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ToxicSlurpee posted:You can see this even more if you look at events like The Boston Massacre. It wasn't a massacre at all and the British soldiers were not only hopelessly outnumbered but were specifically ordered to NOT fire and most certainly NOT escalate the situation. But, you know, that doesn't fit our narrative so we'll call it a massacre despite the fact that 11 people getting shot doesn't quite qualify it as "a massacre." This is not a unique occurrence in American history though.
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Mar 16, 2014 14:19
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Turns out the FBI did Kent State. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kent_State_shootings#Strubbe_Tape_and_further_government_reviews Or aliens or Hitler or truckers or something. I saw it on the history channel.
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Mar 16, 2014 14:26
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ToxicSlurpee posted:The Boston Tea Party is what the history books harp on to show that the revolution was primarily about taxes. It really wasn't. The colonists at that point were basically a bunch of drunken, lawless assholes. Any sort of attempt to instill any sort of law and order on them, be it taxes or things as simple as "there are people living on that land already you can't have it" were strongly opposed, sometimes violently. 1)The British ultimately didn't care about American Indians and the fate of their land any more than Americans did. For the past 200 years they had done a pretty good job forcing tribes back and colonizing, and the colonists developing a separate identity from the British and continuing that effort does not preclude the British continuing to do it and believe that Indian land was fair game (See: Canada). Britain's reason for the Proclamation Line of 1763 was a lot more about wanting to have trade partners for fur and other valuable Ohio valley goods not be interfered with by colonists (And also not having to pay for garrisons to protect those colonists), than some concern for letting Indians keep their land, which the British couldn't care less about. Following the Revolution, British relations with Indians tribes in the U.S. then turned to alliance only so that they could use the tribes to harass Americans and keep their British forts in the Northwest Territory. 2)Prior to the Boston Massacre and all the taxes that the British Parliament tried to pass on to the colonies, there had been little direct control from Great Britain on the 13 Colonies. Most colonies had been allowed to run their internal affairs pretty autonomously, and when the British tried following the French and Indian War to increase their control back over their colonies, Americans understandably were pretty upset that the previous status quo was being overturned, and not in their favor. The Americans weren't drunken, lawless assholes (although some were I'm sure), but they had had a pretty good situation with the British, and didn't want it changed. EDIT: Also, just want to point out, hell yes was the Boston Massacre sensationalized by Paul Revere, but keep in mind those British soldiers were acquitted in an American Court, defended by none other than John Adams himself. And then the British went and passed the Intolerable Acts that allowed British citizens accused of a crime to go back to Britain to face trial for said crime. Because American courts couldn't be "trusted". Arglebargle III posted:Turns out the FBI did Kent State. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kent_S...ernment_reviews I went to Kent State when this news came out and was good friends with the reporter who actually was uncovering some of these tapes. The govt.'s have been pretty reluctant to cooperate on any of this stuff and it has been pretty frustrating to a degree. Crazy Joe Wilson fucked around with this message at 15:02 on Mar 16, 2014 |
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Mar 16, 2014 14:56
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ToxicSlurpee posted:The Boston Tea Party is what the history books harp on to show that the revolution was primarily about taxes. It really wasn't. The colonists at that point were basically a bunch of drunken, lawless assholes. Any sort of attempt to instill any sort of law and order on them, be it taxes or things as simple as "there are people living on that land already you can't have it" were strongly opposed, sometimes violently. Yeah but it's not like it's a whitewashing that happened later. The Boston Massacre like many related events was very consciously leveraged at the time for its propaganda value. It is important however for the extent to which it actually swayed the people (some).
