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
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.
[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
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