Overview
- Days after declaring independence, the Second Continental Congress moved from rhetoric to action by ordering cooking kettles for militia, appointing chaplains for regiments, and commissioning John Dunlap to print and distribute copies of the Declaration.
- Congress authorized John Hancock to send the Declaration to George Washington with a request that he have it publicly proclaimed to the army.
- Washington received the commission, instructed brigades to assemble, and arranged for the Declaration to be read aloud to troops to strengthen morale and clarify what they were fighting for.
- British forces quickly built a large army and fleet near New York after independence was declared, creating an immediate existential threat that set the stage for Washington’s bold counterattacks and the longer campaign that followed.
- Washington’s leadership and key military turning points—crossing the Delaware and victories at Trenton and Princeton, winter at Valley Forge and training under von Steuben, Saratoga’s role in winning French support, and Cornwallis’s surrender at Yorktown—explain how fragile resistance became victory and why those episodes now frame 250th commemoration debates.