Story of American Independence - I

“No taxation without representation”. And the Boston Tea Party. That’s about all I knew about American independence. Until I read Barbara Tuchman’s awesome book, The March of Folly.

It all started with the Seven Years’ War, a war over who controlled America: the British, the French or the native Indians. The British won; and so America became a British colony. After that arose the fairly reasonable question in England: shouldn’t the colony pay for its continued protection from the native Indians and the resurgent French? The Americans, however, didn’t think of it that way: they felt the money would be used to pay British troops to act as “a rod and check over us”. The seeds of mistrust were sown.

The topic of taxation brought with it an unintended debate. Unlike most other colonies, the inhabitants of America (leaving the Indians aside) were British citizens. And so they asked for the “Englishman’s right not to be taxed except by his own representatives”. How come the English parliament had no representatives from America, they asked.

Back in England, democracy wasn’t exactly the way we think of it today. Rather:

“The sovereign (king) was, within limits, chief of the executive with the right to choose his own ministers.”

That in turn meant that the British government never really acted as a cohesive unit since individual ministers owed their post to the monarch. This setup of a government based on connections and favours would be the cause of, well, dumb policies when it came to dealing with American protests and grouses.

Next, in 1763, England announced a policy that made sense for the home country: prohibition of white settlements west of a certain point; and reserving them for the Indians. This was to keep a form of truce with the Indians. However, the whites in America took this as a way to “restrict the colonists to the Atlantic seaboard, where they could continue to import British goods”. Even worse, they suspected this measure was just the “corrupt plans of (England) to grant great tracts of Crown lands to court favorites”. Undue interference was how it was perceived.

In such an environment of mistrust, the next tax imposed by England, though trivial, was opposed in America “because they believed that acceptance of a precedent in parliamentary taxation would open the way to future taxes and other impositions”. Not surprisingly, England considered this as insubordination.

The ball to eventual war had started rolling.