The immeasurable service to American democracy of John and Abigail Adams is enshrined at their home in Braintree, Massachusetts. From proposing George Washington as commander-in-chief of the Continental Army to serving as second president of the United States, John was instrumental at every stage of the Revolution. His civic duty often kept him away from home, but he was sustained and guided by the strength and brilliance of his wife, his “dearest friend,” Abigail.

African Burial Ground is the oldest and largest known cemetery in North America for both free and enslaved Africans. It was in use from the mid-1600s until 1795, covered approximately 6.6 acres, and served as the final resting place for approximately 15,000 people. This cemetery was in use during the Revolutionary War. Africans who fled to New York during the Revolutionary War in search of freedom who died in New York may be buried here.

Primus Hall is one of many Black trailblazers hailing from the Beacon Hill neighborhood of Boston. Born to enslaved parents in 1756, Hall was ‘given away’ to become a shoemaker’s apprentice, but instead joined the Continental Army in 1776. He served in several major battles, reenlisted twice, and witnessed the British surrender at Yorktown. After the war, he became a successful businessman, established himself in Beacon Hill, and became known as a “patriarch” of the Black community in Boston.

The first major battle of the war broke out here in June 1775. Following the fighting at Lexington and Concord, Colonial militia flocked to Massachusetts to contain the British military inside of Boston. To that end, they fortified Bunker Hill on Charlestown Heights overlooking the city. On June 17, some 2,400 British regulars attacked the Colonial stronghold, suffering 1,000 casualties in the combat. Despite the British victory, the valiant American effort helped to unite the thirteen colonies.

Charles Pinckney, a member of a wealthy South Carolina family, joined the militia as a lieutenant in 1779. The next year, the British captured Charleston, imprisoned the young soldier, and threatened his father into pledging loyalty to the king. The pledge saved the family’s estate, which Charles inherited in 1782. After the war, Charles served as a delegate at the Constitutional Convention, contributing 28 clauses to the document. Yet “Constitution Charlie,” as he was called, also fiercely defended slavery.

In December 1606, three ships set sail from England on a five-month voyage across the Atlantic. Upon arriving in Virginia, the voyagers named their settlement Jamestown after King James I. Although the land had been home to Native Americans for centuries, Jamestown became the first English settlement in North America. In 1619, the same year enslaved Africans were brought to Virginia, Jamestown formed a legislative assembly, planting the seed of representative government.

This 55-acre oasis in Washington, D.C. was created in 1976 to commemorate the 200th birthday of the United States. On Signers’ Islands, in the park’s lake, is a memorial to the 56 signers of the Declaration of Independence. The memorial is composed of granite stones with facsimiles of their signatures. In 1986, leading up to the bicentennial of the US Constitution, President Ronald Reagan issued a proclamation making the Gardens a living legacy tribute to the Constitution.

In January 1781, General Daniel Morgan raced through the south as the feared Lieutenant Colonel Tarleton breathed down his neck. Morgan had been sent into the backcountry to break British supply lines, but he soon found his army blocked in retreat by a flooded river. With little choice, Morgan faced Tarleton in an open fight. The ensuing Battle of Cowpens lasted hardly an hour. The Patriots pulled off a stunning victory and turned the tide of the Southern Campaign. 

On the afternoon of April 30, 1789, a great crowd gathered outside Federal Hall to witness the inauguration of George Washington. Called out of retirement and unanimously elected the first president, Washington stepped onto the open air balcony, placed his hand on a Bible, and recited the oath of office. As the people below cheered, Washington felt the burden of the task before him: hold together the young republic while launching its grand experiment in Constitutional government.

In 1755, William Floyd inherited his father’s Mastic Beach plantation. The estate prospered, in part, by enslaved labor, yet Floyd advocated for liberty as a New York delegate at the 1st and 2nd Continental Congress. In 1776, he signed the Declaration of Independence, one of four New Yorkers to do so. After the war, he returned to ‘Old Mastic House,’ now a unit of Fire Island, where he hosted such guests as Thomas Jefferson and James Madison.                                                                                        

In 1754, a young George Washington began his military career in the service of Great Britian. The Battle of the Great Meadows (Fort Necessity) was the first battle of the French and Indian War and Washington’s only surrender. The conflict ended in 1763 with a British victory and the removal of French power from North America. Victory would ultimately set the stage for the American Revolution.

