In hindsight, was the Revolutionary War really justified?

[PlanetaryOrbit]

Yes, there were taxes, British governmental meddling, and many colonists felt denied rights they felt they should have...........but was secession really justified? Were circumstances really bad enough to justify secession?



If you were back then in the 1770s, would you have backed secession or remaining part of Britain?



(This a serious question; not sarcastic.)

[Bluenorthwest]

1. Secession is an act done by equal members in a union to withdraw from that union

The US colonies and other colonies were not equal parts but possessions, which declared independence from the ruling power. That's not secession.

[yuiyoshida]

2. If I was back in the 1770s

I would have been part of the Tokugawa shogunate and hoping my Samurai Husband was making enough RICE to feed our family.

[kwassa]

16. You just can't find a good samurai anymore.

[pangaia]

21. Wonderful !!!!

[Benton D Struckcheon]

27. Heck of a costume.

At the Metropolitan Museum in New York, they have an excellent exhibit of Japanese samurai armor on display, right next to the knights in shining armor. Great stuff.

[yuiyoshida]

29. Oh... I don't know about that....

or..maybe someone a bit younger..

[kwassa]

32. who is that?

I just know the old guys.

[yuiyoshida]

36. The first one is

Ken WATANABE (The LAST SAMURAI)

the second is Takeru Satoh of Rurouni Kenshin (film)

[JaneyVee]

3. Yes I would have fully backed revolution.

[MannyGoldstein]

4. You're in good company

Even though he was as outspoken a critic of Great Britain as anyone, Ben Franklin was extremely skeptical of independence, until summer of 1776 IIRC. The colonies had pretty much the highest standard of living, and the greatest personal freedom, of anywhere in the world.

I suspect I'd be in the same place as Dr. Franklin.

[Zorra]

5. I would definitely have joined the rebels. "Royalty" disgusts me, and I would

never obey or accept the authority of a king or any other "noble".

I left the country during the Bush residency because I refused to live in a country that had an unelected leader.

[AverageJoe90]

6. Speaking as a student of history.....yes, it was.

I know that some of my fellows in the alt-historian writers' community may disagree, but Britain was not truly the super-civilized power that they're often portrayed as. It had its faults. In fact, in many ways, including socially, most of the Founders of this country were quite a way ahead of their time.

One of the key cliches that I find annoying is that Britain would *inevitably* have ended slavery a lot earlier than 1865 as per our world. However, though, one must realize that quite a bit of the non-liberal resistance to slavery was largely motivated by anti-Americanism and not necessarily totally genuine egalitarian, abolitionist feeling. Had the colonies stayed British, it's possible, sadly, at least under certain circumstances, that slavery could actually have lasted until 1900, or even (somewhat) longer.

[Benton D Struckcheon]

35. Actually, the truth is the opposite.

The Somersett decision, in which a slave was freed because he was on British soil, greatly concerned the Southern colonies. The whole point, for them, of establishing the principle that the English Parliament NOT be the supreme law over any laws written in the colonies was to ensure that the principle of the Somersett decision could not be applied in the colonies.
There is a straight line running from that decision to the various documents produced by the Southern states to justify secession in the Civil War. If you look at them, you will notice an angry insistence on the idea that an escaped slave MUST be returned to the owner, even if he has fled into a free state. That was why they objected so heavily to the election of Lincoln, and why they felt they had to secede, because they thought that was in danger under Lincoln. It was the same fear they had during the Revolution re the Somersett decision, as that established the idea that if a slave was brought to a place under English rule where slavery was not in force that slave could be freed.
Up North the motivations were of course completely different. Boston especially felt constrained by having to do all their trading through London, of course their businessmen objected to the taxes imposed, as we all know, and they resented not being able to protect their nascent industries from British competition. Boston and Philadelphia were the Northern centers of revolt because they were the most economically advanced cities in the country at that time. The British were also quite merciless in putting down even the scent of a revolt (as you can see below with their response to an earlier revolt in Virginia; that experience made the British quick to come down hard on any revolts that came after), so you very quickly got into a spiral of retribution as the British cracked down.
So, in the North there was very quickly a ferment for revolt in the two big urban centers of the time, but in the South all those states would not have been so enthusiastic except for the Somersett case.
The folks on the frontier of the time had a constant resentment against the British because they were holding back unfettered settlement so as to keep the deals they made with the Indians intact. In Virginia, there was actually a revolt on this very question exactly 100 years earlier. That was the third source of rebellion against the British.

[AverageJoe90]

39. I'm afraid there's a problem here.

The majority(not all, though, but many) of *conservative* pro-slavery Southerners truly were very much pro-loyalist right up until the war began to end ca. 1780 or so. Somersett had very little to do with the Revolution as a whole, and it was, again, mainly to save their own asses that *conservative* Southerners finally (reluctantly) joined the Rebellion. More liberal Southerners, such as Washington and Jefferson, were either ambivalent to slavery or, in some cases, even wanted it to come to an end eventually. And certainly, virtually all of the Northern Founders wanted it gone as well.

The Somersett decision, I'm afraid, was a bit of a fluke of history anyway, under the circumstances; British support for abolition outside the Northern Colonies in North America was still very much small until after the Revolution and it took the brilliant oration of William Wilberforce and others to really turn the tide, and that wasn't for another couple decades *after* Somersett(the slave trade, in fact, continued until 1807. Only in Britain proper were slaves freed. This did not affect the American colonies or the Caribbean).

