Question

What was the American Revolution really about? What turned a colonial revolt over taxes into a full-blown movement to overthrow the British government and create a new nation? How did American revolutionaries justify the momentous act of disobeying and overthrowing the established government and declaring a new nation

Answer 1

The Revolutionary War (1775-83), also known as the American Revolution, arose from growing tensions between residents of Great Britain’s 13 North American colonies and the colonial government, which represented the British crown. Skirmishes between British troops and colonial militiamen in Lexington and Concord in April 1775 kicked off the armed conflict, and by the following summer, the rebels were waging a full-scale war for their independence. France entered the American Revolution on the side of the colonists in 1778, turning what had essentially been a civil war into an international conflict. After French assistance helped the Continental Army force the British surrender at Yorktown, Virginia, in 1781, the Americans had effectively won their independence, though fighting would not formally end until 1783.

For more than a decade before the outbreak of the American Revolutionin 1775, tensions had been building between colonists and the British authorities.

The French and Indian War, or Seven Years’ War (1756-1763), brought new territories under the power of the crown, but the expensive conflict lead to new and unpopular taxes. Attempts by the British government to raise revenue by taxing the colonies (notably the Stamp Act of 1765, the Townshend Acts of 1767 and the Tea Act of 1773) met with heated protest among many colonists, who resented their lack of representation in Parliament and demanded the same rights as other British subjects.

Colonial resistance led to violence in 1770, when British soldiers opened fire on a mob of colonists, killing five men in what was known as the Boston Massacre. After December 1773, when a band of Bostonians dressed as Mohawk Indians boarded British ships and dumped 342 chests of tea into Boston Harbor during the Boston Tea Party, an outraged Parliament passed a series of measures (known as the Intolerable, or Coercive Acts) designed to reassert imperial authority in Massachusetts.

There are three reasons why the American Revolution was justified: a lack of effective representation, the age of the colonies, and the unprecedented nature of the taxes.

English liberty, the phrase that was used to describe what the revolutionaries originally wanted, meant that taxes could only be levied on subjects if they had a hand in crafting them. This was an early version of what is today termed liberalism. The thirteen colonies in British North America had plenty of taxes, they were not – as some conservatives claim – a group of freewheeling, capitalist, libertarian, states, but rather classically liberal in the sense that the colonial governments could tax because they had been elected by the taxpayers. No one in the colonies had elected the governments of Lord North, the Duke of Grafton, the Earl of Chatham, or the Marquess of Rockingham, the four Prime Ministers of Great Britain between 1765 and 1782. Nor did any colonist vote for the parties or members of parliament that would install those men as Prime Minister. Furthermore, none of the colonists – with a few exceptions – had ever seen, let alone met, the king that authorized their governments. In essence, there was no dedicated representation of the colonies in parliament, and no effective way for them to be represented had the British government and crown wanted to seat them.

The second point is that the age of the colonies was in fact, an important part of their desire for independence. By the time of the signing of the Declaration of Independence in 1776, Georgia was the youngest colony, having been formed in 1732. The next youngest were the Carolinas, having been formed in 1712 (but they were far older, having been one colony before that). There were no people alive in New York, Virginia, or Massachusetts, who could remember a time before their colony existed. Throughout that existence, the British crown had allowed the colonies a relatively free hand in managing their own affairs. The imposition of British Parliamentary and Royal authority was done quickly in the period 1763-1775.

Finally, there was the nature of the taxes. The first of the taxes that Britain would levy on the thirteen colonies, were levied in the aftermath of the Seven Years War (known as the French and Indian War in North America). This war had cost Great Britain a staggering amount of money, and had been fought in defense of the colonies. In London, it only made sense to have the colonists pay their fair share of the costs of a war, that the colonists had inadvertently started, and had been beneficial to them. That logic makes sense until one unpacks the fact that there had been North American components to the Nine Years War (King William’s War: 1688-1697), the War of Spanish Succession (Queen Anne’s War: 1702-1713), and the War of Austrian Succession (King Georges War: 1744-1748). These were all known as “French and Indian” wars, and all had been fought and settled without the British turning around and having the colonists foot part of the bill.

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