kinds of agreements and actions characteristic of independent states. And in support of this declaration, having unswerving faith in the protection of Divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Estates, and our sacred Honor.
- HISTORICAL PERSONS
- BENJAMIN FRANKLIN (Benjamin Franklin 1706 - 1790)
American politician, diplomat and scientist. He was born in Boston on January 17, 1706. He was the 15th of 17 children of Josiah Franklin, in a poor family, where the father was a small manufacturer of soaps and candles. At the age of 13 he began working as an apprentice typesetter in his brother's printing house. In 1723 he left and went to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, where he settled permanently, again working as a printer. A year later he went to London to buy printing supplies and stayed there for two years to perfect himself in this profession.
Returning to Philadelphia, he established his own printing office in partnership with a friend, at the same time began publishing, and very soon acquired a reputation for his practical and sound ideas. Self-taught, he learned French, Italian, Spanish and Latin and at the same time began to engage in various scientific studies. Showing strong organizational and administrative ability, he was appointed postmaster of Pennsylvania and later organized the postal services of all the American colonies and was appointed postmaster general.
In 1751 he was elected a member of parliament in Pennsylvania and in 1757 he went to London for negotiations where he stayed for five years, gaining friends and great esteem for his scientific achievements, as a result of which he was awarded an honorary doctorate of the University of Oxford. During the struggle for the independence of the colonies, he returned to America and worked wholeheartedly for its success. Elected delegate of Pennsylvania to the revolutionary convention of Philadelphia, he was one of the five delegates entrusted with the drafting of the famous declaration of independence of 1776.
In 1778 he succeeded in securing an alliance of the colonies with France against England, and on September 3, 1783, along with John Adams and three other envoys, managed to sign the final peace treaty with Britain. In 1785 he was elected president of the executive power of Pennsylvania and in 1787 a member of the national assembly, which drew up and voted the constitutional charter of the United States. As president of the Society for the Abolition of Slavery, he advocated and signed for black emancipation two months before his death.
He died on April 17, 1790, leaving many philological, political and sociological writings and articles. In the sciences he left as his chief achievement the invention of the lightning rod in 1753, after investigations and experiments begun in 1740. In 1752 he made his famous experiment of flying a kite on a day of storm and lightning.
In 1744 he discovered a stuffing that reduced the pollutants in smokestacks, the formula of which is still used today. His own research was applied to myopia glasses. He also invented a type of Harmonica for music. In the lecture entitled "Tolerance and Secularism in the Western World", given by the professor of the University of Athens, Mr. Savvas Agouridis, in 1998, on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the UN Declaration of Human Rights, we find the excerpt:
"As far as the American revolution and its proclamations are concerned, we simply mention in this connection the ideological amalgam of the Anglo-Saxon and the follower of European, in essence French, Theism and the Enlightenment, citing some great names, who left their personal mark on the American revolution: Benjamin Franklin was probably an Episcopalian but with a fundamental belief that of a Theist, Thomas Paine was a Theist, Thomas Jefferson was an Episcopalian but a Theist in belief.
So did James Madison. In his work "Parable against Persecution" Benjamin Franklin writes the following very true and witty: "When a religion is good, I think it will be able to support itself, but when it cannot support itself, and God does not shows an interest in its support, so that those involved in it are forced to call upon the state power for help, this, as I understand it, shows that it is a bad religion."
According to the mason and historian of Freemasonry Manley Hall, as reported by David Icke in his book "The Secret of All Ages", of the 55 signatures of the representatives who drew up the American Constitution, at the conference held in the summer of 1787 in Philadelphia, nearly 50 belonged to known Freemasons of the time, and only one definitely did not belong to a Freemason. Among those who sign it stand out the well-known freemasons George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, of which the first two were also presidents of the USA.
In Franklin's autobiography, there is a passage that says:
''...my pamphlet somehow fell into the hands of one Lyon, a surgeon, author of 'The Infallibility of Human Judgment', resulting in a getting to know each other. He took a great interest in me, and often invited me to discourse on these subjects, and took me to the Horns, an alehouse in Cheapside, and introduced me to Dr. Mandeville, the author of "The Fable of the Bees," who had a club there, whose soul he was by being the most playful and entertaining company.
The Lyons also introduced me to Dr. Pemberton, at Batson's coffee-house, who promised to give me an opportunity, at some time, of meeting Sir Isaac Newton, which I greatly desired. But that never happened''.
B. Franklin is considered one of the founders of the American state and one of the "fathers" of the nation, to whom official sources always refer with great respect. In addition to his extensive studies in the sciences and letters, it is very likely that he had relations with esotericism, through the powerful and at the same time secret movement of Freemasonry, which set its stamp on the beginning of American civilization, a civilization which, unfortunately, today it is called into question.
- THOMAS JEFFERSON (Thomas Jefferson 1743 - 1826)
“All men are created equal: they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights. These rights include life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Governments are established to guarantee these rights, and their authority derives from the consent of the governed." Thomas Jefferson was born on April 13, 1743 in Sandwell, Virginia. His father, Peter Jefferson, was a man who loved the country life and devoted his time to cultivating his plantation.
His mother, Jane Randolph, belonged to one of the oldest and wealthiest families in Virginia. Because of their kinship with the Randolphs, the Jeffersons became socially accepted, and belonged to the Virginia aristocracy, without being particularly wealthy. Young Thomas was the first of the boys, and when Peter died in 1757, leaving the family almost destitute, young Thomas became head of the family. His father, however, believed in progress and had managed to push young Thomas into studies.
From 1760 to 1762 he studied at the College of William and Mary, in Williamsburg, which was also the only higher educational institution in the South. There he met a Scottish mathematician, G. Small, spiritual teacher of the Enlightenment, by whom he was influenced in terms of his new ideas. During this period of his life in Williamsburg, Jefferson became acquainted with the secular life of the British colony, socialized, entered into the inner workings of the colonial government, and began to learn the violin.
There he also met the law teacher George With, who influenced him to study law. When he finished his studies, he enrolled in the law school of the General Court of Virginia. In essence, Law was the stepping stone to get involved in politics, like most of the fathers of the American republic. Jefferson's political career begins in 1769 with his entry into the House of Commons, as a representative of Albemarle County. In addition to politics and law, Jefferson loved the outdoors, nature, and agriculture.
After all, he had grown up on the plantation in Sandwell, which he had inherited. There he chose an area he named Monticello (little mountain), to express his love of architecture, influenced by the standards of the Italian Renaissance architect Palladio, who had published in 1570 the work "Four Books", the Bible of all followers of classicism. Monticello was completed after Jefferson's return from France and was built on classical standards.
In 1770 a rivalry began between the British soldiers and the American colonists, which was most intense in Virginia and Massachusetts. In 1774 as a member of the House of Commons Jefferson drafted his 1st known text, the "Summary of the Rights of British America", where he defends the rights the colonists had to be heard. In 1775, with the battle of Lexington and Concord near Boston, the rift between the British and the Americans begins.
