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David A. Wilson is a professor in the Celtic Studies Program and the Department of History at the University of Toronto.
On the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, this much is clear: Americans are united in believing that their revolution was a Good Thing. Of course, they are deeply divided about the meaning of that revolution. Sure, there was a wide gap between the language of liberty and realities of slavery and the treatment of Indigenous peoples, runs one side of the argument, but the discrepancy between the ideas and realities acted as powerful dynamic for change: advocates for women’s right and civil rights grounded their positions on the principles of the American Revolution, and leading historians have talked about the “contagion of liberty.”
But definitions of liberty vary, and the contagion can mutate into very different forms. Southern secessionists during the Civil War regarded themselves as the true heirs of the Revolution, and pointed to the slaveholders among the Founding Fathers to buttress their case. More recently, the MAGA movement, like the Tea Party before it, has equated the Revolution with the politics of America First, along with hostility to the “tyranny” of globalization, big government and the “woke politics” of the “far left.” And when supporters of U.S. President Donald Trump proclaim him as a modern-day George Washington, they mean exactly what they say.
The common assumption underlying these radically different interpretations of 1776, though, is that the Revolution was the best thing that happened to America – according to some, the best thing that happened in the entire world. The possibility that the Revolution might actually have been a massive mistake is unthinkable and unsayable. Yet maybe, just maybe, it is worth considering.
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The Revolution rested upon a conspiratorial version of politics that has remained a potent force in American history; it was driven not only by British policies but also by the belief of the patriot leaders that they were facing a conspiracy of power against liberty. It was also powered by populism. The most powerful argument for independence was made by the brilliant polemicist Thomas Paine, whose pamphlet Common Sense said it all: Your own common sense, not the views of educated elites or experts of their day, was all you needed to understand how the world worked. As we now know all too well, such a view was a double-edged sword, and common sense could be pressed into a myriad of anti-intellectual causes.
And if we turn to the principal victims of the Revolution, we come face to face with the most vulnerable and oppressed members of American society: Indigenous peoples and enslaved African Americans. No wonder that so many of them threw their lot in with the British, given their experiences of the colonists. The Paxton Boys who massacred the peaceful Conestoga Indians in 1763 resurfaced in 1776 as the strongest supporters of the Revolution; most Indigenous peoples knew that Britain had tried to protect them against American western expansion.
This attempt, in fact, was one of the driving forces of the Revolution, and it is no coincidence that Thomas Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence included Britain’s support for “merciless Indian savages” among its list of grievances. Another was the Quebec Act of 1774, which simultaneously tried to limit western expansion and guaranteed religious freedom for Catholics; the American Revolution also had a strong anti-Catholic component.
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Similarly, enslaved African Americans knew that their oppression would be solidified by a patriot victory, and leapt at British offers to give them freedom if they fought against their enslavers. “How is it,” asked the British essayist Samuel Johnson, “that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?” No wonder that three-quarters of the African Americans who fought during the War of Independence were on the British side.
The American Revolution, like all revolutions, was also a civil war. John Adams, the second president of the United States, reckoned that one-third of the population did not support the Revolution. Contrary to the stereotype, most of the loyalists were not wealthy merchants and would-be landed aristocrats – in fact, some of the richest men in the colonies were pro-revolutionary slaveholders. Loyalists were largely comprised of farmers and artisans, and many of them were moderates who sought a compromise with Britain rather than outright separation. As the situation became polarized, the stage was set for conflict between colonists; the result was that between 1776 and 1783 tens of thousands people from all sides died violent deaths or succumbed to disease.
Was it worth it? We can’t run counterfactual tests to find out. But we do know that anything that got in the way of the expanding American “Empire of Liberty” (as it was termed at the time) would be swept away (as with Indigenous peoples) or held down (as in enslaved African Americans).
We also know that Indigenous peoples and freed slaves continued to experience severe racial prejudice in British North America. The dark and depressing history of residential schools (which were partly modelled on American examples) is evidence enough of that. And the freedom that enslaved Blacks obtained in Nova Scotia would prove to be so hollow that many of them sought to seek a new beginning in Sierra Leone rather than continue in British North America.
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But there was no Canadian equivalent to the views of Jefferson after the War of 1812: Indigenous peoples who had fought with the British, he wrote, “have by their unexpected desertion and ferocious barbarities justified extermination, and now await our decision on their fate.” Nor was there an equivalent to the ruthless Indian removal policy of President Andrew Jackson during the 1830s. And although slavery persisted in postrevolutionary British North America, it effectively ceased to exist long before the formal abolition of slavery in the British Empire in 1834. In any case, there was nothing like the mass chattel slavery of the southern plantations in the United States.
And there is another revealing point of comparison. American loyalists had consistently argued that America could attain a significant degree of de facto independence through a policy of gradualism rather than violent conflict. It turns out that they had a strong case.
Canada provides the evidence, when it secured responsible government from the British during the 1840s. Henceforth, governors appointed from Britain would have to be responsible to local legislatures rather than British colonial ministers. The history of how this was achieved is commonly greeted by yawns and dismissed as quintessentially boring. But that is the very point. In its very dullness it was actually momentous – nothing less than the first example in history of peaceful decolonization. Canada would be followed by Australia and New Zealand; the same route was open to Ireland, only to break down as a result of ethno-religious divisions in the country.
Could this path have been open to the Thirteen Colonies? The moderate loyalists who thought so were not the last people of a dying cause, but the first ones to anticipate a new future. How things would have turned out is anyone’s guess. But comparing present-day Canada with present-day United States may perhaps offer a clue.