Americans - Keep the torch of British liberty aflame!

[AndyDT]

https://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/danielhannan/100046044/happy-independence-day-to-all-my-american-readers-keep-the-torch-of-british-liberty-aflame/

I know that American historians tend to write up the Revolution in flag-waving terms, as a national rising – as, indeed, a War of Independence. But this interpretation depends on disregarding a great deal of what the patriot leaders were arguing at the time.

They saw themselves, not as revolutionaries, but as conservatives. All they were asking for, in their own minds, was the rights which they had always assumed to be theirs as freeborn Englishmen. Only when the rupture had become inevitable did they begin to use nationalist arguments; and, in the way of these things, those arguments were backdated once the Republic had been secured.

Even during the fighting, few Americans saw Britain as a foreign country: hence the complaint, in the Declaration of Independence, about foreign mercenaries. In his study The Cousins Wars, Kevin Phillips approaches the conflict more realistically as a civil war within a common polity. Indeed, in so far as we can infer these things from the available data, public opinion in Great Britain seems to have been similar to that in the colonies: in both cases, around a third of the population were Tories.

Thomas Jefferson, whose bust stares at me as I write this blog, had wanted to include a touching phrase in the Declaration, but his fellow authors excised it: “We might have been a great and free people together”

[Perpetual Change]

I actually brought a similar point to this up during the 4th of July to my family. Honestly, if the British had just given the colonies the same power of any other provincial rulers, I'd say things would have worked out a lot better for everyone involved. And the major political and pro-freedom social legislation would come a lot quicker.

That's just me, though.

[Orbert]

That's how I've always understood it, and I didn't realize that there was much variation.  The colonists were being treated like dirt in quite a few ways, and all they wanted were the rights and respect afforded other English colonies.  When it was made clear that they weren't going to get them, they said "Fuck you then, we're autonomous.  We declare ourselves independent."