Popular history would argue that the American revolution was based on taxes and parliamentary representation. However, this is not a complete story. Revolution wasn’t a singular event at a fixed point in time, nor was it limited to a handful of decades. Revolution was a long-running movement spanning multiple centuries with millions of participants, each committing a personal act of freedom. With every decision to leave their homelands, Europeans were, in a very real sense, declaring independence. This essay examines the roots of American’s desire for freedom and argues that what is commonly thought of the start of revolution was really the final act. Independence had already been declared centuries earlier and only culminated as a war fought against the British empire.
Centuries before the Sugar Act, the Stamp Act, and the Townsend Acts, and long before the Quebec Act, European settlers waited to board ships bound for the New World. This act of leaving their homeland likely bore special significance to them. It was, after all, no small risk to cross the Atlantic Ocean for a continent populated by a people who neither spoke their language nor shared their customs. There was the basic matter of leaving what was a familiar if not broken system under European rule and heading for a new land replete with danger. Likely very few Europeans imagined that by walking away, they were declaring independence from their homelands. But this was in fact what they were doing.
For many settlers, the New World represented opportunity. There they could develop a trade, own land, practice religion, and accumulate wealth (Foner, 2011 pp. 6-7). It was, in many respects, the basis of what we take for granted today: life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. In other words, the things many of them felt they had no access to in Europe. Fleeing their homelands meant an escape from the European class system, Papal authority, and an unfair and often brutal legal system. It represented a future that simply did not exist outside of the New World.
To put a value on these motivations, consider the risks the average European was taking. Arriving safely in the New World was no guarantee. Hurricanes, pirates, violence, and ship-born disease were just a few of the ways to die before ever catching sight of America. Once arrived upon North American shores, death in the form of disease, Native Americans, and other settlers was possible, if not likely. It was with no small amount of risk that these early settlers departed their homelands. The arduous journey they faced was not unlike that of so many other immigrants who seek American opportunities today. The fact that these settlers braved the dangers ahead speaks to how little future they saw for themselves at home. French settler, Michel-Guillaume Jean de Crèvecoeur (1782), sums up this sentiment well:
To what purpose should [American settlers] ask one another what countrymen they are? Alas, two thirds of them had no country. Can a wretch who wanders about, who works and starves, whose life is a continual scene of sore affliction or pinching penury can that man call England or any other kingdom his country? (p. 3)
Here Crèvecoeur declares that the average settler had no bond to Europe. So little future was offered back home that these settlers readily adopted an American identity. Leaving, for these settlers, was a quiet act of revolution.
By the time the Sugar Act passed into law, the American colonies were full of European immigrants and native-born Anglo-Americans, many of whom came from nothing and bore little allegiance to their parent countries. These same settlers who had fought for English interests only a year before in the French and Indian War, were now being asked to carry its financial burden as well. The Quebec Act of 1774 which ceded territory to the French likely carried additional bite as those colonists who had fought for England watched the monarchy give away large swaths of land. These events carry much more significance when viewed against the backdrop of a population who had fundamentally declared their independence four centuries prior. They’d been asked to die in wars and pay the costs of an empire many of them felt no allegiance to. Taxes weren’t the reason, but they may well have been the cause of the American Revolution.
In summary, immigration to the New World represents a breakup of sorts between the settler and his country. This divorcing of the old life was itself an act of independence and self-determination. It was an indictment of the European system and an embrace of the potential for something better. It was a quiet revolution that involved no armies or wars. It was simply conceived by the act of walking away. What followed nearly three centuries later was nothing more than a formality. Revolution had been building for hundreds of years prior.
References:
Crèvecoeur, M.G. J. (1782). “What is an American?” Letter III of letters from an American farmer.
https://americainclass.org/sources/makingrevolution/independence/text6/crevecoeuramerican.pdf
Foner, E. (2011). Give me liberty: An American history. W.W. Norton & Company