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Mar 16, 2014 15:39
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Crazy Joe Wilson posted:
I'm not going to disagree with you on the reasons for the Americans being concerned about the change in status quo but it wasn't simply a case of the British seizing control of the colonies. The 7 years war had given the British a kick to the proverbials and they had realised the importance of actually leveraging their Empire somewhat. They also now had the time to give attention to the functioning of that Empire. Much of the freedom Americans had enjoyed was de facto rather than de jure. That is the British had laws and institutions in place for control over most of these aspects of colonial governance but due to apathy and neglect (at least in part because of the distractions of other international commitments) it had been allowed to chug on by itself with the colonists exploiting this to the hilt. See the molasses tax (which is more than the British Exchequer ever did). What pissed the colonists off was a change in the status quo in large part due to the British actually enforcing the rules that were in place, even though in many cases they first altered the rules to be more lenient. I'd also heard an interesting analysis of pamphleteering from the time that sought to 'source' the arguments for US independence. The analyst (really kicking myself for not remembering where I heard it, I think it was the Revolutions podcast) found 5 sources: Enlightenment philosophy, Classicism, Traditional English rights, Economic arguments and a strain of political radicalism from the Civil War that viewed society as constant struggle between power and liberty (so that any increase in government's power was necessarily an infringment on personal liberty). In terms of the arguments being made, the first two he saw as only ever tangential or window dressing, the second two are genuinely there but not particularly focal and it's that final socio-political view that was the real ideological drive for US independence. Effectively any increase in the capacity for Britain to rule or change in the status quo generally was viewed by many in the colonies as an direct attack on their personal liberty. Which I personally think is kind of crazy but they weren't totally wrong. There was certainly the potential for the American colonies to wind up like India, deprived of the ability to produce their own goods by economically superior forces that are able to buy up their raw materials. Of course there were many other ways they could have gone about preventing that but the confrontational nature of the thing ended up with people being increasing polarised.
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Mar 16, 2014 16:24
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Crazy Joe Wilson posted:2)Prior to the Boston Massacre and all the taxes that the British Parliament tried to pass on to the colonies, there had been little direct control from Great Britain on the 13 Colonies. Most colonies had been allowed to run their internal affairs pretty autonomously, and when the British tried following the French and Indian War to increase their control back over their colonies, Americans understandably were pretty upset that the previous status quo was being overturned, and not in their favor. The Americans weren't drunken, lawless assholes (although some were I'm sure), but they had had a pretty good situation with the British, and didn't want it changed. There had been little direct control, sure, but that was mainly because for most of the colonies' existence they had simply been too insignificant and unimportant to bother directly interacting with - which is also why the colonists got away with defying previous taxes and tariffs such as the Molasses Act of 1733, which had been opposed by the colonists for economic reasons ("taxation without representation" hadn't yet arisen as an excuse at that time). As English subjects, though, the colonists were still theoretically subject to Parliament's authority, even if Parliament hadn't bothered to exercise that authority before. The colonies just didn't matter enough for Parliament to bother with them until the French and Indian War. Unfortunately, by that time, the colonists were used to doing as they pleased and fiercely resisted and resented all British attempts to assert any kind of control over the colonies, openly defying and violating any act of Parliament they disagreed with. Smuggling was commonplace as merchants sought to enrich themselves by evading British attempts to regulate colonial trade, and officials acting on Britain's behalf were often bribed or intimidated into not doing their jobs. The position of the American colonists as loyal subjects of the British crown despite their constant refusal to obey British law made no sense to British ministers, and war was probably an inevitable result of the American position - much as war was also the inevitable result of the Southern doctrine of "nullification" almost a century later. "Drunken, lawless assholes" is a pretty good description of the colonists as a whole, though. The lawyers, merchants, and politicians leading the movement didn't fit that mold, of course, but they weren't the ones threatening judges or invading and ransacking officials' homes. Rather, most of the actual resistance was carried out by lower-class radicals and rioters, incited to violence by the speeches and pamphlets of ringleaders and media figures who were trying to manipulate the crowds but ended up stirring up more trouble than they could control. For example, after the Stamp Act was passed, in Boston, an angry mob hung an effigy of the designated stamp distributor in the streets, and spent the whole day waylaying passing merchants and forcing them to proclaim support for the rioters' cause. The sheriff was sent to cut down the effigy and break up the mob, but was driven away. Once night fell, the crowd took the effigy to the stamp distributor's office, which they tore apart and destroyed. Then the angry mob took the effigy to his house, cut its head off, set it on fire, set his stables on fire, and then invaded and looted his home. The next day, he resigned, but even that wasn't enough - he was eventually publicly marched through the city by the mob and forced to swear that he would never be a tax collector ever again before the crowd finally let him go. On top of that, several governors' mansions throughout the colonies were similarly attacked and looted. When the colonists were up to poo poo like that on a regular basis, it's no wonder that the British eventually resorted to the Coercive Acts to try to bring the complete disorder and disobedience of the colonies under control. As Hutchinson pointed out at the time, no matter how much the colonists insisted that they were still loyal subjects of the British crown, completely rejecting the authority of Parliament as the colonists were doing essentially amounted to asserting independence from Britain, no matter how they tried to spin it. And on that note, many of the Coercive Acts made perfect sense. Although the Boston Massacre soldiers had received a fair trial, it was still perfectly reasonable for royal officials to be nervous about being tried in jurisdictions where many of them had been threatened or attacked by angry mobs within the previous decade. The reason the Boston Tea Party only happened in Boston was because every other Tea Act official in the colonies had been threatened or forced into resigning. In Philadelphia, for example, the captain of the tea ship was warned by the informal "Committee on Tarring and Feathering" that "You are sent out on a diabolical Service; and if you are so foolish and obstinate as to complete your Voyage, by bringing your Ship to Anchor in this Port, you may run such a Gauntlet as will induce you, in your last Moments, most heartily to curse those who have made you the Dupe of their Avarice and Ambition". Would you want to roll the dice on getting a fair trial with those assholes in the jury? Even today, the US has laws allowing the defendant to request a change of venue if it's judged that the original trial location is too biased to get a fair jury, so to term such a process "intolerable" absolutely stinks of bias.
