9781422287453

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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.

Jacob Graff’s Boarder

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

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