So it was dollar shot night wherever you were last night, huh?

What Percy said. The first bill to outlaw slavery in the colonies was introduced in Parliament, IIRC, in 1776. It failed, but the anti-slavery movement was very strong in GB and the writing was on the wall.

Other issues were economic, for instance the prohibition on iron-working; and diplomatic, treaties with the French and Native-American tribes wold have kept Daniel Boone from grabbing the good land in Kentucky.

The relative percentage of Scottish and Irish residents was also increasing. War was inevitable.

This Washingtonian counter-factual is treated entertainingly in The Two Georges by Richard DREYFUSS and Harry TURTLEDOVE.

Oh, and Britain offered to go to war with Mexico on behalf of the Republic of Texas, provided that the Republic of Texas free its slaves. My great, great grandfather and his partner in Galveston, Gail BORDEN, were all in favor of that. But, Sam HOUSTON and the slave-owning planters up-river prevailed.

Eric FLINT also deals with some of the later Jacksonian counter-factuals in The River Wars.

These are no substitute for historical scholarship. But, counter-factual novels are better than the sort of chauvinistic myth-history taught is grade-school when it comes to understanding what we are and could be.

::JRBehrman

A bit off-topic, but I can't restrain myself.  I read a fascinating essay once written by a Cherokee amatuer historian named Saunders, about Sam Houston.  It began in Tennessee, with Houston involved in a "political marriage" with Chief Bowles daughter, Talahina.  Since it was political, Talahina had no compunction against having a string of Indian lovers on hand, and Houstan began to suffer all sorts of social attacks at being a cuckhold.  It got so bad that he eventually moved to Arkansas, but Talahina followed him there and his agony continued.  He finally ran away to Texas, the story went, and even signed on to the Republic movement in order to get his past behind him and across an international boundary.

I've always wondered how much truth there was behind Saunders' story.  He did some other work that is quite good, mostly in cataloging Cherokee graves in Oklahoma.   

Neoboho

So in 1837 when Parliament outlaws slavery the South rebels against Britain and promptly gets its butt handed to it by the joint efforts of Britain and the northern provinces (including Canada). They wouldn't have been dealing with George III, Lord North or Cornwallis, they wouldn't have had a France they could to for alliance, in fact their espousal of slavery would have poisoned any claims of liberty and revolt against "tyranny" they might have made.

Matt

I would recommend to you any book by Bernard Bailyn especially the "Ideological Origins of the Amermcian Revolution." It belies you point about there being no fundadmental disagreement between the British and the Americans. First and foremost those living in the American Colonies had ceased being British and had become Americans. They were no longer one people.

Secondarily the Americans were very receptive to the "country ideology" which was republican in nature. On almost every issue the British thought they were engaged in a reasonable liberal colonial policy. The Americans saw the very same policies as the height of tyranny. Even Franklin who wanted to preserve the link ultimately saw it was impossible.

Daniel A. Greenbaum

Without the American Revolution to bankrupt France, they'd have bankrupted themselves shortly thereafter, anyway - they were very close to bankruptcy.

In 1787, they got into a diplomatic crisis with Britain and Prussia over the Netherlands. This was at about the same time that Prussia and Poland were involved in a crisis with France's allies Austria and Russia over the Ottoman Empire (with which Austria and Russia went to war). The British and Prussians supported their relations, the House of Orange, who were not the monarchs of the United Provinces, but a kind of hereditary governors, in a struggle against the "Patriot" party, consisting largely of the oligarchic elites of the province of Holland, who were supported by France. After the Patriots basically tried to dispossess the House of Orange, the Prussians, backed by the British, sent an army in to restore them.

The French were seriously pissed off, but because of their financial difficulties and the beginnings of a constitutional crisis, they were unable to do anything. With no American war, they'd probably be able to do something, and get themselves involved in a big continental war that would be much more expensive than their intervention in the American Revolution was. They'll financially collapse soon enough, and perhaps now the Revolution starts in the middle of a war, rather than the war starting up in the middle of the Revolution...things would be different, but probably not that different. The sicknesses of the Ancien Regime in France were of considerably longer scale origin than merely the intervention in America.

The country ideology was British in origin. However, it was a failure in Britain but successful in America.

