The War of Independence

By 1770, there were thirteen colonies along the east coast of North America, all governed by Britain. But Britain was a long way away, and the people of the colonies became angry at the high taxes that the government made them pay.

In December 1773 a group of men threw 342 boxes of tea into the sea at Boston because they did not want to pay the British tax on it. This was the "Boston Tea Party".

The British government was now angry too, and in April 1775 some Americans fought a group of British soldiers at Lexington and Concord, in Massachusetts. A few months later, after the Battle of Bunker Hill, near Boston, it was clear that Britain was at war with its American colonies. A farmer from Virginia, George Washington, became the leader of the American army.

But the colonies did not say that they wanted to be fully independent until the summer of 1776. Thomas Jefferson wrote the famous "Declaration of Independence", where he said that the king, George III, had broken his agreement with his people, because he had not let them have their rights: rights to life, freedom and happiness. The day of the Declaration of Independence is an important American holiday, celebrated each year on July 4.

The Americans finally won the war five years later, in October 1781, and two years after that, they were free to govern themselves. In 1788 they made George Washington their first president.

The thirteen colonies, which became known as "states", grew by adding land to the south and west. In 1803, Jefferson, the third president, bought a piece of rich farmland in the mid-west from France; it was five times as big as France itself, and it only cost $15 million. In 1819, the USA bought Florida from Spain. The United States was now twice as big as it had been in 1781. And by 1848, after winning Texas and the West from Mexico, it had grown again, so that it reached all the way from the Atlantic to the Pacific, over 5,000 kilometres.

The American flag, the Stars and Stripes, also first appeared at that time. It has a stripe for each of the first thirteen states and a star is added when a new state joins, so there are now fifty stars.

Alison Baxter: The USA; Oxford University Press, 1999, page 4 f.