THE FOUNDING OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

LITTLE less than 500 years ago, North America was a vast wilderness inhabited by Indians who, perhaps 20,000 years earlier, traveled across a land bridge from Asia to America where the Bering Strait is today. Icelandic Viking Leif Ericson sailed to America around the year 1000. Then in 1492, Christopher Columbus, an Italian sailing under the Spanish flag, set out for Asia and discovered a "New World. For the next 100 years, English, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch and French explorers sailed forth looking for the New World, for gold and riches, for honor and glory.

But the North American wilderness yielded little glory and less gold, so most explorers did not stay. The individuals who did settle the New World arrived later, and they came in search of different goals - economic opportunity and religious and political freedom. In 1607 a daring band of English settlers built the first permanent village, which they called Jamestown in commemoration of their charter from King James 1 of England. Bleak, hard and lonely as life was in this wilderness, more and more people began to make the difficult ocean journey, and immigrants soon founded colonies all along the Atlantic Coast from Massachusetts to Georgia.

Adventurers and rogues, religious believers and practical builders - all came. America promised, as the poet Robert Frost said, "a fresh start for the human race". The colonies took on the political, religious and cultural views of those who settled them. Puritans from England, for example, established several settlements in Massachusetts. These colonists, who were escaping religious persecution, wanted to establish "a city upon a hill" - an ideal community. Yet their community was based narrowly on their own religious ideals, heretics and other nonconformists were strictly punished. By contrast, the Providence, Rhode Island, colony promised religious freedom; Roger Williams, a Puritan forced out of Massachusetts, founded it in 1636.

Maryland was established in 1634 as a refuge for Roman Catholics, and Pennsylvania was founded in 1681 by Quaker leader William Perm.

Over time, settlers from many other nations joined the English in America. German farmers settled in Pennsylvania and Swedish settlers founded the colony of Delaware. Dutch settlers purchased Manhattan Island from local Indians in 1626. The French settled Canada and Spanish explorers established missions and settlements in Florida and the American Southwest. Africans were first brought to Virginia as slaves in 1619.

The settlers carried with them seeds for planting and tools to ply their trades. They brought ideas shaped by the religious and dynastic wars in Europe, The Magna Carta, The Renaissance and the Protestant Reformation. They cleared the land for farms, built villages and established local governing bodies. The Mayflower Compact, drawn up by the Plymouth colony in New England in 1620, was the colonies' first agreement form "a civil body politic for better ordering and preservation to enact, constitute and frame such just and equal laws..." Under the Compact, the Plymouth settlers were able to conduct their affairs without outside interference.

By 1733 European settlers occupied 13 colonies along the Atlantic Coast, The French controlled Canada, Louisiana and the entire watershed of the Mississippi River. A series of conflicts between the British and the French culminated in the French and Indian War (1754-63) in which Britain, with its American colonial allies, emerged victorious. France ceded Canada and the Ohio territories east of the Mississippi River to Britain in the Peace of Paris of 1763.

In the following years, the British started Imposing new taxes on sugar, coffee, textiles and other imported goods. Under the Quartering Act, the British required the colonists to house and feed British soldiers; under the Stamp Act, they issued special tax stamps to be attached to all newspapers, pamphlets, legal documents and licenses.

These measures seemed quite fair to British politicians, who had spent large sums of money to defend their American colonies during the French and Indian War. But the Americans feared that the new taxes would make trading difficult, and that British troops stationed in the colonies might be used to crush civil liberties which the colonists had here. Speaking as freeborn Englishmen, colonial Americans insisted that they could be taxed only by their own colonial assemblies: "No taxation without representation" was their rallying cry. Parliament heeded their protests and repealed the Stamp Act; however, it enforced the Quartering Act, enacted taxes on tea and other goods and sent customs officers to Boston to collect these tariffs. When the colonists refused to obey, the British sent soldiers to Boston.

Soon all British taxes were removed except for a tax on tea. In protest, on December 16, 1773, a group of Americans disguised as Indians boarded British merchant ships and tossed 342 crates of tea into Boston Harbor. Parliament responded to the "Boston Tea Party" with the "Coercive" or "Intolerable Acts". The independence of the Massachusetts colonial government was sharply curtailed, and the port of Boston was closed to shipping. Instead of isolating Massachusetts, the Coercive Acts helped to unite moderates among the colonists.

Opposed to what was perceived as British oppression, colonial leaders held the first Continental Congress in 1774 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The leaders urged Americans to disobey the Coercive Acts and to boycott British trade. Colonists began to organize militias and to collect and store weapons and ammunition. On April 19, 1775, 700 British soldiers left Boston, determined to capture a colonial arms depot at Concord and forestall a colonial rebellion. At the village of Lexington, they confronted 70 colonial militiamen. Someone -no one knows who - fired a shot, and the American War of independence began.

