Should We Regret The American Revolution?

Happy 4th of July!

Dylan Matthews brings us 3 reasons the American Revolution was a mistake. In a nutshell (although click through for the longer arguments):

1) The Southern States would have had much less power as part of the British Empire than as half the USA, making it likely that American slavery would have ended sooner. (It’s notable that many slaves wanted the British to win.)

2) As horrible as the British were, they wouldn’t have been as horrible to Native Americans as the US government was. (It’s notable that many Native Americans wanted the British to win.)

3) It would have made it more likely that the US (whatever it would have eventually been called) would have wound up with a parliamentary democracy, which is more stable and less subject to paralyzing gridlock, rather than a system which was designed, to a significant degree, to give outsized power to slaveholding states.

Over at the Daily Kos, there are a number of people in this comments thread who do a fairly persuasive job refuting Matthews, especially on his second point. If the United States hadn’t formed and committed genocide on American Indians, it seems all too likely that one of the European powers would have. (Trying to forecast European history without the American revolution is difficult; would there have been a French Revolution at all, for example, if the French hadn’t taken on so much debt to support the American revolution?)

To the first point – slavery – I’ve seen many people point out that if the British were profiting from Southern cotton, grown by slaves, that might have meant that rather than slavery ending sooner in America, slavery ended later in the British empire. That seems possible – but on the whole, it seems unlikely that the British upper-class, even if they were getting part of their fortunes from slavery, could have been as virulently pro-slavery as wealthy Southerners, whose wealth was virtually all wrapped up in slavery.

Because Southern leaders were so passionately pro-slavery, if the British had outlawed American slavery in 1833, the result might have been Southern secession and civil war, about three decades earlier than the Civil War in reality. But the South would have had less of a chance of winning if they were facing the northern states and Britain; perhaps the war would have been shorter and less bloody. And all else held equal, it would be better to have a civil war, and an end to slavery, a generation earlier.

It would be really great to have parallel universes in which the course of history went along different channels, so that we could resolve questions like this (and also, so we could import and binge their better TV shows).

Friends are coming over to our house today; we will barbecue meat and set off fireworks (well, fountains, anyhow) in the street. I hope you folks all have a great day, stuck in the history that we actually have.

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20 Responses to Should We Regret The American Revolution?

  1. 1
    Ben Lehman says:

    … isn’t the last point based on the assumption that, even if the American (and French) revolutions failed, we’d still have international democratic norms? I sort of doubt that. Without the American and French revolutions, the world would probably be governed by mostly autocratic monarchs, with a few countries having weak parliamentary traditions.

  2. 3
    Doug S. says:

    American independence worked out really well (for white Americans, at least), but fighting a war is a really huge cost; I don’t see the difference as worth killing people over.

  3. 4
    Jane Doh says:

    Many Americans wanted the British to win! Support for the revolution was about 1 in 3, if I recall correctly.

    Point 2 is a laugher. Canada (no revolution) does not have a much better track record with their indigenous peoples. The British were brutal colonizers around the world. Hard to imagine they would treat Native Americans any better.

    I think that part of the problem with US politics is that the US has the longest continuously running governmental system in place. The things that worked well in 1789 don’t work as well in 2016, and the changes and alterations via amendment since then have not been enough to provide efficient function today.

  4. 5
    JutGory says:

    I am not sure I understand the third point.

    The system was designed to be inefficient, but how was it designed “to a significant degree, to give outsized power to slaveholding states”?

    By the way, paralyzing gridlock was a feature, not a bug. The reason why it has gotten worse and worse over the years is that the government has taken on powers it was never given and transformed a system for limited government into (essentially) an unlimited one. I believe much of the gridlock in Congress is the byproduct of a fundamental disagreement about the proper role of the federal government.

    -Jut

  5. 6
    RonF says:

    a system which was designed, to a significant degree, to give outsized power to slaveholding states.

    Please explain. Note that the whole reason that Article I, Section 2, paragraph 3 required that representation of States in the House was to be determined by counting only 3/5 of non-free people was to restrict the influence of slave-holding States.

  6. 7
    Jake Squid says:

    RonF,

    I think that refers to the Senate, but I may be wrong.

  7. 8
    JutGory says:

    RonF,
    I disagree, sort of.
    The 3/5 compromise was not to limit the power of slave states. If the Northern States had their way, slaves would have counted for nothing (if you won’t let them count, why count them), while the slaveholders wanted them to count as fully human for this (and only this) purpose. That is one of the weird perversions of the 3/5 compromise.

    Considering they settled on 3/5, the Southern view that slaves should count fully seems to have been the stronger point of negotiation.

