Four Amercian Revolutionary War Q's?

Question

1. What was the main reason that France and Spain helped the United States gain its independence from Great Britain?
a. They wanted the United States to have its independence.
b. They wanted Americans to have the same rights as people in Spain and France.
c. They wanted to weaken Great Britain.
d. They needed the money that the Americans paid them for their help.

2. Who did Thomas Paine refer to as "summer soldiers" and "sunshine patriots" in his pamphlet The American Crisis?
a. Quakers who wanted independence but refused to fight for it.
b. Soldiers who quit the Patriot army when times got tough.
c. Americans who did not support the fight for independence.
d. Volunteers who were willing to fight only in warm weather.

3. Which of the following results of the American Revolution helped free enterprise to develop in the United States? 2
a. Americans were no longer forced to buy British manufactured goods.
b. British mercantilism no longer shaped American economic development.
c. Americans no longer had to obey the Navigation Acts.
d. All of the above are true.


4. Which was a condition of the Treaty of Paris that the British did not observe? 2
a. The northern border of the United States was to be Canada.
b. Americans would have fishing rights off Canada's Atlantic coast.
c. The United States would be independent of Great Britain.
d. The western boundary of the United States was to be the Mississippi River.

ignore the number 2 at then end of questions 3 and 4

Answer 1

c, b, d, b

Answer 2

1. c 2.b 3.a 4.c

Answer 3

1) c - France and Britain had been rivals since 1689
2) b - "These are the times that try men's souls. In this time of crises, the summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will shirk from their duty"
3) d - the economic growth in the period that followed was sizable
4) b - this is still being debated

Answer 4

Nope

Answer 5

1. C
2. B
3. D
4. A

Answer 6

Road to Revolution, 1770–1775
From 1770 to 1772, the British ignored the colonies and tension cooled substantially. However, in the fall of 1772, Lord North began preparations to pay royal governors out of customs revenue rather than let the colonial assemblies control payment. This would deny the assemblies the “power of the purse,” breaking assemblies’ ability to effectively check royal power by withholding, or threatening to withhold, payment. In response to this threat, Samuel Adams urged every Massachusetts community to appoint a committee to coordinate colony-wide measures protecting colonial rights. Within the year, approximately 250 Committees of Correspondence formed throughout the colonies. These committees linked political leaders of almost every colony in resistance to the British.
The Committees of Correspondence began on the community level in Massachusetts and eventually became the means by which the colonies coordinated their efforts to preserve their rights.

The Boston Tea Party
The British East India Company suffered from the American boycott of British tea. In an effort to save the company, Parliament passed the Tea Act in 1773, which eliminated import tariffs on tea entering England and allowed the company to sell directly to consumers rather than through merchants. These changes lowered the price of British tea to below that of smuggled tea, which the British hoped would end the boycott. Parliament planned to use the profits from tea sales to pay the salaries of the colonial royal governors, a move which, like the Townshend Duties, particularly angered colonists.
While protests of the Tea Act in the form of tea boycotts and the burning of tea cargos occurred throughout the colonies, the response in Boston was most aggressive. In December 1773, a group of colonists dressed as Native Americans dumped about $70,000 worth of the tea into Boston Harbor. This event, known as the Boston Tea Party, took on an epic status.
The Intolerable Acts
Parliament responded swiftly and angrily to the Tea Party with a string of legislation that came to be known as the Intolerable Acts. The Intolerable Acts included the four Coercive Acts of 1773 and the Quebec Act. The four Coercive Acts:
Closed Boston Harbor to trade until the city paid for the lost tea.
Removed certain democratic elements of the Massachusetts government, most notably by making formerly elected positions appointed by the crown.
Restricted town meetings, requiring that their agenda be approved by the royal governor
Declared that any royal agent charged with murder in the colonies would be tried in Britain.
Instated the Quartering Act, forcing civilians to house and support British soldiers
The Quebec Act, unrelated to the Coercive Acts but just as offensive to the colonists, established Roman Catholicism as Quebec’s official religion, gave Quebec’s royal governors wide powers, and extended Quebec’s borders south to the Ohio River and west to the Mississippi, thereby inhibiting westward expansion of the colonies.
The colonists saw the Intolerable Acts as a British plan to starve the New England colonists while reducing their ability to organize and protest. The acts not only imposed a heavy military presence in the colonies, but also, in the colonists’ minds, effectively authorized the military to murder colonists with impunity. Colonists feared that once the colonies had been subdued, Britain would impose the autocratic model of government outlined in the Quebec Act.
The First Continental Congress
In September 1774 the Committees of Correspondence of every colony except Georgia sent delegates to the First Continental Congress. The Congress endorsed Massachusetts’ Suffolk Resolves, which declared that the colonies need not obey the Coercive Acts since they infringed upon basic liberties. The delegates voted for an organized boycott of British imports and sent a petition to King George III, which conceded that Parliament had the power to regulate commerce but objected to its arbitrary taxation and denial of fair trials to colonists. Preparing for possible British retaliation, the delegates also called upon all colonies to raise and train local militias. By the spring of 1775, colonists had established provincial congresses to enforce the decrees of the Continental Congress. The power of these congresses rivaled that of the colonial governors.
British Acts and Colonial Responses
British Act Colonial Response(s)
Writs of Assistance, 1760 Challenged laws in Massachusetts Supreme Court, lost case (discussed in previous chapter)
Sugar Act, 1764 Weak protest by colonial legislatures
Stamp Act, 1765 Virginia Resolves, mobs, Sons of Liberty, Stamp Act Congress
Townshend Duties, 1767 Letters from a Pennsylvania Farmer, boycott, Boston Massacre
Tea Act, 1773 Boston Tea Party
Intolerable Acts, 1773 First Continental Congress

