From The American Way of Strategy,
Many people remember vaguely that the American Revolution had something to do with taxes. A few remember that the issue was whether the power to tax lay with London or the American colonies. But this was a surrogate for the real issue: preserving the American way of life.
In the first two-thirds of the eighteenth century, the British colonists in North America developed a distinctive way of life quite different from that of their British cousins. Something like Britain’s aristocratic society endured in the South and parts of the Northeast. But in general, colonial society was characterized by a degree of middle-class prosperity and widespread property ownership unknown in any other society in the world. Not only were America’s yeoman farmers, artisans, and merchants better off than most Britons and Europeans, but also the cost of government was much lower.
The trouble began in the aftermath of the French and Indian War (Seven Years’ War) of 1754-63. The British imperial government insisted that the colonists pay more of the costs of their own defense. The colonists, however, feared that the London parliament was trying to destroy the system of colonial self-government that had grown up in the preceding generations. They remembered that the London parliament had destroyed the Scottish parliament in 1707 (it would eliminate the Irish parliament in 1801). They feared that the same thing was now happening to them. They would pay ever higher taxes, even as their colonial assemblies lost authority to the London parliament. As a result, British North America might come to resemble Ireland or Scotland, impoverished countries were absentee landlords held vast tracts of land and where major decisions were made by well-connected aristocrats and merchants in London with little or no accountability to the people whom they ruled.
<snip>
This history may be familiar but the point is not. For Americans, the independence of the United States from Britain and its organization as a democratic republic was a means to an end, not an end in itself. The end was the safeguarding of the communal right to self-government and the individual liberties that the British settlers in America had already enjoyed for generations under British rule. Americans adopted their own strategy for defending the American way of life against imperial centralization – independence as a democratic republic – only because their first choice, self-government within a federal monarchical empire, was rejected. Democratic republicanism and national independence were only two of several possible methods for preserving what by 1776 was the traditional American way of life, characterized by personal liberty, widespread property ownership, low taxes, and an inexpensive military.
silenus
December 17, 2006, 4:12pm
23
You’re not the boss of us! We can take care of ourselves and do things on our own! Ever since [del]1776[/del] [del]1812[/del] [del]1861[/del] [del]1917[/del] 1945! So there!
Frank
December 18, 2006, 10:34am
25
It’s a legend. The actual debate was on whether to publish translations of the law in German.
For perspective, see these two ongoing threads about how and why the British Empire, in OTL, declined and fell.
If it had included America, would it still be around?
