Response to Rob (I)

As part of our Herring book review, Rob and I will be responding to each other's posts so long as it seems useful.

One thing that Rob emphasized that I want to build upon is the role of trade in the Revolutionary ferment. The Revolutionaries believed the British mercantile system no longer served their interests. They were probably right. And in many ways they were ahead of their time, given that these systems throughout Europe fell apart beginning in the 1830s. But to me this still doesn't make sense as a reason for full revolt. Of course it was more than that--the obstinacy of Parliament (even though the British were fundamentally right) certainly did a great deal to push the colonies away. The revolutionaries fundamentally did not understand the mercantile system they faced; many of them legitimately believed that they could trade with the whole world once they were freed from British "oppression." Again, they were right that the mercantile system didn't make a lot of sense, but they severely underestimated how difficult it would be for the U.S. to find trading markets, a situation that led to the near financial collapse of the 1780s.

Quite a bit of Rob's post and the majority of comments on both of our posts have had to do with my counterfactual of the Revolution not being the best thing for the world, or even potentially for the Americans. The great thing about counterfactuals is also their problem--everyone likes to talk about them but they are incredibly easy to refute by other counterfactuals. The reality of course is that we can never know whether the Revolution was a better thing for the world or not. Nor will we know what would have happened with slavery after a failed revolution.

Rather than address each and every comment about this point, let me just make one quick point. I want to reiterate how the British could eliminate slavery in colonies where it was much more entrenched than the American colonies. Why could they not do the same in the American colonies? Although no one brought this up, I can only think of one legitimate reason--the dispersion of slaves among many white families. Whereas in Barbados and Jamaica, slaves were concentrated on enormous plantations owned by very few whites, in the South, millions of different people owned slaves. This could have potentially made it much more difficult for the British to eliminate the institution.

Also, when the British abolished slavery in 1838, they did so not because of foreign policy reasons, but because of widespread moral disgust from the British population. At least this is my understanding but I am not a British historian. Anyway, while it certainly is possible that the South could have revolted over this issue, it is unlikely the northern colonies would have joined them and it is even more unlikely that the continued ownership of slave colonies in today's American South would have changed the moral position of the British public that led to manumission in the first place.

I also want to expand a bit upon the Native American issues. As a couple of commenters point out, the native peoples had a variety of different foreign policies as they were many peoples. Of course this is true. This is one of those complex situations where one has to generalize. However, we can safely say that most of the peoples of western New York and the Great Lakes region understood damn well what an American victory meant for the future, and it was not pretty. As soon as the Revolution ended, the Americans poured across the Appalachians; by 1815 most tribes in the region were either destroyed or forced west, starting the process by which native peoples would be conquered across the United States by 1890.

Related to this, Rob points out that the British were much more conciliatory toward the Indians than the colonists wanted. This is true, but only in the short term. The British clearly were far more pro-conquest than the French had been. They had to put this aside though because the Seven Years War nearly bankrupted them. Plus they knew what would happen if they let the colonists move west. They would start wars that the army would have to finish up. This is in fact what happened during American expansion in the 19th century. Many of the worst atrocities were committed by either citizens or state militias. The U.S. Army would then have to respond to the Indian revenge upon these massacres. Not that the British had particularly enlightened policies toward the people they conquered, but the American position was morally bankrupt and wrong from a policy perspective. Whether I should be judging their morals 230 years later is questionable, but the British were undoubtedly right that it was in their interests to keep the Indian wars to a minimum while their empire regrouped.

Also, I think westward expansion as a real reason for Revolution has probably been overhyped since 1776.