In hindsight, was the Revolutionary War really justified?

[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.