Had we lost the war, there is, sadly, a fairly good chance that slavery would *not* have ended earlier than in our world, in the *South of America. Many liberal Britons were indeed genuinely egalitarian for the day but many conservatives mainly jumped on the bandwagon just so they could find another excuse for anti-Americanism, and had it not been for that, it's reasonable to assume that in the rest of the colonies, slavery might have lingered on for another decade, or maybe close to two. Or even three, maybe.

BTW, Bacon's Rebellion had nothing to do with the Revolution, either.....and in fact, the defeat of that uprising actually proved to be a *boon* for slavery as it essentially popularized the concept of hardcore racial divisions in British North America.

[Benton D Struckcheon]

40. Taking them one at a time, bottom up,

1. Bacon's rebellion shows one strain of resentment against the British that survived right up to the Revolution: restraint of unfettered frontier settlement, and the urge to deal with the Indians, rather than just attack and destroy, which most frontier colonists were far more in favor of. That's why I posted it.
2. Bacon's rebellion did indeed harden racial division. No argument there.
3. The Somersett case's effect on the Revolution is controversial, so I'll just leave my argument there. Some think it did, some think it didn't affect the Southern states. I think it did because of the fact the Constitution had written into it the requirement that slaves be returned to their owners regardless of where they were (No person held to service or labor in one State, escaping into another, shall in consequence of any law or regulation therein, be discharged from such service or labor, but shall be delivered up on claim of the party to whom such service or labor may be due), which requirement I believe was written in as a direct consequence of that decision, and because, as I said, the exact same concern resurfaced in the lead up to the Civil War. But these things are very hard to prove.

[Lex]

7. Republicans would've been loyal to the status quo, to the Crown.

They love to keep the rich fat and happy, and the peasants poor. Monarchical rule would've pleased them.

[AverageJoe90]

10. Well, probably more just conservative Southerners than Goppers in general.

The conservative Southerners only bolted because they realized the Patriots would turn on them if they didn't cooperate.....and 4 generations later their great-grandsons started the Civil War.....so no surprises there.

[Lex]

26. Nope. The average Republican still sucks up to the rich. Loves the status quo.

Doesn't matter the region.

[AverageJoe90]

34. I guess so, but I still think a lot of it applies even more to Southern goppers than their Yankee...

counterparts, even if Yankee Goppers often share a lot of the same opinions these days.

[Democracyinkind]

8. It was - the moment we won.

That's how history works. History, and revolutions.

IMHO independence was a good idea and also probably a moral cause. Probably not really worth all the blood though - as always those who actually shed their blood weren't the ones to reap the material benefits. Revolutionary rhetoric seems a bit hyperbolic and hypocritical in hindsight but I'd rather err on the side of independence than colonialism, as a general rule when making normative judgments about historic events.

[Nye Bevan]

9. America would eventually have become independent anyway.

Was becoming independent a few years earlier really worth the war, death and destruction?

[seveneyes]

11. I would have politely asked the British to back off first

I'm not a scholar of Revolutionary War era history, but I seem to recall the British soldiers liked to push Americans around. I sense a parallel with how some police treat normal and innocent citizens today.

Power and fear combined is dangerous.

[LeftyMom]

17. That happened. It did not go well.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olive_Branch_Petition

[AngryAmish]

12. I would have hired Ninjas to kill the king

[Arcanetrance]

13. Considering my family was still in Italy until 1914

I'd have probably been riding around going ciao to everyone

[MFrohike]

14. Yes

The issue wasn't the taxes, but the threat to American trade. The taxes were just a mechanism. The issue was whether Britain could continue to extract resources to their own benefit, not Americans'. It was pure colonial dominance.

[unblock]

15. the revolutionary war split families.

i have a friend whose can trace back his family here since revolutionary times.

for purely family reasons, they the warring-age kids split up and fought on either side, so that regardless of outcome, the winning side could protect the family members on the losing side (and, though he didn't say this, i suspect, the family wealth as well).

[reformist2]

18. If a people want to leave one nation and/or join another, the US should have no issue with that.

[YOHABLO]

19. Seems like Canada made out okay. They got a Parlimentary System and Health care.

[yellowcanine]

22. But did the Revolutionary war influence the outcome in Canada?

Historical outcomes do not happen in a vacuum. That is why this kind of speculation is interesting but not really that useful in understanding what might have happened without a given event.

[LeftyMom]

20. It probably depends a lot on which religious group and social strata you were in.

If you were a poor Catholic farmer you probably had a really different view than if you were a well-connected Anglican trader.

[CFLDem]

23. Yep

Why live like slaves to a distant power, when we could be free?

[ElboRuum]

24. Yes.

[Rex]

25. Depends on who you ask now doesn't it?

I think secession was justified. Even Edmund Burke agreed with the revolution.

[africanadian]

28. You want a Queen who lives thousands of miles away in another country?

As a Canadian, I think it's goddamn ridiculous!

[Nye Bevan]

30. A small price to pay for universal healthcare (nt)

[cthulu2016]

33. No, not even close. It was a land grab.

[FSogol]

37. The Revolutionary War was about oil and fracking!

I heard it on DU.....

[JEFF9K]

38. Too soon!