Daniel A. Greenbaum

Daniel, my understanding is that both colonists and the English used the same conceptual framework in the lead up to the Revolution; they just interpreted things differently. So, Gordon Wood argues that the American colonists rebelled on behalf of the English Constitution -- they thought that the English constitution was ideal in principle but that the English practice had betrayed that fundamentally sound principle. (See Wood's Creation of the American Republic for lots and lots of details.)

(Interestingly, Wood also argues that the American experience trying to form state governments totally changed the colonists' understanding of key political concepts. By the time of the Constitution, Wood contends, one could legitimately speak of an "American political system.")

On the formation of identity, I'd recommend Linda Colley's book Britons. Although it deals mostly with the late-nineteenth century, it's still a really intriguing look at how "English" and "Scot" and "Welsh" and maybe even "Irish" became "British" (or "Britons"). One of the points that evolves out of this is that a British identity also wasn't well established at the time.

Bailyn is still important but is no longer the last word on the matter. For a concise summary, I'd recommend Alan Gibson's book Interpreting the Founding (2006, actually), which chronicles the last century of historical debate on the American Revolution. Although Gibson eschews the term “paradigm” as “hoary and overused”—as well as inaccurate -- he inventories five main schools or trends in historical thought. First, the Progressive interpretation, associated with Charles Beard and focused on economic interests. Second, the liberal tradition, espoused by Louis Hartz. Third, the republican synthesis (hi, Bailyn and GWood and PGAPocock!). Fourth, the Scottish Enlightenment explanation, notably characterized as “liberalism in a different key.” And fifth, the polyglot outgrowth of the “new” social history that explored the experiences of, among others, ordinary workers, slaves, Native Americans, and women. Gibson argues that each historical school offers continuing avenues of exploration and suggests that future historical work will productively play them off each other.

In other words, I agree with your suggestion to Matt that there were some important differences between Americans and English at the time of the Revolution -- and that some Americans and some English were aware of those key differences.

But I don't think one can legitimately speak of an "American" identity. After all, even the national Constitution of 1787 was not sold as the creation of a "nation" but the union of sovereign states! The whole issue of a "nation" wasn't officially settled until the Civil War. To steal a sports analogy, then, good hustle on the Revolution, Founders!

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Unlike my dear friend jlkenney (aka the GM), I am something of an expert on Early American history (well, okay, a grad student).

Even though I've got my training wheels on, I can still say that while Greenbaum and others are rushing to cite one or two factors to prove that the revolution was or was not inevitable, it's far more complex than that. You're not going to settle this issue on a comment thread, and no one book, no matter how influential or brilliant, can settle this matter. There is no clear historiographical consensus on the of the revolution; ask a room of thirty early Americanists, and you'll get about ninety different answers.

While I like Matt's question (could statesmanship have avoided the Revolution?), perhaps a better (or easier to imagine) counterfactual scenario is: what if the Americans lost? It doesn't matter how inevitable you think the revolution was; the American victory itself was contingent on all sorts of minute variables, from leaders' personalities to epidemics to weather. Just a few small decisions or chance occurences could have assured a British victory.

Rocketing forward to suggest the implications of the Revolution on WWII is a big counterfactual mess. Even if something resembling the United States was part of a British commonwealth on the eve of war, despite its political affiliations, it would still be an economic and demographic giant compared to Britain. (This would be true even if these North American provinces failed to make the Louisiana Purchase or to seize the northern provinces of Mexico.) It's even possible to suppose that these vast provinces would have representation in Parliament, just as the colonists requested. (Considering that counterfactual, one could even imagine that Parliament, if not the monarchy, would have moved to this side of the Atlantic at some point in the late nineteenth or early twentieth century.)

Rather than picturing Great Britian as an island nation off of Europe mulling its options regarding Hitler's Germany, perhaps we should instead visualize a much Greater Britain, a transatlantic polity that would be less inclined to care about the Continent. There's little reason to assume that without the Revolution, America would have been quicker to enter the war. In fact, just the opposite could be true; without the Revolution, the British might have been slower to fight the Germans.

The more you think about this, and begin to weigh other factors, like the eventual course of European politics, the stickier it gets. That's the nature of counterfactuals.