In August 1777, British forces sent surrender demands to the American garrison stationed at Fort Stanwix, then known as Fort Schuyler. The demands were “rejected with disdain,” and a prolonged 21-day siege began. Colonel Peter Gansevoort led the Americans in successfully repelling the British, earning Fort Stanwix the moniker, “the fort that never surrendered.”  The failed siege significantly helped thwart British plans to take the northern colonies and led to American alliances with France and the Netherlands.

At times wading through frozen floodwaters up to their shoulders, Lieutenant Colonel George Rogers Clark and his Kentucky frontiersmen marched for 18 days in the dead of winter to capture the British post at Fort Sackville. Clark’s mission was part of a campaign to stop British-sponsored Indian raids on American settlers west of the Appalachian Mountains. His surprise attack–among the most daring feats of the war–forced the fort’s surrender and effectively checked British control of the region.

Here in the heart of the Northern Neck of Virginia, at a tobacco plantation where enslaved persons labored, the man most responsible for the birth of the United States was himself born in February 1732. George Washington was the oldest child of Augustine and Mary Ball, and although he lived here for only a short time, the future founding father had his worldview shaped by the land along Popes Creek and its colonial Tidewater culture.

The Americans fought like demons,” said Lieutenant General Cornwallis after the Battle of Guilford Courthouse. Here, on March 15, 1781, General Nathanael Greene commanded 4,400 militia and Continental soldiers against Cornwallis’s 1,900 British Regulars. The clash, which escalated into brutal bayonet fighting, ended with Greene leaving the field in defeat. But the victory cost Cornwallis a quarter of his men and forced him to move north to Wilmington, North Carolina. This set the stage for his surrender at Yorktown seven months later.

The Federal-style country estate was to be Alexander Hamilton’s quiet retreat after leaving political life. Rising from a merchant’s clerk to become the first US Secretary of the Treasury, Hamilton contributed immeasurably to the American Founding. By 1802, he was ready to retire to “The Grange,” named after his father’s ancestral home in Scotland. Hamilton lived in the house for only two years, however, before being killed in a duel with his rival, Vice President Aaron Burr, in 1804.

In the summer of 1776, the Second Continental Congress gathered in Independence Hall to declare the separation of the 13 colonies from Great Britain. On July 4, after several days of deliberation, it approved the final wording of the Declaration of Independence, designing a document destined to change the world. Yet, as the delegates in Philadelphia pledged “our Lives, our Fortunes, and our sacred Honor,” 32,000 British troops arrived on Staten Island, set on crushing the rebellion.

Not all American colonists supported the revolution; an estimated 1 in 3 remained loyal to the Crown. That division played out on October 7, 1780, when Patriot and Loyalist militias clashed at the Battle of Kings Mountain. The battle, fought exclusively between Americans, was the first Patriot victory since the British invaded Charleston in May. Thomas Jefferson called it, “The turn of the tide of success.” The Patriots’ use of the long rifle over the musket was key to the outcome.

The first armed conflict of the American Revolution erupted here on April 19, 1775. The events began the night before, with Paul Revere’s legendary ride alerting colonial militia of the approaching British regulars. At 5 am the next morning, “the shot heard round the world” rang out at Lexington, marking the opening salvo of the war. Who fired the shot is unclear, but the ensuing battle raged until evening and covered 16 miles, from Boston to Concord.

As talk of revolution swept America, North Carolina =remained deeply divided. The colony exiled its Royal Governor in 1775, causing Loyalists to march to the coast to join forces with the British Army. Patriot militia, rallying to block the rendezvous, fought the Loyalists at Moores Creek Bridge on February 27, 1776. The brief battle was a significant Patriot victory and led to North Carolina casting the first vote for independence at the Continental Congress.

By 1781, the British controlled Ninety Six, a strategically important frontier town in the south, and constructed a Star Fort to defend it. Seeking to reclaim the town for the Americans, Major General Nathanael Greene staged a 28-day siege–the longest of the war. The siege culminated in a patriot charge against the Star Fort on June 18. But within an hour, the assault failed, and Greene called a retreat, leaving Ninety Six in the hands of the British.

