The RevWar/Colonial History/General Washington ping list...
Decades of abuses led to the revolution and our founders struggled to avoid a war that came to them anyway.
I’d hardly call that reactionary.
The RevWar/Colonial History/General Washington ping list...
The Boston Tea Party was a reaction, but I think Britain’s response to the Tea Party made people seriously consider whether they really wanted to be under King George III.
These days, all of Neo Europa, the North East, is loyalist. They have finally prevailed.
Now the Rats have multiplied and overrun the place.
How can you write this many words and not mention SAM ADAMS ?
Reactionarism might be defined as wanting to turn the clock back. At that time, the British Government was taking steps to reform the relationship between the colonies and the Crown, whereas the colonists where fighting to retain hard won liberties from the struggles between Crown and people during The English Civil War and the Glorious Revolution of 1688. In that sense, I suppose you could call it a reactionary government that was making innovations leading to tyranny.
I wish I remembered the author who proposed that idea.
All I got out of that was “Massholes have always been Massholes.”
Before you take exception, read Jefferson (with the assistance of Franklin & Adam's) actual words. He postulates the right of the action on the British Government's breach of the compact between the governed & the government. The settlers were resisting an aggression against their primal & previously enjoyed rights. (See Declaration Of Independence--With Study Guide.)
While the Left has always quoted passages of the Declaration out of context--the same technique they have used to distort the Constitution;--it cannot be understood except as a whole. It was carefully crafted to make a very different statement than that, which many of our contemporaries have been led to believe.
William Flax
I think a definite account of the War of Regulation would make a great impact on the people today. Especially in the times we live in. People seldom mention it today.
Most of the American colonies were organized and administered as semi-private enterprises, not subject to the same onerous government as Britain, and were generally left to see to their own affairs. When the British government attempted to assert its authority through what were mild taxes and regulations by English standards, these actions struck colonists, who were used to being largely ignored by Whitehall in London, as tyrannical.
I would mention the love of "limited government" long before I would mention "democratic ideals". Ours was not a socialist revolution.
And there was nothing "reactionary" against disposing of a Monarch and government by an aristocratic class.
This guy needs to read the Declaration Of Independence.
No. It was a pressure cooker like we have today and something finally set it off, but the anger and emotions that drove the war were decades in the making, just like today.
I see today as Yosemite Sam in the bowels of the ship full of barrels of gun powder and he’s got a lit match; no one knows which barrel is going off first but we know one will.
The Revolutionary War was profoundly conservative, but not reactionary.
I really despise the word “reactionary.”
Oh crap, I’m ranting again . . . /s
No where in his 'history' does he mention that at the crux of the revolutionaries complaint was that they were not treated by the crown as British subjects - at first that is what they demanded but once they had crossed the Rubicon militarily, so to speak, their motive evolved to total independence.
Britain's attitude towards the colonies had been characterized by Edmund Burke as "a wise and salutary neglect." Under George III, British governments tried to change that to get the colonies to pay Britain for their own defense and for the war that had just been fought with the French and the Indians. So you could view Britain as the party who wanted to change things.
I wouldn't get hung up on the idea of one side or the other being the modern-day progressives. Too much has changed since the 18th century for us to slap 21st century labels on the political positions of that era. But a phrase like "to the right of Louis XIV" doesn't make much sense. Absolute monarchy was a new idea. Absolute monarchs wanted to change things -- and did.
Thinking that, say, if the Stuart monarchs had won their battles with Parliament nothing would have changed since the 1700s doesn't really add up. More or less absolute monarchy did win in France and forces for change lined up behind it -- until they no longer did and backed revolution. Something similar might have happened in Britain, had James II or his son or grandson have been victorious. Of course there are counter-examples, times and places where change did slow down or stop, like Spain in the same period, but one shouldn't assume that if things in the past had happened differently conditions would have frozen history as they was then.
Hatred of the British is the reason.
No "reaction" at all, just pure Redcoat hate and love of country.