"July 4 Reflections on the Revolution " Topic

Interesting article here.

"…The colonists could not complain about laws limiting manufacturing in the colonies to protect the jobs of British workers. After all, these laws were regularly circumvented. Smuggling was easy to do and officials were often easy to bribe. In 1764 Parliament passed the Sugar Act but it was never enforced. In 1765 it passed the Stamp Act but Crown officials were assaulted and intimidated into ignoring it and it was repealed the following year amid cries from America that "taxation without representation is tyranny". That, of course, was a pretty phrase for propaganda purposes but nothing more as is made clear by the fact that when Benjamin Franklin was sent to London as a sort of envoy for the American colonies, he was given strict instructions not to accept any deal that gave the colonies representation in the House of Commons because they knew full well that, if they had such representation, with their much smaller population they would be easily outvoted. So, they would be doomed to democratic defeat while also losing a valuable propaganda tool. In 1763 the act was passed to limit the American colonies to the land east of the Appalachian mountains with that to the west being reserved for the Indians. It hardly seems draconian considering how sparsely populated the colonies were but it angered the land speculators who wanted to take the land from the Indians to obtain an immense fortune for themselves. The Navigation Acts were widely ignored and never fully enforced, the Quartering Act was resented but it makes American rebels seem anything but patriotic to protest so heavily against providing shelter for troops stationed in America to protect them from French and Spanish encroachment. Likewise, the Townshend Acts were quickly repealed, save for the duty on tea which, as we know, led to the famous "Boston Tea Party".

Nothing better illustrates how ridiculously overblown the fomented outrage of the colonial rebels had become. Consider the fact that, even while paying the miniscule tax on British tea, the American colonists would still have been paying less than they did for Dutch tea smuggled into the colonies illegally. They had become so entrenched in their idealism that they were actually acting illegally, destroying private property in protest to paying *less* for an item than they normally paid. It obviously does not take much intelligence to see that these people were not being driven by practical reality, they were not being oppressed and they were not suffering under the ‘authoritarian' rule of King George III. If anything, the colonies had done extraordinarily well under the benign neglect of the British government. It was only after they acted out so, again, in order to pay more for foreign tea as opposed to paying less for British tea, that Parliament passed acts intended to punish the port of Boston and force the rebel leaders to pay for the private property they had destroyed in their little tea party. This resulted in the calling of the first Continental Congress which voted to boycott all British goods and which saw Patrick Henry declare, "give me liberty or give me death!" He might have said, "give me liberty and more expensive tea or give me death" but that wouldn't have sounded so stirring. If more people were able to look at this period dispassionately they might recognize the absurdity of someone boasting of his willingness to sacrifice his own life rather than buy tea at a cheaper price or to make restitution for vandalism.

The result of all this was the passing of the Restraining Act and finally the outbreak of war in 1775 with the skirmishes at Lexington and Concord. It does make one wonder how a country could ever come to be such an economic powerhouse that started out by demanding the freedom to overcharged. Then again, it is also rather amazing that the United States was to become the premier military power of the world when the military record of the colonists in the War for Independence left so much to be desired. They were defeated at Bunker Hill in the first major battle, invaded Canada but were totally defeated at Quebec. They managed to bluff the British into evacuating Boston but when the British army returned for the major campaign, British troops under General Howe bested Washington and his Continental Army time and time again, driving them across Long Island, capturing New York City, then White Plains and then Fort Washington. Only at the end of the year and the beginning of 1777 did Washington manage to win any victories with two skirmishes against small detachments of British troops at Trenton and Princeton, retreating quickly in the aftermath…"
Full article here
link

Amicalement
Armand

Sour grapes? Only the British defeated the British.

Perhaps this explains everything:

YouTube link

The obstinate old ..

In 1843 Captain Levi Preston of Danvers, Massachusetts was interviewed about what motivated him to engage the British in Concord on April 19th 1775. I think he pretty much sums up the American War of Independence very well.

"What did I go for?" Were you oppressed by the Stamp Act? "I never saw any stamps, and I always understood that none were ever sold." Well, what about the tea tax? "I never drank a drop of the stuff, the boys threw it all overboard." I suppose you had been reading Harrington, Sidney, and Locke about the eternal principle of Liberty? "I never heard of these men. The only books we had were the bible, psalms, hymns and the almanacs." Well then I am not understanding what was the matter? "Young man, what we meant in going for those Redcoats was this. We always had governed ourselves and we always meant to. They didn't mean we should."
Cpt. Levi Preston

First modern asymmetrical war. OP don't get it.

Really interesting view on the war which may offend some and reassure others. And it's always interesting to hear from a man who was there.
I remain a republican at heart and Thomas Paine wrote well on the monarchy (and I will visit the White Hart when I retire).
The last word should surely come from from that arch tyrant, George III himself. In 1785 he told John Adams that though he was the last man in England to consent to the separation of America and Great Britain, he would be the first to meet the friendship of the United States as an independent power.
The man was clearly not the mad German so beloved by some of our humorists nor the despot of Thomas Jefferson, but a man who believed in a balanced constitution and who, so I'm told, had a great regard for one Benjamin Franklin.