Three Myths About the American Revolution You Might Still Believe
As we approach the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, let’s clear some cobwebs of misunderstanding out of our collective historical attic. I have written a longer piece, which appears as a note on the Andersen Institute website, entitled “Why America Fought a Revolution.” Here I focus only on a few common but incorrect beliefs worth drawing attention to.
Myth One: It’s About Taxation
Many Americans are taught that the Revolution was fought because of the high tax burden imposed by the British, which produced complaints about “taxation without representation.” That phrase actually was a reaction to the Stamp Act of 1765, an unprecedented internal tax that had been passed by Parliament. In response to American protests, the Stamp Act was repealed in 1766.
In its place, the British enacted tariffs in 1767, which displeased the colonists, but were not easily overturned, given that enacting tariffs was a traditional imperial power, one that Benjamin Franklin has described as unobjectionable in testimony to Parliament in 1766 (in contrast to internal taxes like the Stamp Tax). The 1767 tariffs were small, and overall, Americans are estimated to have paid taxes only one-twenty-sixth those paid by Englishmen. The word tax appears in the list of 27 grievances in the Declaration—but only once, in grievance 17. One cannot plausibly point to taxation as the main issue that gave rise to the Revolution.
It was the Tea Act of 1773 that started the conflict that eventually became the Revolution. It was a response to declining economic performance by the British East India Company. The Act permitted the Company to ship tea directly to the Colonies, which reduced the price of tea. American merchants—especially New Englanders—played a major role in the trans-shipment of tea from Britain to America, and many faced ruin as the result of the Tea Act.
Americans resented that Parliament had given little weight to their own merchants’ interests, and in solidarity, colonists throughout America organized tea boycotts and prevented its unloading. Unlike those perpetrating the Boston Tea Party of 1773, however, they did not destroy tea shipments.
The Boston Tea Party led Britain to pass what Americans labeled the Intolerable Acts of 1774, which closed Boston Harbor, shifted important powers away from Colonial legislatures, and changed the jurisdiction of local courts—preventing them from trying royal officials that suppressed riots—and limited the right of assembly in trouble-making Massachusetts.
In 1774, Britain also limited Westward expansion (a major source of its expanding costs of military protection). It transferred control of lands above the Ohio River to royal officials in Quebec. Many American founders were active Western land speculators adversely affected by the act, which reduced prospects for land development.
The Revolution was not a response to high taxes, but rather to losses of longstanding political and economic rights—which had been present for many decades and had been a major attraction of North America to immigrants from Britain and Europe.
Myth Two: Americans Were Violent Hotheads
You might think—especially with the example of the Boston Tea Party in mind—that America was a bastion of violent hotheads looking for a fight. Not so. Although prominent Bostonians, such as Declaration signers John Adams and Samuel Adams, supported the Boston Tea Party, many Americans, including Benjamin Franklin and George Washington, criticized it and—like their British counterparts—regarded it as a criminal act. The signers of the Declaration were not a mob; they were wealthy, well-educated, prominent citizens who risked everything by signing it, and they didn’t jump into a revolution. They signed the Declaration 15 months after the fighting began. The list of 27 grievances included in the Declaration, as well as its stated motivation—to provide a rational explanation of the Revolution, out of “a decent respect to the opinions of mankind” –bely any notion that the revolutionaries were irrational or violence-prone.
Myth 3: George III Was Crazy
Many American children are taught that Britain’s King George III was mad, and his push to punish the American Colonies for their disobedience wouldn’t have happened otherwise. That view is captured in a famous 1905 poem by Edmund Clerihew Bentley:
George the Third
Ought never to have occurred.
One can only wonder
At so grotesque a blunder.
It may be true that George III suffered from mental health issues, but Britain’s actions in 1773 and 1774 were not the acts of a lone madman. Increasingly frustrated by the high cost of defending the Colonies during and after the French and Indian Wars of 1754-1763, Britain’s leaders had long searched for ways to limit and share the costs. They had principled objections to the behavior of the Colonies which motivated the unprecedented actions of 1774, both because the Colonies resisted bearing even a significant share of the costs of defending them, and from outrage over the Boston Tea Party. For many in Britain, these were justification enough for unusual treatment.
In summary, it was not taxes, hotheadedness or madness, but conflicting notions of fairness, that put Britain and America on a collision course that led to Revolution. It was Americans willingness to fight for principles that made them willing to rebel, and that kept them committed to fighting for many years until victory was achieved at very high costs, measured in lives lost and wealth destroyed. That is the commitment we celebrate on July 4th.
