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It was the result of a bald-faced plutocracy. These laws also began to take away even the local control of their own governments by dissolving colonial legislatures, firing locally elected officials and judges, denying Americans (at the time British subjects) basic rights, and, to add insult to injury, enforcing the monopoly on trade by the East India Company.
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Actually, the party that benefited most from winning that war was the East India Company, which had Parliament on its payroll.īeginning with the Sugar Act (1764) ,then the Stamp Act (1765), the Townsend Acts (1767) the Tea Act (1773), and finally the completely counter-productive and bone-headed Coercive Acts (referred to by the Americans as "The Intolerable Acts"), Parliament started to impose not just crippling taxes on the Colonies, but did so without their consent, since no colonist could vote for Parliament or even stand for MP. The rationale was that since they were these colonials who had benefited most from kicking the French out of North America, (but alsoĭoing most of the fighting and dying in the French & Indian War, what they called the Seven Years War across the Atlantic), they should have no trouble paying for it. Parliament, under George III's sycophantic prime ministers (culminating in the thick-skulled Lord North), had the brilliant idea of taxing the American colonists for their own colonization. It started more than a decade before, in 1764, after Britain had "won" the Seven Years War and found itself in crippling debt. Lexington-Concord was no spontaneous thing. The First Shot was fired eleven years before
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As with some of my previous posts, the "obscure" part of this is in its departure from the popular story.
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And, finally, that the events of that day weren't a spontaneous reaction to British aggression so much as a long-planned military operation carefully designed and provoked by American radicals with a political objective.
#EMPIRE OF THE UNDERGROWTH CRIPPLING PROFESSIONAL#
Also the professional troops pitted against them were, for the most part, unseasoned, poorly trained, and led by ineffectual amateurs themselves. As I hope to demonstrate in this article, most of the advantages of numbers, training, tactics, and combat effectiveness were on the side of those poor, embattled farmers, who, as they turned out, weren't so much yokels as well-drilled and seasoned combat veterans. And as with so much else in an accepted historical and national narrative, it was slightly different than has been portrayed. The myth, perpetuated by Ralph Waldo Emerson in his poem of 1837, goes on to cast this "embattled farmer" as an amateur citizen-warrior fighting against the world's most professional and powerful army, and miraculously defeating it.īut the opening battle of the American Revolution at Lexington and Concord wasn't a miracle. The opening battle of the American Revolution has long been taught in American schools, and resides in this nation's imagination, as a ragtag bunch of farmers, reluctantly leaving their plows to take down their muskets from over the family fireplace, defending their farms from the imperialist Redcoats who had invaded their land to take away their freedoms (and their jobs!).