Power  /  Debunk

Your Revolution Was Dumb and it Filled Us With Refugees

A Canadian take on America's Revolutionary War.
Attributed to Philip Dawe/National Museum of American History (Wikimedia Commons)

The colonists weren’t fighting a “tyrannical” king so much as they were fighting one of the world’s most democratic nations

The Declaration of Independence places sole responsibility on Britain’s George III for establishing what Americans called “an absolute tyranny over these states.” But George III wasn’t an autocrat. While his power was much greater than the current Queen’s, he had an elected House of Commons and a prime minister to check him. Parliamentarians were free to heckle British war plans, and members of the British press (the freest in the world at the time) openly sided with the colonists. British democracy was far from universal, of course, with voting barred to women, Catholics and the lower classes — and with representation ridiculously concentrated in rural areas. But it was not a far cry from the soon-to-be-independent United States, whose first presidential election would only see about six per cent of the population eligible to vote.

The war did involve an autocratic tyrant though … on the colonists’ side

Speaking of autocrats, the American rebels counted one of the world’s most notorious as their best friend in Europe. Louis XVI, the absolute monarch of France, wholeheartedly backed the colonists’ cause as a way to embarrass the English. France smuggled weapons and advisers to the rebels, dispatched thousands of troops to the colonies and ordered its navy to travel the world and harass British efforts to supply their North American armies. Historians generally agree that, without French support, the British would likely have crushed the American Revolution. Meanwhile, the incredible cost of the American proxy war helped to lead an unstable France ever closer to financial ruin, revolution and, ultimately, the execution of Louis. So in effect, the United States owes its existence to an impulsive dictator who ran his country into the ground so hard that he got himself beheaded.

American colonists had sparked a world war … and then refused to help pay for it

The American Revolution was largely sparked by colonial opposition to new taxes. But Great Britain’s bid to get some American revenue makes a bit more sense when one considers that the colonies had just bungled the Brits into a wildly expensive world war.