Convince me to support American independence

Great Debates
1

I’ve long thought that, had I been alive in the American colonies during the 1770s, I would have been unlikely to support independence from Britain. The colonies had a great deal of self-rule, taxation was (despite the rhetoric of wealthy businessmen pushing for war) not onerous, and the government provided real services in exchange for that taxation. For example, the Brits spared no expense in defending the colonies during the French and Indian war. “No taxation without representation” is a nice slogan, but most Englishmen in London didn’t get to vote for their MPs, either. By the standards of the day, England had a pretty flexible, competent, inclusive government, and was very far from being a harsh colonial overlord. I can’t see why I would have thought independence worth killing or dying for.

Clearly, others thought differently. So, I invite the Teeming Millions - persuade me to engage in vile rebellion against King and Country! (No fair to argue that the US turned out well - we’re talking about arguments that would have been possible during the 1770s).

2

I recommend you look at this timeline of events leading up to the Revolutionary War if you’re not familiar with it already. While Britain had passed several really awful acts that wouldn’t have justified revolution, once the Quartering Act was passed it all went down from there. Especially for Boston, which was the heart of the revolution.

Quartering Act - British soldiers could force colonists to provide them room and board.

The Stamp Act, Townshend Acts, and Boston Massacre - all of these fomented revolutionary spirit in Boston, causing the colonists there to become quite active and unruly.

The above led to the Intolerable Acts, the closing of the Boston Harbor, and strict clamp-downs on freedom of speech, of the press, and of the right to assemble.

From there it wasn’t hard to see why a revolution was inevitable. It’s also worth noting that the closer one was to Boston, the stronger the revolutionary spirit was there. The southern colonies were especially nervous about a revolution because they had a very strong trade with Britain.

3

Many were unconvinced. Even though we started the Revolution here in Rhode Island, when our southermost county was renamed to Washington County, many locals still considered him a traitor, and began the practice of calling it South County.

*Caution: Based on the oral history of dumbasses who don’t even know what their state is named for.

4

The things is, though, that most of this was actually fairly reasonable stuff. The Quartering Act made good sense in the wake of the French and Indian war - British troop presence in the colonies had been bulked up, and troop housing hadn’t necessarily kept up. I very much doubt that anyone in the government viewed quartering troops with civilians as a desirable thing - but it was sometimes necessary, and the troops were charged with protecting the colonists, after all. Beside which, it’s not as if this would have led to troops in every home, or anywhere remotely near. The Quartering Act wasn’t precisely pleasant, but I’m not seeing it as a causus belli. Ditto, the Stamp Act just wasn’t that onerous - it’s not as if people were being driven into poverty by light taxation intended to pay for colonial defense.

The Boston Massacre was unfortunate, certainly - but everyone agreed on that, including the British government officials. And it was a jury of American colonists that acquitted the soldiers involved.

I agree that, eventually, the British crackdown in response to treason and conspiracy grew so harsh that it might have driven me towards vile rebellion in itself; that was poorly managed. But that crackdown was a response to pro-rebel sentiment; it’s this sentiment that I can’t really understand.

5

While the patriotic textbooks all emphasize the driving force of wanting “freedom.” I read somewhere that the unspoken reason is basically money. Not so much anger at taxation, but the idea that the colonies (especially Boston) could fare quite well economically on their own. I think I read this in the book, Cod, so the idea is a bit self-serving for the book. In other words, the lucrative Cod trade in Boston created an economic environment where independence was desired.

6

How far back do you want to go? There were protests to the Sugar Act and the Currency Act in 1764, which started the whole “no taxation without representation” movement and non-importation became trendy. That got the ball rolling as the colonists gradually came to feel that England was exploiting the colonies and not providing a proportionate amount in return.

The Sugar Act directly attempted to punish the colonists from trading with anyone with Britain. It was a parasitic move and it was something that would be bound to get worse as the American economy became more independent from Britain. By the time the Townshend Acts rolled around the primary import from England was tea, and that got a heavy tax. Aside from tea the northern colonies had a robust economy going (while the South was dependent on exporting cotton to Britain).

Every act that led to the Revolution either attempted to limit the economic independence of the colonies or reduce their freedoms. As sachertorte said, the colonists were attempting to go in the opposite direction.

7

They also had a good lawyer, and only six of the eight were acquitted.

That having been said, I have heard estimates that as low as 5% of the population was in active rebellion. Certainly larger numbers supported the rebellion, with either words or material goods, but even then the estimates don’t rise above about 40-45% of the white population. Thus the revolutionary war, which began America’s experiment with democracy, was imposed on the majority by a minority.

