What founding document said the American colonies were free from Britain?

Why this is the answer

The Declaration of Independence is the document that cut the colonies loose from Britain. Its closing paragraph says so in plain terms: the united colonies are, and by right ought to be, free and independent states, absolved from all allegiance to the British Crown. The road to that sentence was short but tense. In 1774 representatives from twelve of the thirteen colonies met in Philadelphia as the First Continental Congress, angry about British laws they saw as unfair. Fighting broke out the next year, and the Second Continental Congress, which met in 1775, asked Thomas Jefferson and others to write a declaration. Jefferson took his draft to a committee that included John Adams and Benjamin Franklin, the committee made changes, and the full Congress adopted the Declaration on July 4, 1776. With that vote the thirteen colonies became the thirteen original states. Declaring independence did not end the war. The fighting stopped after the British army surrendered at Yorktown, Virginia, in 1781, and Britain formally agreed that the United States was an independent nation in a treaty signed in 1783. Franklin was the diplomat who negotiated it. The question asks which founding document said the colonies were free, so the answer is the one that made the announcement in 1776, not the treaty that confirmed the result seven years later. The other likely mix-up is the Constitution. It was written in 1787, eleven years after the Declaration, when the country already existed and its leaders wanted a new government. The Federalist Papers came after that, as essays urging the states to approve the Constitution, so they could not have declared anything in 1776. A quick way to sort the two great founding documents is by their verbs. The Declaration announces: we are free. The Constitution organizes: this is how we will govern ourselves. Whenever a question is about breaking away from Britain, the answer is the Declaration.