The First Battles
In April 1775, colonial minutemen met and exchanged fire with British soldiers attempting to seize a supply stockpile in Concord, a town near Boston. The first confrontation came in Lexington, just east of Concord. Once in Concord, the British troops faced a much larger colonial force. In the skirmish, the British lost 273 men and were driven back into Boston. The Battle of Lexington and Concord convinced many colonists to take up arms. The next night, 20,000 New England troops began a month-long siege of the British garrison in Boston. In June of 1775, the English attacked the colonial stronghold outside Boston in the Battle of Bunker Hill. The English Redcoats successfully dislodged the colonials from the hillside stronghold, but lost 1,154 men in contrast to the 311 colonial casualties.
Attempted Reconciliation
In May 1775, as violence broke out all over New England, the Second Continental Congress convened in Philadelphia. Congress was split. New England delegates urged independence from Britain. Other delegates, mostly those from the Middle Colonies, favored a more moderate course of action. This faction, led by John Dickinson, fervently opposed complete separation from England. In an effort to reconcile with the King, Dickinson penned the Olive Branch Petition, offering peace under the following conditions:
A cease-fire in Boston
The Coercive Acts be repealed
Negotiations between the colonists and Britain commence immediately
The Olive Branch Petition reached Britain the same day as news of the Battle of Bunker Hill. King George III rejected reconciliation and declared New England to be in a state of rebellion in August 1775.
The Declaration of Independence
In June 1775, the Second Continental Congress elected George Washington commander in chief of the newly established American Continental Army. Meanwhile, the British forces abandoned Boston and moved to New York City, which they planned to use as a staging point for conquering New England.
In January 1776, Thomas Paine’s pamphlet, Common Sense, was published and widely distributed. Paine called for economic and political independence, and proposed that America become a new kind of nation founded on the principles of liberty. By May 1776, Rhode Island had declared its independence and New England was deep in rebellion.
In June, the Second Continental Congress adopted a resolution of independence, officially creating the United States of America. Thomas Jefferson’s draft of the Declaration of Independence was officially approved on July 4. The Declaration of Independence proclaimed a complete and irrevocable break from England, arguing that the British government had broken its contract with the colonies. It extolled the virtues of democratic self-government, and tapped into the Enlightenment ideas of John Locke and others who promoted equality, liberty, justice, and self-fulfillment.
Sizing up the Competitors
After the delegates at the Second Continental Congress signed the Declaration of Independence, the two sides readied themselves for war. The numbers were heavily in Britain’s favor. In 1776, 11 million people inhabited the British Isles. Only 2.5 million lived in the newly formed United Sates, and not all of the colonists favored independence.
The colonists were able to build an army about equal in size to the British forces, but while British forces were well-trained veterans backed by the powerful British navy, the American forces were poorly funded and under-trained. The Continental Army and local militias could not compete with the Redcoats (British troops) in pitched battles. For this reason, American forces fought few major battles during the first year of the war—when they did fight, they lost badly.
The colonists found much-needed allies in their war against Britain when, in 1778, France joined the war on the American side. Within two years Spain and the Dutch Republic had also declared war against Britain. Caught in an international war, the British had to split their troops between Europe and North America. With their forces thus divided, the British relied more and more on loyalists to fight in the colonies, and soon found that they had overestimated loyalist support.
Division Among the Colonists
The signing of the Declaration of Independence ignited a sharp division in the colonies between the Whigs, in favor of independence, and the Tories, British loyalists and sympathizers. Approximately 20 percent of free Americans were Tories. Tory influence was most powerful in the Middle Colonies and in Georgia. Slaves also made up a significant number of Tory loyalists, responding to Britain’s promises of freedom for any slave who fought to restore royal authority. The most prominent Whig strongholds were New England, Virginia, and South Carolina.
War in the North
Early in the war, General George Washington’s forces around New York were driven back to Pennsylvania by the superior British forces. Beginning on Christmas 1776, Washington fought back and won decisive victories at Trenton and Princeton, New Jersey. In October 1777, the Continentals (colonists) won another decisive victory at the Battle of Saratoga. This victory raised the U.S. army’s morale and convinced France to recognize U.S. independence and to join the war against Britain.
In early December 1777, 11,000 troops under George Washington’s command marched through the snow to spend the winter at Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, where they regrouped and trained. In June 1778, these newly trained troops met the British at the Battle of Monmouth Courthouse, which lasted six hours in 100º heat. The battle ended when the Redcoats retreated, bringing victory in the North to the Americans.
War on the Frontier
The British enlisted the help of Native Americans all along the American frontier. In modern Illinois and Indiana, bands of militiamen from Kentucky and elsewhere ventured into the wilderness to combat British attempts to establish forts and to ally with Native Americans. Farther east, the Americans led an attack against the pro-British Iroquois, burning some twenty villages to the ground, destroying a million bushels of corn, and forcing the Iroquois into Canada.
War in the South
In 1778, France joined the war against Britain, as did Spain and the Dutch Republic in 1779 and 1780, respectively. Finding themselves in a larger war than they’d anticipated, the British turned their attention to the South, where the seaports provided the flexibility necessary to carry out a geographically broad assault, and loyalist influences were far stronger than they were in the North. The British gained control of the Continental garrison at Charleston, South Carolina in May 1780. In August 1780, they crushed a group of poorly trained Continentals at Camden, South Carolina. The British troops continued to win battles between March and September 1781, though not without a significant cost to their forces.
The War Ends
Washington moved his forces from New York toward Yorktown, Virginia, where the British had established a new base. Near Yorktown, Washington joined 2,500 French troops and a small American force. In October 1781, these troops besieged the British base until the smaller British force surrendered. The defeat crushed the Redcoats’ fighting spirit as well as British public support , effectively ending the war.
King George III initially refused to admit defeat, but official peace talks finally began in June 1782. The Treaty of Paris of 1783 was signed in September 1783. In it, the British recognized American independence and defined the borders of the United States as follows: the northern border along Canada, the western border along the Mississippi, and the southern border along Spanish Florida (a line disputed by Spain). The treaty stipulated that the Continental Congress would recommend restoration of confiscated property to loyalists, and Britain agreed to evacuate its troops.
With the Treaty of Paris of 1783, the British recognized American independence and agreed to evacuate their troops. The United States borders were set along Canada, the Mississippi, and Spanish Florida
A New Government for the United States
The thirteen states of the new United States of America began the process of creating state governments during the Revolutionary War. Rhode Island and Connecticut maintained their colonial charters while excising references to British sovereignty, but many states wrote new constitutions. State constitutions differed from traditional British constitutions in that they were written documents ratified by the people and could be amended by popular vote. These constitutions varied widely, but shared the following similarities:
By 1784, all thirteen state constitutions contained a bill of rights outlining the civil rights and freedoms accorded citizens.
In general, the constitutions established weak executive branches and responsive legislatures. Most called for bicameral legislatures and for appointed, rather than elected, officials.
Most reduced property requirements for voting and otherwise increased social equality.
Most called for no official state religion.
The Articles of Confederation
In an attempt to create a unified national government, John Dickinson brought the Articles of Confederation to the Continental Congress in July 1776. Congress adopted the Articles and sent copies out for ratification by state legislatures; the Articles became law in 1781.
The Articles of Confederation favored the rights of individual colonies, now called states, instead of a strong centralized system. The central government established by the Articles was virtually powerless. It consisted solely of a severely restricted Congress, with no executive branch or judicial department. Congress had no power to tax, raise troops, regulate interstate commerce, or make binding national treaties; it could only request taxes from states, not demand them, and therefore could not regulate currency or raise money for the nation. The Articles of Confederation demonstrated the colonists’ dislike of centralized authority and their fear of falling under a system as potentially tyrannical as they felt the British system had been.
Three major political challenges arose, testing the viability of the government created by the Articles of Confederation. The first challenge was addressing the nation’s finances. After the war, the United States faced enormous debt. In 1781 and again in 1783, Congress proposed an import tax to finance the national budget and guarantee the payment of war debts, but each time, a state rejected the proposal (Rhode Island in 1781 and New York in 1783). With no power to force taxation on the states without state approval, Congress could do nothing to regulate the economy. The government was financially helpless.
The government faced the challenge of westward expansion with more success. Settlers, speculators, and state governments all pressed for expansion into the lands granted to the U.S. under the Treaty of Paris. The government attempted to control this expansion with the Land Ordinance of 1785, which outlined the protocol for settlement. A second ordinance, the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, forbade slavery in the territory above the Ohio River, contained a settlers’ bill of rights, and defined the process through which territories could become states. In such expansion efforts, the government faced fierce opposition from the Native Americans and Spanish along the frontier. The Spanish, denying the validity of the Treaty of Paris, closed the port of New Orleans to American ships in 1784.
The third challenge to the Articles of Confederation concerned the government’s ability to maintain law and order. Depression, inflation, and high taxes made life miserable for many Americans. The plight of farmers in western Massachusetts led to Shays’s Rebellion. In August 1786, Daniel Shays, angered by high taxes and debt he could not repay, led about 2,000 men in closing the courts in three western Massachusetts counties to prevent foreclosure on farms. The rebellion exposed the inability of the central government to control revolt and impose order, and heightened an already growing sense of panic nationwide.
For many Americans, Shays’s Rebellion, along with the economic depression, revealed the shortcomings of national government under the Articles of Confederation. Congress could neither suppress revolt nor regulate inflation; it had neither policing nor financial power.

