from Global Warming and War (Volume II of the Adirondack Green trilogy)
For over a decade before the war began, the Americans had bickered with the British. They argued over taxes, and over regulations at sea. They argued over who was going to appoint the judges in colonial courts. They argued especially about the Proclamation Line of 1763, an imaginary boundary that ran south from the western portion of the Colony of New York along the spine of the Appalachian Mountains, a line beyond which the Americans were not to go. The thirteen growing colonies were supposed to huddle along the Atlantic seaboard, where ships from Britain could sell them what they needed. The colonials were not supposed to settle westward, where British troops would have to protect them from the savages.
During the Seven Years War with the French, from 1756 to 1763, Britain had spent a fortune on maintaining an army in America. Victorious, Britain had won Canada from the French, though not the more valuable sugar islands in the Caribbean. During the years after the war, Britain was in great need of replenishing its coffers. Thus the tax on tea.
For over a decade before the war began, the American colonials discussed and argued and debated a broad range of economic issues, legal issues, political issues, and moral issues. That long decade, from 1763 to 1775, provided Americans the time to fully understand the details of their arguments with Parliament, their conflicts with the King. Bostonians gathered in the Green Dragon Tavern to discuss every new tax, every new regulation. People listened to Christian sermons on these subjects from the pulpit. People talked, while seated around kitchen tables, about the boycott of British goods. They talked, while shopping at stalls in the Boston marketplace, about the British navy in American waters, about British troops on American soil. The newspapers were filled with angry articles, for and against British control. Many Americans had read John Locke, a British writer, and Rousseau, a French writer, and thus were well versed in the wisdom of the Enlightenment.
The Americans did not rush in a mindless march to war. Instead, despite their anger, they felt a growing dread that they and their mother country were approaching a civil war. Though lobsterbacks marched in the streets of Boston, the Americans responded to the military occupation with remarkable restraint.
Yes, the Americans had thought long and they had thought deeply by the time the redcoats made their first military incursion into the countryside outside of Boston. Thus the Americans not only responded immediately, but they knew exactly what they were fighting for.
from Global Warming and War (Volume II of the Adirondack Green trilogy)
John Slade
Woodgate International
For twelve years, Americans went to school. They learned about mercantile economics. They learned about repressive laws. They read books by the great thinkers of the European Enlightenment; some read, in Latin, about Roman law, and some read, in Greek, about the early stirrings of democracy.
Whereas today . . .
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