How America Gained Its Independence

How America Gained Its Independence

The Colonists were justified in declaring their independence from the Mother Country, Britain, but fought a war to break away from its rule. The colonists started out with their own self-government and built on from there. The many of the British rules and taxes were harsh on the colonists, but they wouldn’t go down without a fight. Thanks to Thomas Jefferson, author of the Declaration of Independence, and also to the Treaty of Paris, which helped form an agreement between Britain and the United States, justify the rights of the colonists, and create a new nation called the United States of America.

From the beginning, Britain looked down on the colonists and they were only mere subjects of the British rule, and were only expected to live under the law provided. The colonists already had the authority of the British, but decided to develop their own simple self-government. They held town meetings that occurred once a year, and discussed either about simple things such as salaries, to more important things such as issues and construction. The colonists later figured out that they needed a more improved government, so they had their own legislature, which was made up of two houses, and their own rules for voting. To vote you had to be a Caucasian, Christian male who was over the age of twenty-one and owned property. There were already many rules to be carried out, but nothing hit the colonists like the act of taxing.

Taxation with out representation was a new set of problems, from the Stamp Act in 1765 to the Tea Act in 1773. Tensions started growing when Britain started placing the first taxes on every single colonial written document. The documents had to be stamped to show that the tax o...

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... III violated the rights of colonists.

Although the colonists were justified in declaring their independence from the Mother Country, not all colonists welcomed independence. Some of the colonists were loyalists, so a war broke out called the American Revolution. It was a cluster of a few battles to protect and create a new nation, called the United States of America. The American Revolution had an immense impact on other parts of the world such as France and Latin America. From Saratoga to Yorktown, every battle in between, and the loss of Cornwallis’s army, helped convince Parliament that the American colonists could be defeated, but only at great cost. So the British, in 1782, met representatives of the United States in Paris, and negotiated. The Treaty of Paris, as it was called, ended the war, set nation boundaries, and recognized the American independence.