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Mar 16, 2014 19:51
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This discussion is actually quite interesting. What is the source you're using on the American Revolution Paineframe? Edit: I see we're getting to kind of a middle-of-the-road (placing blame on both the British and colonists) conclusion on the causes of the American Revolution, so what are posters' opinion on the Quebec Act? In my history class I got the general impression that colonists perceived the Quebec Act as Britain flagrantly flipping them off and displaying what they intended to do with the colonies (allowing open practice of Catholicism, lack of legislature elected by those it represented). America Inc. fucked around with this message at 20:49 on Mar 16, 2014 |
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Mar 16, 2014 20:41
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I would say that this is more analogous to the Boston Massacre than Kent State. But the South lost so it doesn't get to be called a massacre.
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Mar 16, 2014 21:45
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Negative Entropy posted:This discussion is actually quite interesting. What is the source you're using on the American Revolution Paineframe? Google, mostly, with some use of Wikipedia to get general overviews of stuff. It helps that most of this stuff is recent enough in human history that most things were written down and thus primary sources are readily available, including actual scans of some of the pamphlets of the time (including the one from the Committee for Tarring and Feathering). Regarding Quebec, the colonists saw it that way, but I don't think the thirteen colonies were a particular factor in the Quebec Act's passage and I don't think the colonists would have been half as bothered if not for the atmosphere of hostility they had against Britain at the time. Rather, the Quebec Act was mainly driven by practicality - although Quebec fell under Protestant English rule, most of the residents were still Catholic French who saw no particular reason to leave just because they were being ruled by a different colonial overlord. With no particular loyalty to Britain, these existing population couldn't be treated too harshly or else they'd rebel just like their southern neighbors were doing. Using lessons learned from the troubles in the thirteen colonies, the Quebec Act imposed royal supremacy in the province's government from the start and avoided troublesome elected legislatures, but otherwise reverted day-to-day administration of the province to more or less how it had been under the French and restored religious freedom. None of this appeared to establish any enthusiastic support for Britain in the Canadian populace, but it didn't inspire any particular hatred either. Letters written by British officials suggest that the colonial government had little actual power, but that the Act was at least sufficient in quelling any revolutionary zeal the residents might have had. On the other hand, the other American colonies, already pissed off at Britain, were able to find reasons to hate just about everything in the bill. The timing didn't help matters either; although the passing of the Quebec Act at the same time as the Coercive Acts was probably mostly a coincidence, the colonists felt that it must have been directed at them as well. Several of the northern colonies as well as numerous settlers and speculators, who already had ambitions of westward expansion, were pissed that much of the American Midwest was given to Quebec. With the French and Indian War still fresh in the public memory, British settlers in both Quebec and the other colonies weren't big fans of French people or Catholics and were annoyed at the fairly good treatment the French settlers got. Most importantly, the introduction of a non-representative government - accountable only to Britain - was happening right in the midst of the power struggle between Britain and the colonies, and the British colonists feared that if they gave in, their representative governments would be completely dismantled and shifted to the system introduced in Quebec as a measure to assert absolute control over the colonies. In fact, the Quebec Act was referenced in the Declaration of Independence as "abolishing the free System of English Laws in a neighbouring Province, establishing therein an Arbitrary government, and enlarging its Boundaries so as to render it at once an example and fit instrument for introducing the same absolute rule into these Colonies". Were they right about that? Probably at least partially. After all, one of the laws passed at the same time as the Quebec Act was one that restructured the Massachusetts government in order to place most of the power in the hands of royal officials. It's quite clear that the British government considered the highly independent governments of the colonies to be partially responsible for the unrest and resistance Parliament was facing, and sought to remedy that by bringing colonial governments more directly under royal control and removing ways in which colonial governments could directly interfere with royal officials' duties. If the colonists had backed down, it's quite likely that similar reforms would have been spread to the other colonies in hopes of preventing another such insurrection from ever happening again. However, while that's usually portrayed in American historical sources as a bad thing, the idea of strong provincial governments able to reject the laws of the central government worked fantastically badly in the post-Revolution US, which was plagued for decades by individual states simply refusing to follow or enforce taxes, tariffs, and other laws they didn't like. Although the colonists supposedly based their arguments in British rights, the attitude of state defiance toward central government remained long after independence and led more or less directly to states' rights, nullification, and eventually secession. And we all know how that went.