In 1780, British Major General Patrick Ferguson swept into the Carolinas to recruit men to the Loyalists’ cause and suppress those who resisted. In response, more than 2,000 Patriot militiamen hunted Ferguson’s army for two weeks, trekking through Virginia, Tennessee, North Carolina, and South Carolina, crossing the Appalachian Mountains along the way. At the Battle at Kings Mountain, the Patriots killed Ferguson and killed or captured his entire army, giving America its first major victory of the Southern Campaign.

In 1781, General Washington and General Rochambeau marched their allied armies south to entrap General Cornwallis at Yorktown. Along the way, their feet fell along the Potomac Path, which passes through Prince William Forest Park and is the most well-preserved segment of Washington-Rochambeau Revolutionary Route National Historic Trail.  After Cornwallis surrendered and the war was virtually won, Rochambeau returned north along the path to Boston in July 1782. During their journey, the French army was cheered by thankful Americans.

Construction of St. Paul’s Church began in 1763 but remained incomplete by 1776. The stone and brick building had just a dirt floor when the Continental Army established it as a hospital after the Battle of Brooklyn. For the next seven years, as the fortunes of the war shifted, American, British, and Hessian armies each made strategic use of the building. The church was completed in 1788, housing a bell made at the same London foundry as the Liberty Bell.

In 1777, a large British invasion force met an equally large American army at Saratoga. After two intense battles, an eight-mile retreat, and a three-day siege, British General John Burgoyne surrendered his entire force. This was the first time in world history that a British army surrendered. It was a pivotal moment in the Revolutionary War, sending shockwaves through the American colonies, securing essential foreign support, and reviving patriots’ hopes for independence.

Two years into the war, the Continental Army established an arsenal 60 miles up the Connecticut River, in Springfield, Massachusetts, out of range of assault from the British navy. The arsenal was used primarily to repair small arms, make gun carriages and musket cartridges, and store powder. After the war, in 1787, it was the violent scene of Shays’ Rebellion, whose bloody aftermath fueled support for a strong central government and the adoption of the United States Constitution.

Thaddeus Kościuszko received a hero’s welcome when he returned to America in 1797 and took up winter residence in a humble second-floor room in Philadelphia. He had distinguished himself nearly 20 years prior when he first arrived from Poland and joined the Revolutionary War. Kosciuszko, a military engineer, designed critical blockades and fortresses for the Continental Army, and inspired Thomas Jefferson to call him “as pure a son of liberty as I have ever known.”

The Thomas Jefferson Memorial was dedicated by President Franklin Roosevelt on April 13, 1943, and is directly south of the White House along the southern edge of the Tidal Basin in West Potomac Park. This iconic memorial was modeled after the Pantheon of Rome, and honors Thomas Jefferson as the primary author of the Declaration of Independence, the first Secretary of State, and the third president of the United States of America. Jefferson was a complex man of the 18th and 19th centuries, and had a wide-ranging impact on the very makeup of America itself.

As the war battered southern cities like Charleston, thousands of Loyalist citizens fled to St. Johns Town (Hester’s Bluff), a settlement in British-controlled East Florida. This 300-acre hillside parcel sat along the St. Johns River and was positioned ideally for trading and defense. The evacuee Loyalists brought with them multitudes of enslaved individuals—over 11,000 by 1783. Accounts from this time tell of enslaved persons self-manumitting but also of being abducted by bands of scoundrels scouring the countryside.

In December 1777, the exhausted and ill-supplied Continental Army marched into Valley Forge to begin a legendary winter encampment. Over the next six months, General George Washington transformed the army from a collection of disparate militias into a cohesive and disciplined fighting force. When spring arrived, so too did word that France had joined the American cause, leading the British to evacuate Philadelphia and head north to New York. Washington’s troops, fresh out of Valley Forge, followed in pursuit. 

In July 1781, General Rochambeau and 5,000 French troops rendezvoused with Washington’s army for a planned attack on the British stronghold of New York City. But when French naval support headed south, the generals changed their target to Yorktown, from where General Cornwallis was orchestrating Britain’s southern campaign. On August 18, the allied armies began a 300-mile march through six states, from New York to Virginia, pulling off a logistical and strategic feat that ultimately trapped Cornwallis and forced his surrender.