In May 1775, a second Continental Congress met in Philadelphia and began to assume the function of a national government. It founded a Continental army and navy under the command of George Washington, printed paper money and opened diplomatic contacts with foreign powers. On July 2, 1776, the Congress finally resolved "that these United Colonies are, and of right ought to be free and independent states." Thomas Jefferson of Virginia drafted a Declaration of Independence, which the Congress adopted on July 4, 1776.

The Declaration presented a public defense of the American Revolution, including a lengthy list of grievances against the British king, George III. Most importantly, it explained the philosophy behind the revolution - that men have a natural right to "Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness"; that governments can rule only with "the consent of the governed"; that any government may be dissolved when it fails to protect the rights of the people.

At first, the war went badly for the Americans. The British captured New York City in September 1776 and Philadelphia a year later. The tide turned in October 1777, when the British army surrendered at Saratoga, in northern New York. Encouraged by that victory, France seized an opportunity to humble Britain, her traditional enemy. A Franco-American alliance was signed in February 1778. Although American troops generally fought well, with few provisions and little training, they might have lost the war if they had not received aid from the French Treasury and the powerful French navy.

After 1778 the fighting shifted largely to the South. In 1781, 8,000 British troops under Lord Cornwallis were surrounded at Yorktown, Virginia, by a French fleet and a combined French-American army under George Washington's command. Cornwallis surrendered, and soon afterward the British government asked for peace. The Treaty of Paris, signed in September 1783, recognized the independence of the United States and granted the new nation all the territory north of Florida, south of Canada and east of the Mississippi River.

The colonies were now free but they had not yet forged a united nation. The first national constitution, the Articles of Confederation and Perpetual Union, had been adopted by the Continental Congress in 1777, but was not ratified by the states until 1781. Moreover, under the Articles, the crucial powers of regulating commerce and levying taxes - indeed the power to make laws -remained with the states. In fact, the Articles of Confederation declared that "each State retains its sovereignty." The federal government could declare war and peace, make foreign treaties and coin and borrow money -but only with the consent of two-thirds of the states. And the Articles provided no method of enforcement.

By 1787 it was widely believed that the su­perficial unity imposed by the Articles of Confederation would disintegrate. The Congress had difficulty negotiating international commerce because any one state could render a treaty ineffectual. The states themselves were constantly involved in commercial or territorial disputes. Small farmers throughout the country, in debt and pressed for payment by merchants, petitioned state legislatures for paper money. When the Massachusetts legislature refused, debt-ridden farmers organized a revolt in 1786-87 known as Shay's Rebellion.

In May 1787, 55 of the most highly regarded American leaders - including George Washington, Benjamin Franklin and James Madison -opened a Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, that had been called specifically for revising the Articles of Confederation. But the delegates boldly decided to throw the Articles out and instead began drafting a new constitution. The meeting, which went on for four long months and is sometimes called "the second American revolution", resulted in the Constitution of the United States. This Consti­tution established not merely a league of independent states but a strong central government that exercises authority directly over all the citizens of the nation.

The framers of the Constitution sought to reconcile their belief in democracy with their concern about the possible abuses of a centralized government. The solution was to divide the powers of the federal government function. The Constitution establishes separate executive, legislative and judicial branches of government, and requires that a "balance of power" be maintained among them. Under this principle, each branch is provided independent means to exercise checks on the activities of the others, thus guaranteeing that no branch can gain dictatorial authority over the government. In addition, even under this strong central government, states retain considerable power: Each state, for example, has the tight to educate children and young people, build highways and maintain order within its borders. Moreover, the ratification of an amendment to the Constitution requires approval by three-fourths of the state legislatures or state conventions.

The Constitution was accepted in 1788, but only after much bitter debate. Many Americans feared that a powerful central government would trample on the liberties of the people, and 10 amendments guaranteeing these liberties - the Bill of Rights - were added to the Constitution in 1791. The Bill of Rights ensures freedom of religion, a free press, free speech, protection against illegal searches, the right to a fair trial by jury and protection against "cruel and unusual punishments". Nor were liberties limited to those specified: The Ninth Amendment holds that "enumeration hi the Constitution of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people". The addition to the Constitution of the Bill of Rights thus strikes a balance between the need for a strong efficient central authority and the need to ensure individual liberties.

Since the Bill of Rights was adopted, 16 other amendments have been added to the Constitution. The 14th Amendment, which bars states from denying "any person" either "due process" or "equal protection" of law is in many ways an extension of the fundamental civil liberties provided by the Bill of Rights. Simply put, it guarantees that all persons in the nation have equal rights. Other key amendments include: the 13th, barring slavery; the 15th, prohibiting states from interfering with the right to vote; and the 19th, giving women the right to vote.

The framers of the Constitution created and enduring but by no means unchanging document. The Constitution was formulated in a way that allows it to evolve and change as the nation itself has grown and developed. Today, more than 200 years after it was written, the Constitution remains vital, alive, and at the center of American political ideals and practices.

(From Profile)

Date: 2016-04-22; view: 1618