The Continental Congress, in Philadelphia in 1776, was attended by thirteen delegates from the colonies, which had become sovereign states. Jefferson represented Virginia. A committee was formed to prepare a proclamation, and it suggested that Jefferson draft it. It took him three weeks to write the text of the Declaration of Independence, which was accepted by Congress on July 4, 1776.
Then committee men like Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, took part in shaping it, made it smaller, made it milder, and took out some parts, like a passage blaming the King of England for status of slavery. That is why it is still considered the result of collective work, but the basis of the text belongs to Jefferson. For Jefferson himself, since then his ties with the Kingdom have been severed.
After the Philadelphia Convention in 1776 and until the end of the War of Independence, Jefferson disappeared from the national political scene and returned to Virginia, where he was a proponent of important reforms. Through them we see the enlightening spirit by which he was characterized. He believed that the church should have nothing to do with the state, but he faced a lot of backlash. Until then the Anglican church priests were paid by taxpayers' money. He also drafted the Secular Act, which would later be passed while Jefferson was in Paris.
He proposed reforming the inheritance system, which until then was based on the aristocratic English tradition and there was an unequal distribution of inheritance. Another reform was the one concerning the judicial system and the administration of justice. He even proposed the abolition of the death penalty under the influence of Beccaria, a famous jurist known for his work "Crimes and Punishments". It didn't directly accomplish anything, but it planted the seed for change. As an enlightened person of his time, he was directly interested in education and believed that illiteracy should be combated.
That is why he proposed a three-level education and was an advocate of the view that children should learn ancient languages, such as Latin and Greek, but also various sciences, because in this way the formation of modern man would be more complete. The program he proposed was so revolutionary that it can only be compared to that of the French revolution. In 1780 he was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia. In 1783 he is elected Virginia's representative to Congress in Philadelphia and continues with his radical legislative proposals.
He proposed that the newly formed state mint its own currency, based on the decimal division, as well as expanding the states westward. During Jefferson's parliamentary term no change was made. These came a little later, with the creation of the dollar as a national currency and the development of the future states. Another important milestone in Jefferson's life was his appointment to France as minister. As he states in his memoirs, "Congress resolved to appoint a minister, subordinate to Mr. Adams and Dr. Franklin, to negotiate commercial treaties with foreign nations."
However, in March 1785 Jefferson replaced Franklin and presented himself to Louis XVI. During his diplomatic mission in France, he tried to improve relations between France and the United States, because as a spokesman for the Enlightenment and a follower of liberal economics - invented by Adam Smith - he believed that the abolition of borders would facilitate trade for the benefit of all. This was one reason he made several trips to Holland, the Low Countries, the Rhine region, Italy.
He also believed in the values and ideals of both the Roman Empire and ancient Greece. Regarding ancient Greece, he said: "We are all obliged to the ancient Greeks for the LIGHT that led us away from the darkness."
During his stay in Paris he socialized with great thinkers of the time, such as Lavoisier, Biffon, the most famous of the naturalists, Jean-Jacques Rousseau's former friend, Volnet, who introduced him to Egyptology, Doctor Campani, who had written the "Relations between the Physical and Moral State of Man," the French philosopher Desty de Tracy, who had written an essay on Montesquieu's "Spirit of the Laws."
He also associated with the Duc de La Rochefoucauld, who was a promoter and translator of the book "The Constitutions of the 13th United States of America". This was published in 1783 and had a great impact on the political revisionists of the time, because it contained a complete record of the ideas of the Enlightenment. Jefferson was an eyewitness, in Paris, of the events of the expiration of the old regime and the beginning of the French revolution.
He also experienced the storming of the Bastille. As he states in his autobiography, "I was in contact with the leading patriots of the National Assembly. Because I came from a country that has gone through similar reforms, they trusted me with their thoughts." With some of them, such as Lafayette or La Rochefoucauld, they were also personal friends. When the General Sessions were called, Jefferson emerged as a man with an important role in shaping the Declaration of the Rights of Man.
In July 1789 Lafayette gave the National Assembly a draft of the "European Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen", which was the result of meetings with Jefferson. More generally, Jefferson influenced proposals for both the legislature and the proposed Constitution. His contribution to France was important, which is why from 1801 he was a member of the Institute of France. Jefferson left Paris in September 1789.
On his return to America he was offered by George Washington the position of Secretary of State, one of the five members of the country's government. This was the first step that then led him to assume the presidency from 1801 to 1809. He was the third president of the United States. He was also president of the American Philosophical Society from 1797 to 1814.
Jefferson died on July 4, 1826, nearly half a century after the Declaration of Independence. In South Dakota, USA, there is the monument to the four presidents (George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln) sculpted in granite on Mount Rushmore.
- JOHN ADAMS (John Adams 1735 - 1826)
John Adams was the first vice president of the United States of America and the second President of the country after George Washington. He was born on October 31, 1735 and died on July 4, 1826. Adams came to prominence during the early stages of the American Revolution. As Massachusetts' delegate to the Continental Congress, he played a leading role in persuading Congress to approve the Declaration of Independence of the American States in 1776.
As Congress' representative in Europe, he was a major negotiator for the eventual peace treaty with Great Britain, and bears the main responsibility for the granting of substantial loans by the Dutch. In 1764, John Adams married Abigail Smith (1744 - 1818), daughter of the Reverend William Smith, in Weymouth. The couple had several children, Abigail (1765 - 1813) Susanna (1768 - 1770), Charles ( 1770 - 1800), Thomas Boylston (1772 - 1832) and a stillborn infant daughter Elizabeth (1775).
Directly connected to the rebellion of the colonies is the Boston lawyer John Adams, one of the perhaps underestimated Founding Fathers of the United States of America. One of Adams' first significant contacts with the English Crown was at a trial of English soldiers accused of firing on a mob in Boston and killing a large number of Americans.
Adams, while a prominent Bostonian patriot, undertook to defend the soldiers, before an American court full of citizens and an American jury. He took on the case, it is said, because he deeply believed in the value of the law, above sentimentality and self-interest. Not only did he take it on, he won it! And not only did he win it, but he continued to live in Boston without much trouble from those who lost children and friends in the incident.
Adams personifies the maturity of the Americans of the time, a group of people ready to govern themselves, with high ideals of freedom and respect for individual rights. Washington became the first president of the USA, thanks to his very imposing presence and of course the laurels of his victorious Grand Strategy. Adams was reduced to being vice president and only after Washington's two terms ended did he finally become the second president of the United States.
But even if Adams' name was not given to the capital, his contribution was decisive for the subsequent course of the USA. The reason the USA did not become Mexico or Argentina, which gained their independence shortly after (as did Greece, of course), is directly linked to the legacy of the Founding Fathers and especially Adams. There are many countries with vast land and natural resources, but not all of them had the same wise and robust institutions.
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Adams left to the USA an excellent Constitution, a monument of love for the rights of the individual and belief that everyone has the right to determine his own life. He left a well-organized system, a balanced state with checks and balances. Most importantly, he left a culture of austerity, respect for laws by citizens and respect for institutions by leaders, firmly established principles that no one could shake down.