Enjoy,
Steven

8

The saying I’ve heard bandied about was that one third supported the revolution, one third didn’t, and the other third were in the middle and were too focused on living their lives to care.

9

MtgMan:

But still to a lesser degree than British absolute monarchy was.

10

The UK never had an absolute monarchy, and even England hadn’t had a true absolute monarch since Henry VIII (and he was probably the first/last, as most of the English Kings before him were checked by powerful noble families.)

In the 1770s George III was a real player in government, with genuine say in who his PM was and what their policies would be, but he still was very much a constitutional monarch. He didn’t govern the UK day to day, and while he did things I don’t believe any British monarch has done since (he resisted appointing PMs who he disapproved of and eventually basically forced Lord North into a long premiership so he wouldn’t have to keep fighting the opposition to appoint someone like Fox), he was no absolute King.

11

I think you have the wrong idea of what an absolute monarchy is.

12

They were fine with troops being around during the war, but why after? They weren’t hanging around before the war. Who were they suppoesd to be protecting them from? Besides, the Bill of Rights 1689said there would be no standing army during a time of peace without the consent of parliament. Plus the colonist were charged with paying for the housing and feeding of the troops.

The colonists had a simple request for George: give us the rights all Englishmen have.

He didn’t.

So they decided not to be Englishmen anymore.

13

Another complicating factor was that, as far as the colonists were concerned, they wanted to be citizens of England and loyal servants of the Crown. However, the powers-that-were in England really saw them as nothing more than a useful resource. An those powers were concentrated in Parliament, which took control of the colonies.

The anger of the colonists rested on this: they were Crown colonies. It was right in their charters that they reported to the King. As was usual in English history, the weak wanted to ally with the strongest (George III) in order to bypass the intermediate powers (Parliament). However, George was quite a waste of human flesh and had more or less been completely dominated by his advisors - mostly influential nobles. The result was that a trend of Parliament taking monarchial privelege continued and they began tossing off edicts to the colonies.

Well, that did not go over well, because the colonial legislatures were legally about equal with Parliament. They probably would have been willing to go along, except that said edicts were rather bloody-minded, insulting, and poor policy, aimed at sacrificing the livelihoods of colonists in favor of England. This, of course, was the common and completely backward economic thought of the day. Hence trade was to be controlled, colonists subject to strict English rule*, and dissent tolerated very little. Worse yet, the King then handwaved their complaints and treated them as subjects - and that’s when discontent turned to white-hot rage. The King had, in essence, declared that they were not citizens, but subjects without rights to be respected.

Trade was certainly an issue: many of the msot successful Americans involved themselves in American trade with other nations’ colonies. It was, in fact, almost necessary for the colonies to function. Meanwhile, the Crown kept the colonies from building their own industry and manufactures, to keep the colonies from competing with English and Scots merchants. This was another huge sore point.

Now, it may be fairly said that Britain defended the colonies. However, the colonists need never have been involved in the French and Indian war if not for Britain. France had no beef with the, and in fact would prove to be the best ally of the early Republic.

In short, the young America was trying very hard, and wanted very much, to become as great a land as England. They saw themselves as British, and rebelling against an arrogant and dismissive central power is very English. Many fo the founders had been personally insulted by the powers of England - but they did not rebel because of the insults, but because the insults were such a basic part of the attitude of that very British establishment.

*OK, a few Scots, too, but this was still a time when England very much dominated Britain. It was mostly Englishmen making the decisions, not colonists. Now and then the governers appointed were colonists though. Ben Franklin’s son was serving as Royal Governer of New Jersey at the time of Revolution, to which post he was appointed in order to shut up his dad. (Didn’t work, but it created a crushing family feud that completely broke the Franklin family.)

14

You know, you seem like a smart man, Mr. Excellent. So I’m going to give it to you straight. I’m not going to pretend to be outraged by “taxation without representation”. You and I both know that the Patriots can only say this because they have invented a radical new definition that requires voting for representation. We know that we are represented in Parliament now as our fathers and their fathers were before them. Because we are Englishmen. I’m not going to pretend that our colonial assemblies are superior or even equal to Parliament. We are educated so we know the Doctrine of Parliamentary Supremacy. That’s what the Civil Wars were fought over, after all.

