THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION

The United States of America

began its history as an appendage
of Europe.
Except for the American Indians
and the slaves brought over from
Africa, all of its original inhabitants
were European.
They spoke European
languages and brought with them
European habits, ideas and
achievements.
 The settlers of the 13 original
colonies had left the mother
country to look for new
opportunities over 4,800
kilometres abroad.
Though their motivations
varied from the religious to the
commercial, they had physically
departed from England to begin
anew in a new world.
 Britain itselfa six-to-eight-week
journey away by shipbecame an
increasingly remote concept for
subsequent /sbskwnt/
generations of colonists /klnists/
who had never set foot in the
country.
 Thus, the fact of American
independence was revolutionary
indeed.
Most colonists had shared a
sense of British identity throughout
the first 150 years of settlement, and
breaking with the only state
authority that many of them had
ever known was a difficult decision
to make, let alone execute
/ekskjut/.
 No society had ever done what
the American revolutionaries
attempted to do: unseat an
aristocracy /rstkrsi/ and
defeat the world's most powerful
navy and a great army, while
establishing a new republican
government without falling prey to
the forces of chaos /kes/ and
despotism /desptzm/.
 This movement began as a
transatlantic/trnztlntk/
dispute over parliamentary
/plmentri/ authority and policy,
as American colonists chafed
/teft/ against British measures to
reconsolidate their hold over their
North American empire.
 This difference of opinion grew
into a crisis of authority when
colonists expressed their opposition
by rioting, burning effigies of English
officials, organising vigilante
/vdlnti/ associations, and
pledging boycotts of imported
goods.
 The colonists did not initially
think of themselves as waging a war
for independence, but rather
believed they were defending their
natural rights as Englishmen to resist
misguided and corrupt government
officials and representatives.
With every new British assertion
of authority, the colonists redoubled
their activism, and the stakes got
higher and higher.
 The colonists' faith in their sovereign,
King George III, was dashed by his
rejection of their appeals and his
condemnation of their protests as an
unlawful rebellion.
Once they lost all faith in the
righteousness and reason of the
monarchy, the American Patriots
/ptrits/ rejected it outright and set
forth not only to win independence, but
also to build a new kind of society in
place of the old.
 We can list 5 causes of the
American Revolution or War for
Independence:

1.) the mercantilist policies of the

British government, which were
exemplified by various acts for the
regulation of trade and taxes.
 For 100 years, England had passed
laws to regulate colonial trade in the
interest of a mercantilist policy
designed to ensure that imperial
commerce benefited the mother
country.
These laws supposedly bound
American colonists to trade only with
English merchants and ship their
products only in English vessels, even if
the Americans could find better prices
through foreign traders.
 Yet until 1763, the imperial
government in London had allowed
those laws to go largely
unenforced, and the colonists had
since become accustomed to a
sense of self-determination during
this period of so-called "salutary
neglect/sljtri nlekt/.
 However, while Britain may
have been especially powerful after
the French and Indian War, it was
also quite broke financially.
At war's end, the British sought
to recoup /rkup/ some of their
costs from the Americans.
 The British failed to appreciate just
what a century of salutary neglect had
done: the colonists interpreted the new
Parliamentary acts after 1763 as
violations of their liberty, unacceptable
infringements of their rights as free
Englishmen.
When British officials tried to take
such freedoms away, Americans not
only protested, but they began to think
and speak of those freedoms as their
essential rights.
 The oldest of these acts were
the Acts of Trade and Navigation
(1651) which prohibited trade
between England and the colonies
in other than English-owned or
English-built ships and forbade the
exportation of certain articles such
as tobacco, sugar, cotton, to any
country except England.
 In 1764, Parliament passed the
Sugar Act, which reduced the tariff
on certain imports, but levied
/levid/ additional duties on sugar,
wines, coffee, silks, and linens
brought into the colonies from the
Spanish and French West Indies.
 The Sugar Act was designed
not only to regulate, but also to
increase revenues. Its ultimate
effect was to create anxiety among
colonists whose economic
livelihoods were substantially
threatened by the new (or newly
enforced) taxes and regulations:
these were primarily the inhabitants
of port towns along the coast.
 In 1765, Parliament followed up
with the Stamp Act, a direct British tax
on a wide variety of printed materials
(everything from playing cards to court
documents, land deeds, books,
newspapers, and even dice).
Because each of those
documents had to contain the official
government stamp, colonists had to
pay the tax whenever they wanted to
purchase any of the printed items.
 The Stamp Act marked a
departure from all imperial regulations
that preceded it, as it was the first time
the British sought to gain revenues by
taxing colonial commerce directly (an
"internal tax") instead of regulating
trade (an "external tax").
Some of these revenues were
supposed to go towards the cost of
stationing British troops in North
America, to ensure security and
stability.
 American colonists responded
to the Stamp Act with outrage. They
quickly became alarmed at the
prospect of a permanent standing
army in their midst. Local elites were
offended by Parliament's challenge
to their own authority.
 And a large cross-section of
Americans who read books or
newspapers, played cards or dice, or
purchased any of the printed items
specified in the Stamp Act were
angered not only by the financial
burden incurred, but by the principle
of the matter: Parliament had directly
taxed the colonists without their
consent or the consent of their
representatives.
 The Stamp Act aroused a violent
storm of opposition. A mob surged
/sd/ through the crooked streets
of Boston and gutted /t/ the
mansion of Lieutenant-Governor
Hutchinson.
From New Hampshire to Georgia
the Act was flouted /flat/ (to
intentionally not obey a law), the
agents who sold stamps were driven
from their offices, and the stamps
themselves were publicly burned.
 The Stamp Act can be counted
as the second cause of the
American Revolution.

