Created By: Volunteer JW Boston
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It’s estimated 50,000 convicts were sent to America prior to the Revolutionary war. Other’s chose to leave to pursue religious freedom. This did not build a base of citizens who felt strong loyalties to British rulership. While many took pride in being British and appreciated the support in protecting the fledgling colony, many had already proved rebellious in one way or another in their original emigration to the Americas for a fresh start.
“Up until then, each colony had its own government which decided which taxes they would have, and collected them,” explains Willard Sterne Randall, a professor and author of numerous works on early American history, “They (Britain) felt that they’d spent a lot of blood and treasure to protect the colonists from the Indians, and so they should pay their share.” The colonists didn’t see it that way. They resented not only having to buy goods from the British but pay tax on them as well. Ultimately Benjamin Franklin convinced the British to rescind the first taxes, but that only made things worse. “That made the Americans think they could push back against anything the British wanted,” Randall says.
“The southerners were totally dependent upon the English to buy their crops, and they didn’t trust the Yankees,” Randall explains. “And in New England, the Puritans thought the southerners were lazy.” At the start, it was unclear whether the southern colonies, whose interests didn’t necessarily align with the northern colonies, would be all in for a war of independence. Many of the Founding Fathers including George Washington opposed the Coercive Acts but still wished to remain part of the British Empire. What they took issue with wasn’t the empire itself but Parliament’s treatment of the colonies, sometimes making egregious comparisons between this and their own treatment of enslaved people. This was in no way fighting for freedom as colonial legislatures denied women, free blacks, and propertyless white males the right to vote.
What unified these divided colonies to declare independence? Racism! Britain offered African Americans their freedom if they took up arms on the loyalist side. This “stirred up fears of a slave insurrection in the South,” Randall says.
John Adams wanted Americans to know just how astounding it was that America even attempted to declare independence. Getting all thirteen colonies to reach this same, momentous decision, Adams remembered, was “certainly a very difficult enterprise” and “perhaps a singular example in the history of mankind.” Colonists really didn’t know or particularly like one another. They fought with each other all the time. But something phenomenal happened in 1776. “Thirteen clocks were made to strike together—a perfection of mechanism which no artist had ever before effected.” Adams was bragging, subtly suggesting that the work he, Jefferson, Franklin, and the Continental Congress did was pretty much a miracle. This magical way of thinking created an attractive, exceptional origin story for the United States. But it covered up the work that Adams and his colleagues undertook at the time. That work was about publicizing stories to make Americans afraid of British-sponsored slave “insurrections” and Native “massacres.” He was hiding just how important race was to the founding. Patriot leaders found one thing that white colonists shared: racism. The founders embraced and mobilized colonial prejudices about potentially dangerous African Americans and used those fears to unite the colonists in one “common cause.” We know this because they cropped Jefferson’s antislavery sentiments but kept the accusation of ‘instigated insurrections. Yes, it’s written right into the Declaration of Independence as a grievance against King George for inciting enslaved and Native peoples or “domestics” to potentially join the King to destroy American liberty.
It was one thing to win the Revolutionary war, even to defend independence in the war of 1812, but to establish a government that would last was quite an undertaking. American Founding Fathers wanted to avoid the corruption and include transparency and accountability. However, they had already failed to put together a functional government when the Articles of Confederation failed. There haven’t been many historical examples of a second chance, but they had one, and built a Democratic Republic. The origin of a Democratic Republic is actually Greek, and the American version was an experiment. At the end of the Constitutional Convention, George Washington said, "I do not expect the Constitution to last for more than 20 years."
New-York Daily Tribune wrote on Nov 27,1860 “The social, and especially the political institutions of the United States, have, for the whole of the current century, been the subject in Europe, not merely of curious speculation, but of the deepest interest. We have been regarded as engaged in trying a great experiment, involving not merely the future fate and welfare of this Western continent, but the hopes and prospects of the whole human race. Is it possible for a Government to be permanently maintained without privileged classes, without a standing army, and without either hereditary or self-appointed rulers? Is the democratic principle of equal rights, general suffrage, and government by a majority, capable of being carried into practical operation, and that, too, over a large extent of country?”
Not only did they not expect their works to survive, but they didn’t want it to continue indefinitely. This is why Thomas Jefferson spoke about the Constitution lapsing every 19 years, so that one generation could not bind another. While the founding fathers were very religious and looked to imbue the constitution with bible principles of equality and freedom, they were unsure of what a government ‘of the people, by the people, for the people’ would truly look like in the long term and if it would survive. They certainly never envisioned exactly how that government did fit the bible’s timeline, or that it would gain the power that it has. (Visit Yale University in CT where volunteers offer a bible tour on site for more on the founding fathers and their guiding principles.)
-Source Links-
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/11/books/review/alan-taylor-american-revolutions.html
https://news.stanford.edu/press-releases/2020/07/01/meaning-declaratnce-changed-time/
https://time.com/6077468/united-states-1776-racism-slavery/
https://www.history.com/news/american-revolution-causes
https://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/ows/seminars/revolution/Adams-Niles.pdf
https://wol.jw.org/en/wol/d/r1/lp-e/102001089?q=america+revolutionary+war&p=par
https://www.loc.gov/exhibits/creating-the-united-states/road-to-the-constitution.html
This point of interest is part of the tour: Boston and The Dual-Powered King of the South
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