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Mar 16, 2014 21:59
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ToxicSlurpee posted:The Boston Tea Party is what the history books harp on to show that the revolution was primarily about taxes. It really wasn't. The colonists at that point were basically a bunch of drunken, lawless assholes. Any sort of attempt to instill any sort of law and order on them, be it taxes or things as simple as "there are people living on that land already you can't have it" were strongly opposed, sometimes violently. Reminds me of my uncle who was involved in the Whiskey Rebellion. He got a bunch of people to parade around town, broke open a bar, beat up a priest, then marched on his brother's house. His brother promptly kicked his rear end and sent him home.
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Mar 16, 2014 22:27
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MrNemo, and MainPainFrame, you both are correct in pointing out that the autonomy of the 13 Colonies was more a result of the British homeland not enforcing their laws as much as they could have and ineffectual colonial policies rather than actual design, but my original point that to have the British then try to change the status quo was not going to end well, loyal British subjects or not. Has there ever been a region that's been rather autonomous and then willingly went back to strict control?
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Mar 16, 2014 22:55
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Warcabbit posted:Reminds me of my uncle who was involved in the Whiskey Rebellion. He got a bunch of people to parade around town, broke open a bar, beat up a priest, then marched on his brother's house. His brother promptly kicked his rear end and sent him home. Surely you don't mean your uncle was involved in the Whiskey Rebellion that took place in 1791? Either there's some greats missing there, or you're 150 years old.
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Mar 17, 2014 02:30
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Yes, it's like a lava lamp.
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PittTheElder posted:Surely you don't mean your uncle was involved in the Whiskey Rebellion that took place in 1791? Either there's some greats missing there, or you're 150 years old. Still probably has to have a great- or two involved for it to make sense, but yeah.
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Mar 17, 2014 02:40
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Crazy Joe Wilson posted:MrNemo, and MainPainFrame, you both are correct in pointing out that the autonomy of the 13 Colonies was more a result of the British homeland not enforcing their laws as much as they could have and ineffectual colonial policies rather than actual design, but my original point that to have the British then try to change the status quo was not going to end well, loyal British subjects or not. Has there ever been a region that's been rather autonomous and then willingly went back to strict control? I think this comes down to a distinction between the pragmatic realities of the situation and the rhetoric or understanding of things the participants had. In terms of realpolitik you're correct that British action resulted in a change in the status quo that saw an increase in outside control and taxation in real terms for the colonists. On the other hand the colonies had proved not particularly beneficial to Britain as they had been allowed to slip into relative lawlessness. On the other hand no-one in the colonies was making that argument (and it certainly doesn't seem to be what's taught for most Americans). The colonists regarded themselves as loyal Englishmen and loudly proclaimed their rights as such. At the same time they routinely engaged in smuggling, broke what laws were there and generally ignored or flouted British laws. The laws the British brought in were genuine attempts at compromise (that is, seeking to introduce more acceptable laws and effective enforcement of them) but the colonists disputed the right of the government to introduce and enforce laws on its citizens. Independence wasn't initially very popular but the fact that there was a significant group in the US that felt that way and many more who found an economic advantage in following them meant that it didn't really matter what Britain or Parliament did short of telling them they should totally govern themselves and putting British troops in the area entirely at their disposal. I'd make some comparisons to the war in Utah or the Whiskey rebellion. I don't think you'd find a single person in the US that would seriously say the US government should bear responsibility for those conflicts because a groups of people who belong to a state saying, "Yeah, we're just going to enforce our own laws don't bother us" isn't really acceptable and a government that doesn't do anything about it is one that is going to be exiting stage left pretty rapidly anyway.
