Answer:
1775
The Revolutionary War or the American Revolution, the war between Great Britain and its American colonies, 1775-83, by which the colonies won their independence.
What were the causes of the American Revolutionary War?
A glance at the Declaration of Independence would show that there were other grievances beyond taxation. Among them:
- jury trials were replaced with admiralty courts where the defendant was presumed guilty unless he could prove otherwise and his guilt was determined by a judge.
- colonial trade with European powers outside of the English Empire was forbidden.
- London reserved the power to limit what products Americans could manufacture.
- intense resentment over the growing presence of English troops in colonial America.
- the Proclamation of 1763 declared that colonists could not settle west of the Appalachian Mountains; this was particularly resented because many colonists had been awarded land beyond the Proclamation Line by the English government for their service in the French and Indian War.
- Parliament had suspended the New York Assembly until it agreed to impose certain taxes; with this precedent, it became clear that self-government was limited to what London permitted.
- Soldiers could search private property--homes, farms, offices, ships, etc.--without the necessity of a warrant.
- English soldiers were immune from arrest in Boston regardless of the crime they were accused of committing; instead they would face trial in England, where it would be difficult for colonial victims or witnesses to travel to testify.
- the Battles of Lexington, Concord, and Bunker Hill all occurred before the Second Continental Congress voted to declare independence. England had already commenced hostilities against the American colonies.
- George III (pictured below) spurned the olive branch offered by the First Continental Congress and chose to send troops rather than negotiators. By upbringing, temperament, and outlook, if war was to be avoided, he was the wrong King at the wrong time.
Had Charles II (pictured below) been King, things would have likely been very different.
He would have sailed to America at the first sign of trouble. There, he would have delivered a lecture at Harvard on English history, laid a wreath at the graves of the victims of the Boston Massacre, gone shopping in Philadelphia, attended the theater in New York, and gone fox hunting with men from the most prominent families in Virginia.
By the time he would have departed, Charles would have been the most popular man in America. And he likely would have fathered a few children along the way.