The immeasurable service to American democracy of John and Abigail Adams is enshrined at their home in Braintree, Massachusetts. From proposing George Washington as commander-in-chief of the Continental Army to serving as second president of the United States, John was instrumental at every stage of the Revolution. His civic duty often kept him away from home, but he was sustained and guided by the strength and brilliance of his wife, his “dearest friend,” Abigail.

African Burial Ground is the oldest and largest known cemetery in North America for both free and enslaved Africans. It was in use from the mid-1600s until 1795, covered approximately 6.6 acres, and served as the final resting place for approximately 15,000 people. This cemetery was in use during the Revolutionary War. Africans who fled to New York during the Revolutionary War in search of freedom who died in New York may be buried here.

Primus Hall is one of many Black trailblazers hailing from the Beacon Hill neighborhood of Boston. Born to enslaved parents in 1756, Hall was ‘given away’ to become a shoemaker’s apprentice, but instead joined the Continental Army in 1776. He served in several major battles, reenlisted twice, and witnessed the British surrender at Yorktown. After the war, he became a successful businessman, established himself in Beacon Hill, and became known as a “patriarch” of the Black community in Boston.

The first major battle of the war broke out here in June 1775. Following the fighting at Lexington and Concord, Colonial militia flocked to Massachusetts to contain the British military inside of Boston. To that end, they fortified Bunker Hill on Charlestown Heights overlooking the city. On June 17, some 2,400 British regulars attacked the Colonial stronghold, suffering 1,000 casualties in the combat. Despite the British victory, the valiant American effort helped to unite the thirteen colonies.

Charles Pinckney, a member of a wealthy South Carolina family, joined the militia as a lieutenant in 1779. The next year, the British captured Charleston, imprisoned the young soldier, and threatened his father into pledging loyalty to the king. The pledge saved the family’s estate, which Charles inherited in 1782. After the war, Charles served as a delegate at the Constitutional Convention, contributing 28 clauses to the document. Yet “Constitution Charlie,” as he was called, also fiercely defended slavery.

In December 1606, three ships set sail from England on a five-month voyage across the Atlantic. Upon arriving in Virginia, the voyagers named their settlement Jamestown after King James I. Although the land had been home to Native Americans for centuries, Jamestown became the first English settlement in North America. In 1619, the same year enslaved Africans were brought to Virginia, Jamestown formed a legislative assembly, planting the seed of representative government.

This 55-acre oasis in Washington, D.C. was created in 1976 to commemorate the 200th birthday of the United States. On Signers’ Islands, in the park’s lake, is a memorial to the 56 signers of the Declaration of Independence. The memorial is composed of granite stones with facsimiles of their signatures. In 1986, leading up to the bicentennial of the US Constitution, President Ronald Reagan issued a proclamation making the Gardens a living legacy tribute to the Constitution.

In January 1781, General Daniel Morgan raced through the south as the feared Lieutenant Colonel Tarleton breathed down his neck. Morgan had been sent into the backcountry to break British supply lines, but he soon found his army blocked in retreat by a flooded river. With little choice, Morgan faced Tarleton in an open fight. The ensuing Battle of Cowpens lasted hardly an hour. The Patriots pulled off a stunning victory and turned the tide of the Southern Campaign. 

On the afternoon of April 30, 1789, a great crowd gathered outside Federal Hall to witness the inauguration of George Washington. Called out of retirement and unanimously elected the first president, Washington stepped onto the open air balcony, placed his hand on a Bible, and recited the oath of office. As the people below cheered, Washington felt the burden of the task before him: hold together the young republic while launching its grand experiment in Constitutional government.

In 1755, William Floyd inherited his father’s Mastic Beach plantation. The estate prospered, in part, by enslaved labor, yet Floyd advocated for liberty as a New York delegate at the 1st and 2nd Continental Congress. In 1776, he signed the Declaration of Independence, one of four New Yorkers to do so. After the war, he returned to ‘Old Mastic House,’ now a unit of Fire Island, where he hosted such guests as Thomas Jefferson and James Madison.

In 1754, a young George Washington began his military career in the service of Great Britian. The Battle of the Great Meadows (Fort Necessity) was the first battle of the French and Indian War and Washington’s only surrender. The conflict ended in 1763 with a British victory and the removal of French power from North America. Victory would ultimately set the stage for the American Revolution.

