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He left off an important detail: By 1776 Americans were not only wealthier, but also considerably more educated than British, on average. Almost all white Americans, especially in New England, could read. Americans considered British troops to be coarse, poor and uneducated and resented being ordered about by people they considered their economic and intellectual inferiors.

(It is said that British officers found American speech slightly archaic. After the revolution, Americans made a tongue in cheek offer to teach the Prince of Wales how to speak and read English.)

Some linguists have surmised that English people living in the 17th-18th Centuries sounded more like Americans than English people today (apparently, they learned this by reading contemporary letters, which were written phonetically in the days before standard spelling rules were adopted).
Words like ‘Fall’ (for Autumn) and ‘chore’ had fallen into disuse and were basically preserved and re-imported back into England later...

By contrast, London at that time (1776) was teeming with slums and filth. London was the center of world trade at the time so certainly they had some very wealthy merchants but it was basically a class-based society in which your economic prospects were determined at birth.

Only a fraction of Englishmen had the right to vote and despite London's million inhabitants (most of them poor and making less than $4,000 a year - in todays money), London had only 8 seats in Parliament while some much smaller town would have over 100 seats in Parliament. It would be as if Dallas, Texas could send 50 or 60 congressmen to Washington but New York City or Chicago could only send 2 or 3! This was due to some archaic system where Parliament seats could be bought and sold by wealthy landowners.

So for the most part, taxation without representation was rampant even in England itself.

By 1776 Americans were not only wealthier, but also considerably more educated than British, on average. Almost all white Americans, especially in New England, could read. Americans considered British troops to be coarse, poor and uneducated and resented being ordered about by people they considered their economic and intellectual inferiors.

Well now that's awfully racist of them! /sarc

Isn't it quite interesting how we live in a time where the Conservatives among us are generally the better educated and wealthy while the Progressives seem Hell-bent on "equality" among all people despite the fact that those poor and uneducated masses have no desire to better their situations.

Essentially, as you so eloquently put in your opinion, we "[resent] being ordered about by people [we consider our] economic and intellectual inferiors."

I don't know about any of you, but Barack Hussein Obama has shown nothing to me to indicate any grooming or pedigree from an institute of higher education, and I would go so far as to say that he's no more intelligent or intellectual than any rag-wearing bum on a Chicago street corner asking for change to wash your windshield.

The Adamses, Washingtons, Monroes, Franklins and Jeffersons among us need to see the "correspondences" from Washington as a bell-weather for the coming tides of darkness and prepare our bulwarks accordingly.