Build up to American Revolution Essay
After more than a century and a half of English colonial settlement in North America, a coalition of British colonies along the east coast declared their independence from the British crown in the summer of 1776. In the seven years that followed, a bloody war raged, pitting British soldiers and loyal colonists against revolutionary colonists who identified themselves as American. The American Revolution took shape not immediately in the mid-1770s, but over the course of many years. The path to revolution was laid out clearly in 1763 with the end of the Seven Years War between Britain and France, in which many American colonists had fought for Britain. Over the next 13 years, a series of policy decisions by the British Parliament alienated and enraged various groups of colonists, who slowly crafted a distinct national identity. Consider the challenges anti-British colonists faced in cultivating a new national identity in the 1760s and 1770s. Since the early 1600s, English colonies in North America had been home to a wide variety of people, from different economic classes, ethnic and religious traditions, races, and regions. Think about ways that class, religious, and ethnic identity inhibited the formation of an anti-British coalition.
Write an essay that explains the origins of the American Revolution by discussing the specific complaints that different groups (seaside merchants, politicians, backcountry settlers, Indians, slaves, freedmen) of Americans had against the British government.
Your essay should explain the series of events between the early 1760s and 1776 that culminated in the drafting of the Declaration of Independence.
How did so many different groups of Americans, who had long considered themselves to be loyal British subjects, reach a point where they desired to be a free and independent people?
How did race (Africans, African Americans, Native Americans, newly arrived immigrants) cause different people to join opposing sides or remain neutral? This essay is not about the Revolution itself.
Do not discuss events past the war’s beginning (1776 at latest), unless linked to answering this prompt.
