The Declaration of Independence lists numerous grievances against the crown (I presume specifically King George III). But I had thought that by the 1770s the power of the British monarch was largely a polite fiction, with the King rubberstamping the acts of Parliment that the colonials resented so. Furthermore some of the grievances listed seem like hyperbole (“ravaged our coasts, burned our towns”??). Was George really the author of all this misery, or were the Declarers speaking rhetorically in that the monarch was (theoretically) the one who signed off on all of this?
As I recall from 7th grade history class, Britain regarded the colonies as a source of wealth, obtaining raw goods & other material wealth then turning around and taxing the colonists as well. “No taxation without representation” was a genuine, quite real grievance. Another major factor was where the taxmoney was going: lots of it was going towards the financing of wars that colonists had no interest in, petty ongoing/perpetual european conflicts. The colonists had disparaging local names for these conflicts.
Pinning stuff on the royalty was shorthand but like most political shorthand there are always quite a few who swallow it whole and regurgitate it with sincerity.
It was the landed gentry among the colonists, more than the peasantry or working class etc, who most resented the situation, as many marxists & socialists have remarked in the process of rejecting the American revolution as a “real revolution”. Our decently wealthy folk wanted to have a voice in Parliament and not be sucked dry by taxes and have their interests respected as much as those of any Englishman. (To an extent, our baseline poor had no such expectation to begin with).
There were some heavy-handed attempts on the part of the British gov to establish “law and order” after various expressions of local annoyance, which increased resentments.
Starting our own government as something other than a monarchy was less the cause of the revolution than a product of the times and a thread of idealistic political thought that was circulating and happened to have the support of many of the folks most involved in leading the insurrection.
From what I’ve heard, the Americans understood that the King had limited powers. But they thought it would be more popular to proclaim they were rebelling against a tyrant rather than admit the truth that they were rebelling against a democratically elected Parliament. There some elements of truth to their claims - George III did try to intervene in Parliamentary affairs, he was adamantly opposed to American independence, and Parliament did not let Americans vote on its membership (of course back then it didn’t let most Britons vote either).
Many of the grievances attributed to “the present King of Great Britain” were actually actions by his royal governors, who represented him and acted in his name in the colonies. Consider the very first grievance:
No British monarch had refused royal assent to an act of the British Parliament since Queen Anne. But colonial governors were vetoing bills in the colonies all the time. So yes, this is a grievance against monarchy, but not against King George in person.
Is the Declaration being dishonest, then, in attributing this action to the King? No, not really–the royal governors represented and were conjoined to the Crown, and there was no way to get rid of them without separating from the Crown.
Plus by attributing grievances to the King, they got to refer to him as “he” instead of “his majesty”, which was a calculated slight.
In the interest of fairness, it must be said that 7th grade teachers and 7th grade textbooks don’t always have the most nuanced of positions ;).
While the colonies were more or less unrepresented, they had also had the benefit of benign neglect for decades, wherein they had been extremely undertaxed compared to the average British citizen in the British Isles. Even after the imposition of the new taxes in the colonies in the aftermath of “French and Indian War”, this was still the case, relatively speaking. Britain was financially strapped, partly due to the expense of having to try to defend the colonies in the aforementioned war. Meanwhile any additional taxation back home might have prompted open revolt.
So the government of Great Britain, though hardly blameless in the rather ham-handed and high-handed manner it went about things, did have a somewhat reasonable argument to make.
The guys that wrote those documents weren’t stupid. They had their grievances and they had their agenda. As a history major once told me, “History is an agreed upon lie.” In my assessment, I’d say that they had a much more inspired vision for how the American colonies should be run than the deadheads back in London so they probably did the right thing, no matter how they framed it.
Now what are you going to tell the 5th graders to whom you have to teach American history?
Like most lists of grievances which eventually turn into something else, they were initially asking only for reaction to their complaints and if they had been satisfied by the responses the Crown’s position in North America would probably have remained unchallenged.
The monarch’s role in personal government was rapidly declining at this time but in Lord North, the architect of disaster in the American colonies, the King had a Prime Minister wholly to his liking.
George was tremendously popular in England, but in America has come to be perceived in popular folk memory as a tyrant, for no really good reason other than that the politics of the time required it.
For much of his reign he was too ill to take an active part in government.
Not to derail the thread or anything, but Marxists tend to hold up the American revolution right next to the French revolution as an archetypal example of feudalism-to-capitalism revolution. A real revolution in every sense, just not a Socialist one.
Or as Kipling puts it:
Twas not while England’s sword unsheathed
Put half a world to flight,
Nor while their new-built cities breathed
Secure behind her might;
Not while she poured from Pole to Line
Treasure and ships and men–
These worshippers at Freedoms shrine
They did not quit her then!
So George III did have the power to directly appoint colonial governors, and so he rather than Parliament was responsible for their actions?
Ironically, before Lexington and Concord, many patriots proceeded under the assumption that the King was simply being badly advised by his ministers and would, if only shown the truth, take benign steps to relieve the colonies of Parliament’s heavy-handed rule. The Olive Branch Petition was one example of this mindset.
The King’s disability, though, came after the Revolution, beginning in 1788 (although he’d suffered a brief episode in 1765). Before and during the Revolution, he was a hands-on monarch who was determined to keep control of the colonies. He was much more politically assertive than his immediate predecessors (read David McCullough’s 1776 for some good insights). But British public and parliamentary opposition to the war grew dramatically over time, and by the time of Cornwallis’s surrender at Yorktown, Lord North could see it was all over, and so advised the King. George III gave serious thought to abdication, so closely associated was he with the war policy, but was dissuaded from doing so.
