It is our nature to make up stories to tell ourselves, then believe them.
Some people will believe what they want, for whatever reasons they can invent. Some of us need to invest in heroes and myths and imagine ourselves as part of some great sprawling drama. They want--they need--a world full of enemies and righteous actors, an "us" with whom they can identify and a "them" they may despise with impunity.
If these people read newspaper columns, it is less to hear and evaluate an opinion than for the dopamine charges that hot takes can provide. It's a binary experience, a way of affirming one's place in a tribe through identification with or rejection of a given opinion.
I'm guilty of reading some writers just to keep up with their self-serving over-simplifications, to see what they're using for chum to try and stir y'all up.
If I were to try a similar tactic, I might propose that the American Revolution was an act of treason, perpetrated by a tiny minority of hard-liners who never gained the support of even half of their countrymen.
There are facts to support this contention: most Americans were content to be British subjects, even if some of them imagined that one day there'd be some kind of amicable split with the mother country one day. (As late as 1774, John Adams was worried that the next generation of Americans might have to deal with separating from the British, a process he imagined might be painful.)
Despite what you might have learned in high school history, the tax burden on the colonists was relatively light; British citizens were, in the early 18th century, paying up to 10 times as much in taxes per capita as the average colonists. Britons paid five times as much as the colonists in Massachusetts, six times as much as New Yorkers, 18 times as much as Connecticut Yankees, and almost 36 times as much as Pennsylvanians.
If this seems surprising, maybe you should know that while some people did come to the New World to avoid religious persecution (although fleeing intolerance isn't exactly the same thing as establishing religious freedom) a whole lot more came for economic reasons; America was looked upon by many as a tax haven.
Not only did one have the chance to disappear into the wilderness here, it was codified: the 1629 Charter of Massachusetts Bay gave all settlers a seven-year exemption from customs taxes and a 21-year exemption from all other taxes. Before that the Dutch government granted the Dutch West India Company an eight-year exemption from all trade duties. Swedish settlers in Delaware got a 10-year tax exemption.
England did want the colonists to share the burden of the incredibly expensive French and Indian War which, from Parliament's perspective, had been in defense of the colonists. The Stamp Act was ham-handed and regrettable but quickly repealed, though the Declaratory Act that accompanied its repeal insisted Parliament "had hath, and of right ought to have, full power and authority to make laws and statutes of sufficient force and validity to bind the colonies and people of America... in all cases whatsoever."
While largely a face-saving measure, the Declaratory Act sounded ominous to those Americans riled up about taxation without representation (which was a complaint sometimes expressed by British taxpayers, especially those living in the growing towns and cities of England's north and industrial midlands).
It made it clear that Parliament intended to treat the inhabitants of its most lucrative colonies like the British subjects they in fact were. Most colonists were happy to go along with this. But there was a class of "Americans" disproportionately inconvenienced by the British raking back some power: the colonial economic and political elite.
There's a lot of history out there to be read and studied, but it is not unreasonable to suggest two causes of the Revolution were colonial dissatisfaction with assurances the British made to their American Indian allies that westward expansion would be limited, and the sneaking suspicion the end of the slave trade was imminent.
That's not to say the Revolution was fought to preserve slavery or because Americans wanted to steal the continent from native people, only that it's undeniable that the American economy benefited both from the genocidal decimation of the indigenous population and the prolongation of the slave trade past the midpoint of the 19th century. American independence came at the expense of slaves and Indians.
And the Revolution wasn't sparked by unspeakable British atrocity. It was a political dispute that could have been resolved; bloody military conflict wasn't inevitable. Had Parliament granted the colonies something more than "virtual representation," had some compromises been made to appease the richest colonists, we might have evolved along the lines of Canada.
Some historians argue that had Alexander Wedderburn, the king's solicitor general, not excoriated the very loyal Benjamin Franklin before the Privy Council in January 1774--in the process transforming the conciliator into an insurgent--we'd have a very different national story.
Though we'd probably not tell it with any more nuance than we accord the founding myth we have.
In any case, the real and final motives for what we do and when we do it are often obscure, even to ourselves. Franklin's transition from royalist to revolutionary is often described as a kind of epiphany--he suddenly understood he could not work with these people--but he was thinking and writing about the implications of American independence as early as the 1740s.
To say that Wedderburn's insults pushed him into the revolutionary camp is convenient and maybe sort of true, or at least as close to the truth as we can come. It's a reminder that the men--they were exclusively white men of means--were subject to the same spasms or ego and irrationality that afflict us all.
These men accomplished something extraordinary, and many of the words and documents they produced are remarkable and worthy, but there is nothing in the historical record that insists their adventures were sponsored by any higher power. A faithful person can believe that God allowed the founding of the United States. It is more difficult to believe He favors us above all people, that we are really that special.
Some people consider that apostasy. I think that's a problem.
Philip Martin is a columnist and critic for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Email him at [email protected].