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Mar 17, 2014 04:10
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PittTheElder posted:Surely you don't mean your uncle was involved in the Whiskey Rebellion that took place in 1791? Either there's some greats missing there, or you're 150 years old. My direct-line ancestor was the brother that kicked his rear end. It's a great-great-something uncle. The amusing thing is that we found this out by figuring out why said uncle had moved to New Hampshire. Apparently, Ethan Allen had some land up there he provided free to people who participated in the Rebellion and got chucked out of town. We then followed the documents back, and found the actual document reading him out of town and his behavior that caused him to be read out. My family history is full of horrible, horrible, amazingly amusing things. This is pretty typical of it. (Their dad was a soldier in the Revolutionary War. He was declared dead - letter sent home and all, twice (Battle of Long Island, Bunker Hill (stayed for the long winter)) and survived both times - there's a letter in the late 1800s from his 'widow' asking for a larger pension. (She had to have been thirteen and he had to have been 80 when they married.) Edit: Oh, I had a relative involved in the Utah issue, too. She ran off from her first husband to follow Joseph Smith. Huge, huge suffragette, correspondent with Susan B. Anthony and all that, huge proponent of polygamy, ran for Senate (Illegally). Warcabbit fucked around with this message at 05:46 on Mar 17, 2014 |
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Mar 17, 2014 05:42
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Yeah, I think it's undoubtable that there was a growing "independence" (if not initially pushing for literal independence) movement that was moving toward totally denying all British legislative authority over the 13 colonies except in a few small areas, and this was stated openly in the last few years before the war. Even the last civilian governor of Massachusetts said about the situation something along the lines of "Privileges become custom become unalienable rights" in the eyes of local agitators. The colonies, probably in large part because of the rapidly growing population and lack of perceived need for the imperial government, were going to demand more local power on one hand, and violently oppose the slightest expansion of imperial power over them on the other. And that included powers which the British parliament had never legally given up but had allowed to lapse centuries earlier when the colonies were not seen to be economically significant. In all I see the war as having been virtually inevitable, the only way the British were going to be able to maintain their previous legislative authority over the 13 colonies was through military force. Also, in my opinion I think it's likely that all problems between the colonies and Great Britain could have eventually been solved if the colonies had been close enough to be given Parliamentary representation (though at that point in history parliamentary seats hadn't been updated to reflect population movements for centuries and were probably at a representation nadir, but that's another issue, though it probably would have made things more complicated) But the distance between them was so large as to make that completely impractical.
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Mar 17, 2014 05:52
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MrNemo posted:I'd make some comparisons to the war in Utah or the Whiskey rebellion. I don't think you'd find a single person in the US that would seriously say the US government should bear responsibility for those conflicts because a groups of people who belong to a state saying, "Yeah, we're just going to enforce our own laws don't bother us" isn't really acceptable and a government that doesn't do anything about it is one that is going to be exiting stage left pretty rapidly anyway. About the US government bearing responsibility, I'm actually going to totally disagree on this point! Sure the people involved with the Whiskey rebellion were a bunch of thugs, but the law spurring it really did blatantly screw over the Pennsylvania backcountry farmers in favor of the major whiskey distillers in the east (it literally taxed whiskey production for small stills at a higher rate than for major distillers, and was passed by legislators with likely links to said distillers). But more importantly, it was one of the main events making American politicians realize their current system of government was all hosed up and that they needed a new system of government that would actually work, or else things like the Rebellion were going to keep happening.
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Mar 17, 2014 06:08
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Sucrose posted:Also, in my opinion I think it's likely that all problems between the colonies and Great Britain could have eventually been solved if the colonies had been close enough to be given Parliamentary representation (though at that point in history parliamentary seats hadn't been updated to reflect population movements for centuries and were probably at a representation nadir, but that's another issue, though it probably would have made things more complicated) But the distance between them was so large as to make that completely impractical. It wouldn't have solved a thing. At decent chunk of the British Parliament was in favor of giving it to them - admittedly not the conservative faction in power, they were with George, who was not prepared to give them an inch as I recall - but in any case, the colonists didn't want it. No serious requests for such a thing were made (as was done in the Counties Palatine), and I believe one of the American representatives in Britain was instructed specifically not to accept representation, since it would never have been enough to settle their grievances. No Taxation Without Representation was just a nice catch phrase, their goal was No Taxation.
