Unit 3 Flashcards
A turning point of the Revolution in October 1777, when an army of 6,000 British soldiers
surrendered in New York; the battle resulted from a British attempt to divide the colonies through the Hudson River Valley. The American victory convinced the French to ally with the colonies and assured the ultimate success of independence.
Battle of Saratoga
A siege that ended in October 1781 when Washington trapped 8,000 British soldiers on a peninsula in Virginia after a British campaign in the southern colonies; this defeat caused the British to cease large-scale fighting in America and to start negotiations, which eventually led to the colonies’ independence.
Battle of Yorktown
America’s leading diplomat of the time who served as a statesman and advisor throughout the Revolutionary era. He was active in all the prerevolutionary congresses and helped to secure the French alliance of 1778 and the Treaty of Paris, which formally ended the Revolution in 1783.
Ben Franklin
Confrontation between British soldiers and Boston citizens in March 1770. The troops shot and killed five colonials. American radicals used the event to roil relations between England and the colonies over the next five years.
Boston Massacre
British actions to punish Massachusetts for the Boston Tea Party; they included closing the port of Boston, revoking Massachusetts’s charter, trying all British colonial officials accused of misdeeds outside the colony, and housing British troops in private dwellings. In the colonies, these laws were known as the Intolerable Acts, and they brought on the First Continental Congress in 1774.
Coercive Acts (1774)
Passed as the British Parliament repealed the Stamp Act; a face-saving action, it asserted Parliament’s sovereignty over colonial taxation and legislative policies.
Declaratory Act (1766)
King of England during the American Revolution. Until 1776, the colonists believed he supported their attempt to keep their rights. In reality, he was a strong advocate for harsh policies toward them.
George III
Commander of the colonial army; while not a military genius, his integrity and judgment kept the army together. Ultimately, he was indispensable to the colonial cause.
George Washington
Conservative leader who wrote Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania; he advocated for colonial rights but urged conciliation with England and opposed the Declaration of Independence. Later, he helped write the Articles of Confederation.
John Dickinson
Lead diplomat in negotiating the Treaty of Paris (1783); he secretly dealt with the British representatives at Paris and gained all of America’s goals for independence despite the deviousness and meddling of France and Spain.
John Jay
English philosopher who wrote that governments have a duty to protect people’s life, liberty, and property; many colonial leaders read his ideas and incorporated them into their political rhetoric and thinking.
John Locke
Colonists who remained loyal to England; they often were older, better educated people who were members of the Anglican Church. The British hoped to use them as a pacification force but failed to organize them properly.
Loyalists (Tories)
An early advocate of independence who was a strong opponent of the Stamp Act and great defender of individual rights; in 1775, he declared: “Give me liberty, or give me death.”
Patrick Henry
Indian uprising in the Ohio Valley region that killed 2,000 settlers; as a result, the British sought peace with the Indians by prohibiting colonial settlement west of the Appalachian Mountains (the Proclamation of 1763). The Americans saw this ban as an unlawful restriction of their rights and generally ignored it.
Pontiac’s Rebellion (1763)
British policy before 1763 of generally leaving the colonies alone to conduct their own internal affairs; the abandonment of this policy after 1763 was a major factor leading to revolution and independence.
Salutary Neglect
Agitator and leader of the Sons of Liberty, who supported independence as soon as the British veered from salutary neglect; he was the primary leader of the Boston Tea Party and later a delegate to the Continental Congress.
Samuel Adams
Fought between England and France, 1756-1763; known as the French and Indian War in the colonies, it started in 1754, over control of the Ohio River Valley and resulted in France’s withdrawal from North America. It was the impetus for Parliament’s taxing policy that led to the American Revolution.
Seven Years War
Street gangs that formed during the Stamp Act crisis to enforce the boycotts and prevent the distribution and sale of the tax stamps; they were the vanguard of the Revolution as they intimidated British officials with violence.
Sons of Liberty
A tax on more than fifty items such as pamphlets, newspapers, playing cards, and dice; it set off a strong protest among the colonists, who claimed it was an internal tax designed only to raise revenue and therefore unlawful for Parliament to levy.
Stamp Act (1765)