The Constitution
In September 1786, delegates from five states met at the Annapolis Convention. Originally concerned with interstate commerce, the delegates turned their focus to the shortcomings of the national government. They proposed a convention to consider amending the Articles of Confederation. Congress agreed, and asked the states to appoint delegates to convene in Philadelphia.
In May 1787, fifty-five delegates, representing every state except Rhode Island, met in Philadelphia. Notable delegates included George Washington, John Dickinson, John Jay, Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Hamilton, and James Madison. The delegates were convinced of the need for a stronger national government. The first question facing the delegates was whether to amend the Articles of Confederation or to create a new framework of government. The decision was made to create a new framework embodied in a new constitution, and the convention became known as the Constitutional Convention.
Writing the Constitution: Conflict and Resolution
The main difficulty in drafting the Constitution immediately became clear: achieving a balance between the needs of large and small states. James Madison presented the Virginia Plan, a framework of government that contained one potential solution to this problem. The plan called for a bicameral (two house) legislature with representation in both houses proportional to population. These houses of Congress would jointly name the president and federal judges. But the smaller states opposed the Virginia Plan, since representation by population would give more power to the larger states. Smaller states supported the New Jersey Plan, which called for a unicameral (one house) Congress in which each state would have an equal number of seats.
In June 1787, a committee assigned to resolve this conflict approved the Connecticut Compromise, which created a bicameral legislature where each state received an equal vote in the upper house, and representation in the lower house was proportional to population. In September 1787, the new Constitution was approved by the convention and sent to the states for ratification.
The Connecticut Compromise combined the Virginia Plan’s suggestion of proportional representation and the New Jersey Plan’s suggestion of equal representation for all states, creating the House of Representatives and the Senate as we know them today.

