The origins and founding of the Sons of Liberty is unclear, but history records the earliest known references to the organization to 1765 in the thriving colonial port cities of Boston and New York.
Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address began with the words, “Four score and seven years ago, our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” By invoking the memory of the American Revolution, Lincoln reminded the nation why men fought—so that “government of the…
The six-month encampment of General George Washington’s Continental Army at Valley Forge in the winter of 1777-1778 was a major turning point in the American Revolutionary War.
On May 7, 1757, Thomas Pownall sailed from England for Boston to take his post as the governor of Massachusetts. Aboard the ship was George Lord Howe, an army officer. The two men developed a friendship over the three month voyage.
The text of the Virginia Act for Establishing Religious Freedom spells out the revolutionary premises upon which Thomas Jefferson builds his argument for religious freedom for all. In the bill, the author of the U.S. Declaration of Independence declares his foundational beliefs about religion and liberty.
Among the Founding Fathers, two in particular, Jefferson and Madison, played a pivotal role in passage of the landmark Virginia Act for Establishing Religious Freedom in 1786. This act served as an important model for the new Constitution that would be adopted by the states in 1789.
The issues of the revolution were many and varied. They included erosion of self-government and increased taxes which royal authority needed in order to pay for the expenses of the recently concluded French and Indian War, called the Seven Years War in Europe, which lasted from 1756 to 1763.
The causes which made possible the assertion of American National Independence must be sought, not merely in the oppressive legislation which directly provoked the colonists into revolt, but, back of that, in the political institutions they had evolved for themselves.
