Three dozen church members made their way back to England, where they were joined by about 70 entrepreneurs—enlisted by the London stock company to ensure the success of the enterprise. In August , the Mayflower left Southampton with a smaller vessel—the Speedwell —but the latter proved unseaworthy and twice was forced to return to port.
On September 16, the Mayflower left for America alone from Plymouth. In a difficult Atlantic crossing, the foot Mayflower encountered rough seas and storms and was blown more than miles off course. After a day voyage, the ship landed on November 21 on the tip of Cape Cod at what is now Provincetown, Massachusetts. After coming to anchor in Provincetown harbor, a party of armed men under the command of Captain Myles Standish was sent out to explore the area and find a location suitable for settlement.
While they were gone, Susanna White gave birth to a son, Peregrine, aboard the Mayflower. He was the first English child born in New England. In mid-December, the explorers went ashore at a location across Cape Cod Bay where they found cleared fields and plentiful running water and named the site Plymouth.
The expedition returned to Provincetown, and on December 21 the Mayflower came to anchor in Plymouth harbor. Just after Christmas , the pilgrims began work on dwellings that would shelter them through their difficult first winter in America.
In the first year of settlement, half the colonists died of disease. Plymouth soon secured treaties with most local Indian tribes, and the economy steadily grew, and more colonists were attracted to the settlement. Select from these resources to teach your students about what sparked the Revolution, and the key events of the war. The Continental Congress provided leadership during the American Revolution and drafted the Declaration of Independence and the Articles of Confederation. The right to petition the government is provided in the First Amendment to the United States Constitution.
Join our community of educators and receive the latest information on National Geographic's resources for you and your students. Skip to content. Image Washington at the Constitutional Convention Before becoming the the United States' first president, George Washington presided over the Constitutional Convention, which established the nation's Constitution.
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In the midst of war, and with a divided population, North Carolina began trying to create a new government. The king's governor had fled. If the king were no longer the sovereign, the center of authority and order, then who would be? Where would the government come from?
All the colonies faced this problem. They knew about English law and understood about governors, legislators, and judges. The new "twist" in was the practice of placing the power of government in the people rather than in a monarch. The questions of how this popular sovereignty would be expressed through elections, and how often, and who would be eligible to vote, would become areas of considerable debate.
In November the provincial congress at Halifax met to draft a bill of rights and a constitution and to create a new government for the state. First, the Declaration of Rights was adopted, and on the following day the new constitution was accepted. The Declaration of Rights guaranteed personal freedoms—the right to choose one's form of religious worship, to write and say what one believed, and to hold peaceful public meetings, among others.
The constitution provided for a form of government with three equal branches: an executive to run the state government, a legislative to make the laws, and a judicial to enforce the laws. The constitution also had provisions applying to holding public office, voting, and public education. When the Patriots adopted their bill of civil rights before they adopted their form of government, they showed how important individual liberties were to a people who were fighting against what they felt was the oppressive government imposed by the king and Parliament.
In both its bill of rights and its constitution, North Carolina—like the other states—showed a deep distrust of government. Tar Heels believed that personal freedoms needed to be stated in writing. They believed that each branch of government had to be independent of the others so that a single individual or group could not have too much power.
In creating the new government, revolutionary Americans reached their greatest achievement. They decided that sovereignty would lie with the people of the nation, not in any single person such as the king or institution such as Parliament. Democracy would be the ideal. The system devised was not perfect then, nor is it perfect now. But the ideal of "government by the citizens and for the citizens" was the fuel that fired the revolutionary vision of a just society.
It is the ideal that allows for change when the people desire change. For example, in those days, only free men who owned a certain amount of property were allowed to vote.
But since then, the requirement of owning property has been dropped. Women are allowed to vote. Slavery was abolished. Now all adult citizens of the United States with the exception of those who have committed serious crimes are allowed to vote. Expanding suffrage—the right to vote—to a greater number of people means that citizens have greater power over their own government.
Many Tar Heels living in would be horrified to see that everyone has the right to vote. Other revolutionaries of the time would be pleased that the democratic government they created has become strong and works so well.
The great legacy of the American Revolution is that a government was established that allowed for debate and differences of opinion. This government is able to develop and improve as society progresses. It seems strange and wrong to us today that the men at Halifax could talk about personal freedom and a better government while holding African Americans in slavery and denying voting and other rights to women and to men without property.
But the dramatic fight for constitutional rights in the s was staged by an all-white, all-male cast. However much we may question the ideas of some of the founders, we must acknowledge the importance of what they achieved. They adopted the United States Constitution, which created a government based on written principles with the possibility of amendments.
Thus, they established a method to achieve fundamental changes in the future, such as the abolition of slavery and the expansion of the right to vote. North Carolina Civic Education Consortium. Flickr user: Visit Hillsborough. Josiah Martin Photograph no.
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