Brief on the American Revolution

The American Revolution

Some scholars have argued that economics and class conflicts caused the American Revolution. However, most experts now endorse the traditional theory that the Revolution was a political conflict, caused by irreconcilable differences about how the American colonies should be governed. By 1776, the British were committed to the view that Parliament must exercise unchallenged authority in all parts of the empire, including the power to tax Americans without their consent. Americans believed that they were entitled to certain fundamental rights, the "rights of Englishmen," which put certain activities beyond the reach of any government.

Inability to compromise on these ideas led in 1775 to an appeal to arms.
Because of the strong bands of law, loyalty, faith and blood uniting the two peoples, many Americans were surprised that a war against the British had occurred. Most Americans believed themselves to be as English as their kin in the mother country, differing from them only in living in another part of the empire. Even on the eve of declaring independence most Americans would have been happy with what is today called "dominion status," which would have meant owing allegiance to the British monarch but otherwise enjoying political autonomy.

Since it began in 1775, the fighting was bloody. The Revolution, concluded by a preliminary peace treaty in the fall of 1782, was, after the Civil War, the costliest conflict in American history in terms of the proportion of the population killed in service. It was three times more lethal than World War II.
The brutality of the war convinced leading American statesmen such as George Mason (1725-1792) that enduring hostility would exist between Britain and America. Mason wrote in the autumn of 1778: "Enormities and cruelties have been committed here, which not only disgrace the British Name, but dishonour the human kind. We can never trust a People who have thus used us, Human Nature revolts at the idea."

Although hostility remained after the war, many Americans continued following British ways as eagerly as ever. In the 1790s one of the two leading American political parties sought a "rapprochement" with Britain -- a powerful testimony to the strength of what Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826), in the Declaration of Independence, called the "ties of our common kindred."