The American Revolution: Done by Majoritarian Coalitions

Much has been written (as an understatement) about the American Revolution; some of it is great; much of it is mainly good; most of it, however, is of a debatable nature ranging from simple or simplistic, blind glorification to a condemnatory style making the Founding Fathers into just a (supposed) bunch of mostly contemptible scoundrels (or worse).
A false controversy exists, however, regarding the American Founding: to wit, was it some sort of a rebellion (unjustifiably?) brought about, by only a certain portion of the population, wickedly intent on subversion conducted surly against the mother country, meaning England, or was there a movement of a genuinely popular nature that had involved the majority of the people of what then became the early United States of America?
In most American history textbooks, there is, usually, the great division in seeing, in interpreting, the American Revolution that involves those authors who incorrectly think that only a supposed minority of the colonists really had pulled it off versus the accurate view, which can, in fact, be documented through research, that the majority of the people finally came to favor the Revolution. The former belief, characterized as acceptance of the minority myth, can be found in the diverse writings of such past and present public figures as: Daniel Ellsberg, Irving Kristol, Alistair Cooke, and Rush Limbaugh, being among many other such misinformed people.
If, as often erroneously thought, only an assumed third of the people truly wanted the Revolution to succeed and another third were loyalists and a remaining third were indifferent, then Great Britain would have, surely, won. Since it was the (then equivalent to the) world’s major superpower, it is logistically inconceivable as to any other outcome, even though what had occurred became part of a “world war” in that at least several nations, France, Spain, and Holland, eventually lined up against the English and their empire.
The proper and correct way to really understand what had happened, however, is to acknowledge that a series of political coalitions came together for making and sustaining, creating and maintaining, the Revolution; most such coalitions had lasted throughout the war, some formed and unformed during the course of the fighting, and a few basically reconstituted themselves within the revolutionary process itself. And, as intellectually and critically seen here, the associated Revolutionary War was a part of the Revolution, not its entirety, as John Adams and other revolutionists clearly knew and so stated explicitly in their writings.
Also, to the pivotal point here, a letter written by Adams to James Lloyd, dated January, 1813, is almost always misinterpreted as suggesting that American opinion about the Revolution (as is noted in the above second paragraph) was divided roughly into thirds; what he was, in fact, actually talking about (which can be understood by anyone reading it properly in context) in that letter was really just the domestic (American) opinion, in the 1790s, about the French Revolution.
Too many historians have, nonetheless, just blindly accepted the false opinion of other historians (the laziness of not doing original research on Adams’ letter) as to the claimed division into thirds, which has terribly messed up countless textbooks, as a direct unfortunate consequence of this quite needlessly perpetuated error; it has, therefore, logically created a false impression, a major historical distortion, about the very nature and meaning and reality of the Revolution and its patriotic supporters.
If the Revolution were done only by a minority, then that would radically change the basic nature of the interpretation and consequent understanding and comprehension of it; on the other hand, because the majority of the people, in fact, mainly supported the cause, it is or ought to be known as having been a popular effort containing most of the enduring sympathies of the new nation.
Most people, as a consequence of the nature of the cause, came to see the vital necessity for developing republican governments (not to be confused with simple democracies) for the former colonies; the majority of the Founding Fathers, knowing the classical authors such as Aristotle, saw democracy as a form of tyranny (mob rule), not what it is popularly perceived as being today. But, the central matter to keep in mind is that most Americans, eventually, gave up any hope in monarchy and, instead, preferred to fight for free, representative government better suited to their own political requirements in the New World.
The English General Thomas Gage, after easily seeing the notable vehemence, ardent determination, and tremendously fierce resistance, during what became known as the Battle of Bunker Hill (fought on Breed’s Hill), was lead to write that he never saw such a heightened fighting spirit among the Americans, even during the entire course of the past French and Indian War! And, that is a most notable, historical remark (not to be ignorantly discounted or dismissed) since it, thus, came from Gage himself, the then commander of all His Majesty’s forces in North America.
As Aristotle long ago pointed out, however, if an initial error (the Minority Myth) is not caught and corrected soon in the reasoning process about something, then it becomes virtually impossible to correct the then resulting later errors. Improperly looking at the Revolution as having been carried out by just a minority ends up, necessarily, greatly skewing and distorting, mangling and deconstructing, any attempted appropriate interpretation.