In August 1777, British forces sent surrender demands to the American garrison stationed at Fort Stanwix, then known as Fort Schuyler. The demands were “rejected with disdain,” and a prolonged 21-day siege began. Colonel Peter Gansevoort led the Americans in successfully repelling the British, earning Fort Stanwix the moniker, “the fort that never surrendered.”  The failed siege significantly helped thwart British plans to take the northern colonies and led to American alliances with France and the Netherlands.

At times wading through frozen floodwaters up to their shoulders, Lieutenant Colonel George Rogers Clark and his Kentucky frontiersmen marched for 18 days in the dead of winter to capture the British post at Fort Sackville. Clark’s mission was part of a campaign to stop British-sponsored Indian raids on American settlers west of the Appalachian Mountains. His surprise attack–among the most daring feats of the war–forced the fort’s surrender and effectively checked British control of the region.

Here in the heart of the Northern Neck of Virginia, at a tobacco plantation where enslaved persons labored, the man most responsible for the birth of the United States was himself born in February 1732. George Washington was the oldest child of Augustine and Mary Ball, and although he lived here for only a short time, the future founding father had his worldview shaped by the land along Popes Creek and its colonial Tidewater culture.

The Americans fought like demons,” said Lieutenant General Cornwallis after the Battle of Guilford Courthouse. Here, on March 15, 1781, General Nathanael Greene commanded 4,400 militia and Continental soldiers against Cornwallis’s 1,900 British Regulars. The clash, which escalated into brutal bayonet fighting, ended with Greene leaving the field in defeat. But the victory cost Cornwallis a quarter of his men and forced him to move north to Wilmington, North Carolina. This set the stage for his surrender at Yorktown seven months later.

The Federal-style country estate was to be Alexander Hamilton’s quiet retreat after leaving political life. Rising from a merchant’s clerk to become the first US Secretary of the Treasury, Hamilton contributed immeasurably to the American Founding. By 1802, he was ready to retire to “The Grange,” named after his father’s ancestral home in Scotland. Hamilton lived in the house for only two years, however, before being killed in a duel with his rival, Vice President Aaron Burr, in 1804.

In the summer of 1776, the Second Continental Congress gathered in Independence Hall to declare the separation of the 13 colonies from Great Britain. On July 4, after several days of deliberation, it approved the final wording of the Declaration of Independence, designing a document destined to change the world. Yet, as the delegates in Philadelphia pledged “our Lives, our Fortunes, and our sacred Honor,” 32,000 British troops arrived on Staten Island, set on crushing the rebellion.

Not all American colonists supported the revolution; an estimated 1 in 3 remained loyal to the Crown. That division played out on October 7, 1780, when Patriot and Loyalist militias clashed at the Battle of Kings Mountain. The battle, fought exclusively between Americans, was the first Patriot victory since the British invaded Charleston in May. Thomas Jefferson called it, “The turn of the tide of success.” The Patriots’ use of the long rifle over the musket was key to the outcome.

The first armed conflict of the American Revolution erupted here on April 19, 1775. The events began the night before, with Paul Revere’s legendary ride alerting colonial militia of the approaching British regulars. At 5 am the next morning, “the shot heard round the world” rang out at Lexington, marking the opening salvo of the war. Who fired the shot is unclear, but the ensuing battle raged until evening and covered 16 miles, from Boston to Concord.

As talk of revolution swept America, North Carolina =remained deeply divided. The colony exiled its Royal Governor in 1775, causing Loyalists to march to the coast to join forces with the British Army. Patriot militia, rallying to block the rendezvous, fought the Loyalists at Moores Creek Bridge on February 27, 1776. The brief battle was a significant Patriot victory and led to North Carolina casting the first vote for independence at the Continental Congress.

By 1781, the British controlled Ninety Six, a strategically important frontier town in the south, and constructed a Star Fort to defend it. Seeking to reclaim the town for the Americans, Major General Nathanael Greene staged a 28-day siege–the longest of the war. The siege culminated in a patriot charge against the Star Fort on June 18. But within an hour, the assault failed, and Greene called a retreat, leaving Ninety Six in the hands of the British.