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Mar 17, 2014 06:29
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PittTheElder posted:It wouldn't have solved a thing. At decent chunk of the British Parliament was in favor of giving it to them - admittedly not the conservative faction in power, they were with George, who was not prepared to give them an inch as I recall - but in any case, the colonists didn't want it. No serious requests for such a thing were made (as was done in the Counties Palatine), and I believe one of the American representatives in Britain was instructed specifically not to accept representation, since it would never have been enough to settle their grievances. No Taxation Without Representation was just a nice catch phrase, their goal was No Taxation. Representation in Parliament was impractical for multiple reasons, anyone in favor of it was for it as a last-ditch resort to end the crisis. Imperial representation schemes to keep the far-flung White Commonwealth together with Great Britain were often suggested during the 19th century as well, but were never taken seriously by either side for similar reasons. And as has been stated before, money-wise the taxation in effect had been ended, with the only remaining tax being a nominal amount on a single luxury product; the dispute was over actual legislative rights of parliament vs the colonial assemblies. edit: Heh, just noticed your username/avatar combo joke. That's good. Sucrose fucked around with this message at 06:56 on Mar 17, 2014 |
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Mar 17, 2014 06:47
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Sucrose posted:My favorite is the pennydreadful panic of Victorian Britain, where it was widely feared that cheap adventure stories printed for the lower classes were fueling or going to fuel a crime wave. This was in the 1880s. Sadly I don't think we'll even be free of them. People complained about novels when those first came about in the early modern era, you go back to the ancient Greeks Aristotle (I think it's getting kind of late and my memory is fuzzy) was against fiction and drama. Whenever there are things that young people or people in the lower classes or people in the upper classes do not like there will be a moral panic about it.
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Mar 17, 2014 07:10
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The thing about the Boston Tea Party and the EIC is that is still hosed even the honest merchants. They'd still have had to have gone through the old system, while the EIC go to bypass it. Think about how Mom and Pop stores would react if Walmart was suddenly able to import anything from overseas duty free while any other company had to pay a huge markup. Sure, it brings down the price for the average consumer, but...
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Mar 17, 2014 07:17
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Sucrose posted:edit: Heh, just noticed your username/avatar combo joke. That's good. I'm always glad when people are pick up on it; it's obscure enough I don't expect many people to notice, and normally they don't. I just wish I didn't have a spelling mistake in there, but I'm not about to pay $5 to fix it.
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Mar 17, 2014 07:44
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Crazy Joe Wilson posted:MrNemo, and MainPainFrame, you both are correct in pointing out that the autonomy of the 13 Colonies was more a result of the British homeland not enforcing their laws as much as they could have and ineffectual colonial policies rather than actual design, but my original point that to have the British then try to change the status quo was not going to end well, loyal British subjects or not. Has there ever been a region that's been rather autonomous and then willingly went back to strict control? Not that I can think of offhand, but it's not like letting the colonies retain that level of autonomy was ever a reasonable proposition - especially when both the colonies and the British considered the colonists to be British citizens. The closest analogues I can think of, ironically, are the US under the Articles of Confederation and the US in the early to mid 19th century, both of which featured a weak central government teetering on the edge of being unable to effectively govern the US due to open defiance from the states, often to the detriment of the country as a whole. And although the US sought compromises, workarounds, or just ignored the problems completely for a long time, the power struggle between the central government and the states was ultimately solved by military force when the Civil War put a permanent end to any serious talk of seccession or nullification. Maybe a bit of a stretch, sure, but the same spirit of autonomy that drove the colonies to rebel against the British also gave the US federal government one hell of a time trying to keep the country together.
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Mar 17, 2014 08:25
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asdf32 posted:Yeah but it's not like it's a whitewashing that happened later. The Boston Massacre like many related events was very consciously leveraged at the time for its propaganda value. It is important however for the extent to which it actually swayed the people (some). One of my very first little research bits ever was finding some British contemporary coverage of the Boston Massacre. The main find was a London (I think) newspaper article discussing the Unhappy Difturbance In Bofton and how it was a riotous mob hurling bricks at noble stalwarts of the British military who comported themselves excellently. This strikes me as probably closer to the truth than the popular American perception.
