It seems to me that your first two criteria were met. The British weren’t monsters so the colonist were under no existential threat. However, they’re very way of life was threatened. Remember, the colonists were accustomed to governing themselves. They had their own courts, their own legislators and even their own executive officials. When what amounts to a foreign government comes in and attempts to take away what people view as their rights they tend to get upset. Colonists attempted to patch things up with the British government but didn’t get anywhere. For most of the years leading up to the revolution the colonists placed most of the blame at the feet of parliament. It wasn’t until a few short years before the war that the colonial ire was concentrated on King George.
That there was a strong minority of British officials who opposed war with the colonists is something that is left out of most of our high schools curriculum. I didn’t learn anything about it until I took a revolutionary war course as an undergraduate.
How would you propose independence could or should have been gained if not by war? It’s an unfortunate fact that independence frequently means war or violence.
No they didn’t. The CSA actually shot itself in the foot by ceasing to export cotton to Europe in the belief that it would force England to intervene in the Civil War on their side. All they managed to do was annoy England, which vastly expanded the cultivation of cotton in Egypt and India.
I’ve been enjoying Chernow’s biography, Washington: a Life. The economy of the colonies are part of the equation. The Colonial elites were land-rich but cash poor and everybody was in debt to the Brits, who in many cases handled the situation poorly and by that created a common cause of resentment. British restrictions on trade caused a surprising amount of hurt feelings- landowners had to trade though London brokers with long communication times and waits, with a lot of chiseling and ripping-off, such that even the most successful Colonials wound up paying too much for goods that might turn out to be garbage when they finally arrived.
And so on. There were all kinds of things about the relationship with the Brits that chafed the colonials. Washington himself started his career hoping to get promoted in the British system, but by the end, well you know how that turned out. His change of heart reflects the trajectory of plenty of his contemporaries.
I don’t know if it is a sufficient cause for war, but much of the cause seems to be emotional. People could agree the Brits were jerks in this, that and the other way. After awhile they could agree on a pattern, and I bet their best lights foresaw a future of ever-increasing oppression, such that every little thing that may not seem outrageous to us today seemed to them a confirmation of SOP in the Colonies. To them, conditions were unacceptable enough that war was warranted. To what degree are we, today, justified in judging them? They weren’t insane; they were a British colony. Who wants to be a colony?
A “strong minority” didn’t prevent the war.
In March 1782, King George lost his influence in Parliment and any hope to continue the war when British Prime Minister, Lord North, resigned. North was succeeded by Lord Rockingham after which Parliment accepted the end of the war and started truce negotiations.
WWI started because Austria-Hungarian, British Empire, Italy, France, Germany, Serbia, Russia, and the rest of Europe had grown accustomed to warring with each other. What was happening or not happening in the U.S./13 colonies had little effect on European matters of honor.
WWII was basically a result of how WWI ended.
WWI may not have started in 1914 but Europe was going to end up in a huge war. I think that was inevitable.
That seems self-evident, does it not?
I was referring to the The Star-Spangled Banner which was written in 1814.
I seriously doubt we would have gotten what we wanted eventually. Our revolution is what created the idea that England had to negotiate with her colonies.
And I wish the OP would stop ignoring the multiple attempts to deal with this peacefully. War cannot be your first resort.
Simply stating that a “minority” of officials were opposed to the war established the fact that wars approval wasn’t unanimous. Was the approval rate “self-evident” to you?
I don’t believe that a “strong” minority had any more effect than a simple “minority”.
If we had just waited 180 years (give or take), they would have given us independence.
This is the closest anyone’s come in this thread to laying out a case for the war, but I’m still not convinced. The simple fact of England throwing their weight around more and refusing to allow the colonies to govern themselves isn’t in and of itself a reason for mass bloodshed. What had they done that actually made the situation unbearable for the majority of people?
Ignored how? No one’s really brought it up in any detail in this thread, and I’m not really aware of anything besides the fact that they had petitioned the crown several times, but that Parliament kept debating the matter.
The “strong minority” could easily have become a majority if the powerful and wealthy among the colonists hadn’t switched from political protests to rampant destruction of property and refusal to pay damages. It was only 10 years from the Stamp Act to the Revolution, and there is no reason to think it would have taken 180 years for the issues to be resolved peacefully.
And even if it had taken that long, what was so bad? I could come up with a list of rights violations by the current administration, and no one but racist crackpots thinks rebellion is justified.
Imagine you were making the case to a lower middle-class colonial mother that she should send her sons to fight the redcoats. What would you say? What was so bad that it couldn’t wait for attitudes in England to change, even if it took a generation?
Did they really start a war though? If they declared independence and Britain said OK, no war. It was Britain’s choice to make it a martial conflict.
Maybe a sufficiently strong British Empire would have deterred the Germans. After all, with the exception of the Germans and the nations attacked by Germany/Prussia, I don’t think any of those nations had been in a European war since the Crimea, if you want to count that as European, or otherwise since the Napoleonic wars. So somewhat more than fifty years, hardly “accustomed to warring with each other”.
These grievances don’t seem very justified. Taxes were low, representation was better than pretty much anywhere else in the world, most of the costs of defence were paid by other people, the King refused to force parliament to do the Royal whim… Weak!
The revolutionaries were gangs of armed criminals. The Boston Tea Party was a gang of “merchants”, which is to say smugglers, annoyed by the lowered taxes cutting into their profit margins. As mentioned by another poster upthread, the tax situation after independence was that taxes were much higher.
The Founding Fathers were famously dominated by slave-owners, and the proximity of the armed revolution to the Somersett decision, ending slavery in Britain, seems like more than a coincidence.
In other words the real cause of revolution was that it served the interests of the Colonial elites, not some high minded love of “democratic” representation, not hatred of taxes, not hatred of being protected by the world’s foremost military power, not even outrage over armed gangs of fanatics being disarmed, sub-Waco-stylee, by the government, and so on.
I think the lingering outrage over the Proclamation of 1763 sort of gets short-shrift in modern histories, but was a big issue for many of the “little people” who supported the Revolution. The promise of free land was what drew people to the colonies and what saved the small-time farmers from the life of peonage they would live back home. The Proclamation seemed to be threatening to put a stop to it by making land a (conceivably) limited commodity again. Even though some land west of the Appalachians had been opened through treaty negotiations, the vast majority of colonists still weren’t happy about anything less than the unconditional right to keep expanding west.
Now I’m not personally going to argue the Revolution was justified by the Crown’s insufficiently aggressive Indian-land-stealing policies, but I do think there was what would seem to be an unresolvable conflict between the colonists’ desire to maintain the supply of free land and the mother country’s lack of interest in inland expansion.
The mother country’s limitation of expansion was a big issue in the agitation that led up to the big devolutionary acts in Canadian and Australian history too. Along the same lines as what jackdavinci is saying, it could very well be that those would have lead to war too had the British not been feeling more conciliatory at that point in history.
There might not have been a French revolution. —> no Napoleon ------> no german unification = no Germany.
Who knows how the democratic movements would have fared had all the world still been monarchies.
No doubt there would have been other conflicts and some movements might have come to be regardless but there is no doubt 19th century history would have been quite different. Consequently so would the 20th century.
Well, if they started by blowing up buildings, they’d clearly be wrong. But suppose the people in DC began asking for representation in the national government and were denied. I say that at some point, it would be fair for them to conclude they were not being represented fairly according to American standards and they would be justified in attempting to break away and form their own sovereign government.
It also served the interests of allies of the colonials such as the French, Spanish and Dutch - all still aspiring to empire and happy to tie the British up where they could.