Template:Stub The United States of America (commonly referred to as America) was founded in on July 4, 1776 with the signing of the Declaration of Independence. George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and the other Founding Fathers and formally established as the United States by the ratification of the U.S. Constitution in 1788. Since the presidency of John Quincy Adams the United States has been governed by one of two political parties in a republic increasingly tending towards democracy as the franchise has expanded. The younger of the two existing major parties, the Republican Party, was created in 1854. Between independence in 1776 and ratification of the Constitution in 1788, the United States' governing documents included the Articles of Confederation and the Declaration of Independence itself.
The Declaration of Independence acknowledges the existence of a God when it refers to "the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God" and says all men "are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights," though the latter statement was made by Thomas Jefferson, whose religious beliefs are notoriously unclear. Conservatives argue that most of the Founding Fathers were Christians and that, explicitly or not, the United States was founded upon the principles and ideals of Christianity. However, the freedom of religion (stating that the government cannot interfere in the conduct of religious groups) is a fundamental aspect of the First Amendment to the Constitution. This Free Exercise Clause of the Amendment began increasingly to be tested and interpreted by the judiciary in the late 19th century as a result of the increasing population of religious minorities in the United States. At that time, the most significant minorities were probably the Mormons, the Roman Catholics, and the Jews.
Geography
In 1783, when the Peace of Paris concluded hostilities against Great Britain, the former colonial power, the United States' Italic texttaxableItalic text population totalled some three million citizens and slaves living on slightly less than one million square miles of land. An unknown number of Native Americans also lived in the western part of the United States, which was then bordered on the west by the Mississippi River, on the north by Lake Superior, Lake Huron, Lake Erie and Lake Ontario, on the east by the Atlantic Ocean, and on the south by Florida, then controlled by Spain. The land border with Canada was not clarified until the Rush-Bagot Agreement of 1816.
The majority of the taxable population lived in the thirteen original states. In alphabetical order they are Connecticut, Delaware, Georgia, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Carolina and Virginia. The remainder of the 1783 territory was eventually organized as the states of Ohio, Indiana, Michigan, Illinois, Wisconsin, Kentucky, Tennessee, Mississippi and Alabama. Two additional states were added during the first fifty years by secession from existing states: Vermont from New York, and Maine from Massachusetts. After that, the legality of secession became an issue.
In 1803, French emperor Napoleon Bonaparte took advantage of a lull in his war with Great Britain to sell the Louisiana Territory to the United States, more than doubling the nation's land area. This territory would later be organized as the states of Minnesota, North Dakota, South Dakota, Montana, Wyoming, Nebraska, Iowa, Missouri, Arkansas, Kansas, Oklahoma, and Louisiana proper.