President of the United States States which is not decided by popular vote. Nine vice presidents became president by virtue of a president's intra-term death or resignation. Donald Trump of New York is the 45th and current president. He assumed office on January 20, 2017. During the American Revolution in 1776, the Thirteen Colonies, acting through the Second Continental Congress, declared political independence from Great Britain. The new states were independent of each other as nation states and recognized the necessity of closely coordinating their efforts against the British. Congress desired to avoid anything that remotely resembled a monarchy and negotiated the Articles of Confederation
Mecklenburg Declaration of Independence Mecklenburg Declaration of May 20. In 1847, the complete text of these Mecklenburg Resolves was found in a South Carolina newspaper published in June 1775. Unlike the Mecklenburg Declaration that had appeared in the "Raleigh Register" in 1819, the Mecklenburg Resolves fell short of an outright declaration of independence, and did not contain language that was parallel to Jefferson's 1776 Declaration of Independence. The Resolves, though radical, were similar to other local resolutions that were adopted in the colonies in 1774 and 1775. The controversy over the Mecklenburg Declaration entered a new phase with the discovery of the Mecklenburg Resolves.