THE AVOIDABLE:

Only 1/3rd of Americans Supported the American Revolution? (William Marina, 6/28/04, History News Network)

The most common piece of evidence cited in numerous books about the Revolution is a letter of John Adams indicating that one third of the Americans were for the Revolution, another third were against it, and a final third were neutral or indifferent to the whole affair. [...]

A close reading, however, of Adams' letter indicates just the opposite. The "well-known" letter of Adams was to James Lloyd, dated January, 1813. Written so many years after the American Revolution, it becomes clear that Adams was actually discussing American opinion about England and the French Revolution during his presidency, 1797-1801:

"The middle third, composed principally of the yeomanry, the soundest part of the nation, and always averse to war, were [sic] rather lukewarm both to England and France...."

It really boggles the imagination to suggest that Adams would have regarded a neutral third so highly with respect to the American Revolution. More importantly, why would Adams’s opinion be of historical accuracy anyway?

To paraphrase the historian Carl Becker, the American Revolution was both a war ultimately for Independence, but also about the nature of the American nation which would emerge after the war.

There were in fact at least three distinct phases relating to what we can in general call the American Revolution. The first of these was in the debate over American liberties prior to the war itself. The second involved the issue of Independence and the the war to win it. Finally, there was the question of establishing an American nation afterwards, which really was not decided ultimately until the later Civil War.

No one disputes that in the Stamp Act crisis of 1765, Americans were overwhelmingly against that legislation. In the debates which followed, the great contemporary American historian Mercy Otis Warren focused on one event as a day that would "live in infamy," although Franklin D. Roosevelt and his speechwriters gave her no credit when they expropriated that phrase on December 8, 1941.

That event was the British decision to send an army from Halifax to occupy Boston in October, 1768.

At any rate, it needn't have happened had the Brits just been more far-sighted.

Posted by Orrin Judd at July 4, 2004 7:25 AM