As for my own thoughts on this, I still feel that if politician had managed to avoid the Revolution, or if the Continental Army had lost it, there would have still been countless smaller or not-so-small revolutions that would have followed. Imperial policy towards native lands undoubtably would have continued to upset backcountry settlers, leading to constant strife from the periphery, and the question of abolition would have alienated southern planters. I can imagine all sorts of strange events, including a prolonged backwoods rebellion that would have pitted Scots-Irish colonists against English and other colonists and their native allies , or a southern/Carribbean revolution led by planter elites against the abolition movement that could have resulted in an independent slaveholding confederacy stretching from Texas to Jamaica. But, like any other counterfactuals, these are highly speculative scenarios. I hope they illustrate my point that this is a very, very complex question without any easy or definitive answers.

And as a shout-out to jlkenney: stop reading blogs and go back to l'archive.

If we'd gotten into World War II in 1939 rather than 1941 the war, presumably, have been considerably shorter and many lives could have been saved.

that's ridiculous.  If we had gone to war in 1939, Hitler might have decided to put off attacking the U.S.S.R.  If we had attacked before Hitler became mired in Russia, we would have probably had casualties at least three or four times greater than the ones we suffered.  Plus, Stalin would have been in that much better a position at the start of the Cold War.

In many ways the German army was superior to ours on a man-for-man basis.  If Hitler had not lost so many in the vain attempt to ocnquer the Soviets, I'm not even certain we would have won. 

"You say I'm a dreamer.  We're two of a kind.  Looking for some perfect world that we both know that we'll never find." - Thompson Twins, "Hold Me Now"

"on some level there's no real point." Yeah, well, always good to have a reminder why I should hate the celebrity and career potential of people whose main track record is blogging. 

John 

http://www.haberarts.com/

Re: None of them (Austria, Britain, Prussia, Russia) experiences any significant revolutionary unrest during the whole period

That's true, but it doesn't mean the ruling class wasn't terrified of the possibility. There was a huge reaction against all forms of liberalism at that time: the despots dropped the "enlightened" pretense. We even saw a small echo of it in the young USA with the Alien and Sedition Acts. In a way it was much like the hysteria that surrounded the opening years of the Cold War. There was never a danger that that the USA would undergo a Communist Revolution but that didn't stop people from being paranoid about the possibility, or demagogues from profitting by that fear.

To Ms. Bev’s point, I think the following complaint against “Mad” George (I mean the III, not the present one) in the Declaration of Independence, is very apt:

“In every stage of these Oppressions we have Petitioned for Redress in the most humble Terms: Our repeated Petitions have been answered only by repeated Injury. A Prince, whose Character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the Ruler of a free People.”

Gee, if you change “Prince” to “President”, it may still be apt.

America wasn't and isn't perfect.. name me one nation that was or is.. human beings can never attain attain perfection. I will say that despite our nation's wrongdoings, many of it's people have been the most willing to examine it's nations wrongs and to be willing to address them. The very nature of our constitution and bill of rights allowed our citizenry to have the potential to be able to overcome the wrongs and foibles that are the result of all too human wrongdoings.

Yglesias puts forward Canada as one example of what America could have been had we not sought to be an independent and free nation. Others have rationalized that Britain was more "honest" and for example, that native peoples wouldn't have had their lands seized by "white" people, etc.. because Britain honored treaties, etc..

I'd like to counter with what might have been the outcome for Canada, et al.. had there not been an American revolution.

Firstly, countries that are establishing colonies, that make inroads into other countries do so to to take over and exploit the resources, including the peoples of those countries. This is true whether we're talking about any country, be it white, black or any of the many shades in between. This has gone on long before Britain or even the Roman empire ever cast it's eyes beyond it's own borders.. and it still continues to this day, whether we're talking about what's happening in Darfur, what China has done and still does in Tibet, what the Soviet Union did, and what Putin still tries to do, what the Dominican Republic does in Haiti... plus much more. The native peoples of Canada were being fought, killed, their lands seized, and it continued under British rule.

Britain wasn't interested in maintaining treaties with France or other countries, their intent was to ultimately have control over as much of the globe as possible. It's laws governing it's colonies in the new world were specific to the fact that those colonies were to only make trade laws that benefited Britain and hurt other trading countries. Britain, which had no problem grinding the people of Ireland, Scotland and elsewhere, including their colonists of the neww world under it's heels, who were the ones ultimately advocating for the exploitation of the native peoples of the new world, and their lands (and ultimately he native peoples of other lands, India comes first to mind) in the seizing of the cited, Kentucky from the tribes that lived there. Britain had massive debt that included expenses from it's other empire building activities.. and it's own citizenry could be taxed only so much... so it was exceedingly willing to overlook appearances as far away from home as possible.