The false view, the historical error, involves conspiratorial intimations that, in effect, a relatively small or, perhaps, tiny cabal of dedicated miscreants and assorted troublemakers, as was also believed by most of the main British authorities, conspired mightily to both oppress and subjugate the vast majority against their true wishes to maintain monarchical authority and power in the colonies; yet, such a view is, in its fundamental essence, totally fallacious and not supported by the accumulated and essential facts, the empirical evidence from documents but, more importantly, from actions taken; actions usually speak louder than words.
On the other hand, the correct view of there having been a series of political coalitions, forming a mainly majoritarian consensus, can be easily defended and documented to refute any absurd contention that just a minority alone had actually supported the Revolution.
Although the English held a number of (the few) major American cities, at various times, during the course of the war that lasted eight years, it was virtually impossible for their troops to simply cavort through the countryside of any of the colonies in a fancy free manner. Why? This is because the English were never able to functionally nor fundamentally sustain and maintain basic control over the vast majority of the American colonies as to their hinterlands, meaning the country at large. Why?
The majority of the inhabitants, meaning the American people at large, time and again, made it (to put matters mildly) an unhealthy proposition to attempt any actual control and dominance of the basic hinterland, the homeland. Alert militias and other forces were, therefore, active in the countryside to counter forays of either loyalist or British troops.
One of the major military and sociopolitical illusions, throughout the course of the fighting, was that the British political leaders often fully expected overwhelming numbers of loyalists, tories, who would spring up inspiringly, throughout the country, and rush enthusiastically to the most warm defense of Mother England. Thus, most assuredly, if there were anywhere near a third or even a good fifth of the colonists who were truly loyal to England and so very willing to fight on its behalf, the revolutionists would have certainly lost under such a presumed condition.
In significant point of fact, moreover, the British had to definitely import foreigners, the Hessians, to most needfully supplement their manpower resources for fighting the rebels, meaning the American patriots. Tremendous numbers of loyalists, if they only had supposedly existed in realistic military quantities, would have, thus, meant almost no real requirement to supply mercenaries for suppressing a most popular colonial uprising; and, this is surely part of the empirical evidence for the popular support for the Revolution.
As noted previously, therefore, the true lack of any effective military control where about 95% of the Americans lived, meaning outside the few relatively large urban concentrations, proverbially speaks volumes to refute the minority thesis; this is, of course, as to its always great significance concerning the fundamental sentiments of the people during the course of the long conflict.
Yes, there certainly were many tories as allies in the colonies but never in such assumed numbers as to have had the ultimate effect of logically swinging the tide of battle finally in favor of the invaders. The “hearts and minds” of the general populace, to say the least, were never won over to the cause of the English; it was truly a people’s war, as opposed to the often regnant minority myth about the fight for American liberty.
But, much more to the point of this article, what was the majority and, arguably, the vast majority of the American people who had composed the various groupings or coalitions that had united for the sake of independence? There were, e.g., people greatly dissatisfied, at a minimum, with the Peace Treaty of 1763 that disallowed settlement west of the Appalachian Mountains; this denied land to major numbers of land hungry inhabitants and wealthy speculators united for achieving access to more new lands.
There were those engaged in the importing trade who logically hated British regulations aimed at restricting or delimiting possible trade with other countries; many people, in another area of concern, wanted America to pursue domestic manufacturing without being dependent upon foreign, i.e., British manufactured goods that often came late, were somewhat shoddy, and not in quantities truly sufficient to supply the wants of a rising population with, significantly in addition, its own rising expectations.
Many Americans were, also, middle-class professionals, farmers, and merchants existing well beyond such numbers of people, as readily compared to their usually less-well-off counterparts found in England. Added to all this were, of course, the many popular complaints, needlessly to say, about taxation without representation.
But, besides pure economic, social, and cultural interests of the cited and mutually supportive coalitions in favor of having a revolution, there was the political sense of freedom and liberty attained in the colonies unlike what basically existed in the mother country for the mass of the people; among other matters, there was no hereditary aristocracy resident in all of the American colonies, which is, therefore, a much more important matter than is usually realized by most commentators and historians.
Yet, one may ask, why is it important to speak of there having been a series of coalitions that combined and not simply just one coalition that formed for support of the Revolution? An example of what is meant can easily be rendered here. The Over The Mountain Men (yes, that’s what they were actually called) in the Carolinas were fiercely independent, rude, crude, frontiersmen who had very little in common with, say, men of the nature of the extremely wealthy, urbane, and sophisticated John Hancock on the Atlantic Seaboard.
