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The Declaration of Independence proclaimed that all men are created equal, though it was not until later centuries that constitutional amendments and federal laws would incrementally grant equal rights to African Americans, Native Americans, poor white men, and women. The Patriot leadership professed the political philosophies of liberalism and republicanism to reject rule by monarchy and aristocracy.

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The Continental Congress declared British King George III a tyrant who trampled the colonists' rights as Englishmen, and they pronounced the colonies free and independent states on July 4, 1776. The Patriots unsuccessfully attempted to invade northeastern Quebec and rally sympathetic colonists there during the winter of 1775–1776, though they were far more successful in the southwestern parts of the colony. Each colony formed a Provincial Congress, which assumed power from the former colonial governments, suppressed Loyalism, and contributed to the Continental Army led by Commander in Chief General George Washington. Patriot militia, joined by the newly formed Continental Army, then put British forces in Boston under siege by land, and they withdrew by sea. Open warfare erupted when British regulars sent to capture a cache of military supplies were confronted by local Patriot militia at Lexington and Concord on April 19, 1775. Opponents of Britain were known as 'Patriots' or 'Whigs', while colonists who retained their allegiance to the Crown were known as 'Loyalists' or 'Tories'. The other colonies rallied behind Massachusetts, and twelve of the thirteen colonies sent delegates in late 1774 to form a Continental Congress for the coordination of their resistance to Britain.

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The British responded by closing Boston Harbor and enacting a series of punitive laws which effectively rescinded Massachusetts Bay Colony's privileges of self-government. The burning of the Gaspee in Rhode Island in 1772, the passage of the Tea Act of 1773 and the resulting Boston Tea Party in December 1773 led to a new escalation in tensions. The British government repealed most of the Townshend duties in 1770, but retained the tax on tea in order to symbolically assert Parliament's right to tax the colonies.

The British government deployed troops to Boston in 1768 to quell unrest, leading to the Boston Massacre in 1770. Tensions relaxed with the British repeal of the Stamp Act, but flared again with the passage of the Townshend Acts in 1767. The passage of the Stamp Act 1765 imposed internal taxes on official documents, newspapers and most things printed in the colonies, which led to colonial protest and the meeting of representatives from several colonies at the Stamp Act Congress. During the 1760s, however, the British Parliament passed a number of acts that were intended to bring the American colonies under more direct rule from the British metropole and increasingly intertwine the economies of the colonies with those of Britain. Before the 1760s, Britain's American colonies had enjoyed a high level of autonomy in their internal affairs, which were locally governed by colonial legislatures. The Americans in the Thirteen Colonies formed independent states that defeated the British in the American Revolutionary War (1775–1783), gaining independence from the British Crown and establishing the United States as the first nation-state founded on Enlightenment principles of constitutionalism and liberal democracy.Īmerican colonists objected to being taxed by the Parliament of Great Britain, a body in which they had no direct representation. The American Revolution was an ideological and political revolution that occurred in British America between 17.

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