The third cause was the British

interference with the interests of
land-hungry colonists.
 In 1763, England had issued a
Royal Proclamation prohibiting
colonists from settling west of the
Appalachian Mountains, in order to
avoid potentially costly and
protracted /prtrk.td/ (lasting for
a long time) frontier wars between
settlers and Indians.
 This, of course, angered white
settlers who had already pushed
into the backcountry of Kentucky
and Tennessee, as well as the elite
/lit/ eastern planters who had
already speculated in the purchase
of extensive land claims beyond the
Appalachians /plenz/.
 Like all revolutions, the one
which occurred in America
between 1775 and 1781 had its
ideological /adildkl/ basis,
which can be named its fourth
cause.
Samuel Adams, Thomas Paine
and Thomas Jefferson drew their
inspiration from philosophers of the
Enlightenment.
 John Locke is often referred to
as the "intellectual godfather" of the
Revolution.
There is no question that his
ideas had a profound influence on
the movement for independence.
Locke's Second Treatise on
Government was a book that
Thomas Jefferson read at least
three times.
 Finally, the conflicting theories
of representation and sovereignty
were the fifth cause of the
American Revolution .
Colonial leaders believed that
a true representative /reprzenttv/
must be an actual representative
who lived in the district whose
interests he defended.
 The British believed in virtual
representation: according to them,
every aristocrat /rstkrt/ in the
empire was represented by the
British nobility and every commoner
by the members of the House of
Commons, regardless of district
location.
 On the issue of the sovereignty
of Parliament, colonial philosophers
rejected the theory of absolute
sovereignty, whereas British
constitutionalists had gradually
come to believe that Parliament
was legally omnipotent
/mnptnt/.
 In March 1770, a company of
British soldiers in Boston became
panicky and opened fire on a
disorderly mob. When the smoke
cleared away, 4 Americans lay
dead. This event became known as
the Boston Massacre /mskr/.
 In December 1773 occurred the
Boston Tea Party, when a band of
citizens dressed as Indians dumped
tea into the harbour in resentment
against a monopoly which the
British government had granted to
the powerful East India Company.
 Britain retaliated /rtliet/ by
closing the port of Boston until the
tea was paid for, increasing the
power of the kings officials in
Massachusetts, and ordering
transportation of political offenders
to England for trial.
The colonists referred to these
measures as the Intolerable Acts.
This was the breaking point and
battles began.
 King George III condemned the
colonists as a people in open and
avowed /vad/ rebellion.
The next time the colonists
addressed the King, a Congress
had been summoned and they
communicated via /va//vi/
the Declaration of Independence.
 In this document, Thomas
Jefferson and the other Founding
Fathers charged George III with 27
carefully enumerated transgressions
/trnzrenz/ that they felt
justified their move toward
independence.
The Declaration was signed on
July 4th 1776.
 When they finally and
reluctantly rejected their king as a
tyrant /tarnt/, the American
Patriots rejected monarchy
altogether, setting a course towards
a radically new form of republican
government.
 The Founding Fathers were
exceptionally bright people; they
were well-read and had admirable
/dmrbl/ hopes and dreams.
However, they were human beings,
flawed /fld/ and fallible /flbl/
with their own set of contradictions
and shortcomings.
These same contradictions and
paradoxes abounded in the
republican ideology they adopted.
 For 18th-century republicans, a
person with "virtue" owned property,
possessed an intrinsic /ntrnzk/
sense of morality, and was willing to
subordinate /sbdnt/ his own
interests for the interests of the
community.
 Republican government was, by
design, antithetical /ntetkl/
(exactly opposite) to monarchies or
aristocracies in which a rigid hierarchy
/harki/ predetermined the social
structure and a small number of
powerful people ruled over the
masses with little to no oversight.
Yet, the United States utilised
slave labour and denied women any
direct voice in government.
 Republicanism was not the
same as democracy.
The United States was not
formed as a democracy in the
classic sense, and the word itself
does not appear anywhere in the
Constitution.
Originally, a democracy was a
form of government in which the
