"Was it a mistake?" Topic

Interesting article.

link

OC, there's a pit, with over-head protection, a little to your left, mate.

Feel free to use it, if necessary.

I don't agree with it. I just thought it brought up some interesting points. Don't shoot the messenger! The British did all they could to push the Colonist away. They made the mistake. Treated the colonist like step-children. All they wanted were the rights as Englishmen.

Oh, not another "if only the United State hadn't happened" article. I thought Tango had already posted links to every one ever written. ("Just for interest" of course--but every time, the imagined world is a better place with less freedom and more bureaucrats.)

You want to know what REALLY would have happened without a c. 1775 American Revolution? The British would have continued wiping out local representative governments, granting land in huge blocks to absentee landlords in London, eliminating trial by jury when they didn't like the verdicts and treating the entire continent as an oversize version of their Irish piggy bank. The eventual North American uprising would have made 1798 Ireland and France in the Terror look like models of restraint.

Stability would have looked like the Directory, and 19th Century North America would have resembled 19th Century Latin America--without the example of a functioning limited government anywhere. But no one links to that future.

And the only reason I'm being even this polite about it is that thie is as far from miniatures as it's possible to get and still post on TMP. I don't want to encourage it.

Interesting article. It's my belief, that if England had given the colonies representation in parliament that the revolution may have never happened, because all they really wanted was to be recognized as Englishmen and treated as such….a simple thought I know, but it's mine. My answer to your question is no, the revolution was not a mistake.

Agree with cavcrazy from what I have read through the years. Democracy had been progressing through English history. Giving the Colonists would have been a next step. I understand robert piepenbrink's issue, but given communications and distance, and the Colonists' propensity to take charge of their own politics, they might have been able to change the course of England's way of treating colonies or Ireland.

What would have been lost is the inalienable natural rights principle of the Declaration and the Bill of Rights. The world would be far less free without that.

Also, guns. An unarmed society is all but helpless against those who will regulate us for our own good.

We will have no King but Jesus.

Crouch down and lick the hand that feeds you. May your chains set lightly upon you , and may mankind forget that ye were our countrymen.

With respect, rustymusket, not a chance. Crown and Parliament had been instituting a whole string of measures since the end of the French and Indian Wars--failing to renew charters, establishing new colonies without elected representatives, making block grants of land to influential Englishmen to reduce Americans to tenant farmers who would have been unable to vote anyway--not to mention the effort to tax American newspapers out of existence. There was appoximately zero interest in extending "the rights of Englishmen" to the colonies. That wasn't what colonies were for. Take a good look at 18th and early 19th Century Ireland to see what the next phase would have looked like, and contemplate regiments sent to America--as some were--fresh from suppressing unrest in Britain. Ask Ochoin about the Highland Clearances.

Even losing America wasn't enough. The Brits had every intention of maintaining the same system in Canada until local officers pointed out that not even the Tory refugees would put up with it--and they were armed and organized. Canada isn't what the US might have become without a war: post-1783 Canada was the package of concessions the Brits finally put in place to avoid losing the entire continent.

Things change later, in response to the American and French Revolutions and to the Chartists. But Britian in 1775 is by no means on a democratic trajectory.

Now can we get back to miniatures? No one pays me to lecture on US history these days.

Robert, yes

My comment on this is simply the following observation:

The war did not start until the government came for the Colonists' guns. And not just hunting weapons, but actual devices only usable in war— to whit, cannon.

Thus the first right actively protected in the American Revolution was neither the right to representation, freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of religion, trial by jury, the right to remain silent, the right to peaceably assemble, or the right to real property, but the right to keep and bear arms.

So, in honor of that right, put forth the Battles of Lexington & Concord, complete with the devastating retreat to Boston. Have your Minutemen make a stand at the Bridge, and change the world.

You know the rest. In the books you have read how the British regulars fired and fled, how the farmers gave them ball for ball from behind each fence and barnyard wall, chasing the redcoats down the lane then over the fields to emerge again under the trees at the bend of the road and only stopping to fire and load.

No matter what they say, no matter what excuse they give, anyone who tries to disarm you means to make you his slave.