Thirteen Colonies and become states. The Second Continental Congress assembled in May 1775 and began to coordinate armed resistance against Britain. It established a government that recruited soldiers and printed its own money. General Washington took command of the Patriot soldiers in New England and forced the British to withdraw from Boston. In 1776, the Thirteen Colonies declared their independence from Britain. With the help of France and Spain, they defeated the British in the American Revolutionary War. In the Treaty of Paris (1783), Britain officially recognized the independence of the United States of America. The colonial population rose to a quarter
Mecklenburg Declaration of Independence though the Mecklenburg Declaration was supposedly written more than a year before the 1776 United States Declaration of Independence, the two declarations had some very similar phrases, including "dissolve the political bands which have connected", "absolve ourselves from all allegiance to the British Crown", "are, and of right ought to be", and "pledge to each other, our mutual cooperation, our lives, our fortunes, and our most sacred honor". This raised an obvious question: did Thomas Jefferson, the principal author of the American Declaration of Independence, use the Mecklenburg Declaration as a source? One person who thought so was John Adams,