citizenry directly participated in the
function of government.
 The only time such a government ever
existed was in 508 B.C. in Athens, and even then
it only encompassed a democracy for males
over the age of eighteen.
After the Revolution, American people
elected representatives to presumably
/przjumbli/ speak and act on their behalf.
Besides, many Founding Fathers did not
want a pure democracy; they thought that
some sort of executive power was necessary,
along with an "upper house" of the government
to serve as a sort of "buffer" between the
masses and the powers that governed them.
 Despite these considerable
restrictions, the United States became
a wholly new system of government in
a world primarily dominated by rigidly
hierarchical, aristocratic systems.
As regards, religion, the Founding
Fathers decidedly broke from an Old
World monarchy that was inextricably
/nkstrkbli/ intertwined with its state
church.
 Thus, they adopted a form of
government that incorporated
religious liberty, so that Christians,
members of other faiths, and non-
believers alike could fully participate
as American citizens.
 The Constitution which now rules
the United States was drafted from
May to September 1787.
According to this legal instrument,
the government of the United States
consisted of executive, legislative and
judiciary branches.
The people chose the members of
the House of Representatives and
participated in the election of the
Electoral /lektrl/ College.
 A powerful executive was created
with authority to veto acts of Congress
and to use his own agents to enforce
the laws.
The federal Supreme /suprim/
Court had the power to nullify /nlfa/
those acts of Congress and state
legislatures /ledsltrz/ in conflict
with the Constitution, which was
declared the supreme law of the land.
 How do US presidential elections
work?
Every four years, on the Tuesday after
the first Monday of November, citizens go
to local voting booths to cast their vote
for the next president and vice president
of their country.
However, the results of the popular
vote are not guaranteed to stand
because the presidential election is really
decided by the votes of the Electoral
College.
 The Electoral College is the process
through which 538 electors come
together every four years to give their
official votes for President and Vice
President of the United States.
This number is reached by adding 435
estate Representatives, 100 Senators, and
3 electoral votes for the District of
Columbia.
In order to win in the Electoral
College, a candidate needs 270 votes.
 On the first Monday after the second
Wednesday in December, the electors
meet in their respective state capitals to
officially cast their votes for president and
vice president.
These votes are then sealed and sent
to the president of the Senate, who on
January 6th opens and reads the votes
before both houses of Congress.
The winner is sworn into office at noon
on January 20th.
 If there is no winner in the
Electoral College, the House of
Representatives elects the President
and the Senate elects the Vice-
President.
The Electoral College process was
actually put in place to ensure a
nationwide system of fairness.
 The Electoral College process (and its
outcome) may seem a bit shocking. In the 2000 US
presidential election, for example, more Americans
voted for Al Gore, but George Bush actually won
the presidency because he was awarded the
majority of Electoral College votes (50,992,335 and
50,455,156 votes for each candidate, respectively.)
This is a political upset that has occurred
several times since the first U.S. presidential election;
actually, four presidents have been elected by the
Electoral College after losing the popular vote.
1 INTERESTING FACT
+
1 FUN FACT
 When enumerating the inalienable
/nelinbl/ rights of "all men," including
"life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness"
in the Declaration of Independence,
Thomas Jefferson drew on a phrase from
John Locke: "life, liberty, and property."
Jefferson substituted the word
"happiness" for "property" because he
did not consider property to be an
inalienable right. Besides, the belief of
the time was that that property
produced "happiness."
 Diplomat, scientist, inventor,
businessman, and humourist
Benjamin Franklin composed a list
of some 200 synonyms for "drunk."
Published at least four decades
before the American Revolution, it
included terms such as "soaked,"
"cut, "his flag is out," "middling,"
"been in the sun," and "cherry-
merry."