Where does the search for the American Revolution begin?
Over the past 30 years, our family has walked the brick path of Boston’s Freedom Trail, from the Custom House, the site of the March 5, 1770, Boston Massacre, to the Old North Church, the site of the “one if by land, two if by sea” Paul Revere fame.
We visited Quebec, site of the failed 1775 American invasion, and Charleston, where the victorious British army oversaw the 1780 surrender of the rebel garrison, one of the Continental Army’s worst defeats. Was the republic’s inception tied to the Second Continental Congress’ approval of the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776, at today’s Independence Hall in Philadelphia?
Or the decisive 1777 Continental Army victory at the Battle of Saratoga, where the surrender of the British Army commanded by General Burgoyne convinced the French royalist government of Louis XVI to support the anti-royalist North American rebels attempting to dethrone Great Britain, France’s centuries-old geopolitical rival? And how did the North American continent become the staging ground for European imperial wars of conquest and annihilation?
The battle for Western Hemisphere control between Spain, Portugal, England, France, and Holland began in 1492, with the arrival of the Genoese sailor Christopher Columbus, sponsored by the Spanish monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella, tasked to chart a new European route to India and China in the aftermath of the 1453 takeover of Constantinople (today’s Istanbul) by the Ottoman Turkish Empire. With Turkey controlling the major access points to the lucrative Silk Road, European monarchs were forced to think outside the box, or the European continent as the case may be, and reach Asia through new sea routes, thus sparking the Age of Discovery and, consequently, colonial expansion. Columbus landed in the Bahamas and confirmed what was postulated by a fellow Italian explorer, Amerigo Vespucci, namesake of the Americas, that between Europe and Asia lied a distinct continent, which soon became a theater for European wars.
The political and religious contradictions of the 17th century resulted in the Thirty Years’ War (1618-1648), which established France as the dominant European continental superpower. This position was challenged in the 18th century during the Wars of the Spanish and Austrian Successions and the Seven Years’ War, which spilled over to the North American continent – and onto the pages of James Fenimore Cooper’s 1826 “The Last of the Mohicans” and William Makepeace Thackeray’s 1857-1859 “The Virginians.” Known in North America as the French and Indian War, this conflict proved the training ground for the young Lieutenant Colonel George Washington, then serving as a British officer in the Virginia Regiment. The war engaged Native American peoples as auxiliary troops, infringing on their territorial and sovereignty rights and precipitating the eventual devastation and decline of the native populations.
French losses in the Seven Years’ War were massive: France ceded the remaining Canadian colonies to Britain, as well as its North American possessions east of the Mississippi River, with the territories west of the Mississippi going to Spain, thus initiating Iowa’s brief Spanish period. European empires were willing to bankrupt each other and bleed to death in their drive to possess North America and, with the consequential French defeat, retribution was the rallying cry in Paris. This partly explains why French aristocrats and royalists such as Rochambeau and Lafayette – Broadway notables of late thanks to the musical “Hamilton” – supported the overthrow of royalist British rule in the 13 rebel colonies.
The blueprint for the secessionist drive was provided by the English Civil Wars, which resulted in the beheading of the English king Charles I and the establishment of the short-lived English republic, the Commonwealth, under the Lord Protector Oliver Cromwell (see my January column). These extraordinary events culminated in the Glorious Revolution (1688-1689), a permanent shift of power from the British monarch to Parliament. Britain’s adoption of the 1689 Bill of Rights, which influenced the drafting of the first Ten Amendments to the US Constitution, laid out the provisions for parliamentary supervision of taxation and guaranteed freedom of speech and regular elections. The American Revolution proponents utilized the tools provided by Britain’s Glorious Revolution against the very country that initiated the Age of Revolutions in the 17th century.
From the adoption of the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776, to the crucial victories at the Battle of Saratoga and the Battle of Yorktown, the story of the US’s inception is integral to a revolutionary continuum. Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, and Alexander Hamilton will be featured in my March column.
Professor Anna Barker teaches in the UI College of Liberal Arts and Sciences Russian Program. She is a Fellow of the International Napoleonic Society and serves of the Board of Directors of the Napoleonic Historical Society. Her book “13 Notes from Napoleon, Iowa: Musings on the Edge of the French Empire” was published in 2025 (Ice Cube Press).
This article originally appeared on Ames Tribune: Age of Revolutions: From Empire Wars to 1776 | Guest Column
Reporting by Anna Barker, Special to the Press-Citizen / Ames Tribune
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