Starting in 1765, members of American colonial society rejectedthe authority of the British Parliament to tax them without anyrepresentatives in the government. During the following decade,protests by colonists—known as Patriots—continued to escalate, asin the Boston Tea Party in 1773 during which patriots destroyed aconsignment of taxed tea from the East India Company.The Britishresponded by imposing punitive laws—the Coercive Acts—onMassachusetts in 1774 until the tea had been paid for, followingwhich Patriots in the other colonies rallied behind Massachusetts.In late 1774 the Patriots set up their own alternative governmentto better coordinate their resistance efforts against Britain,while other colonists, known as Loyalists, preferred to remainsubjects of the British Crown.
Tensions escalated to the outbreak of fighting between Patriotmilitia and British regulars at Lexington and Concord in April1775, after which the Patriot Suffolk Resolves effectively replacedthe Royal government of Massachusetts, and confined the British tocontrol of the city of Boston. The conflict then evolved into aglobal war, during which the Patriots (and later their French,Spanish and Dutch allies) fought the British and Loyalists in whatbecame known as the American Revolutionary War (1775–1783).Patriots in each of the thirteen colonies formed a ProvincialCongress that assumed power from the old colonial governments andsuppressed Loyalism. Claiming King George III's rule to betyrannical and infringing the colonists' "rights as Englishmen",the Continental Congress declared the colonies free and independentstates in July 1776. The Patriot leadership professed the politicalphilosophies of liberalism and republicanism to reject monarchy andaristocracy, and proclaimed that all men are created equal.Congress rejected British proposals requiring allegiance to themonarchy and abandonment of independence.
The British were forced out of Boston in 1776, but then capturedand held New York City for the duration of the war, nearlycapturing General Washington and his army. The British blockadedthe ports and captured other cities for brief periods, but failedto defeat Washington's forces. In early 1778, following a failedpatriot invasion of Canada, a British army was captured by apatriot army at the Battle of Saratoga, following which the Frenchentered the war as allies of the United States. The war laterturned to the American South, where the British captured an army atSouth Carolina, but failed to enlist enough volunteers fromLoyalist civilians to take effective control. A combinedAmerican–French force captured a second British army at Yorktown in1781, effectively ending the war in the United States. A peacetreaty in 1783 confirmed the new nation's complete separation fromthe British Empire. The United States took possession of nearly allthe territory east of the Mississippi River and south of the GreatLakes, with the British retaining control of Canada and Spaintaking Florida.
In the period after the peace treaty in 1783, Loyalists weresubjected to extreme suppression and acts of arbitrary violence,including murder by lynching, despite a promise by patriot leadersto British negotiators that Loyalist rights would be respected. Alarge proportion were driven off their land and forced to flee asrefugees to Canada.