The Road To Independence

In addition to the British, the French also wanted colonies in the Americas. They started to settle in Canada and a series of wars were waged [1] between them. In the end the British won, but at the cost of the United States. The French wars were very expensive and the British government decided to tax their American colonists to pay for them. 

The colonists didn’t like this, especially since they had no representation in the British parliament, and so they protested. A popular slogan was “No taxation without representation!” In December 1773 they attacked a ship carrying tea and threw all the tea into Boston Harbour, an incident called the Boston Tea Party. Tension grew and the colonists declared their independence from Britain on July 4th 1776. The war lasted [2] until 1783 when the British were finally defeated and America was free. 

America was now a country made up of [3] 13 colonies. In 1787, representatives from these states met and wrote a constitution for the new nation. They didn’t want a monarchy so they asked George Washington, the commander of the American army in the war against Britain, to be President. They decided to have a Congress like the British parliament, but the Senate had two elected representatives from each state and no Lords! The old colonies kept [4] a lot of their powers as individual states. The nation’s new capital was called Washington and the White House was built for the President and Capitol Hill for the Congress. 

[1] se hicieron guerras, [2] durar, [3] hecho de, [4] conservaron