The latter types, with other groups within the local Southern region, formed a coalition with others who were equally angry at the British (meaning their supporters), as had, therefore, up North, the various associates of Hancock and the merchants in the many towns of New England, the Mid-Atlantic colonies, and elsewhere had formed their own coalition. The Over The Mountain Men were hardly enlightened as to various complexities of continental politics but were united enough to go and fight against the perceived common enemy, the loyalists, in defense of their rights as free men.
After the fighting, especially after the Battle of Cowpens, they just wanted to get home, remain independent spirits, and, most of all, be just left alone – and not messed with by anyone. Many disparate or diverse groups came together for a basically united or combined purpose, regardless of their many and intense differences and, sometimes, even antagonisms, as with when, e.g., Ethan Allen almost sought out a separate peace with the British to, thus, better secure the often endangered rights of his Green Mountain Boys regarding what later became Vermont.
So, many groups of people in the colonies, these coalitions of related and often highly interrelated interests, ended up uniting not perfectly but more than merely sufficiently and, on balance, effectively enough to create a generalized revolutionary consensus; this was the patriotic thought that most economic, social, and political conditions would be, on average, better by successfully getting rid of English rule (and often any local loyalists) in favor of the governments of the then newly created states.
Most successful forms of patriotism get easily allied to enlightened self-interest sooner or later in terms of, in the case of the colonies, preferring a return to the former colonial policy of benign neglect that had basically existed prior to the 1760s.
When, therefore, it was just logically perceived by the majority of the people, composed finally of these revolutionary coalitions of united interests, that no real return to the earlier status quo would be made possible, there was the resort to the final appeal known as war. The explicit reasons are, of course, documented in the Declaration of Independence that reads like a good catalogue of why there existed groups of people opposed to being oppressed and suppressed in various ways.
Unfortunately, there is the modernist tendency, as an example of convoluted historicism, to look back in time, at the people of the colonies, as having then behaved badly because they were merely excessively irked, supposedly, by what seem so slight as provocations. Such an interpretation is yet bizarre.
In the 18th century, however, people, especially English-speaking ones, saw more clearly the implications in the fundamentally initial principles of the dramatic and revealing actions that were taken by a British government intent upon the commission of tyranny. Thus, it was not simply, in vulgar terms of absurd historicist interpretation, that a minor or insignificant tax, e.g., was put upon tea importation that might have, supposedly, just somewhat slightly annoyed the colonists.
What was- shockingly!- perceived and correctly so was the extremely arbitrary and high-handed nature of the aggressive political activism that had manifested itself viciously, in the involved economic terms, that would manifestly end with not just merely taxed tea but, rather, such determined political subjugation and oppression (done also)in the name of taxation. But, it’s a simply ludicrous form of reductionism of the worst sort to say that it was only about a protest against a mere tax on some tea.
The people in the American colonies had, therefore, a significantly greater appreciation of and very heightened sensitivity to the requisite cause of liberty and their cognate logical need to be free of any kind of arbitrary government, which really, of course, is another name for tyranny; they obviously recognized, at its inception, the consequences as leading to a form of slavery; this is if the colonists were to just meekly submit, to basely yield, to the injustices heaped upon them by acts of arbitrary power exercised in a necessarily tyrannical manner.
The Sons of Liberty, for instance, had needfully organized for the great purpose of defending their rights and liberties as freeborn Englishmen (merely happening to live in the colonies); when, however, these things were to be effectively and illegitimately denied to them by King and Parliament, the decided course of activity and political activism was most sincerely clear: Revolution.
Unlike the French Revolution with its abstract appeals to nice-sounding abstractions, they were then definitely fighting for the ancient, traditional, and prescriptive rights of Englishmen against the surely radicalizing tendencies and actions of the crown. From that manifestly conservative perspective, the actual “revolutionaries” were really in London, not Philadelphia or Boston. And, as Hannah Arendt and others had correctly understood, the American Revolution was an actual revolution that brought about an ordered liberty, free government, for the people (not perfection on earth), unlike the clear fiascos called the French or Soviet Revolutions, which had merely rationalized, better systematized, and made more terrible the obvious despotic realities and cognate tendencies in the prior monarchical regimes.
Good reading would include: Bruce Lancaster’s The American Revolution. Or, as Edmund Burke had rightly and succinctly said: “An Englishman is the unfittest person on earth to argue another Englishman into slavery.”