No I’m not going to try any sleight of hand or rhetorical tricks. Those are for the poor bastards that will actually have to do the fighting and the dying for our independence. I respect you too much for that. Instead I’m going to lay out the possible futures for you and trust that you’ll see the light. Now I’m sure you’ve heard the talk about how the colonies in America are inevitably going to become independent of London. It’s been going on for years based on the simple fact that our population is doubling every generation. Before too long there will be more Englishmen on this side of the Atlantic.

That talk was especially common during the aftermath of the latest French and Indian war. There was much debate over which to France. Canada or its Caribbean possessions. London chose to turn over the islands instead of the territory of Canada. Why do you think that is? Now clearly those islands produce much much more wealth than what the French were getting out of their northern colony which was basically just the fur trade. So why give them back? It’s not because of the frozen northern lands but because of the lush farmland south of the Great Lakes. Without France to support them the Indians won’t be able to resist our expansion.

And who do you think is going to profit from that expansion? Do you think it will be colonists like George Washington or Benjamin Franklin who have already claimed and marked out lands beyond the mountains. Of course not. Those claims are illegal. That’s what the Proclamation Line of 1763 was about. The French and Indians were not the only obstacles to the orderly transfer of that land into wealth in the pockets of Londoners. We were too. We unruly colonists were in the way of their profits.

This then is their plan. They do not intend to continue to allow us to mostly govern ourselves as we see fit as we have been accustomed to over the years. We will not run things from here for us here. Instead they will run things from London and for London. It’s not enough any more to funnel our trade through their wharves. They want to profit more directly. And if it wasn’t bad enough that they were going to govern us more forcefully they are going to govern us badly. Because they just don’t understand our situation. They look at the tax rates and believe we are getting off lightly. They don’t realize that the trade imbalance they insist on drains us of money. Not only are they wrong to believe we should pay for their Stamp Act (because we are already supporting the nation with our one-sided trade) but they are wrong that we can. We simply did not have enough money to pay for the stamps and would have had to close our courts if we had obeyed the law. These are the kinds of ignorant and arrogant laws we could expect in the future.

But there is another future. One we are fighting for right now. A future where we can control our own destiny. Where we can ship our goods freely and import goods from wherever we can find a better price. Where we can learn to manufacture our own goods instead of buying them from overseas. Where we can expand westward at our pace and to our benefit. Where we won’t have to tithe the best of our produce to our masters. This is the compelling future. You could almost say it is our manifest destiny. Sooner or later we will be independent of London. Population alone makes that inevitable. Now is the time.

(So how did I do?)

15

I thought it was the other way around? See point #3 in this relevant article.

16

The relevant article, by the numbers.

  1. While Franklin did accept the Stamp Act as inevitable and he was representing Pennsylvania (and Georgia at the time as well) in London he was hardly the only colonist in town. That Franklin didn’t understand that there simply wasn’t enough hard money in the colonies to pay the tax isn’t much of an indictment of him or an excuse for Parliament. If they were legislating from ignorance (and pretty clearly they were) then they had no one but themselves to blame.

  2. Taxation in the colonies was light compared to that in England but as I’ve noted, this was a necessity because of the trade system London imposed. Manufactured goods were only supposed to be imported from London. This drained hard money from the colonies. Smuggling was tolerated by British authorities because it was the best way to get hard coin into the northern colonies (which shared the English climate and thus had few resources to export home). You This is how a respectable figure such as John Hancock could be widely known as a smuggler.

  3. The colonists did not ignite the Seven Years War. Europeans considered pretty much anything outside of Europe as uncivilized. If you ventured Out There, you had to expect Shit To Happen. A ship might overpower a ship of an opposing nation if given the opportunity. Or a colonial governor might plunder a neighboring colony. Whether or not the nations were officially at war made little difference. These incidents happened all the time and only blew up into wars if the home governments decided, for their own purposes, to take offense. In this case London was feeling frisky and decided to remove the French from the valuable Ohio region using large numbers of regular troops to the colonies for the first time ever. That escalation caused France to decide the war should resume sooner rather than later.

  4. Here the author is on more solid ground. But by the time the Tea Act rolled around both sides had dug in. The ideological lines had been drawn and the conflict turned on theoretical points. Parliament imposed a nominal tax in order to demonstrate it’s authority to tax the colonies. Colonists protested in order to reject that authority. Neither side understood how far the other was willing to take things.

  5. This one I can’t disagree with though it is worth noting that British attempts to control immigration over the Appalachian Mountains weren’t unpopular with just wealthy colonial speculators. Landless colonists wanted to settle there. Landed colonists wanted the land available so their many children could also acquire land cheaply when the time came. (Not to mention the wishes of the Indians who actually lived there.) I would say that the author is wrong about the lack of Catholic hate. I mean, it was historically significant even within living memory.

