Democracy: Different From Independence

A chief cause of the American Revolution was simple distance. If you wrote a letter in New York and sent it to London by sailing ship in, say, 1760, you were unlikely to get an answer before 1761. They wouldn’t get your reaction to their letter much before 1762.
With that much of a time lapse, effective government from London simply wasn’t feasible. It was supposed to happen! But it nearly never did. As a result, American colonists early developed a taste for direct, representational government in a form England would not be able to fully adopt until the 1800s.
It wasn’t that the colonists were more progressive or democratic; it was merely an accident of location that caused them to jump ahead of their English cousins.
Americans voted to elect someone to the colonial assembly and expected him to vote pretty much as he was told to—by his constituents. Many Englishmen had no representation in Parliament.
Colonial governors were paid by revenues raised from their immediate American constituents. This made them far more pliable than officials needed to be in England. (Cut off a man’s paycheck and, however stubborn, he will eventually listen to you.)
In England the feeling about Parliament was: It’s our government; it represents us. In America the feeling became: It’s our government to control.
Englishmen accepted the notion of “virtual government”. There had been no census or reapportionment in centuries. Whole cities had no representative in Parliament. Nearly everyone in the much younger American colonies had a representative sitting in the colonial legislature. “No taxation without representation” made no sense to an Englishman; nothing else was acceptable in America.
When Americans and Englishmen talked at each other in 1776, neither side was hearing or understanding the other. That was a major problem. Now let’s look at other significant causes of The Great War of The American Revolution.
The most important cause came in 1761. The French—whose Indian allies had been terrifying American colonists through four major wars since 1689—were gone. The terrible danger that had kept the colonies afraid to cross the street without holding mama England’s hand, was suddenly no longer a threat. Without this fact, no revolution could have occurred.
Another major cause can only be described as England’s FEAR of America. When Franklin wrote that the center of English speaking power would become the North American continent after the French were gone, a lot of people in London could see his point.
This led to a lot of Parliamentary moves between 1761 and 1775 designed to clip the wings of the colonies. It didn’t help that the British had to be aware of the fact that French agents had traveled through the colonies for two years after 1761, promising to help whenever the colonists wanted to set up their own government. (90% of the rounds Washington’s men fired came from France.)
English ARROGANCE was another significant factor. You’re mere colonials—“wogs” they might have called us in a later century—WE are Englishmen. Bitter resentment burned through the colonies. Some have suggested that if England had broken its rule that no colonial officer could rise about lieutenant colonel and made Washington a general in the 1760s, he might never have revolted.
American love of “the FREE LUNCH”, or our insistence on having our economic cake and eating it too, contributed in a big way to the revolution. England had spent vast sums to defend her American colonists against French depredations in the past four wars. The French and Indian War—which drove France out—had been especially expensive.
She felt it only fair that Americans start paying some of the same taxes English citizens had to pay in support of that war. (Notably the Stamp Tax, universal in Europe.) Americans had been quick to scream for help when the Indians came; they were equally quick to scream when they were asked to pay at least partially for their own deliverance.
The Revolutionary War was really not fought over liberty. We had English liberties as our legal and political heritage—no one anywhere else on the planet enjoyed so much freedom. It was fought over our desire to be INDEPENDENT. That’s something very, very different.
To give you an idea: We are trying to impose democratic liberties on Iraq and Afghanistan. Their insurgents are fighting against this and FOR their right to act independently. Think about that for a moment. Do you see the difference? The men who led us into Vietnam and the Arab world did not.
Americans in 1776 wanted to be shuck of economic and political controls coming out of London. Dreams of controlling the sea routes to the orient had been part of the American dream since 1607. The competition for sea routes and Pacific ports (still thousands of miles away!) may have been the greatest underlying cause. The British considered the rights to the West Coast entirely theirs.
Then we stepped on the sorest English toe of all. We appeared to turn traitor to democracy, which England had and would shed a lot of blood for—against Louis XVI, the Irish, the Stuarts, Napoleon, the Kaiser and Hitler. Now the War of 1776 became an English crusade for democracy.
Like James II, we showed ourselves perfectly willing to ally with French Absolutism to get what we wanted. The French immediately began pouring military supplies into America; 90% of every round fired by Washington’s men came from Absolutist France.
This dependency on the part of the colonists led to the first of two fascinating documents to come out of that war: the very French “Declaration of Independence”. Had we followed the ideas set out in that document by the Francophile Jefferson, our political history might well have been like that of France—chaotic, bloody and completely unrestrained.
But we very fortunately chose to follow the second document—our very British Constitution—which has given us the most stable democracy in the world. IT begins with “We The People … .”
We’ll look next at a comparison of both documents.