    -Jut

  8. 9
    JutGory says:

    Jake Squid,
    I think the two house compromise was primarily for smaller states (Delaware, Maryland, and Rhode Island) and was based on the principle that each state was equal. Yes, slave states may have had smaller populations of non-slaves, but I did not think that was the primary reason for that compromise, as I believe Virginia, the Carolinas, and Georgia had substantial populations that rivaled many northern states.

    Of course, as with all things, I might be mistaken.

    -Jut

  9. 10
    Ampersand says:

    Ron, there are several ways in which the Constitution was tilted to favor the proslavery states. But (as Jut says) the 3/5 compromise was a big one, giving the slave states a big advantage not only in the House but also in the electoral college. (Jefferson probably wouldn’t have become president without the advantage of the 3/5 law).

  10. 11
    MJJ says:

    The 3/5 compromise was not to limit the power of slave states.

    It limited their power compared to counting slaves fully; considering how often people say that slaves were “only 3/5 of a person” as if fully counting them would have been better for their interests, it is a fair point. I doubt RonF was asserting that the 3/5 compromise was the best theoretical limit on slave state power, the “sweet spot.”

  11. 12
    Ampersand says:

    considering how often people say that slaves were “only 3/5 of a person” as if fully counting them would have been better for their interests, it is a fair point.

    I think it’s a reasonable guess that anyone who says that (emphasizing the “only”) doesn’t fully understand the context. I don’t see how that makes it “a fair point.” Unquestionably the 3/5 rule was bad for slaves and gave slavers more power.

    Yes, one can imagine situations in which slavers had even more power – counting each slave 100%, or for that matter counting each slave 200%, etc. But that in no way alters the fact that the 3/5 rule was enormously beneficial to slavers, and had the effect of giving voters in slaveowning states disproportionate voting power.

  12. 13
    nobody.really says:

    Unquestionably the 3/5 rule was bad for slaves and gave slavers more power.

    Yes, one can imagine situations in which slavers had even more power – counting each slave 100%, or for that matter counting each slave 200%, etc. But that in no way alters the fact that the 3/5 rule was enormously beneficial to slavers, and had the effect of giving voters in slaveowning states disproportionate voting power.

    I find this a curious characterization. This strikes me as a wholly semantic issue. Yes, the 3/5 compromise enhanced the voting power of slave states relative to a hypothetical outcome in which slaves would not be counted at all, but impaired their voting power relative to a hypothetical outcome in which each slave counted as an entire person.. Is there any reason to prefer one frame of reference over the other?

    Perhaps. Wikipedia has a nice discussion of the issue.

    The 3/5 compromise was initially proposed as an amendment to an amendment to the Articles of Confederation. The initial amendment would revise the mechanism whereby the weak central government might raise taxes and apportion the burden among the colonies, and said that taxes “shall be supplied by the several colonies in proportion to the number of inhabitants of every age, sex, and quality, except Indians not paying taxes.” That is, the default language would have counted slaves as equal to anyone else.

    Far from leaping with joy, slave states balked at the idea of having to pay more taxes than free states just because they chose to hold some of their wealth in the form of human beings. So the delegates hammered out the 3/5 compromise—but the amendment still failed, because the Articles of Confederation prohibited amendments from taking effect without unanimous consent. This was the sort of problem that would shortly lead people to propose a new organizing document—the Constitution.

    And as part of the Constitution, we ended up with the 3/5 compromise, which allocated electoral power and tax burdens among the states. So slave states derived both benefits and burdens in proportion to the size of the compromise.

  13. 14
    RonF says:

    JutGory (and Amp):

    The 3/5 compromise was not to limit the power of slave states.

    The fact that the 3/5 compromise did not eliminate the disproportionate voting power in the House that non-voting slaves gave the slave-holding States does not mean that it did not limit it. It made it less than it would have been had that clause not been put into the Constitution – therefore it limited it. Was it optimal? Not from our viewpoint. But what it did was to preserve the Union instead of having at least two and maybe more countries in the territory presently comprising the United States, including one country that might well have preserved slavery much longer than 1865.

    I’ve recently read a biography of Lincoln. An analysis of the issue presented in there held that at the time the Constitution was signed there was a broad expectation that slavery was on its way out, that it would go away on its own as the economy progressed. Apparently even in the South there were many people who held this view. But in the decades following the adoption of the Constitution this changed. So at the time this was signed many of the people who approved this figured that it was going to be a relatively short-lived issue. They were wrong, as it turned out, but that was what many people thought at the time.

  14. 15
    Ampersand says:

    Nobody Really: The tax burdens were trivial, because those “direct taxes” could only be levied by Congress, and Congress wouldn’t do that. (Which was not a coincidence, because of slave states’ disproportionate sway in Congress.)

