sábado, 9 de diciembre de 2017

American Revolution: An inevitable consequence?

American Revolution:
An inevitable consequence? 
In this essay I am going to discuss about how important the American Revolution was in the development of the British colonies during the eighteenth century and also see if it was an unavoidable fact or not in the evolution of themselves. With this in mind, this essay will be seen from two different perspectives: the American and the English one. Moreover, my proposition is to see the change of mentality of the colonials regarding to Great Britain.

            According to Knott the paradox of the mainland colonies is that they were increasingly becoming more culturally integrated to Great Britain on the very eve of the independence. The Seven Years’ War transformed the idea of a decentralized British Empire into a relation based in trade, military alliance and the administration by a protector-king. This change of mentality would later affect British literature during the Romantic period, when there was a big nationalistic movement because of the British Empire. This was the reason why colonialists claimed their British identity, which allowed in among other freedoms: loyalty to the crown in the British Parliament and the practice of Protestantism. The rise of professions, the spread of newspapers, new commercial trades and the idea of social aspirations brought eastern colonies to a bigger proximity with Britain. The devotion to the British royalty doing similar festivities also provoked a similar sensibility to the crown. [1]
Nevertheless, as Knott says in his book, British ideas used in Great Britain against their own monarchy as “no taxation without representation” or “liberty and property” were after used by colonial patriots between the decades of 1750 and 1760 that collected the complaints of the colonists of the Thirteen Colonies towards the British authorities. All this sentimentality combined with the absence of any type of aristocracy and no frontier experience, as in the case of America, brought to the elite and middle-class colonial society from the 1760s, a revolutionary and reformist spirit, that is to say, the idea of becoming a nation (medicine and print will be crucial transatlantic conduits to make this sensibility possible).
In the case of America this new sensibility divided the population in two different bands. On one side there were, as I mentioned before, the patriots, people of the American colonies who wanted to gain the independence from Britain creating instead of this, the United States. These states will be composed by the thirteen American colonies. And on the other side, the loyalists, people who wanted to stay part of Great Britain and conserved their British citizenship. Loyalists will be a fundamental piece for the mediation between Britain and the colony.[2]
Patriots
In relation to what Spalding says, patriots at the beginning of the American Revolution were conscious that their Puritan ancestors were already looking for their freedom when they first came to America. They considered themselves as the descendants of Oliver Cromwel’s army, Cromwel and Puritan army appeared in a time in which army conflicts were very common. Thomas Jefferson was one of the main precursors of this belief in which"the laws of nature and of nature's god” (The Declaration of Independence) preserved the Puritan tradition. Moreover, not only Jefferson and his patriot colleagues were aware of this revolutionary Puritan provenance, also loyalists, who dissolved the House of Burgesses on May 26, 1774, when patriots were illegally planning their revolutionary movement. This means that since that moment all these Puritan ideas came to play a very important role for the revolution. Paradoxically, this religion, which once pretended to be used to reform the Anglicanism in England (really approached to royal power), was now being used against them.[3]
Boston Massacre
In the military aspect of the Revolution it’s important to mention the Massacre of Boston, an incident between the population of Boston and the 29th regiment of the British army in America. The conflict happened because Boston inhabitants didn’t like the presence of majesty’s troops in their cities, so they organised a riot against them (pretending to take king’s chest and kill its sentries). Despite this fact, Preston, the leader of the regiment, told soldiers not to fire against the population. Unfortunately, in the middle of the protest with the shouting, the American inhabitants throwing snowballs and using clubs against soldiers, some British army soldiers fired without orders to the population, killing three people and two more people later, because of wounds. Preston was judged, but finally found innocent. This event would be another fact to take into account to understand the mentality of the colony was changing towards Britain.[4]
Loyalists
On the other band of the Revolution there were the loyalists, who, according to Calhoon, were in the middle of all these changes, being still loyal to England. The most important revolutionary conflicts appeared because of Great Britain’s decisions in the 1750s and the 1760s of centralizing the territory control over the colonies. Decisions as the Stamp Act[5] or the use of Townshed duties revenue to pay Crown officials’ salaries were some of the conflicts that loyalists supported. These important colonials held positions as royal governors, judges and attorneys generals. Nevertheless, loyalists were in the very difficult situation of defending British parliamentary statutes, which they found harmful for the well-being of the Empire, as for instance: prosecuting patriot activists or using British troops to enforce civil laws, and at the same time, wanting to preserve a peaceful stability in the relationship between the colony and the mainland. [6]
Moreover, doing these actions, they also had to promote crown ideas and beliefs, as for example, parliamentary supremacy of the mainland, the British Empire being the Mother country of the colonies or the colonial prosperity thanks to British credit, among other ideas. Loyalists didn’t believe in the British parliamentary supremacy, but they considered British legislature and Constitution as the bases of the British Empire. Conscious of the commercial fragility within the Empire, they protected British militia and supported commercial trade with Great Britain. Loyalists, therefore, tried to avoid an ideological conflict between the Crown and the colonies. When it finally occurred with the incident of the Boston Tea Party[7] at the very end of 1773 they began to see the big alienation between the colony and the empire.[8]
The Revolution did not only affect British institutions in America, but it also extended to all domains in which there was a colonial-imperial relationship. As well, it is important to mention that The Revolution occurred in a really diverse society composed by European immigrants and their descendants, Native American Indians, African American slaves and free slaves. So when the royal governor of Virginia called slaves of rebellious planters to win their liberty, eight hundreds of them fought for the Empire. They even feared that thousands of others would also want to fight in order to win their liberty. In the case of Native Indians, British cultivated them for the purpose of fighting against the French and they also discovered that through diplomacy they could obtain Indian lands needed for the colonial expansion (Indians feared between being British allies or staying neutral).[9]
The Declaration of Independence
The moment of the Revolution was arriving and all colonies need to agree to declare the independence of the colonies, it is for this reason that during the spring of 1776, localities and groups of ordinary Americans, as New York mechanics or South Carolina grand Juries among others, adopted the resolutions of the independence. This encouraged the Continental Congress to assemble a five-member committee to draft a formal declaration of independence. Thomas Jefferson wrote it and the other four members supervised and edited it. Radical ideas as “all men are created equal having inalienable rights” or the “Declaration of Sentiment appeared in it. Despite the fact of being so utopian (because American History shows the repeated injuries done to this declaration along its history), the 4th July 1776 the United States of America declared the independence from Great Britain. In this declaration they explained the reasons why they wanted to be independent: one of the main reasons is that they believed that British government is not untouchable, and when it doesn’t represent all the population, it needs to be changed. Other reasons were the unfair taxes imposed to them, the King of England (they considered he was a history of repeated injuries), or British aristocracy.[10]
This essay has discussed about the different points of view on the causes of the Revolution. Despite all the causes I have mentioned throughout the entire essay, it is   true that nothing in history is inevitable and America could still be part of the British Empire. However, taking into the account how Great Britain treated its colonies, the absence of an a hierarchic society, the wish of American people to become a nation and the fact of being so far away from the United Kingdom, made impossible that this relationship would have continued as it was before the Revolution started. Naturally, the American Revolution served as a precedent not only for other British colonies, but also for the rest of them around the world, changing their mentality towards the colonizers.

