The Non-Revolutionary American Revolution

Today is just the right but reckless time to say that the American Revolution has never rung quite true to me, and this doubt started with questions that refused to go away, about why the Revolutionary War was held in the first place.

The Declaration of Independence clearly says why it was held. The British, as personified by its then king, George III, were guilty of all kinds of constraints on the freedoms of the American colonists, and therefore the Declaration was made to announce that the colonists had ceased to see themselves as British subjects, and instead they were now citizens of a newly formed country of their own.

That's all well and good, but was the yoke of London that onerous upon Boston in Massachusetts and Williamsburg in Virginia as the Declaration made things out to be? That's not so clear.

What violated freedoms were the so-called revolutionaries talking about? Mainly it boils down to two that should still be familiar to us today. In the northern colonies it was taxes, and in the southern it was human rights, which to the colonists included the right to hold people as slaves. So, simply put, in the North the colonists wanted no taxes at all, but if taxes were needed, they wanted the remittances to go into their own coffers and not overseas to the British, and in the South the colonists wanted to be assured that freedom would never be extended to its slaves brought over Africa.

And so it was done.

The northern complaint was much more reasonable than the southern, but as it was hard to do anything against the British without the South, the northerners went along. And just a few years later, in 1805 or thereabouts, the British abolished slavery wherever it still had authority and started intercepting slave ships, but in the U.S. slavery continued uninterrupted for decades longer, and eventually became a big boil that burst into the Civil War, during which slavery finally ended in the U.S., though the resentments over it continue to this day.

So was the American Revolution a revolution at all, when its motives were not that revolutionary, and, furthermore, when it didn't occur between the forces that are usually present in revolutions? True revolutions take place between two groups of citizens of the same country and on the home soil. Look, for instance, at the French Revolution that preceded the American, and at the Russian Revolution and the Cuban Revolution. In those revolutions no new nations were formed. Most of the French stayed in France, when they weren't following Napoleon around hassling the rest of Europe, and there was no New France outside of France. Most of the Russians stayed in Russia, when they weren't recoiling during and after World War 2, and there was no new Russia outside Russia. And most of the Cubans stayed behind in Cuba, and there has been no new Cuba, outside of a neighborhood in Miami. But in the American case, the forces didn't fight in the British Isles. All the fighting took place in distant North America, and there a big new country was formed and started growing by such leaps and bounds that quite soon it dwarfed Great Britain.

Or rather, the U.S. had already existed for a while before the Declaration, and with the War it finally emerged into plain sight with all the trappings of new nationhood, with its own capital, its own political system, its own currency, and, if I might also say, its own language, plus all the rest of the bit.

So, looked at in that way, the American Revolution was not a revolution at all. It was instead just another war between what had already become two distinctly different countries, fought by one nation to kick out another country's gendarmes, who had overstayed their leave but didn't know it.