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T
homas Jefferson arrived in Philadelphia on June
11, 1776. He found the nation’s largest city alive
with talk of
revolution
. Since April of the previous year,
when Massachusetts minutemen chased British soldiers
out of the towns of Lexington and Concord, the colonies
had been at war with the army of King George III.
The first year of the war had gone well for the
colonists. They fought the British hard at Bunker Hill
and won a victory at Fort Ticonderoga. Now, the
Continental Army under George Washington was
camped near New York, awaiting the arrival of a British
invasion force. Ninety miles south of Washington’s
camp, delegates from the 13 colonies gathered in
Colonial minutemen fire on British troops at
the North Bridge near Concord,
Massachusetts, in April 1775. Fighting at
Lexington and Concord marked the start of
the American Revolution.
2
Jacob Graff’s
Boarder
13