American Independence
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The American war of independence was fought between 1775 and 1783 and ended British rule over thirteen colonies that became the United States. The quarrel began over taxation without representation: the stamp act of 1765 and the townshend duties were resisted, the tea tax provoked the Boston Tea Party in 1773, and the port of Boston was closed in punishment. Fighting started at Lexington and Concord in April 1775, and on 4 July 1776 the second continental congress adopted the declaration drafted mainly by Thomas Jefferson, which asserted that all men are created equal and that governments derive their power from the consent of the governed. The war was close-run: Washington's army nearly dissolved in the snows of Valley Forge, and France entered openly in 1778 after the American victory at Saratoga, supplying money, ships and troops. Cornwallis surrendered at Yorktown in 1781, and the treaty of Paris in 1783 recognised the new nation from the Atlantic to the Mississippi. The constitution was written in 1787 and the bill of rights added in 1791, and the revolution's language of rights was taken up in France and Latin America. The alliance with France made a colonial war into a European one.