A second debate resolved by the Constitution concerned the representation of slave states: whether slaves should be counted as persons or as property for the purposes of representation and taxation. Northern states, where slavery was not as common, argued that to count slaves as members of the population would give the South an unfair advantage in the lower house, where representation was proportional to population. The solution came in the three-fifths clause, which allowed three-fifths of all slaves to be counted as people.
The Constitution Completed
The document that emerged from Philadelphia represented, ultimately, a balance between a number of different forces:
The delegates’ acceptance of the need to strengthen the national government and their fear of government despotism and tyranny
The interests of the larger and smaller states
The interests of northern and southern states
The government was granted the powers to set and collect taxes, to regulate interstate commerce, and to conduct diplomacy in international affairs. The national government was also given the power to invoke military action against the states. The Constitution declared all acts and treaties made by Congress to be binding on the states.
The Constitution proposed a government composed of three branches: the legislative, executive, and judicial. A system of checks and balances, in which each branch of the government held certain powers over the others protected against tyranny, and was the cornerstone of the new government. According to the checks and balances:
The president, the head of the executive branch, could veto acts of Congress and was responsible for appointing Supreme Court and other federal judges.
Congress, as a joint body, was given the power to impeach, try, and remove the president or Supreme Court justices from office, if necessary. The upper house of Congress, the Senate, could ratify or reject treaties proposed by the president, and had to approve the president’s cabinet appointments.
The judicial branch, headed by the Supreme Court, had the power to interpret the laws passed by Congress.
The writers of the Constitution wanted to increase the power of the national government without debilitating the states. They reserved for state legislatures the powers to elect members of the Senate and to select delegates for the Electoral College that elected the President. They further stipulated that the Constitution could be amended by a vote of three-fourths of the state legislatures.
Federal government can: State governments can:
Regulate foreign and interstate commerce Regulate intrastate commerce
Levy taxes Run elections
Conduct international relations Provide education
Declare and wage war Maintain the integrity of state borders
Raise an army and navy Maintain police power
Coin money Ratify proposed constitutional amendments

