3.2Independence declared

Fighting broke out at Lexington and Concord in April 1775. For a year, many colonists still hoped for reconciliation, but Thomas Paine's pamphlet Common Sense (1776) made a blistering popular case for independence. On July 4, 1776, the Continental Congress adopted the Declaration of Independence, drafted chiefly by Thomas Jefferson.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.

Those words announced a revolutionary principle even as the society proclaiming it kept millions enslaved and denied women political rights. The Declaration's ideals would be invoked by generations of reformers who insisted the nation live up to them.