Yep. They decided they wanted a country so badly that slavery was A-OK and every state signed off on it.
They signed and ratified the document. That’s not “staunchly”, that’s “mildly and situationally”.
Anyway, the point stands that the American Revolution was a roaring success for white people and neutral, at best, for everybody who wasn’t white.
I don’t know - would we have the EU and peace in Europe if a unified Germany didn’t first rise up and then get put down, hard, multiple times?
That’s the tack I’m taking, in case it wasn’t obvious - I’m looking at France, and generally Western Europe, today, and seeing if not having had revolutions could possibly have led to a better outcome. I highly doubt it, I can’t think of a much better (realistic) outcome than the EU.
As I understand it, many of the framers expected slavery to die out naturally within a few decades. (The invention of the cotton gin is one reason why it did not.)
As DrDeth noted, it would have been politically impossible to abolish slavery at the time the Constitution was written and still have it be ratified. The choice wasn’t between slavery and no slavery, but between a united country and no USA.
In the short term, I’m not sure how much difference the American Revolution made to people’s lives, whether those people were white or non.
In the long term, there probably is a big difference between how things actually turned out vs. how they would have turned out if the American Revolution hadn’t happened or hadn’t been successful, but it’s very debatable what that difference would have been.
So they consciously decided to do nothing. How would you justify this to a person who was enslaved at the time?
Just because you choose to frame it this way doesn’t make it the right framing. Again, how would you justify this to an enslaved person at a time? “Sorry you’ve got to be a slave until… well… I don’t know, but us white folk need our country.” Slaves were PEOPLE. Slaves were AMERICANS.
Once again, nobody seems to dispute that the American Revolution was great for white people and lousy for everybody else. But folks sure are eager to explain why they’re OK with that state of affairs, and I imagine 100% of them are white.
Yes, I dispute that.
Nobody disputes that slavery was bad for enslaved people. Nobody disputes that slavery continued to exist after the American Revolution. But there’s a large logical gap between that and “the American Revolution was great for white people and lousy for everyone else” that I don’t think you or anyone in this thread has come close to filling in.
Are you suggesting the American Revolution was anything but bad for nonwhite people? It seems to have caused slavery to be abolished even later than it was in the other colonies. That’s unambiguously bad. And I hope you don’t need a cite for the unambiguously bad things it did for Native Americans. Are you suggesting that any of this was good or even neutral for nonwhites?
The only reason anybody can suggest the American Revolution was an unvarnished good is if you buy into the myth that slaves only became people when white people recognized they’re people, and everything that happened before that was just insignificant breaking of eggs for the wondrous holy omlet of having a particular document happen in a particular year to enshrine the property rights of white people.
I’m saying I’m not convinced that the American Revolution itself made things, in general, worse for nonwhite people than they already had it. It may have done so, but it’s not obvious.
The question was about whether a given revolution made things better on balance. It doesn’t have to be unvarnished good. And I hadn’t thought about short vs long term, or revolution vs alternate history if it hadn’t happened. That seems too speculative to reach any conclusion, better to compare to the state before the revolution.
It certainly didn’t make things better (unless, again, you were a white property owner).
If the argument is “we couldn’t have a country without some people remaining slaves”, then this is an admission that your revolution and your country really weren’t anything to brag about.
Can we get back to the OP, maybe?
Question for our Brit dopers: would GB have been better off granting North American colonists full participation in Parliament? I fully recognize that this would have been completely unrealistic to English minds in the 18th century.
What “we”? I addressed the OP, and your only contribution thus far is to complain about what I posted.
Canada was granted its own representative elected assemblies in 1791.