This mentality, perhaps inherited from the English but carefully cultivated by men like Adams with the addition of a deep liberalism, is one of the greatest assets of this country. Respect for laws, even if it doesn't always mean good laws (don't forget that slavery remained legal at the insistence of the southern colonies for nearly 100 years after the Revolution) means that society can function well. And strong institutions mean that citizens eventually achieve a fair and proper legal system, worthy of respect.
Adams left the country feeling that every man has a fundamental right to go to court and seek justice, to hold his leaders accountable. It created a dominant culture among citizens that says justice (in the sense of fair) is of great value. For a decade he held various diplomatic posts in Paris, The Hague and London, until in 1789 he became vice president (the first in the history of the United States) and president in 1796, succeeding Washington. From a literary point of view, his Epistles are important.
After his defeat in the 1800 election, Adams retired to his hometown of Massachusetts, where he died on July 4, 1826. He died exactly 50 years after the signing of the US Declaration of Independence. Thomas Jefferson died on the same day, a few hours before his friend.
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- GEORGE WASHINGTON (George Washington 1732 - 1799)
George Washington (February 22, 1732 - December 14, 1799) or George Washington was a protagonist of the liberation struggle of the United States of America against Great Britain (1775 - 1783), as the leader of the Continental Army and the first President of the country under its newly drafted constitution.
George Washington was born on February 22, 1732 on his family's estate at Pope's Creek in Westmoreland County, Virginia. He received little and irregular schooling. He took up surveying and at 16 became overseer of Lord Fairfax's estates. In 1749 he was appointed official surveyor of the province of Kalperer. After the death of his father, Augustine, and his brother, Lawrence, he inherited a large fortune.
In 1752 he was named a major in the Virginia militia and took charge of the education of the men in his district. In 1754 he led an expedition to drive the French out of the Ohio region. Together with his Indian allies, he destroyed a French detachment. He then built a fort, Fort Necessity, but was forced to surrender as the French and Indians were outnumbered. When he was freed from the French and returned to Virginia he was not held responsible for the defeat.
In 1755 he participated as a staff member in General Braddock's expeditionary force, which was defeated by the French at the Battle of Monongahela. There Washington was recognized as a hero as he managed to rally the remnants of the army for retreat. He was therefore promoted to colonel and made commander of all the forces in Virginia. In 1758 he took part in the campaign that captured Fort Duquesne and drove the French out of the area. Washington had increased his fortune after his marriage to the wealthy widow, Martha Custis.
He owned over 50 sq. km. lands, while at Mount Vernon alone he employed more than 100 slaves. From 1759 to 1774 he was elected member of Congress from Virginia. Initially, he did not have much of a role in American protests against the British and was not in favor of independence. With the continued oppression of the English, he began to be active in the leading circles of the colonists.
So when the revolution started Washington showed up to Congress in battle gear showing he was ready for war. In 1775 he assumed the chief strategy of the American army. In 1776 he captured Boston after a siege. The British managed to capture New York, Washington was forced to retreat. On December 25, 1776 he crossed the Delaware River and won an important victory at Trenton and later at Princeton.
Washington's tactic was to buy time to tire the British and win European support. In 1777 he contributed to the decisive victory at Saratoga which brought the French into open war. With the participation of the French in the war the situation changed to the detriment of Britain. Finally, in 1781 British General Charles Cornwallis surrendered Yorktown to the Americans thus marking the end of the war. The Treaty of Paris in 1783 recognized the US. as an independent state.
After the war ended in 1783 he retired to his farms, but returned to public life in the late 1780s, concerned about the course of the union, to urge and oversee the drafting of the constitution, which strengthened the ties between the States essentially giving the country the shape it has today. After the adoption of the constitution he was elected to the Presidency twice, receiving 100% of the votes from the electoral body.
He started the tradition of wanting US presidents. not to seek re-election to a third term in office, which became official law after World War II. He did not belong to a party, as the Fathers of the USA. they hoped that party factions would not develop in their country, hopes that ultimately proved false, as parties appeared from the very first post-Washington elections.
- THE RESULTS AND CONSEQUENCES OF THE REVOLUTION
A. Constitution - Presidential Democracy
1) A Federal central government responsible for foreign policy, defense and finance.2) Each state retains legislative and executive authority over local government, police, justice and education.3) Legislative power is vested in Congress, which consists of the House and the Senate.4) Each state is represented in Parliament by a number of representatives proportional to its population. 5) Each state is represented in the Senate by two representatives regardless of its population.6) Executive power is exercised by the President who is elected by voters for four years and has the right to be re-elected once more. George Washington was elected the first president of the United States.7) The Judiciary headed by the Supreme Court is independent.
B. The national particularities of the colonists were set aside and thus not only a new state but also a new nation was created.
C. The American revolution was the first example of a successful outcome of a revolution that was followed by the Spanish colonies in Latin America but also states in Europe such as Switzerland, the Netherlands, Belgium and of course France.
D. The new state developed very rapidly in all areas and developed into a great power.
But let's see in more detail how the Bank of England influenced the British economy and how, later, it was the one that caused the American Revolution. In the middle of the 18th century the British Empire was approaching the height of its power throughout the world. Britain since the creation of the central private Bank of England had participated in four wars in Europe. The cost was high though.
The British Parliament to finance these wars instead of issuing its own debt free currency borrowed huge sums from the bank. At that time the debt of the British government reached the exorbitant sum of £140,000,000. The government was therefore forced to vote on a scheme to raise public revenue, through the American colonies, to be able to pay the interest, at least, on the loans to the bank. In America the situation was different.
In the mid-18th century, pre-revolutionary America was still relatively poor. There was a serious shortage of gold and silver coins that could be used in trade and the purchase of goods, so that the early colonists were forced to experiment by issuing their own local paper money. Some attempts were successful. Also in some colonies they successfully used tobacco as a medium of trade.
In 1720 every colonial Royal Governor was ordered, usually unsuccessfully, to curtail the issue of colonial currency. In 1742 the British Resumption Act, which required payment of taxes and other debts in gold, caused an economic depression in the colonies, many properties were seized or confiscated from the rich for a tenth of their value. Benjamin Franklin was one of the biggest supporters of issuing colonial currency. In 1757 Franklin was sent to London to advocate for colonial currency.
He ended up staying eighteen years, almost until the start of the American Revolution. During this period most American colonies ignored Parliament and began issuing their own currency called "Colonial scrip". The effort was successful but had notable exceptions. Colonial currency provided a reliable medium of exchange and helped create a sense of unity among the colonies.
History 1301 Lecture 7: The American War for Independence, 1775-1783
It is simple, in the colonies we issue our own currency called "Colonial Wallet". We issue the due ratio required by trade and industry to enable a comfortable exchange of products between the producer and the consumer. In this way we create for ourselves, our own currency, we control its purchasing power and we do not have to pay any interest. This was common sense to Franklin. But can you imagine the impact it had on the Bank of England?
America had discovered the secret of money and this genie needed to go back into its bottle as soon as possible. As a result, Parliament quickly passed the Currency Act of 1764, which prohibited colonial officials from issuing their own currency and ordered them to pay all future taxes in gold or silver coins. In other words, it obliged the colonies to join the gold and silver standard.
