In my previous entry, I mentioned how the words for Guy Fawkes Day were running through my head as I woke up. And it did get me to thinking that the Fourth is of course called "Independence Day", as a sort of new beginning -- as if we started from scratch.
The thing is, of course, we didn't -- as those words about Guy Fawkes hint at.
You see, what the Revolutionaries and Founding Fathers were actually fighting for wasn't independence from Britain. They were fighting for their rights as
native Englishmen. I think that tends to be forgotten a lot in all the patriotism on this day. Maybe that's what my subconscious was getting at.
In Britain and in particular in England, there was a long tradition of individual liberties that went back to the earliest days of Anglo-Saxon England in the so-called Dark Ages -- the right to trial by jury and the "hundreds", local councils that ran basic affairs. These early foundations led later on to developments such as
Magna Carta (which actually was just a laundry list of rights of nobility versus the Crown, but that laid the cornerstone of Parliament's later supremacy) and
Simon de Montfort's imposition of the power of council (and thus Parliament) over the Crown. The stones were slowly being laid for constitutional monarchy and with it parliamentary democracy.
Still later, the English Civil Wars (1642-1651) ended up firmly establishing the power of Parliament to choose the monarch and not the other way around -- and this was further anchored in the
English Bill of Rights in 1689, the
Act of Settlement in 1701, and the
Act of Union in 1707. As an effect of these Acts, individual liberties also were increasingly firmly established -- the right to free assembly, free speech and so on. But unfortunately, these rights weren't being taken seriously by the Tory government of the day.
Thus the revolutionaries were fighting for what they saw as their rights as patriotic
Englishmen. Franklin, Washington and all the others at first didn't want to break with Britain at all. Even the most radical Sons of Liberty didn't want it at first. Remember the war began as many as 16 months before the Declaration of Independence -- with the UK Parliament declaring Massachusetts to be in rebellion on February 9, 1775 and actual hostilities breaking out at Lexington and Concord on April 19, 1775.
Indeed the (in hindsight very naïve) hope among many was good King George would step in and tell Parliament to stop abusing the loyal colonists, who were true-blue Englishmen through and through. In the end the king did nothing of the sort and was horrified that the colonists had taken up arms against his realm (as he saw it).
Yet Britain was not by any means united in determination to crush the colonists. Many actively supported them, in particular the Whig Party in Parliament or William Pitt the Elder (for whom Pittsburgh is named). Indeed, had Britain -- the superpower of its age -- really been united in defeating us, we would have lost. Badly. As it was, the Whigs continually harried the Tories in Parliament, popular support for the war was brittle at best, and once the French entered the war on our side, the end of the war was only a matter of time.
It was only when there was obviously no hope that neither Parliament nor King would relent that the Declaration of Independence was conceived and signed -- and even then many in Britain didn't give up on us.
Thus the American Revolution wasn't really "anti-British" at all. In many ways, it was the
British Revolution -- just it didn't take place in Britain.
