What Independence Did
The three threads, measured
- British attempts to assert tighter control... and the colonial resolve to pursue self-government led to a colonial independence movement and the Revolutionary War.
- The American Revolution's democratic and republican ideals inspired new experiments with different forms of government.
- Migration within North America and competition over resources, boundaries, and trade intensified conflicts among peoples and nations.
Put the three governmental experiments in order.
Each answered the failure of the last and kept something from it.
Government: three experiments in twenty years
- State constitutions with legislative power and property qualifications; the Articles with a deliberately limited centre; the Constitution, limited but dynamic.
- Each answered the failure of the last, and each kept something from it.
- Continuity: legislatures remained central, property qualifications remained, and the states were never abolished.
Select all the governmental continuities this lesson names.
The Articles were replaced.
Society: gains, limits, and a widening gap
- An increased awareness of inequalities produced calls for abolition and greater democracy from some individuals and groups.
- Republican motherhood granted women new importance within the family.
- And 3.12's expansion of slavery beside rising antislavery sentiment began to create distinctive regional attitudes — the gap the next units follow.
Government, society, or the continent?
Sort each effect of independence by 1800.
The honest verdict on the third thread is that independence...
The CED's own verbs supply the evidence.
Independence changed who governed the seaboard states without settling the continent's competition. British and Spanish presence continued, native nations repeatedly evaluated and adjusted their alliances, and frontier cultures continued to grow — the CED's own verbs are the evidence for that verdict.
Distinctive regional attitudes toward slavery are the ____ the next units follow.
Expansion beside rising antislavery sentiment.
The continent: still contested
- British and Spanish presence continued; native nations repeatedly evaluated and adjusted their alliances; frontier cultures continued to grow.
- So independence changed who governed the seaboard states without settling the continent's competition.
- That is the honest verdict on the third thread, and the CED's own verbs supply it.
The continuities in this answer prevent it from reading as...
Six statements: three effects, three continuities.
Writing the unit's conclusion
- The objective is how the American independence movement affected society from 1754 to 1800.
- Give a governmental effect, a social effect and a continental effect, and name a continuity beside each.
- Six statements, all supplied by the CED, and the continuities are what keep the answer from reading as a founding myth.
A new government can be built, argued over, rejected, rebuilt and ratified inside twenty years while the questions of who may vote and who may be held in bondage stay exactly where they were. Both are the same period.
By 1800, government had run three experiments — state constitutions, the Articles, and a limited but dynamic Constitution — while legislatures, property qualifications and the states persisted; society saw calls for abolition and greater political democracy from some individuals and groups and republican motherhood confined within the family, with distinctive regional attitudes toward slavery beginning; and the continent stayed contested, with British and Spanish presence continued and native alliances repeatedly evaluated and adjusted.