Thus began the first fierce act of the First Banking War in America, which ended with the defeat of the Moneylenders. A defeat caused by the Declaration of Independence and the subsequent peace agreement, the Treaty of Paris of 1783. Those who believe that a gold standard is the solution to America's modern monetary problems should look at what happened then, immediately after it was passed Currency Act of 1764. Franklin in his autobiography notes:
Within a year we found ourselves in the reverse situation, which marked the end of economic prosperity and the beginning of a deep and widespread economic depression, which drove armies of the unemployed into the streets of the colonies. Franklin is sure that this was the main cause of the American revolution. As he writes in his autobiography: The Colonies would gladly have accepted a small tax on tea and other products if England had not forbidden them to issue their paper money which created unemployment and discontent.
In 1774 Parliament passed the Stamp Act which required a stamp to be affixed to every article of trade as proof of payment of the tax in gold, which once again threatened the existence of colonial paper money. In less than two weeks the Massachusetts Committee of Safety passed a resolution ordering the issuance of more colonial paper money and accepting the coins of the other colonies.
On June 10 and 22, 1775, the Congress of the Colonies resolved by resolutions to issue $2,000,000 in return for the commercial and political loyalty of the "United Colonies". This constituted an act of defiance towards England, a refusal to accept a monetary system that was unfair to the citizens of the colonies. For this reason, the objects of commercial credit (bills of credit), i.e. paper money, which historians out of ignorance and prejudice have underestimated as objects of risky economic policy, were really the cause and occasion for the Revolution.
And it was much more than that, it was the Revolution itself. By the time the first shots were fired in Concord and Lexington, Massachusetts on April 19, 1775, the colonies were drained of gold and silver coins due to British taxation, leaving the continental government with no choice but to issue the its own paper money to finance the war. At the beginning of the revolution the American colonial money supply reached $12,000,000. By the end of the war it was close to $500,000,000.
In part this was due to mass counterfeiting by the British. But it had the effect that the money had essentially become worthless. The shoes sold for $5,000 a pair. As George Washington complained: A wagon full of money would scarcely buy a wagon full of supplies for the army. Earlier the colonial currency system was successful because only what was necessary to facilitate trade was issued and counterfeiting was minimal.
Today those who support a currency based on the gold standard focus on this period, during the revolution, to demonstrate the evils of "real paper money". But remember that the same currency had worked so well for twenty years, during peacetime, that the Bank of England asked Parliament to declare it illegal. Also during the war the British deliberately attempted to erode it by counterfeiting it in England and shipping it "by the pound" to the colonies.
- The Bank of North America
Toward the end of the revolution the Continental Congress met in Independence Hall in Philadelphia frantically trying to raise money. In 1781 he allowed Robert Morris, Treasurer of the Treasury, to establish a private central bank in the hope that they would succeed. Incidentally Morris was a financially well-to-do man who had become wealthy during the Revolution trading in war supplies.
The new bank, the Bank of North America as it was called, was modeled after the Bank of England. It was allowed, or rather not prohibited, to operate with minimal cash reserves, that is, to lend money it did not have and charge interest on it. If you or I did that we would be convicted of fraud, which is a felony. Few were aware of this practice at the time and of course it was kept secret from the people and politicians as much as possible.
Moreover, the bank was given the monopoly of issuing banknotes, which were also accepted in payment of taxes. The bank's charter invited private investors to participate in the initial capital of $400,000. But when Morris couldn't raise the money, he shamelessly used his political influence to have gold deposited in the bank, gold that France had lent to America. He then lent that money to himself and his friends to reinvest in the bank's stock.
He explained the problem in the following way: This institution having no other priority than avarice will never diverge from its object...to monopolize all the wealth, power, and influence of the state. The plutocracy once established will corrupt the legislature so that laws are made in its favor and the Department of Justice will favor the rich. But the people behind the Bank of North America—Alexander Hamilton, Robert Morris, and the bank's president, Thomas Willing—didn't give up.
Only six years later, Hamilton, then Secretary of the Treasury, and his mentor Morris created a new private central bank, the First Bank of the United States, through the new Congress. Thomas Willing again served as the bank's president. The players were the same, just her name? bank had changed.
- The Constituent Assembly
In 1787 the leaders of the colonies gathered in Philadelphia to replace and amend the problematic articles of the "Charter of the Union". As we predicted, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, both unconvinced, opposed the creation of a private central bank because they saw the problems created by the Bank of England. They wanted none of that, and as Jefferson later put it:
If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issuance of their currency, first by inflation and then by deflation, the banks and businesses that will grow around these will deprive the people of their property until their children wake up homeless on a continent conquered by their fathers.
During the public debate over the future monetary system, another of the founders of the United States, Governor Morris, headed the committee that drew up the final draft of the Constitution and was well aware of the bankers' motives.
Along with his old boss, Robert Morris and Alexander Hamilton, they had presented the original plan for the Bank of North America to the Continental Congress during the last year of the Revolution.
In a letter he wrote to James Madison on July 2, 1787, he revealed what was really going on. The rich will fight for the prevalence of their sovereignty and the exandrapodism of the rest. This is how they always do and this is how they want it to be... The result here will be the same as elsewhere if we do not keep them with the power of the government in their proper field of action. Despite the defection of Governor Morris from the bank faction, Hamilton, Robert Morris and Willing and their European supporters were not going to back down.
They succeeded in persuading most of the delegates to the Constitutional Convention not to authorize Congress to issue paper money. Most dealers were still reeling from the massive inflation caused by paper money during the Revolution. They had forgotten how well colonial paper money had worked before the war. But the Bank of England had not forgotten. The Moneymakers did not accept the possibility that America would issue its own paper money again.
Many believe that the Tenth Amendment to the Constitution, which reserved powers to the states not represented in the federal government, made the issuance of paper money by the federal government unconstitutional, since the power to issue paper money was not expressly stated as a power of the federal government by the Constitution. The Constitution remains silent on this point. However, the Constitution expressly forbids the States from issuing paper money.
Most of the congressmen intended the Constitution to be silent on this point so as not to give the federal government "absolute power" to issue paper money. Indeed in the paper of the Assembly, on the sheet of August 16th, we read the following: The deletion of the words "prohibition of bank notes" was seconded, and the motion passed in the affirmative.
Of course the paper money itself was not the main problem. Lending with minimal reserves was a bigger problem because it multiplied any rate of inflation caused by excessive paper money issuance several times over. So the delegates were left with the thought that banning paper money was a good idea. By banning any kind of paper money they would probably also limit the minimum reserve banking that was practiced, as the use of checks was negligible and if it had been brought up for discussion would it have been banned as well?
Bank loans created by accounting entries in the books were not reported and thus not prohibited. It was thus considered that the issuance of paper money by the Federal and State governments was prohibited while the same was not meant for banks. It is disputed that this power of who has the right to issue by not being expressly prohibited to the government was reserved as a future right of citizens and the people (including legal entities such as banks).
An opposing view said that the banking companies were organs and agents of the states, since they recognized their legitimacy, and thus were not subject to the ban on issuing bank notes, as was the case for the states themselves. This argument was ignored by the bankers who proceeded to issue bank notes against minimum reserves and lost all ground when the US Supreme Court ruled that the federal government could establish a bank that could issue money.