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Mar 17, 2014 08:35
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Early Patriot portrayals of the Boston massacre were also incredibly Eurocentric (Attucks and others non-whites don't appear in Revere's engraving, focus on them came later) and spun it as being more gentlemanly than its mostly working class nature.
MothraAttack fucked around with this message at 08:51 on Mar 17, 2014 |
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Mar 17, 2014 08:48
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And here I thought DnD was all about working-class mobs hurling things at the legal authorities.
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Mar 17, 2014 11:17
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Why not canada? Was there a big difference in the political mood between Boston and Halifax before the revolution? Was it just because of the large royal navy presence there? Was there considered to be any political border or difference in vulture between what is now the us vs what is now canada other than maybe montreal? What about in the west indies?
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Mar 17, 2014 15:10
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It was a combination of factors. Some colonies weren't affected by the unpopular taxes, some had a large British navy presence, some didn't have a strong self-government that could organize a rebellion. I think I remember hearing that the Catholic church in Quebec was against British rule but didn't like the Enlightenment ideology the leaders of the American Revolution spouted, and the Caribbean colonies felt like the British military was the only thing keeping a slave uprising from happening. Some colonies supported the rebellion quietly or traded with the thirteen colonies but didn't openly rebel themselves.
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Mar 17, 2014 16:27
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Ron Jeremy posted:Why not canada? Was there a big difference in the political mood between Boston and Halifax before the revolution? Was it just because of the large royal navy presence there? Was there considered to be any political border or difference in vulture between what is now the us vs what is now canada other than maybe montreal? What about in the west indies? Well Canada had just been conquered from France and maybe use to more direct control from the mother country. I can't really remember since colonial history isn't my strong point.
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Mar 17, 2014 16:28
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Ron Jeremy posted:Why not canada? Was there a big difference in the political mood between Boston and Halifax before the revolution? Was it just because of the large royal navy presence there? Was there considered to be any political border or difference in vulture between what is now the us vs what is now canada other than maybe montreal? What about in the west indies? A large number of soldiers had settled in the area of Eastern Canada which made Revolution there pretty impossible. The Eastern Provinces of Canada if I'm not mistaken actually did issue some declarations in support of the 13 Colonies at the beginning, but weren't able to really do anything.
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Mar 17, 2014 16:42
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vintagepurple posted:And here I thought DnD was all about working-class mobs hurling things at the legal authorities. Usually the hurling requires justification and proper target designation. This was like Puerto Ricans getting shot for ripping bricks off the Morro walls and throwing them at the local cops because Congress passed a bill levying some excise tax to pay for hurricane safety and erosion prevention infrastructure. E: later on Congress allowed Jim Beam and Jack Daniels to avoid paying booze tax on booze they directly shipped to PR, while keeping that tax in effect for retailers, including retailers who imported JB/JD through other channels.
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Mar 17, 2014 17:24
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GreyjoyBastard posted:One of my very first little research bits ever was finding some British contemporary coverage of the Boston Massacre. It's pretty much how John Adams defended the soldiers too, by claiming that they had been attacked by an unruly mob composed of all kinds of minorities and other undesirables. Ron Jeremy posted:Why not canada? Was there a big difference in the political mood between Boston and Halifax before the revolution? Was it just because of the large royal navy presence there? Was there considered to be any political border or difference in vulture between what is now the us vs what is now canada other than maybe montreal? What about in the west indies? Canada had only just passed from French control to British a few years before, and was still populated almost entirely by French people, so there was hardly any common ground between them and the other colonies. "Taxation without representation" was an argument based in the English constitution and didn't resonate much with the French Canadians, and since the British were still setting up a new government for them, they didn't have any expectation of being left alone. In addition, after the Boston Tea Party, the British feared that Canada might join in on the impending revolution, so they significantly relaxed their control over Quebec in order to avoid pissing them off.
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Mar 17, 2014 19:00
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To reiterate a bit (and I may be overly influenced by Mike Duncan's Revolutions) it's actually important to recognise the influence some of the political theorising from the English Civil War had on the American colonies around the time of the revolution. The basic underlying idea that the British government was a tyranical monarchy and increasing government power was a direct attack on individual liberty wasn't a universal concept at the time. It had a lot of cache in the colonies at the time because there were a number of people who had carried that idea over the atlantic. I doubt that sort of thinking was present in the French portion of Canada and more recent immigrants would likely have moved onto different ideologies.
