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America, and the colonies were connected to the empire only through the king. The most the colonists would concede was that Parliament had the right to regulate their external commerce only “from the necessity of the case, and a regard to the mutual interest of both countries,” as the Declarations and Resolves of the First Continental Congress put it. But the British government remained committed to parliamentary sovereignty embodied in the Declaratory Act, which no American leader could any longer take seriously.
    It was now only a matter of time before these irreconcilable positions led to armed conflict.

III
    Revolution
    By 1774, within the short span of a decade following the introduction of the imperial reforms, Americans who had celebrated George III’s coronation were in virtual rebellion against Great Britain. During the two years after the Coercive Acts of 1774, events moved rapidly, and reconciliation between Britain and its colonies became increasingly unlikely. By this time the crisis had become more than a simple breakdown in the imperial relationship. The colonists’ extraordinary efforts to understand what was happening transformed their resistance and ultimately their rebellion into a world-historical revolution. The Americans’ Declaration of Independence in 1776 turned their separation from Britain into an event that many Americans and some Europeans believed was unprecedented in human history. Americans saw themselves striving not only to make themselves free, but also to bring freedom to the whole world.
    THE APPROACH TO INDEPENDENCE
    The Coercive Acts of 1774 provoked open rebellion in America. Not only had the abuses of the English government aroused the Americans’ principles, but repeated expressions of English arrogance had finally worn out their tempers. Whatever royal authority was left in the colonies now dissolved. Many local communities, with a freedom they had not had since the seventeenth century, attempted to put together new popular governments from the bottom up. Mass meetings that sometimes attracted thousands of aroused colonists endorsed resolutions and called for new political organizations. Committees of different sizes and names—committees of safety, of inspection, of merchants, of mechanics—competed with one another for political control. In the various colonies royal government was displaced in a variety of ways, depending on how extensive and personal previous royal authority had been. In Massachusetts, where the crown’s authority had reached into the villages and towns through the royally appointed justices of the peace, the displacement was greater than in Virginia, where royal influence had scarcely touched the control of the counties by the powerful landowners. But everywhere there was a fundamental transfer of authority that opened new opportunities for new men to assert themselves.
    By the end of 1774, in many of the colonies local associations were controlling and regulating various aspects of American life. Committees manipulated voters, directed appointments, organized the militia, managed trade, intervened between creditors and debtors, levied taxes, issued licenses, and supervised or closed the courts. Royal governors stood by in helpless amazement as new informal governments gradually grew up around them. These new governments ranged from town and county committees and the newly created provincial congresses to a general congress of the colonies—the First Continental Congress, which convened in Philadelphia in September 1774.
    In all, fifty-five delegates from twelve colonies (all except Georgia) participated in the First Continental Congress. Some colonists, and even some royal officials, hoped that this Congress might work to reestablish imperial authority. Those who were eager to break the bond with Great Britain, however, won the first round. Led by the cousins Samuel and John Adams from Massachusetts, and by Patrick Henry and Richard Henry Lee from