- The Continental Congress voted to meet again in May 1775 to consider further action, but by that time violence had already broken out.
- On April 19, local militiamen clashed with British soldiers in Lexington and Concord, Massachusetts, marking the first shots fired in the Revolutionary War.
- When the guns fired at Lexington and Concord in 1775, there was not yet even a Continental Army.
- Those battles were fought by local militias. Few Americans had any military experience, and there was no method of training, supplying, or paying an army.
- The American Revolution was a political upheaval during the last half of the 18th century in which thirteen colonies in North America joined together to break from the British Empire, combining to become the United States of America.
- By June 1776, with the Revolutionary War in full swing, a growing majority of the colonists had come to favor independence from Britain.
- On July 4, the Continental Congress voted to adopt the Declaration of Independence, drafted by a five-man committee including Franklin and John Adams but written mainly by Jefferson.
- That same month, determined to crush the rebellion, the British government sent a large fleet, along with more than 34,000 troops to New York.
- In August, Howe's Redcoats routed the Continental Army on Long Island; Washington was forced to evacuate his troops from New York City by September.
- Pushed across the Delaware River, Washington fought back with a surprise attack in Trenton, New Jersey, on Christmas night and won another victory at Princeton to revive the rebels' flagging hopes before making winter quarters at Morristown.