The successful ending of the American Revolution

Usage examples of independence.

Nothing is more strange than the incongruous mixture of the forms of feudalism with the independence of the Acadian woods.

That virtue and independence were among the highest of mortal attainments, John Adams never doubted.

To Adams independence was the only guarantee of American liberty, and he was determined that the great step be taken.

It was the New Englanders who held firm for independence, though two of the Massachusetts delegation, John Hancock and Robert Treat Paine, exhibited nothing like the zeal of either Samuel Adams or Elbridge Gerry.

Friends in Massachusetts reported to Adams that because of Common Sense the clamor for a declaration of independence was never greater.

Much as he foresaw the hard truth about the war to be waged, Adams had the clearest idea of anyone in Congress of what independence would actually entail, the great difficulties and risks, no less than the opportunities.

But writing again to Warren, Adams tried to explain the concern and hesitation over independence.

Jefferson had been slower, more cautious and ambivalent than Adams about resolving his views on independence.

Words in debate were one thing, the war quite another, but to Adams independence and the war were never disjunctive.

Taking the floor in protest, Adams called Sullivan a decoy duck sent to seduce Congress into renunciation of independence.

Above all, with his sense of urgency and unrelenting drive, Adams made the Declaration of Independence happen when it did.

American struggle for independence hope for all humanity, and who, as Adams would long contend, never received the recognition they deserved.

But in this Adams was both overstating his own part and being blatantly unfair to Franklin, who had supported the recognition of American independence since the beginning, before Adams ever arrived on the scene.

IT HAD BEEN NINE YEARS since the First Continental Congress at Philadelphia, eight years since Lexington and Concord, seven since the Declaration of Independence, and more than three years since John Adams had last left home in the role of peacemaker.

If Adams had any thoughts or feelings about the passing of the epochal eighteenth century--any observations on the Age of Enlightenment, the century of Johnson, Voltaire, the Declaration of Independence, the American Revolution, the French Revolution, the age of Pitt and Washington, the advent of the United States of America--or if he had any premonitions or words to the wise about the future of his country or of humankind, he committed none to paper.