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First Continental Meeting September 1774

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First Continental Meeting September 1774

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The First Continental Congress meeting took place in 1774 and was convened in response to the Coercive Acts, also known as the Intolerable Acts. This meeting discussed how badly they were being treated by the British and how to put an end to it. This meeting included George Washington, Samual Adams, and John Adams

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The First Continental Congress convened in Carpenters’ Hall in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, between September 5 and October 26, 1774. Delegates from twelve of Britain’s thirteen American colonies met to discuss America’s future under growing British aggression.

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Second Continental Congress Meeting May 1775

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Second Continental Congress Meeting May 1775

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They started in 1775 in Philadelphia, just after the Revolutionary War. During the war, they were the government that this country ran on. Some things that they did were coordinating the war effort, handling national affairs, making and issuing a currency for the whole country.

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Second Continental Congress | Summary, Achievements, Facts - AmericanRevolution.org

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Learn all about the Second Continental Congress. Read a summary of what occurred, as well as interesting facts.

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The Articles of Confederation were the first rules this country had established. It supported a weaker central government and a stronger state government. Because of this, the federal government was unable to effectively tax its citizens and pay off its debt. (National Archives).

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EnlargeDownload Link Citation: Articles of Confederation; 3/1/1781; Miscellaneous Papers of the Continental Congress, 1774 - 1789; Records of the Continental and Confederation Congresses and the Constitutional Convention, Record Group 360; National Archives Building, Washington, DC. View All Pages i…

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The Shays Rebellion happened from 1786 to 1787, and it was a protest against the Articles of Confederation. They stockpiled weapons and attempted to fire on Springfield, and they were repelled(Britannica).

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Shays's Rebellion, (August 1786-February 1787), uprising in western Massachusetts in opposition to high taxes and stringent economic conditions. Armed bands forced the closing of several courts to prevent execution of foreclosures and debt processes. In September 1786 Daniel Shays and other local leaders led several hundred men in forcing the Supreme Court in Springfield to adjourn. Shays led a force of about 1,200 men in an attack (January 1787) on the federal arsenal at Springfield, which was repulsed. Pursued by the militia, on February 4 he was decisively defeated at Petersham and fled to Vermont. As a result of the rebellion, the Massachusetts legislature enacted laws easing the economic condition of debtors. Though small in scale and easily repressed, Shays's action became, for some, a persuasive argument for a stronger and conservative national government, thereby contributing to the movement for the Constitutional Convention.

The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica Adam Augustyn.

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Shays's Rebellion | Summary, Dates, Significance, & Facts

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Shays's Rebellion, (August 1786-February 1787), uprising in western Massachusetts in opposition to high taxes and stringent economic conditions. Armed bands forced the closing of several courts to prevent execution of foreclosures and debt processes. In September 1786 Daniel Shays and other local leaders led several hundred men in forcing the Supreme Court in Springfield to adjourn.

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The U.S Constitution was written in 1787 and ratified in 1788. This was the set of rules our country needed. It helped stabilize our central government, and it helped make sure that everyone was treated equally under the law

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U.S. Senate: Constitution of the United States

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The first ever election was held in 1789, and George Washington was elected with 69 electoral votes. The vice president elected was John Adams. The vote was only done by 10 of the 13 states, as the other 3 did not participate

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In 1789, the first presidential election, George Washington was unanimously elected president of the United States. With 69 electoral votes, Washington won the support of each participating elector. No other president since has come into office with a universal mandate to lead.

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The first political parties formed were called "factions." The first factions were the Federalists, who wanted a strong national government and had leaders like Alexander Hamilton and James Madison, while the opposing faction supported a stronger state government with a weaker national government. These were the Anti-Federalists; some major leaders of the Anti-Federalists were Patrick Henry and George Mason, who were very powerful Virginians.

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During Washington’s Administration, political parties started to form as leaders debated over the meaning of the Constitution and future of the country.

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The Bill of Rights was written as the first ten amendments of the Constitution. The amendments described the individual rights that every U.S citizen has. Some of the rights that are listed are: freedom of speech, the right to bear arms, protection from unfair searches by law enforcement, and making sure that everyone is treated fairly in court.

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Español Accordion [accordion classes="" id="59774" expand_first="true"][/accordion] Back to Main Page How Did it Happen?

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The Residency Act of 1790 declared Philadelphia the temporary capital of the United States. In 1800, when George Washington was elected, he was given the power to select the location of the capital. Even though Washington selected where the presidential palace would be, President Adams was the first President to set foot into the Presidential Palace as the President.

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How Philadelphia lost the nation’s capital to Washington

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It’s a sad day for some historically minded Philadelphians: It’s the anniversary of the congressional act that moved the nation’s capital from their city to Washington, D.C.