    The compromise proved to be a good deal for the south. Direct taxes were rarely enacted, so the region’s slave-enhanced liability did not amount to much of a penalty. And three-fifths of all southern slaves still provided the south with many more representatives than they would otherwise have been entitled. It is no coincidence that four out of the first five American presidents came from the state of Virginia (the electoral college was also tied to congressional representation). Jefferson’s election in 1800, in fact, owed much to the windfall of the 3/5 clause.

    Article I, section 8 of the Constitution also provided slavery a measure of protection. While delegating to Congress the power to “lay and collect taxes, duties, imposts and excises, [and] to pay the debts . . . of the United States,” it specified that “all duties, imposts and excises shall be uniform throughout the United States.” The delegates meant this “uniformity clause” to pertain to geographical uniformity; a tax on slaves, for example, would tend to affect the South to a significantly greater extent than the North.

    Having shielded servitude through direct tax provisions and the uniformity clause, southerners sought to head off another potential assault. Fearful that representatives of populous northern states would target slavery by taxing the products of a slave economy (particularly tobacco, rice, indigo, and cotton), southern delegates insisted that the Constitution prohibit export taxes.

    So no, the South did not actually end up with any significant tax burden due to slavery.

  15. 16
    Tamme says:

    “would there have been a French Revolution at all, for example, if the French hadn’t taken on so much debt to support the American revolution”

    Obviously we can never know this conclusively. But most historians of the French revolution (I am thinking particularly Jonathan Israel and Carole Rampling) would argue that the real cause of the French revolution was Les Lumieres, who created an ideological hegemony among the French administrative classes that was incompatible with absolute monarchy. It needed an economic crisis for this ideological hegemony to have an opportunity to seize power, but it seems impossible that France would be able to avoid any kind of economic crisis for the next century (the economic hardships caused by French intervention in the USA were certainly not unprecedented).

    “Point 2 is a laugher. Canada (no revolution) does not have a much better track record with their indigenous peoples. The British were brutal colonizers around the world. Hard to imagine they would treat Native Americans any better.”

    The ‘British’ record, while always one of imperialism, was not uniformly maximally brutal. In Canada, as you say, it was arguably even worse than in the independent USA. In Australia, it was worse again, while in New Zealand it was comparatively benign. It seems that British policy towards indigenous groups seems to have mostly been a response to local conditions. Given what actual British policy was in what’s now the USA, it seems it was trending towards a relatively benign approach, notably forbidding European settlement in agreed areas and enforcing it quite strictly. And as Amp points out, many indigenous people wanted the British to win – and presumably they had a better idea of their own interests than we do.

  16. 17
    Ruchama says:

    I’ve recently read a biography of Lincoln. An analysis of the issue presented in there held that at the time the Constitution was signed there was a broad expectation that slavery was on its way out, that it would go away on its own as the economy progressed. Apparently even in the South there were many people who held this view. But in the decades following the adoption of the Constitution this changed. So at the time this was signed many of the people who approved this figured that it was going to be a relatively short-lived issue. They were wrong, as it turned out, but that was what many people thought at the time.

    I’m currently reading a biography of Hamilton, and it says pretty much the same. That there were several people (Hamilton, Adams, a bunch of others) who wanted to get rid of slavery entirely, but the compromise made at the time was that nothing would change about slavery at the federal level until 1808. A lot of them did seem to think that, if bringing in new slaves was outlawed in 1808 (which, in fact, it was), then slavery would gradually die out. (And, now that I think about that, Hamilton probably based that on his childhood in the Caribbean, where he spent several years as a teenager working as a clerk for a shipping company, and one of his jobs was keeping track of the slaves being brought in. In the Caribbean, slaves lived an average of something like four years after arriving, and there, outlawing the external slave trade would end slavery, very quickly. I’m not sure if he’d ever been south of Baltimore within the US at that point.)

  17. 18
    Ortvin Sarapuu says:

    @Ruchama: Were you prompted to read about Hamilton by that musical

  18. 19
    RonF says:

    I have a biography of Hamilton I’m working through now. I wonder if it’s the same one (I’ll have a look when I get home)? Given your summary I suspect it may be. I was prompted to buy it because I recently spent a week in San Francisco/San Jose, and whenever I fly I buy a book to read during the flight.

  19. 20
    Ruchama says:

    Yes, I was prompted by the musical. I mean, I might have ended up reading this eventually anyway, but I specifically decided to read it this summer because I’ve been listening to the musical (and I’ve loved Lin-Manuel Miranda for a while anyway, since seeing “In the Heights.”) It’s the one by Ron Chernow, which is the one the musical was based on.

    Right now, I’m reading about the aftermath of his affair with Maria Reynolds, which pretty much means I’m wanting to shout, “You idiot!” at someone who’s been dead for over 200 years. (But, really. He was an idiot, in pretty much every decision he made around that.)