17

Well I learned a new thing or two today. That’s why I come here after all :slight_smile: thanks

18

I refer you to This Informative Pamphlet.

There is no better argument.:cool:

19

Relying on Cracked for your history… or for anything at all, is no different than using John Stewart for your daily news. As in, you get a version skewed for entertainment. No, George Washington did not start the French and Indian War. Great Britain did (half-inadvertently) and he happened to be involved in one (and only one) step in the process.

At the time, the border between French and British territory was still being hammered out, while tensions were already rising between those nations. Washington’s orders were to control a specific area, which he did. But the French had a scouting party sneaking around the place, rather a big no-no. Washington took his orders seriously and ambushed the French, and here is where accounts differ.

I find Contrecœur’s account to be improbable. The British had no reason to randomly kill people who’d surrendered, and less reason to kill an officer who’d surrendered. It’s much more likely that the Frech realized they were beat, and tried to surrender but failed to do so before the next volley or two cut through the sound, fury, and smoke of the battlefield (one account also says that an AmerIndian ally of Washington’s killed Jumonville on his own). Regardless, the British took prisoners.

When the French resprisal captured Washington and his troops, they (in a dick move of antiheroic proportion) inserted a clause in French to the effect that the dead Fench commander had been assasinated, which Washington most definitely did not admit to. In fact, he didn’t speak a word of French. Of course, the French then claimed that the heavily armed French scouts captured by Washington were on a diplomatic mission ( :rolleyes: ) etc. etc. we love peace and all that bull, and this became the excuse for the war, etc. But it was coming one way or another, and they simply took advantage of a young British officer to do it. And neither the French nor the British took the accusation that seriously in any case.

What you should understand, too, is that none of this was that unusual, and small skirmishes such as this happened frequently before the French and Indian War. The real cause of the war occurred in Europe, because neither Britain nor France was willing to bend, and the major issue was Quebec, not the 13 Colonies: the French saw the British encircling Quebec, while the British wanted to end a dangerously large French dominion they might use to launch attacks against a very sizable stretch of British North America.

20

Given that the Ohio territory at the time belonged to neither France or Britain you can’t condemn one side for having forces there and not the other. Scouting a position is no less legitimate than occupying one.

The French casualty figures do not support this interpretation. Washington gives them as one wounded and ten killed (actually more were killed). This flies in the face of what we expect to see from such engagements where there are at least double the number wounded as killed and usually more. Washington’s casualties were typical: one killed and several wounded.

The explanation that makes the most sense takes into account the third force in the battle: Indians. The Iroquois leader Tanaghrisson was allied with the English but had every incentive to stir up trouble between the European powers in order to prevent one side or the other from controlling the Ohio region. The report of an Irishman under Washington (who wasn’t at the skirmish but saw the site thereafter) and from a deserter to the French both stated that he personally killed the French leader after a truce had been agreed to. And it was an Iroquois after all who informed Contrecœur shortly thereafter that Washington had slain Jumonville. This interpretation neatly explains why Washington covered up the incident. It was a stain against his honor to have a noble prisoner slain after he had given him quarter.

The man commanding the force that defeated Washington at Fort Necessity was Jumonville’s brother. Washington was lucky to get any terms at all. Had the French and their allies not been low on ammunition they likely would have expended them into the bodies of all of the British in a fit of righteous fury. It’s not as if the French inserted a clause in a foreign language in the surrender terms to trick Washington. They were French. The whole document was in their language. The skill of the one Englishman who could read French is uncertain but given that he had dishonored himself Washington was in no position to quibble whether he knew of the accusation or not. And let’s be plain, the facts indicate that Jumonville was assassinated. That it was done not by Washington himself and against his wishes by someone only nominally under his command made no difference in the matter of honor.

Jumonville’s task was to check on the English forces that had been driven from the Forks of the Ohio. He was given a letter to deliver if he found any requiring them to retire across the mountains. This sort of diplomatic cover for intelligence gathering operations was de rigueur and doubtless was accepted by everyone as such. (Unless they had reason to want to do otherwise.) One of Washington’s qualifications for his military position was that he was familiar with the territory having accomplished a similar mission the year before.

For anyone interested in the French and Indian War, pick up Fred Anderson’s Crucible of War. It was only published in 2000 but it already seems to have become the standard work on the conflict. A really comprehensive and readable history.