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The white land-hungry citizens of the USA were desperate for land. They made negotiations with the Indians to take their land, and if they accepted, they would be left alone for a while, but if they refused the land would be taken by force. After all the treaties, America took a lot of land and kept doing that.

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The U.S. Government used treaties as one means to displace Indians from their tribal lands, a mechanism that was strengthened with the Removal Act of 1830. In cases where this failed, the government sometimes violated both treaties and Supreme Court rulings to facilitate the spread of European Americans westward across the continent.

As the 19th century began, land-hungry Americans poured into the backcountry of the coastal South and began moving toward and into what would later become the states of Alabama and Mississippi. Since Indian tribes living there appeared to be the main obstacle to westward expansion, white settlers petitioned the federal government to remove them. Although Presidents Thomas Jefferson and James Monroe argued that the Indian tribes in the Southeast should exchange their land for lands west of the Mississippi River, they did not take steps to make this happen. Indeed, the first major transfer of land occurred only as the result of war.

In 1814, Major General Andrew Jackson led an expedition against the Creek Indians climaxing in the Battle of Horse Shoe Bend (in present day Alabama near the Georgia border), where Jackson's force soundly defeated the Creeks and destroyed their military power. He then forced upon the Indians a treaty whereby they surrendered to the United States over twenty-million acres of their traditional land-about one-half of present day Alabama and one-fifth of Georgia. Over the next decade, Jackson led the way in the Indian removal campaign, helping to negotiate nine of the eleven major treaties to remove Indians.

Under this kind of pressure, Native American tribes-specifically the Creek, Cherokee, Chickasaw, and Choctaw-realized that they could not defeat the Americans in war. The appetite of the settlers for land would not abate, so the Indians adopted a strategy of appeasement. They hoped that if they gave up a good deal of their land, they could keep at least some a part of it. The Seminole tribe in Florida resisted, in the Second Seminole War (1835-1842) and the Third Seminole War (1855-1858), however, neither appeasement nor resistance worked.

From a legal standpoint, the United States Constitution empowered Congress to "regulate commerce with foreign nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian tribes." In early treaties negotiated between the federal government and the Indian tribes, the latter typically acknowledged themselves "to be under the protection of the United States of America, and of no other sovereign whosoever." When Andrew Jackson became president (1829-1837), he decided to build a systematic approach to Indian removal on the basis of these legal precedents.

To achieve his purpose, Jackson encouraged Congress to adopt the Removal Act of 1830. The Act established a process whereby the President could grant land west of the Mississippi River to Indian tribes that agreed to give up their homelands. As incentives, the law allowed the Indians financial and material assistance to travel to their new locations and start new lives and guaranteed that the Indians would live on their new property under the protection of the United States Government forever. With the Act in place, Jackson and his followers were free to persuade, bribe, and threaten tribes into signing removal treaties and leaving the Southeast.

In general terms, Jackson's government succeeded. By the end of his presidency, he had signed into law almost seventy removal treaties, the result of which was to move nearly 50,000 eastern Indians to Indian Territory-defined as the region belonging to the United States west of the Mississippi River but excluding the states of Missouri and Iowa as well as the Territory of Arkansas-and open millions of acres of rich land east of the Mississippi to white settlers. Despite the vastness of the Indian Territory, the government intended that the Indians' destination would be a more confined area-what later became eastern Oklahoma.

The Cherokee Nation resisted, however, challenging in court the Georgia laws that restricted their freedoms on tribal lands. In his 1831 ruling on Cherokee Nation v. the State of Georgia, Chief Justice John Marshall declared that "the Indian territory is admitted to compose a part of the United States," and affirmed that the tribes were "domestic dependent nations" and "their relation to the United States resembles that of a ward to his guardian." However, the following year the Supreme Court reversed itself and ruled that Indian tribes were indeed sovereign and immune from Georgia laws. President Jackson nonetheless refused to heed the Court's decision. He obtained the signature of a Cherokee chief agreeing to relocation in the Treaty of New Echota, which Congress ratified against the protests of Daniel Webster and Henry Clay in 1835. The Cherokee signing party represented only a faction of the Cherokee, and the majority followed Principal Chief John Ross in a desperate attempt to hold onto their land. This attempt faltered in 1838, when, under the guns of federal troops and Georgia state militia, the Cherokee tribe were forced to the dry plains across the Mississippi. The best evidence indicates that between three and four thousand out of the fifteen to sixteen thousand Cherokees died en route from the brutal conditions of the "Trail of Tears."

With the exception of a small number of Seminoles still resisting removal in Florida, by the 1840s, from the Atlantic to the Mississippi, no Indian tribes resided in the American South. Through a combination of coerced treaties and the contravention of treaties and judicial determination, the United States Government succeeded in paving the way for the westward expansion and the incorporation of new territories as part of the United States.

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Milestones: 1830-1860 - Office of the Historian