There has been no more daring assertion of statehood than that proclaimed by the Declaration of Independence, adopted by the Second Continental Congress on July 4, 1776 and signed by all 56 delegates present. What would become the United States consisted of 13 British colonies, steadily established since the 17th century, and scattered along the east coast of North America. They were not just geographically remote from their mother country; most were also geographically remote from each other.

Their economies were fragile, and they had no coherent political identity—citizens of Virginia considered themselves to be Virginians, for example, not Americans—beyond an increasingly strained loyalty to the British crown. However, the colonies were also remarkably self-aware and acutely conscious of Enlightenment notions of political liberty, and they were concerned that their freedom would come under threat as a result of British rule.

Unable to assert their own natural rights, and subjected to what they considered unreasonably imposed taxes, the colonists questioned why a distant parliament and a distant king should impose their will on them. Impelled by a series of exceptional leaders, in 1776 they not only rejected British authority, but they set about establishing an entirely new kind of state in which government would derive from “the consent of the governed.” This explosively novel idea would lead to the creation of a new and enduring republican government.

Support for a formal assertion of American independence was far from universal in the colonies, however. Five states in particular—New York, New Jersey, Maryland, Delaware, and Pennsylvania—feared it would damage trade and, if unsuccessful, provoke harsh reprisals from Britain. In the same way, as many as 500,000 of a population of 2.5 million remained loyal to the British crown to the end of the conflict, many subsequently settling in Canada.

The conflict takes shape

It would take a drawn-out and bitterly fought war to make independence into reality. Britain was determined to assert what it saw as its legitimate rule, while the hastily assembled forces of the nascent United States were no less determined to assert what they saw as their right to independence. The two modest armies—Britain’s, because of the difficulties of sending forces en masse to America; the colonists’, because they consistently lacked the means to raise and equip any substantial fighting force—confronted each other in a series of minor engagements over six years.

At their peak, the American forces numbered scarcely 40,000 and had almost no navy at all. Britain deployed about the same number of soldiers but in addition had a vastly greater number of ships. In 1778, however, France declared support for the colonists and sent 5,000 troops and a substantial fleet. Facing certain defeat, in October 1781, the British surrendered at Yorktown, Virginia. The war would not formally end for another year, but in every important respect, the colonists—and their French allies—had dealt a huge blow to their British masters.

The French involvement in the creation of this new nation owed everything to a desire to reverse the humiliations of the Seven Years’ War. But the debts incurred would, ironically, be among the many causes of the bankruptcy of the French crown that led to the French Revolution in 1789. There was a profound irony, too, in absolutist France seeking to win Americans the freedoms that it was unwilling to accord its own citizens.

"These United Colonies are, and of Right ought to be Free and Independent States."

-Richard Henry Lee

Proposed resolution at the Second Continental Congress (June 1776)

Revolutionary ideals

At the heart of the American Revolution was the new political philosophy encapsulated by the Declaration of Independence. It was the work of a distinctly patrician Virginian, a haughty, wealthy slave-owner named Thomas Jefferson. He was one of a committee of five charged with writing the Declaration, yet the two drafts it went through in June 1776 were almost entirely his own. It is hard to overstate the importance of the Declaration of Independence. It made, for the time, an astonishing claim: “that all men are created equal.” It further claimed “that governments are instituted among men deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.”

These were actively seditious sentiments that neither George III of England nor Louis XVI of France could have any sympathy with. They nonetheless formed the bedrock of what would become the United States and, indeed, liberal political systems across the Western world. These political creeds, derived from the work of British and French Enlightenment thinkers, led to the creation of the first modern state and, in doing so, changed the world.

The destiny of America

Jefferson remains an enigma. He loathed monarchy yet loved pre-Revolutionary France, where he was the United States’ first ambassador, delighting in its civilized elegance. He claimed to despise high office yet served two terms as President of the United States. And, as president, in 1803 he drove through the Louisiana Purchase, which saw a vast area west of the Mississippi transferred at a bargain price from France, its nominal ruler, to the United States. He understood that the destiny of the US lay in its colonization of the vast lands to the west, he assented to the notion that its indigenous inhabitants should be driven off, and he owned slaves. “Blacks,” he asserted, “are inferior to the whites in the endowments both of body and mind.” Whereas George Washington, also a patrician Virginian, freed his slaves, Jefferson opted not to.

None of this, though, can diminish Jefferson’s significance in articulating notions of liberty that resonate today. And even though he felt slavery was wrong, his personal belief was that emancipation would be bad for both slaves and white Americans—unless they were returned to Africa.

"The god who gave us life, gave us liberty at the same time."

-Thomas Jefferson

A new constitution

Although Jefferson can readily be considered the guiding spirit behind the Declaration of Independence, he played no formal role in the drawing up of the next great document that shaped the nation: its Constitution. The United States was legally able to assert its independence from Britain in 1783. But for the next four years, it existed in an increasingly unstable political vacuum, its fate decided by an ever-more divided Confederation Congress, meeting variously in Pennsylvania, New York, and New Jersey.

There were serious reasons to believe the new nation might fail, torn apart by those arguing for the primacy of the rights of the individual states over the central government, and those in favor of a strong central government or even the creation of an American monarchy. In the spring of 1787, a Constitutional Convention took place in Philadelphia. The written, formalized Constitution proposed would not be provisionally ratified until June the following year, and then only after prolonged disputes. The result was an assertion of a new form of government. It was both a bill of rights and a blueprint for an ideal government, whose three branches—executive, legislative, and judiciary—would keep each other in check. It would have a profound influence on that issued in Revolutionary France in 1791 and remains a model of its kind.

“Unfinished business”

The founding fathers were rightly optimistic about the United States’ potential, but they had failed to resolve one crucial question. Jefferson’s first draft of the Declaration of Independence called slavery “an execrable commerce” and “a cruel war against human nature itself.” However, to placate the slave states of the south and the slave traders of the north, these radical statements were later dropped. Almost 90 years later, it would take a civil war and 620,000 dead to end the practice and complete what Abraham Lincoln saw as the “unfinished business” of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.