In 1780, British Major General Patrick Ferguson swept into the Carolinas to recruit men to the Loyalists’ cause and suppress those who resisted. In response, more than 2,000 Patriot militiamen hunted Ferguson’s army for two weeks, trekking through Virginia, Tennessee, North Carolina, and South Carolina, crossing the Appalachian Mountains along the way. At the Battle at Kings Mountain, the Patriots killed Ferguson and killed or captured his entire army, giving America its first major victory of the Southern Campaign.

In 1781, General Washington and General Rochambeau marched their allied armies south to entrap General Cornwallis at Yorktown. Along the way, their feet fell along the Potomac Path, which passes through Prince William Forest Park and is the most well-preserved segment of Washington-Rochambeau Revolutionary Route National Historic Trail.  After Cornwallis surrendered and the war was virtually won, Rochambeau returned north along the path to Boston in July 1782. During their journey, the French army was cheered by thankful Americans.

Construction of St. Paul’s Church began in 1763 but remained incomplete by 1776. The stone and brick building had just a dirt floor when the Continental Army established it as a hospital after the Battle of Brooklyn. For the next seven years, as the fortunes of the war shifted, American, British, and Hessian armies each made strategic use of the building. The church was completed in 1788, housing a bell made at the same London foundry as the Liberty Bell.

In 1777, a large British invasion force met an equally large American army at Saratoga. After two intense battles, an eight-mile retreat, and a three-day siege, British General John Burgoyne surrendered his entire force. This was the first time in world history that a British army surrendered. It was a pivotal moment in the Revolutionary War, sending shockwaves through the American colonies, securing essential foreign support, and reviving patriots’ hopes for independence.

Two years into the war, the Continental Army established an arsenal 60 miles up the Connecticut River, in Springfield, Massachusetts, out of range of assault from the British navy. The arsenal was used primarily to repair small arms, make gun carriages and musket cartridges, and store powder. After the war, in 1787, it was the violent scene of Shays’ Rebellion, whose bloody aftermath fueled support for a strong central government and the adoption of the United States Constitution.

Thaddeus Kościuszko received a hero’s welcome when he returned to America in 1797 and took up winter residence in a humble second-floor room in Philadelphia. He had distinguished himself nearly 20 years prior when he first arrived from Poland and joined the Revolutionary War. Kosciuszko, a military engineer, designed critical blockades and fortresses for the Continental Army, and inspired Thomas Jefferson to call him “as pure a son of liberty as I have ever known.”

The Thomas Jefferson Memorial was dedicated by President Franklin Roosevelt on April 13, 1943, and is directly south of the White House along the southern edge of the Tidal Basin in West Potomac Park. This iconic memorial was modeled after the Pantheon of Rome, and honors Thomas Jefferson as the primary author of the Declaration of Independence, the first Secretary of State, and the third president of the United States of America. Jefferson was a complex man of the 18th and 19th centuries, and had a wide-ranging impact on the very makeup of America itself.

As the war battered southern cities like Charleston, thousands of Loyalist citizens fled to St. Johns Town (Hester’s Bluff), a settlement in British-controlled East Florida. This 300-acre hillside parcel sat along the St. Johns River and was positioned ideally for trading and defense. The evacuee Loyalists brought with them multitudes of enslaved individuals—over 11,000 by 1783. Accounts from this time tell of enslaved persons self-manumitting but also of being abducted by bands of scoundrels scouring the countryside.

In December 1777, the exhausted and ill-supplied Continental Army marched into Valley Forge to begin a legendary winter encampment. Over the next six months, General George Washington transformed the army from a collection of disparate militias into a cohesive and disciplined fighting force. When spring arrived, so too did word that France had joined the American cause, leading the British to evacuate Philadelphia and head north to New York. Washington’s troops, fresh out of Valley Forge, followed in pursuit. 

In July 1781, General Rochambeau and 5,000 French troops rendezvoused with Washington’s army for a planned attack on the British stronghold of New York City. But when French naval support headed south, the generals changed their target to Yorktown, from where General Cornwallis was orchestrating Britain’s southern campaign. On August 18, the allied armies began a 300-mile march through six states, from New York to Virginia, pulling off a logistical and strategic feat that ultimately trapped Cornwallis and forced his surrender.