Whenever I read or hear about the founding of the United States, I’m always bothered by this nagging question, and I very rarely see it directly addressed. What usually gets addressed is the justification for American independence. It’s clear that the American colonists had plenty or reasons to want to be independent, but that doesn’t necessarily mean any of those reasons rises to a cause for war.
From what I understand, the taxes on colonists were sometimes punitive and inequitable, but they weren’t crushing or without justification. (I’ve seen arguments over whether the French & Indian War made them necessary and fair, but even if you reject that claim, they weren’t clearly illegitimate.) Not long after the Revolution, the Congress imposed taxes that were arguably just as inequitable and unfair, but no one thinks the Whiskey Rebellion should have succeeded.
The major issue seems not to have been the taxes per se, but that they were imposed without representation. But no one would think an act of war by the citizens of Washington, DC, would be justified; the costs in lives and property would be much greater than the injustice it would seek to remedy. No system is perfectly equitable, and there were areas in England with little representation in Parliament. The theory of government at the time was that each MP was supposed to act as a representative for all the people, and there were defenders of American rights in Parliament.
From what I understand, the real tipping point was the Boston Tea Party, in which the colonial patriots destroyed the private property of third party merchants who had done nothing to harm them and refused to pay for the damages. At that point, the rest of the independence movement either had to repudiate what was a blatantly illegal act of malicious vandalism, which would have sapped the movement of its most dedicated participants, or embrace their criminal element and lose all sympathy and respectability in England, and they chose the latter. As you can tell, I don’t have much sympathy for that decision.
Even at the hight of revolutionary ferver, I believe only about half of the civilian population in the colonies supported going to war.
In any war, innocent people are killed, lives are ruined, crops are destroyed, homes are burned, children are made orphans or worse, and the rule of law breaks down. What were the circumstances in America that made all that worth it? What had England done that was so intolerable that it was worth mass killing over?