The centerpiece of the Constitution was the establishment of the checks and balances system, which would prevent any of the three branches of government from becoming too powerful.

The Fight For Ratification
Once approved by the Constitutional Convention in 1787, the Constitution was sent to the states for ratification. Only two-thirds (nine) of the states were needed to ratify it to put the new government into operation. Since states that did not ratify the Constitution would remain under the authority of the Articles of Confederation, the possibility existed that the United States would be divided into two countries.
The process of ratification began with two opposed and entrenched sides. The supporters of the Constitution called themselves Federalists. Their opponents went by the name Anti-federalists. The Anti-federalists claimed the Constitution granted too much power to the national government. They argued that the Constitution doomed the states to be dominated by a potentially tyrannical central government. Federalists defended the necessity of a strong national government and lauded the Constitution as the best possible framework.
The Federalists pushed ratification through eight state conventions by May 1788, though Rhode Island and North Carolina both rejected the Constitution outright. Virginia and New York, states crucial to the Union in terms of population and economics, remained undecided. In June 1788, New Hampshire became the ninth state to ratify the Constitution, making the document the legitimate framework of national government. Debate gripped Virginia and New York. In late June 1788, Virginia finally ratified the Constitution by a narrow 53 percent majority. In New York, disputes continued for a month until Alexander Hamilton’s Federalists finally emerged victorious by a margin only slightly greater than that in Virginia.
The writings of the political leaders of this period are an important part of American history. The most notable works are collected in The Federalist Papers, a series of articles written by John Jay, James Madison, and Alexander Hamilton. Exactly how much influence these papers had on the ratification of the Constitution is up for debate, but the articles do clearly explain the arguments in favor of the Constitution.