Ultimately only the States were banned from issuing paper currency, and this ban was not imposed not only on banks but not even on municipalities and communities (as was the case during the 1929 economic depression in four hundred cities throughout the US).
Another mistake that is not often noticed has to do with the power given to the Federal Government to "mint currency" and "fix its value there and then".
Determining the value of the coin (i.e. its purchasing power or its value relative to other things) is not related to its quality or content (eg so many grams of gold and so many copper etc.) but to the quantity, the stock of money. It is the quantity that determines the value, and Congress has never legislated to set a specific quantity of money in the US. Legislating a specific amount of money (including coins, checks, and bank reserves) means in practice determining the value of each dollar (purchasing power).
A legislative act that defines the rate of increase of the money stock implies the determination of its future value. Congress has decided neither, although it clearly has the constitutional right to do so. He has relinquished that power to the Federal Reserve and the 10,000-plus banks that create our monetary reserve.
The American Revolution (1775-1783)
- INDEPENDENCE AND NEW STATE
England was forced to recognize the 13 colonies in the Treaty of Paris in 1783 as an independent state under the name of the United States of America (USA). The US constitution, which was drawn up in 1787 and is still in effect today, declared the country a union (Confederation) of states and was based on the principle of separation of powers. The central government decides on the economy, defense and foreign policy.
The states themselves regulate matters of local government, justice, education and policing. Legislative power is exercised by Congress through the Senate and the House of Representatives. Each state is represented in the Senate by two senators, regardless of its population. In the House of Representatives, however, the states are represented by a number of deputies proportional to their population.
Executive power is exercised by the President, who is elected every four years by an electorate and can be re-elected only once. The first president of the USA was elected, in 1789, George Washington. In his honor the US capital was later named after him. Finally, the judiciary was defined as independent and elected.
- KEY TO THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
The American Revolution (1775 - 1783) against the British had begun before the "unanimous declaration of the 13 United States of America" on July 4, 1776, which has been celebrated every year since then as US Independence Day. At first it was a struggle between Great Britain and its thirteen colonies in America, which opposed British legislation and sought their independence.
But it was also a struggle between the colonists as several Americans, mainly from England, who were called Loyalists (Law-abiding) or Tories (after the English Conservatives), sided with Great Britain against the colonial rebels. The American Revolution was still a continuation of the colonial wars between France and England. The French supported, first secretly and then openly, the American patriots.
One of the American patriots, the publicist Thomas Paine, whose book captivated North American revolutionaries, expressed views very similar to those of Riga the Bold and the French revolutionaries or philosophers. Paine wrote that "society is a great good, but power, in whatever form, is an evil. An honest man alone is more valuable than all the crowned rascals of the world. On the other hand, it is absurd for someone to claim that an island (Britain) can indefinitely dominate an entire continent."
The French and American revolutions set a positive precedent for enslaved Greece. And of course the political rights and freedoms provided for in the Regime of Riga Feraios, as in the first Greek constitutions, are borrowed from the "Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen of the French Revolution".
- DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE OF THE USA
- THE INDEPENDENCE OF THE USA
From the beginning of the 17th century, the east coast of North America began to be steadily colonized by Europeans, mainly of British, Dutch, German and French descent. In the same context, the establishment of colonies also began, with the result that by 1732 13 colonies had been formed. The economy of these colonies was basically agricultural with vast arable lands.
Of course, while in the poorer South the pillar of the economy was the plantations of rice, corn, cotton and tobacco, in the developed North trade through maritime communications and with centers in the ports of New York, Boston and Philadelphia dominated. However, a point of friction between metropolitan England and the developing American region was the taxation policy of the former.
Meanwhile the "Philadelphia Assembly", the supreme governing body of the colonists, published the "Declaration of the Rights of Man" with explicit reference to the abolition of the imposed English taxation. Now everything was leading to the conflict, a fact that was confirmed when, in the following days, the colony of Massachusetts, with Boston as its capital, decided to set up a regular army, made up of the local militia, with George Washington, a landowner from Virginia, as its commander-in-chief.
England officially, with a treaty signed with the new American parliament, recognized on September 3, 1883 the independence of the United States, which in the meantime had already declared its independence from metropolitan England on July 4, 1776, through the "Assembly of Philadelphia". The above date marks the national anniversary of the United States. In the years that followed, the war became more general. The British were constantly sending reinforcements and the Americans were trying to keep the revolution alive.
France sent financial aid to the rebellious Americans as well as troops. The English army, led by General Cornwallis, finally surrendered at Yorktown, Virginia on October 19, 1781. The war officially ended with the Treaty of Paris on September 3, 1783, in which England ceded its territories to the US. The last English troops left the continent on November 25, 1783.
It was drafted by Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin, and was approved around August 2, 1776 (but symbolically on July 4, 1776) by Congress. It is considered as the founding act of the state of the United States of America. On July 4, 1776, a convention of Americans is convened in Philadelphia, where the Declaration of Independence is voted, which is based on the political ideas of the Enlightenment. Protagonists in drafting the Declaration were Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson.
- HISTORICAL CONTEXT
Britain, considering the thirteen States (States) of North America as colonies of the British Crown, meant to treat them as it did to all its other colonies: it imposed its own Government employees, different taxation from that which applied in Britain, restrictive terms on trade, freedom of expression, political activity, etc. King George III had, in fact, established the "five intolerable Laws" in the American colonies (1774). This could not be accepted by the "settlers", who felt oppressed.
In many American colonists the idea of independence had begun to form and mature. The first really decisive move was made on June 7, 1776 in Philadelphia. There, before Congress, was read a resolution by Richard Henry Lee, a representative of the state of Virginia, which, in broad terms, declared the determination of the "thirteen united colonies" to obtain self-government exempted entirely, as it should be valid, from subjection to Great Britain.
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At the same time, it was learned in the American colonies that King George, not having enough of an army, was negotiating the purchase of mercenaries from Germany to reinforce the English army. This indeed happened later - 30,000 Hesse mercenaries were granted to the English Crown at £7 each. Mercenaries were sent to the colonies, but more than half of them blew it before they even got involved in operations.
At the same time, Thomas Paine published in January 1776 his book "Common Sense", a text in which he listed the reasons and reasons why the colonies should become an independent state. This book was sold by the thousands and laid the groundwork for all "colonists" to realize the necessity of independence.
After Lee's resolution was read in Congress, it created on June 11 a Commission consisting of Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Roger Sherman, and Robert Livingston to draft a Declaration of Independence. Jefferson, at the urging of the Commission, retires to a house on the outskirts of Philadelphia and begins drafting the first Declaration of Independence (June 12 to 27).
On June 28, the draft of the Declaration is read in Congress, where, after discussions and objections, several amendments are made. On July 4, 1776, the final draft of the Declaration was approved by Congress. John Hancock, President of Congress, on July 5, 1776, orders printer Dunlap to print the text. On July 19, Congress orders the formalization of the Declaration document. The official document is printed on January 18, 1777 in Boston and distributed to all the States.
