American Revolutionary War

The American Revolutionary War (1775–83) resulted from British restrictions of colonial grassroots social and economic networking in North America. Restrictions on commerce and manufacturing by the Navigation Acts (after 1707), restrictions on land settlement [Page 28]in western territories, and attempts to raise revenues for the Crown with the Stamp Act (1765) and the Tea Act (1773) raised the ire of local leaders who sought to develop native resources and networks. Cheap cloth and luxury items became available as cleanliness became the mark of urban sophistication, while industry and frugality gave way to demonstrating delicacy, refinement, and attention to fashion. Women were politicized as a consumer block after the British Parliament passed the Tea Act (1773), which men called “taxation without representation,” when they boycotted British products, leading to the Boston Tea Party to protest duties that undercut colonial merchants. Thomas Paine, Thomas Jefferson, and Benjamin Franklin provided the intellectual underpinnings for this successful revolt, while George Washington led the eight-year fight to root out royal rule and replace it with a republican experiment that subordinated the military to civilian authority.

As new social constructs formed, letter writing centered on new ideologies and semantics that shaped networking configurations among colonial elites. John Adams, a member of a private club of provincial lawyers called Sodality, compiled ideas from his correspondence into a public justification of colonial resistance after the British Parliament's approval of the Stamp Act. His A Dissertation on the Canon and Feudal Law (1765) argued that the motivation behind the Stamp Act was tantamount to a direct and formal design to enslave all Americans. Pamphleteers, writers of short works on current issues or causes, also shaped an ideology that mobilized activism in the years preceding the American Revolution. Thomas Paine, the son of an English stay maker, immigrated to Pennsylvania in 1754 and became an overnight sensation and author of the Revolution's rallying cry with his pamphlet, Common Sense (1776), which assaulted all forms of hereditary rule by advocating a new form of government with direct representation.