{"id":376,"date":"2014-10-01T23:56:59","date_gmt":"2014-10-01T23:56:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/hist-117pinsker\/?p=376"},"modified":"2016-09-20T17:23:40","modified_gmt":"2016-09-20T17:23:40","slug":"american-independence","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/hist-117pinsker\/2014\/10\/01\/american-independence\/","title":{"rendered":"American Independence"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Tom<\/a>

Tom Paine<\/p><\/div>\n

Who declared American Independence? \u00a0The answer is not quite as simple as it appears. \u00a0Gordon Wood relates how some observers remarked later\u00a0that Sam Adams of Boston had at least decided on\u00a0independence as early as 1768, following enactment of the Townshend Duties. \u00a0One thing is clear in Wood’s account of the movement from resistance to rebellion –there was a real sense of American Independence readily apparent by 1774. \u00a0That was the year of the Coercive Acts and what Wood characterizes as “open rebellion in America.” \u00a0Students in History 117 should be able to identify a variety of ways that the authority of the British imperial system quite literally fell apart in the American colonies during the period from 1774 to 1775. \u00a0Yet still, there was no “declared” independence until the summer of 1776. \u00a0Nonetheless, it is not enough to simply reward the credit for American Independence to the decision-making of the Second Continental Congress and \u00a0the prose of Thomas Jefferson. \u00a0According to Wood, it was Tom Paine, more than any other figure, who most fully expressed “the accumulated American rage against George III.” \u00a0Students might benefit from studying this rage in Paine’s sensational pamphlet,\u00a0Common Sense<\/a>\u00a0<\/em>(1776) or by analyzing its influence on the “long train of abuses” which dominate the second half of the Declaration of Independence<\/a>. \u00a0Yet regardless of how exactly independence got declared, or how to explain the ideology which lay behind it, one Founder who was noticeably reluctant about embracing this revolutionary step was John Dickinson, the famous pamphleteer. \u00a0Dickinson warned<\/a> his colleagues on July 1, 1776 that with their declaration that they would be attempting to\u00a0\u201cbrave the storm in a skiff made of paper.\u201d \u00a0Dickinson soon came around to the cause, but his fears remained a recurring concern for many. \u00a0Securing independence proved even far more challenging than declaring it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Who declared American Independence? \u00a0The answer is not quite as simple as it appears. \u00a0Gordon Wood relates how some observers remarked later\u00a0that Sam Adams of Boston had at least decided on\u00a0independence as early as 1768, following enactment of the Townshend … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":373,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-376","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/hist-117pinsker\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/376","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/hist-117pinsker\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/hist-117pinsker\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/hist-117pinsker\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/373"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/hist-117pinsker\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=376"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/hist-117pinsker\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/376\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/hist-117pinsker\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=376"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/hist-117pinsker\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=376"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/hist-117pinsker\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=376"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}