Although the Declaration of Independence is somewhat hyperbolic, and is perhaps as much political propaganda as a principled recitation of grievances, there can be no doubt that the members of Congress who debated and eventually adopted it believed it to be true. They would not otherwise have gambled their “lives, fortunes and sacred honor” with so much at stake. And the Declaration, the Articles of Confederation and the Constitution showed an emphatic rejection of hereditary and politicized monarchy that endures to this day.
On paper, the King certainly had that power. My (imperfect) understanding of Eighteenth Century British politics is that, with respect to royal governors, he exercised it in practice as well. For example, Francis Bernard, the controversial governor of Massachusetts during the Stamp Act crisis, was a “patronage appointment” who “obtained the post by virtue of connections to the king through his uncle”.
Of course, even though personally appointed by the King, once in office the Royal Governor would often find himself enforcing unpopular acts of Parliament (such as the Stamp Act). At some points the authority of King, Parliament, and Royal Governor becomes a little difficult to disentangle.
And, in the Declaration of Independence, the colonists didn’t try. Parliament and royal governors both acted (and still act today) in the name of the monarch even when they weren’t carrying out his express personal wishes. Attributing their action to the King in person made for better rhetoric, and better made the case for separation from the Crown as opposed to a short-term change in policy.
I think it was David McCullough in one of his books who remarked that the American Revolution was actually a textbook case of secession (of the sort that the Confederacy attempted some 80 years later), instead of being a true revolution.
The colonists kept many (most?) of their previous governmental officials. These officials (colonial representatives) simply voted to secede from the British crown.
From what I understood from my government class an AP US History (political history) class we were rebelling against parliament (you know, after that whole issue with the Declaratory Act and “Parliament is supreme and can do whatever we want to you nyah nyah nyah” and whatnot) but figured that may rub people the wrong way trying to denounce a government style (or in this case the style of a certain branch) and then create something that looks at least vaguely like it (and later on, a lot like it) so we masked it by using the monarchy as a scapegoat/shorthand/symbol.
Personally after that class though I don’t really agree with our reasons for the revolution much anyway. I mean, it’s not like they were extorting us with taxes, we were given (relatively) the same taxes as everyone else, it’s just we were used to not having to pay much of anything with the smuggling (i.e. no tariffs) and lack of enforcement/collection of taxes and other random things during the salutary neglect period. (Someone correct me if I’m wrong here, things like this tend to fade after a while) I think the gentry class just wanted something to piss on and what better way than renouncing the mother government and declaring you’re running where you live how you want to run it?
Holy shit! America was a bitchy teenager! 
Yes, but wasn’t the complaint “taxation without representation”? The DofI didn’t complain of over taxation. The forefathers probably anticipated a status (in what would be termed in the current corporate world) of being a “cash cow”.
Good for the signers! They opted to go it alone and that wasn’t without it perils. The early US government had very limited powers to tax and almost found itself broke. The early Federalist would have been content to rejoin the British. Thankfully, the colonies found a way through it. Ironically, had the British not have invaded the colonies would not have found the will to cooperate against the intrusion. “Don’t burn my house down without me fighting back.”
“Taxation without Representation” was a wonderfully snappy line, but (as with most political slogans) one that concealed a far more nuanced issue.
In a very, very, general way, the argument from a British perspective went something like this:
Gross generalisation aside, the whole situation was ridiculously complex. The myriad of factors involved on both sides covered everything from personal power trips and genuine idealism to commercial issues, propaganda and inept officials. Trouble is, as Tamerline pointed out, that kind of detail rarely makes it into the black-and-white place that is a 7th Grade classroom. Particularly when it relates to something so closely tied to the “American Myth.”
Not that we’re immune to that kind of approach to history over here either - Both Cromwell and Richard III still aren’t exactly well represented in the equivalent British classrooms.
Then, of course, after Independence was achieved, the Founding Fathers made it such that the tax-paying residents of the new country’s capital city lacked:[ul]
[li]Any representation in the US Senate. [/li][li]A voting Member of the the House of Representatives.[/li][li](prior to 1964) The ability to vote for President.[/li][/ul]Needless to say, when I – a US-tax-paying Brit – lived in Washington DC, we had a few laughs at the expense of “No Taxation Without Representation!”.
Well, maybe I’m not being nuanced enough, but I think that “You’re not being taxed as much as other people” isn’t a rebuttal of “No taxation without representation.”
What might be an effective counter-argument, though, is… “What do you mean, no representation? You’ve got limited representation, and that’s as much as your taxes entitle you to.” 
(To which the Americans would probably then argue that they only had representation in bodies that didn’t have full decision making powers, and that if the Parliament was calling the shots, then representation only counted if it was there, and anything else was meaningless appeasement.)
Which, in fairness, was pretty much the argument that the British tried to make throughout the whole thing - it was just difficult to communicate from the other side of the Atlantic.
No one has time for complex arguments when they’ve got someone shouting snappy slogans louder in your other ear.
The irony of course was that your average American Colonist had about as much representation as your equivalent British Citizen. It wasn’t Joe American whose situation was likely to improve by representation, it was Joe “Owns 50 Farms” American.