- THE CONTENTS OF THE ANNOUNCEMENT
AT A MEETING OF JULY 4, 1776
The unanimous Declaration
of the thirteen united
States of America
1) When in the Course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bonds which bind them to another, and to assume among the powers of the earth the separate and equal place to which they are entitled by the Laws of Nature and the God of Nature, rudimentary respect for the opinion of mankind compels (this people) to declare the causes which impel it to separation.
2) We accept the following truths as self-evident, that all men are created equal, and are endowed by their Creator with certain inviolable Rights, among which are the right to Life, the right to Liberty, and the right to the pursuit of Happiness.
3 ) How to secure these rights, Governments are established among Men, deriving their reasonable powers from the consent of the governed.
4) That whenever a Form of Government becomes destructive to these purposes, it is the Right of the People to alter or abolish it, and to establish a new Government, laying its foundations on such principles, and organizing its powers in such a form, as shall appear most likely to brings about his Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, dictates that Governments long established should not be changed for trifling and temporary reasons; and accordingly, experience has shown that mankind are more disposed to endure, while the evil endures, than to correct their course by abolishing forms (of government) in which it is learned. But when a long series of abuses and usurpations, continually to the same end, testifies to the subjection (of the People) to absolute Despotism, it is his right, it is his duty, to shake off such Government, and establish new Guardians for its future security.
5) Such has been the patient forbearance of these Colonies; and such is to-day the necessity which compels them to change their former System of Government. The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injustices and usurpations, with the immediate object of establishing an absolute Tyranny in these States. In proof of this, let us quote the facts to the honest world.
6) He (the King) has refused the ratification of the most beneficial and necessary laws for the common good.
7) He has forbidden his Governors to enact Laws of immediate and urgent importance, unless they are conditional upon his consent. And while they are under probation he has utterly disdained to deal with them.
8) He has refused to make any other Laws for the service of the inhabitants of large districts, unless those inhabitants would surrender the right of Representation in the Legislature; a right inestimable to them, and fatal only to tyrants.
9) He has convened legislatures in places unusual, inappropriate, and remote from the places where their Public Records are kept, for the sole purpose of exhausting their members until they comply with his measures.
10) He has repeatedly dissolved Houses of Representatives because they bravely opposed his own counsels against the rights of the people.
11) It has long refused, after such dissolutions, to hold new elections, consequently the legislative power, indestructible in itself, devolved upon the whole people to be exercised by them; the State remained in the meantime exposed to all dangers of invasion by without, and of turmoil within.
12) He has endeavored to prevent the growth of the population of the states; to this end he has obstructed the enforcement of the naturalization laws of aliens; he has refused to approve others to encourage immigration, and has imposed additional conditions on the grant of tracts of land.13) It has obstructed the administration of justice by refusing to sanction laws establishing judicial authorities.14) He has made the Judges dependent only on his Will for their tenure, and the amount and payment of their salary.
15) He has instituted numerous new posts and sent here hordes of officials who oppress our people and drain their possessions.
16) He has maintained among us, in time of peace, a Standing Army without the consent of our legislators.
17) He attempted to make military power independent and superior to political power.
18) He has conspired with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution, and not admissible to our laws; by sanctioning their pretended enactments;
19)To station large bodies of armed soldiers among us.
20) To protect them, by mock Trials, from punishment for the murders they commit against the inhabitants of these States.
21) To cut off all our Transactions with the rest of the World.
22) To impose Taxes on us without our consent.
23) To deprive us, in many cases, of the benefit of a Trial by Jury.
24) To send us across the Oceans to be tried for non-existent offences.
25) To abolish the free System of English Laws in a neighboring Province, he establishes in it an Arbitrary Government, and extends its Limits so as to make it at once a model and a fit instrument for introducing the same absolute power into those Colonies.
26) To gut our Charters, repeal our most precious laws, and fundamentally change the way we govern.
27) To suspend our legislatures, they usurped (the King and his accomplices) the power to legislate for us in any case.
28) He has renounced his right to rule here since he renounced his Protection and is waging war against us.
29) It has plundered our seas, ravaged our shores, burned our cities and destroyed the lives of our people.
30) He is already transporting strong military forces of foreign mercenaries to complete the work of death, desolation and tyranny which he has already begun with Cruelty and Treachery, examples of which could hardly be met with in the most barbarous times, and are wholly unworthy of the leader of a civilized nation.
31) He compelled our fellow-citizens whom he captured on the high seas to take up arms against their country, and either become the executioners of their friends and brothers, or be murdered by them.
32) He raised native insurrections among us, and endeavored to direct against our frontier dwellers, the relentless Savage Indians, whose known method of warfare is the indiscriminate extermination (of men) of all ages, sexes, and social classes.
33) At every stage of this oppression we have petitioned for remedy with the greatest modesty: but our repeated appeals have been answered only with repeated injustices. A Ruler whose character has all the traits befitting a Tyrant, is unfit to be the leader of free men.
34) Nor have we neglected our obligations to our British brethren. We have warned them from time to time of the attempts of their legislatures to extend their arbitrary jurisdiction over our affairs. We reminded them of the circumstances of our immigration and settlement here.
35) We appealed to their innate sense of justice and magnanimity, and appealed to the ties of our common descent to repudiate these acts of usurpation, which would inevitably sever our ties and correspondence. They too turned a deaf ear to the voice of justice and kinship. We must, therefore, yield to the necessity which our separation imposes, and regard them, like the rest of mankind, as enemies in war and friends in peace.
36) Therefore, we, the representatives of the United States of America, having convened a General Assembly, calling upon the Supreme Judge of the world to witness our intentions, solemnly declare and declare, in the name and by authority of the good people of these colonies, that these united Colonies, are and by right ought to be free and independent states, that they are released from all allegiance and subjection to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the British State is dissolved and no longer exists; and that as free and independent states they have full power to declare war, to conclude peace, to enter into alliances, to establish commerce, and to enter into all kinds of agreements and actions characteristic of independent states. And in support of this declaration, having unswerving faith in the protection of Divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Estates, and our sacred Honor.
- HISTORICAL PERSONS
- BENJAMIN FRANKLIN (Benjamin Franklin 1706 - 1790)
American politician, diplomat and scientist. He was born in Boston on January 17, 1706. He was the 15th of 17 children of Josiah Franklin, in a poor family, where the father was a small manufacturer of soaps and candles. At the age of 13 he began working as an apprentice typesetter in his brother's printing house. In 1723 he left and went to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, where he settled permanently, again working as a printer. A year later he went to London to buy printing supplies and stayed there for two years to perfect himself in this profession.
Returning to Philadelphia, he established his own printing office in partnership with a friend, at the same time began publishing, and very soon acquired a reputation for his practical and sound ideas. Self-taught, he learned French, Italian, Spanish and Latin and at the same time began to engage in various scientific studies. Showing strong organizational and administrative ability, he was appointed postmaster of Pennsylvania and later organized the postal services of all the American colonies and was appointed postmaster general.