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Mar 17, 2014 19:30
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Right, because it hasn't been linked yet, Mike Duncan's Revolutions podcast is covering the American Revolution and he covers a lot of what's been recently asked (background of the Boston Tea Party, why not Canada, etc)
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Mar 17, 2014 19:42
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gradenko_2000 posted:Right, because it hasn't been linked yet, Mike Duncan's Revolutions podcast is covering the American Revolution and he covers a lot of what's been recently asked (background of the Boston Tea Party, why not Canada, etc) Yeah, the series is pretty interesting to listen to. Neat bit of info - Oliver Cromwell almost emigrated to Connecticut in the 1630s. It seems like the colonies had always had an allure for people who had a beef (or multiple beefs) with the Crown.
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Mar 17, 2014 20:24
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MrNemo posted:To reiterate a bit (and I may be overly influenced by Mike Duncan's Revolutions) it's actually important to recognise the influence some of the political theorising from the English Civil War had on the American colonies around the time of the revolution. The basic underlying idea that the British government was a tyranical monarchy and increasing government power was a direct attack on individual liberty wasn't a universal concept at the time. It had a lot of cache in the colonies at the time because there were a number of people who had carried that idea over the atlantic. I doubt that sort of thinking was present in the French portion of Canada and more recent immigrants would likely have moved onto different ideologies. Even before I saw Fauxton's post I was about to reply that one of the first ships launched in New England at the start of the war was promptly named the Oliver Cromwell. And don't forget that several of the Regicides escaped the noose and were buried in Connecticut. Of course the connections only go so far, but you could write a whole paper about it.
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Mar 18, 2014 03:49
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How reliable is information about tax burden before and after the war? It seems like the Colonies traded a relatively lightly enforced British tax regime for an American one, but how heavy was the post Art. of Confederation and then post-Constitution tax burden?
menino fucked around with this message at 04:06 on Mar 18, 2014 |
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Mar 18, 2014 04:04
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Sucrose posted:Even before I saw Fauxton's post I was about to reply that one of the first ships launched in New England at the start of the war was promptly named the Oliver Cromwell. And don't forget that several of the Regicides escaped the noose and were buried in Connecticut. Of course the connections only go so far, but you could write a whole paper about it. The Many-Headed Hydra by Linebaugh and Rediker spends some time covering English Civil War and exile influence on Revolutionary thought. Maybe worth looking into.
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Mar 18, 2014 05:24
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menino posted:How reliable is information about tax burden before and after the war? It seems like the Colonies traded a relatively lightly enforced British tax regime for an American one, but how heavy was the post Art. of Confederation and then post-Constitution tax burden? It's a difficult question to answer, because for most of the country's history, taxation has been performed primarily via the states (which each had their own tax system) rather than by the federal government. However, the burden imposed by the British taxes was fairly light, and the states racked up a lot of war debt fighting the Revolution that had to be paid back via heightened taxation, so tax rates were almost certainly higher after independence. War was expensive, and the main reason the British had started taxing the colonies in the first place was because the Seven Years' War had drained their coffers and the English mainland was already taxed to the limit. The Articles of Confederation didn't give the federal government any taxation power at all, period; its sole method of funding itself was politely asking the states to give it money. It also had no power to regulate interstate or foreign trade or impose tariffs of any sort. A big factor in the abandonment of the Articles is that the states didn't always pay up, and almost never provided as much money as was necessary to finance the government's operations or pay its debts. The Constitution originally allowed the federal government to levy taxes, but direct income taxes were required to be divided among states according to their population, making a sane comprehensive tax system somewhat difficult to implement. Nonetheless, taxes of various sorts were instituted over the years, and the first couple of presidencies saw several tax revolts, such as the Whiskey Rebellion. The country didn't have a permanent direct federal income tax until the Sixteenth Amendment made it possible in 1913, though.
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Mar 18, 2014 06:28
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MothraAttack posted:The Many-Headed Hydra by Linebaugh and Rediker spends some time covering English Civil War and exile influence on Revolutionary thought. Maybe worth looking into. I was just about to recommend this as well. It's got some problematically bits but it's definitely worth reading if this sort of stuff interests you. If you've got access to JSTOR or similar I'd read "Red Atlantic" by David Armitage as well. It's just a few pages but it's a nice look at what Many Headed does well and what it doesn't do well. One fun thing from Many-Headed, L&R basically put the Thirteen Colonies 'Thermidor reaction' well before 1776.
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Mar 18, 2014 06:50
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