And Virginia’s House of Burgesses and the General Court of Massachusetts Bay Colony both dated back to the 1600s. “Representative elected assemblies” weren’t the point–the Thirteen Colonies generally had those. The point was that the Mother of All Representative Elected Assembles–the Parliament in London–continued to claim the right to legislate for Britain’s colonies, but none of those colonies ever had any representation in that Parliament. This was ultimately resolved by the London Parliament giving up all right to legislate for the “dominions” in the 20th century, and ultimately the break-up of the British Empire (except for the ceremonial tie of the monarchy shared by the “Commonwealth Realms”, and the very loose association of the larger Commonwealth). Britain’s overseas colonies never did get any MPs in London (and Britain’s remaining “overseas territories” still have no representation in Parliament, in contrast to French overseas territories, which have representation in the Senate and National Assembly).
With no Revolution, they would have been slaves as well. That war didn’t free them, but not having the war wouldn’t have changed their status either. Yes, the UK did free their slaves in the 1830s, but that was 50 years after the War ended, so it’s irrelevant. No one in the 1770s could have predicted it. And it’s also quite possible that if there had been no American Revolution, Britain would not have freed the slaves in their colonies at that time.
The truth is, it’s impossible to say with any certainty when or how slavery would have been abolished in the British Empire if the American Revolution had never happened (or did happen, but was put down). Maybe slavery would have been abolished in Virginia and Georgia and South Carolina “on schedule” in 1833, but that’s half a century of butterfly wings being flapped. Maybe, with more slave colonies, abolition would have been a harder sell in the unified Empire. Maybe the move to abolition would have triggered a civil war within the Empire, as it did within the independent USA.
Meanwhile, before the American Revolution, slavery was legal in the British Empire, including in North America from New England to Georgia. In the course of the Revolution, a number of the new states began abolishing slavery, a process that began not only before the Constitution was written, but before the war was even formally over–Massachusetts moved to abolish slavery in 1780, before the Treaty of Paris was even ratified. For the first few decades after the Revolution, it appeared that slavery was on its way out in the United States–an institution that had in one form or another been around for thousands of years, that isn’t directly condemned in the Bible and was never formally repudiated in Christian Europe, and had assumed a new and especially vicious “racial” form in the 16th century with the African slave trade, but that was pretty blatantly at odds with the idea “that that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness”.
After seemingly being “in the course of ultimate extinction” in the Revolutionary era slavery wound up getting deeply re-entrenched in the 19th century United States with the cotton gin and the rise of the new “King Cotton” plantation economy of the Deep South, so deeply entrenched that it took the Civil War to get rid of it.
But in an alternate history in which the Declaration of Independence was never written? (Or was burned by the public hangman, next to the gibbeted bodies of the defeated and executed traitors?) No one can really say what would have happened.
I don’t think that’s how Empire works. The metropole decided, and it was done, there was no “selling”. Like it or lump it. At least, that was the South African experience. Granted, that led to the South African War 70 years later…
All of this is true, and we can’t know what the hypothetical reality would have brought.
What we know is that no American in any position of power cared enough about ending slavery to sacrifice the goal of having 13 united colonies. There were other choices available. How about a union of 6 colonies or 9 colonies? The non-slave states could have simply forged on with their own union with an intent to annex the southern states piecemeal and abolish slavery, whether by diplomacy or by force.
We can’t really know if those options were viable. We do know that they didn’t care enough to even try them. We know the framers were very sure that was the only choice, but what if they were wrong?
We tend to think that the realized version of history was the only possible version, but there’s no way to know that. The only fact we know for certain is that white property owners prioritized the signing of a magic document over the freedom of millions of its people.
And to this day, that choice is heavily defended by those whose interests were protected (white people), and criticized by those who were harmed. Funny how it always works out like that.
That’s an interesting note about France. It seems to me that North American colonies had a higher percentage of settlers from the British Isles, as part of the territory’s total population, than some of England’s other colonies around the globe. And that that might have triggered a desire in Parliament to foster a closer working relationship with the NA colonials. I wonder if anyone ever broached the possibility? And, had it ever been enacted, how much differently history would have turned out (beyond the interesting slavery discussion)?
Considering Britain’s support for the CSA during the Civil War, I think the anti-slavery movement in Britain would have been scuttled if that meant dismantling the slave-dependent cotton industry in an American South that was still part of the empire.