In 1751 he was elected a member of parliament in Pennsylvania and in 1757 he went to London for negotiations where he stayed for five years, gaining friends and great esteem for his scientific achievements, as a result of which he was awarded an honorary doctorate of the University of Oxford. During the struggle for the independence of the colonies, he returned to America and worked wholeheartedly for its success. Elected delegate of Pennsylvania to the revolutionary convention of Philadelphia, he was one of the five delegates entrusted with the drafting of the famous declaration of independence of 1776.
In 1778 he succeeded in securing an alliance of the colonies with France against England, and on September 3, 1783, along with John Adams and three other envoys, managed to sign the final peace treaty with Britain. In 1785 he was elected president of the executive power of Pennsylvania and in 1787 a member of the national assembly, which drew up and voted the constitutional charter of the United States. As president of the Society for the Abolition of Slavery, he advocated and signed for black emancipation two months before his death.
He died on April 17, 1790, leaving many philological, political and sociological writings and articles. In the sciences he left as his chief achievement the invention of the lightning rod in 1753, after investigations and experiments begun in 1740. In 1752 he made his famous experiment of flying a kite on a day of storm and lightning.
In 1744 he discovered a stuffing that reduced the pollutants in smokestacks, the formula of which is still used today. His own research was applied to myopia glasses. He also invented a type of Harmonica for music. In the lecture entitled "Tolerance and Secularism in the Western World", given by the professor of the University of Athens, Mr. Savvas Agouridis, in 1998, on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the UN Declaration of Human Rights, we find the excerpt:
"As far as the American revolution and its proclamations are concerned, we simply mention in this connection the ideological amalgam of the Anglo-Saxon and the follower of European, in essence French, Theism and the Enlightenment, citing some great names, who left their personal mark on the American revolution: Benjamin Franklin was probably an Episcopalian but with a fundamental belief that of a Theist, Thomas Paine was a Theist, Thomas Jefferson was an Episcopalian but a Theist in belief.
So did James Madison. In his work "Parable against Persecution" Benjamin Franklin writes the following very true and witty: "When a religion is good, I think it will be able to support itself, but when it cannot support itself, and God does not shows an interest in its support, so that those involved in it are forced to call upon the state power for help, this, as I understand it, shows that it is a bad religion."
According to the mason and historian of Freemasonry Manley Hall, as reported by David Icke in his book "The Secret of All Ages", of the 55 signatures of the representatives who drew up the American Constitution, at the conference held in the summer of 1787 in Philadelphia, nearly 50 belonged to known Freemasons of the time, and only one definitely did not belong to a Freemason. Among those who sign it stand out the well-known freemasons George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, of which the first two were also presidents of the USA.
In Franklin's autobiography, there is a passage that says:
''...my pamphlet somehow fell into the hands of one Lyon, a surgeon, author of 'The Infallibility of Human Judgment', resulting in a getting to know each other. He took a great interest in me, and often invited me to discourse on these subjects, and took me to the Horns, an alehouse in Cheapside, and introduced me to Dr. Mandeville, the author of "The Fable of the Bees," who had a club there, whose soul he was by being the most playful and entertaining company.
The Lyons also introduced me to Dr. Pemberton, at Batson's coffee-house, who promised to give me an opportunity, at some time, of meeting Sir Isaac Newton, which I greatly desired. But that never happened''.
B. Franklin is considered one of the founders of the American state and one of the "fathers" of the nation, to whom official sources always refer with great respect. In addition to his extensive studies in the sciences and letters, it is very likely that he had relations with esotericism, through the powerful and at the same time secret movement of Freemasonry, which set its stamp on the beginning of American civilization, a civilization which, unfortunately, today it is called into question.
- THOMAS JEFFERSON (Thomas Jefferson 1743 - 1826)
“All men are created equal: they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights. These rights include life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Governments are established to guarantee these rights, and their authority derives from the consent of the governed." Thomas Jefferson was born on April 13, 1743 in Sandwell, Virginia. His father, Peter Jefferson, was a man who loved the country life and devoted his time to cultivating his plantation.
His mother, Jane Randolph, belonged to one of the oldest and wealthiest families in Virginia. Because of their kinship with the Randolphs, the Jeffersons became socially accepted, and belonged to the Virginia aristocracy, without being particularly wealthy. Young Thomas was the first of the boys, and when Peter died in 1757, leaving the family almost destitute, young Thomas became head of the family. His father, however, believed in progress and had managed to push young Thomas into studies.
From 1760 to 1762 he studied at the College of William and Mary, in Williamsburg, which was also the only higher educational institution in the South. There he met a Scottish mathematician, G. Small, spiritual teacher of the Enlightenment, by whom he was influenced in terms of his new ideas. During this period of his life in Williamsburg, Jefferson became acquainted with the secular life of the British colony, socialized, entered into the inner workings of the colonial government, and began to learn the violin.
There he also met the law teacher George With, who influenced him to study law. When he finished his studies, he enrolled in the law school of the General Court of Virginia. In essence, Law was the stepping stone to get involved in politics, like most of the fathers of the American republic. Jefferson's political career begins in 1769 with his entry into the House of Commons, as a representative of Albemarle County. In addition to politics and law, Jefferson loved the outdoors, nature, and agriculture.
After all, he had grown up on the plantation in Sandwell, which he had inherited. There he chose an area he named Monticello (little mountain), to express his love of architecture, influenced by the standards of the Italian Renaissance architect Palladio, who had published in 1570 the work "Four Books", the Bible of all followers of classicism. Monticello was completed after Jefferson's return from France and was built on classical standards.
In 1770 a rivalry began between the British soldiers and the American colonists, which was most intense in Virginia and Massachusetts. In 1774 as a member of the House of Commons Jefferson drafted his 1st known text, the "Summary of the Rights of British America", where he defends the rights the colonists had to be heard. In 1775, with the battle of Lexington and Concord near Boston, the rift between the British and the Americans begins.
The Continental Congress, in Philadelphia in 1776, was attended by thirteen delegates from the colonies, which had become sovereign states. Jefferson represented Virginia. A committee was formed to prepare a proclamation, and it suggested that Jefferson draft it. It took him three weeks to write the text of the Declaration of Independence, which was accepted by Congress on July 4, 1776.
Then committee men like Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, took part in shaping it, made it smaller, made it milder, and took out some parts, like a passage blaming the King of England for status of slavery. That is why it is still considered the result of collective work, but the basis of the text belongs to Jefferson. For Jefferson himself, since then his ties with the Kingdom have been severed.
After the Philadelphia Convention in 1776 and until the end of the War of Independence, Jefferson disappeared from the national political scene and returned to Virginia, where he was a proponent of important reforms. Through them we see the enlightening spirit by which he was characterized. He believed that the church should have nothing to do with the state, but he faced a lot of backlash. Until then the Anglican church priests were paid by taxpayers' money. He also drafted the Secular Act, which would later be passed while Jefferson was in Paris.
That is why he proposed a three-level education and was an advocate of the view that children should learn ancient languages, such as Latin and Greek, but also various sciences, because in this way the formation of modern man would be more complete. The program he proposed was so revolutionary that it can only be compared to that of the French revolution. In 1780 he was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia. In 1783 he is elected Virginia's representative to Congress in Philadelphia and continues with his radical legislative proposals.
