The American & French Revolutions
The American (1775-89) and French (1789-99) Revolutions as paired Atlantic revolutions: their causes, documents, and the export of constitutionalism and popular sovereignty.
The American Revolution (1775-1789)
The American Revolution converted Enlightenment political theory into a working republic. Its proximate cause was fiscal: after the Seven Years' War (1756-63) Britain sought colonial revenue through the Sugar Act (1764), the Stamp Act (1765) and the Townshend duties (1767). Colonists answered with the constitutional doctrine of 'no taxation without representation,' grounded in the rights of Englishmen and John Locke's Two Treatises of Government (1689), which justified resistance to government that violated life, liberty and property.
From Protest to Independence
The Boston Massacre (5 March 1770) and the Boston Tea Party (16 December 1773) escalated the confrontation; Parliament's Coercive (Intolerable) Acts of 1774 closed Boston's port and provoked the First Continental Congress (September 1774). War began at Lexington and Concord on 19 April 1775. On 4 July 1776 the Second Continental Congress adopted the Declaration of Independence, drafted chiefly by Thomas Jefferson, asserting that 'all men are created equal' and endowed with 'unalienable Rights.' The Franco-American alliance of 1778, decisive after Saratoga (1777), brought French naval power that produced the British surrender at Yorktown (19 October 1781). The Treaty of Paris (1783) recognized independence.
The Constitutional Settlement
The Articles of Confederation (ratified 1781) proved too weak, prompting the Philadelphia Convention of 1787. The resulting Constitution of the United States established federalism, separation of powers and checks and balances, defended in The Federalist (1787-88) by Hamilton, Madison and Jay. The Bill of Rights (first ten amendments, ratified 1791) entrenched individual liberties. The Revolution thus produced the first large-scale written republican constitution, a model that radiated across the Atlantic. Its limits were equally consequential: slavery survived (the three-fifths clause, Article I, and the 1808 slave-trade compromise), and the franchise remained propertied. The American example demonstrated that a colonial people could constitute a durable republic on the basis of popular sovereignty rather than monarchy.