Bibliography
An Account of a late military massacre at Boston, or The consequences of quartering troops in a populous town. Boston: Digital History Eighteenth Century Collections Online, 1770.
Calhoon, Robert M., Barnes, Timothy M., and Davis, Robert Scott. Tory Insurgents : The Loyalist Perception and Other Essays. Carolina: Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2010.
Declaration of Independence . Digital History, 1776.
Knott, Sara. Sensibility and the American Revolution. North Carolina: Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012.
Spalding, James C. “Loyalist as Royalist, Patriot as Puritan: The American Revolution as a Repetition of the English Civil Wars.” Cambridge University Press , September 1976: 329-340.




[1]Knott, Sara. Sensibility and the American Revolution. North Carolina: Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012. 1 
[2]Knott, Sensibility and the American Revolution, 2-3
[3]Spalding, James C. “Loyalist as Royalist, Patriot as Puritan: The American Revolution as a Repetition of the English Civil Wars.” Cambridge University Press , September 1976: 329-340.
[4]Account of the Boston Massacre, 1770
[5]Act of the British Parliament that imposed a direct tax on the American colonies and that required the use of British stamps and British stamp papersin many colonial printed manuscripts.
[6]Calhoon, Robert M., Barnes, Timothy M., and Davis, Robert Scott. Tory Insurgents : The Loyalist Perception and Other Essays. Carolina: Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2010. Introduction xii
[7]An act of protest in which the American settlers destroyed an entire shipment of tea sent by the East India Company of Great Britain due to the high taxes imposed by the British and in response of the Boston Massacre. It is also considered as one of the biggest precedents  of the Independence War
[8]Calhoon, Introduction to: Try Insurgents, xiii- xiv
[9]Calhoon, Introduction to: Try Insurgents, xiii- xiv
[10]Declaration of Independence, 1776