However, in March 1785 Jefferson replaced Franklin and presented himself to Louis XVI. During his diplomatic mission in France, he tried to improve relations between France and the United States, because as a spokesman for the Enlightenment and a follower of liberal economics - invented by Adam Smith - he believed that the abolition of borders would facilitate trade for the benefit of all. This was one reason he made several trips to Holland, the Low Countries, the Rhine region, Italy.
He also believed in the values and ideals of both the Roman Empire and ancient Greece. Regarding ancient Greece, he said: "We are all obliged to the ancient Greeks for the LIGHT that led us away from the darkness."
During his stay in Paris he socialized with great thinkers of the time, such as Lavoisier, Biffon, the most famous of the naturalists, Jean-Jacques Rousseau's former friend, Volnet, who introduced him to Egyptology, Doctor Campani, who had written the "Relations between the Physical and Moral State of Man," the French philosopher Desty de Tracy, who had written an essay on Montesquieu's "Spirit of the Laws."
He also associated with the Duc de La Rochefoucauld, who was a promoter and translator of the book "The Constitutions of the 13th United States of America". This was published in 1783 and had a great impact on the political revisionists of the time, because it contained a complete record of the ideas of the Enlightenment. Jefferson was an eyewitness, in Paris, of the events of the expiration of the old regime and the beginning of the French revolution.
He also experienced the storming of the Bastille. As he states in his autobiography, "I was in contact with the leading patriots of the National Assembly. Because I came from a country that has gone through similar reforms, they trusted me with their thoughts." With some of them, such as Lafayette or La Rochefoucauld, they were also personal friends. When the General Sessions were called, Jefferson emerged as a man with an important role in shaping the Declaration of the Rights of Man.
On his return to America he was offered by George Washington the position of Secretary of State, one of the five members of the country's government. This was the first step that then led him to assume the presidency from 1801 to 1809. He was the third president of the United States. He was also president of the American Philosophical Society from 1797 to 1814.
Jefferson died on July 4, 1826, nearly half a century after the Declaration of Independence. In South Dakota, USA, there is the monument to the four presidents (George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln) sculpted in granite on Mount Rushmore.
- JOHN ADAMS (John Adams 1735 - 1826)
John Adams was the first vice president of the United States of America and the second President of the country after George Washington. He was born on October 31, 1735 and died on July 4, 1826. Adams came to prominence during the early stages of the American Revolution. As Massachusetts' delegate to the Continental Congress, he played a leading role in persuading Congress to approve the Declaration of Independence of the American States in 1776.
Directly connected to the rebellion of the colonies is the Boston lawyer John Adams, one of the perhaps underestimated Founding Fathers of the United States of America. One of Adams' first significant contacts with the English Crown was at a trial of English soldiers accused of firing on a mob in Boston and killing a large number of Americans.
Adams, while a prominent Bostonian patriot, undertook to defend the soldiers, before an American court full of citizens and an American jury. He took on the case, it is said, because he deeply believed in the value of the law, above sentimentality and self-interest. Not only did he take it on, he won it! And not only did he win it, but he continued to live in Boston without much trouble from those who lost children and friends in the incident.
Adams personifies the maturity of the Americans of the time, a group of people ready to govern themselves, with high ideals of freedom and respect for individual rights. Washington became the first president of the USA, thanks to his very imposing presence and of course the laurels of his victorious Grand Strategy. Adams was reduced to being vice president and only after Washington's two terms ended did he finally become the second president of the United States.
But even if Adams' name was not given to the capital, his contribution was decisive for the subsequent course of the USA. The reason the USA did not become Mexico or Argentina, which gained their independence shortly after (as did Greece, of course), is directly linked to the legacy of the Founding Fathers and especially Adams. There are many countries with vast land and natural resources, but not all of them had the same wise and robust institutions.
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This mentality, perhaps inherited from the English but carefully cultivated by men like Adams with the addition of a deep liberalism, is one of the greatest assets of this country. Respect for laws, even if it doesn't always mean good laws (don't forget that slavery remained legal at the insistence of the southern colonies for nearly 100 years after the Revolution) means that society can function well. And strong institutions mean that citizens eventually achieve a fair and proper legal system, worthy of respect.
Adams left the country feeling that every man has a fundamental right to go to court and seek justice, to hold his leaders accountable. It created a dominant culture among citizens that says justice (in the sense of fair) is of great value. For a decade he held various diplomatic posts in Paris, The Hague and London, until in 1789 he became vice president (the first in the history of the United States) and president in 1796, succeeding Washington. From a literary point of view, his Epistles are important.
After his defeat in the 1800 election, Adams retired to his hometown of Massachusetts, where he died on July 4, 1826. He died exactly 50 years after the signing of the US Declaration of Independence. Thomas Jefferson died on the same day, a few hours before his friend.
- GEORGE WASHINGTON (George Washington 1732 - 1799)
George Washington (February 22, 1732 - December 14, 1799) or George Washington was a protagonist of the liberation struggle of the United States of America against Great Britain (1775 - 1783), as the leader of the Continental Army and the first President of the country under its newly drafted constitution.
George Washington was born on February 22, 1732 on his family's estate at Pope's Creek in Westmoreland County, Virginia. He received little and irregular schooling. He took up surveying and at 16 became overseer of Lord Fairfax's estates. In 1749 he was appointed official surveyor of the province of Kalperer. After the death of his father, Augustine, and his brother, Lawrence, he inherited a large fortune.
In 1752 he was named a major in the Virginia militia and took charge of the education of the men in his district. In 1754 he led an expedition to drive the French out of the Ohio region. Together with his Indian allies, he destroyed a French detachment. He then built a fort, Fort Necessity, but was forced to surrender as the French and Indians were outnumbered. When he was freed from the French and returned to Virginia he was not held responsible for the defeat.
In 1755 he participated as a staff member in General Braddock's expeditionary force, which was defeated by the French at the Battle of Monongahela. There Washington was recognized as a hero as he managed to rally the remnants of the army for retreat. He was therefore promoted to colonel and made commander of all the forces in Virginia. In 1758 he took part in the campaign that captured Fort Duquesne and drove the French out of the area. Washington had increased his fortune after his marriage to the wealthy widow, Martha Custis.
He owned over 50 sq. km. lands, while at Mount Vernon alone he employed more than 100 slaves. From 1759 to 1774 he was elected member of Congress from Virginia. Initially, he did not have much of a role in American protests against the British and was not in favor of independence. With the continued oppression of the English, he began to be active in the leading circles of the colonists.
So when the revolution started Washington showed up to Congress in battle gear showing he was ready for war. In 1775 he assumed the chief strategy of the American army. In 1776 he captured Boston after a siege. The British managed to capture New York, Washington was forced to retreat. On December 25, 1776 he crossed the Delaware River and won an important victory at Trenton and later at Princeton.
He started the tradition of wanting US presidents. not to seek re-election to a third term in office, which became official law after World War II. He did not belong to a party, as the Fathers of the USA. they hoped that party factions would not develop in their country, hopes that ultimately proved false, as parties appeared from the very first post-Washington elections.
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