American Revolution: Taxes and Independence Analysis

The American colonists as tax evaders

• The author first realized that the Fourth of July was a fraud in Mr. Speck's seventh-grade history class in Canada
• The author learned that the American colonists who declared independence were not idealistic but rather "whiners, welshers and tax cheats"
• The Boston Tea Party was an act of vandalism that would be illegal today
• Paul Revere is portrayed as a hero, despite his questionable actions

The Seven Years' War

• The War of Independence began with the Seven Years' War
• The British victory in 1763 resulted in the Spanish being expelled from Florida and the French from North America, opening the continent to American colonists
• The 13 colonies should have been grateful to Britain for this, as the Seven Years War was funded almost entirely by the British
• The 12-year period between the end of the Seven Years War and the start of the War of Independence is a story of peevish and ungrateful New Worlders who refused to contribute to the defense of the continent
• The colonists refused to contribute to the defense of the continent, leading to a large deficit for the British Parliament of over 130 million pounds

American taxes

• The author suggests that the Declaration of Independence should have been signed on April 15, as it was motivated by tax evasion
• The British wanted to keep an army of 7,500 men in America for the benefit of the 13 colonies, they were defending the colonists from Indian tribes
• Pontiac burned down all but two of the British forts west of Niagara in 1763
• The British asked the American colonies to pay a small fraction of the over 200,000 pounds it cost to pay for this army
• Americans paid an average of six pence a year in taxes, compared to 25 shillings for the average British taxpayer, a 50-fold difference
• Colonists contrived to make a mountain out of a perfectly reasonable molehill

Taxation Acts

• The Sugar Act of 1764 was a tax cut to encourage compliance, reducing the tariff on molasses exported from England to rum distillers in New England
• Molasses smugglers were upset that the economic incentive to smuggle had been taken away
• The Tea Act of 1773 allowed the East India Tea Company to sell directly to America, reducing the cost of British tea below illegally smuggled Dutch tea
• Colonists protested to protect their smuggling operations, turning Boston Harbor into a Superfund site
• Virginia tobacco farmers, including Founding Fathers, owed between 2 and 3 million pounds to British creditors before the War of Independence
• George "University" Mason said "If we now have to pay the debts due to British merchants, what have we been fighting for all this while?"

Revolutions

• For the bulk of the colonists, the amount of money they were prepared to go to war to save was almost embarrassingly trivial
• Economist Robert Thomas found that the economic cost of trade restrictions on the colonies was offset by the benefits of guaranteed markets and British military protection
• The net burden of British trade policies on the colonies was about 26 cents per person per year, about $50 today
• The revolution may be the first fought over the cost of dinner and a movie
• George Washington, an indebted Virginia farmer and slave owner, said they must assert their rights or submit to every imposition and become slaves like the blacks they rule
• Tom Paine questioned the colonists' complaints about enslavement while enslaving hundreds of thousands of people
• King George III wasn't that bad and to the extent that as a psychotic he needed help, also he was German
• The British wanted to honor their treaties with Native Americans, while colonists wanted to plunder their lands
• Canada had a gloriously peaceful transition, hammered out by reasonable men over many bottles of gin
• Canada won the War of 1812
• Malcolm Gladwell is New York bureau chief of The Washington Post