Let's consider the seperation of church and state which so many here express great concern about. It was one of the huge outcomes from the American revolution, it's cited as an example that the common people of the US could become a self governing people in it's own right... and lead to similar demands in Canada who were able to force the British crown to fear facing a similar revolution in Canada.

The US revolution inspired the whigs in Britain, people in Ireland, the Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, France (the so called French revolution was becoming a prime example of a failed revolution), Spain and even Latin America to seek freedom and redress wrongs.

Again, I'm not claiming we achieved perfection, but the American ideal did inspire a desire for freedom that gave hope to common peoples around the world. Also, our founding fathers, as flawed as they might have been were passionate enough about the principles of freedom and liberty that they bent over backwards to create a document that allowed a people the ability to overcome the many mistakes that being human beings they could end up making.

I could see possible result where the American South, possibly joined by the British Caribbean, ended up as a separate nation. The North however was pro-British almost as soon as the Revolution ended, and probably would have remained in union with the rest of British North America (Canada and Oregon territory.)

But there wouldn't have been an America without a revolution... thereby no American government that could have had the decision making power to achieve anything, let alone it's being a power to contend with. So it would have been exclusively Anglo.

I just wanted to add that despite all the America bashing, that the presidency of George W. Bush wasn't pre-ordained, it was the by product of extremist thinking, just as other wrongs in history have been the by product of extemist thinking the world over.

This morning on Washington Journal, one of the questions discussed was is dissent unpatriotic. The discussion broke down based on ideology, my opinion is that it isn't, but where we're going wrong these days is that we no longer have a free press. Since the loss of the fairness doctrine, since the deregulation of press and media has taken place our media is now controlled by a handfull of people/corporations. So there isn't a watchdog out there reporting/challenging the lies that are told, by the political extremists out there.

The very thought that the U.S. could have become as bland, as tasteless and odorless as Canada -- no frontier humor!no Mark Twain! no Jesse James or Al Capone or Hollywood gangsters or Ralph Ellison or Blues or Jazz or hip hop or Jackson Pollack or Norman Mailer, etc., etc. -- has filled me with a rush of pride for our 1776 guys. Thank god they saved us from a fate worse than death!

Surely American troops on the Western Front in 1940 might have prevented the fall of France?

That's presupposing the elements that later became the Vichy government wouldn't have sided with the German invaders and betrayed the American troops.

Interestingly, this "fun history factoids" piece in the Sun. Times "Week in Review" section

Celebrating July 2: 10 Days That Changed History By ADAM GOODHEART

has a different narrative to yours:

APRIL 19, 1802: Mosquitos Win the West

Events that change America don't always occur within our borders. Consider the spring of 1802. Napoleon had sent a formidable army under his brother-in-law, General Charles Leclerc, to quell the rebellion of former slaves in Haiti.

On April 19, Leclerc reported to Napoleon that the rainy season had arrived, and his troops were falling ill. By the end of the year, almost the whole French force, including Leclerc himself, were dead of mosquito-borne yellow fever.

When Napoleon realized his reconquest had failed, he abandoned hopes of a New World empire, and decided to sell the Louisiana Territory to the United States.

"Across a huge section of the American heartland, from New Orleans up through Montana, they ought to build statues to Toussaint L'Ouverture and the other heroes of the Haitian Revolution," says Ted Widmer, director of the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University.

While both are simplistic, I myself believe the narrative based on J. Carter Brown's statement is a bit more accurate, that one can't easily say that the American Revolution "bankrupted" France. After all, they had quite a lot of other things that intervened shortly thereafter, that you are leaving out, like some guillotines and stuff.

P.S. The other factoids in the article are fun, recommeded for those who enjoy contrarian historical challenges....

The Declaration is factually wrong. By George III's time the Crown was no longer the main power in the state. That role had shifted to parliament. The decisions, unjust, incompetent and arbitrary as they were, that led to US independence were made by ministers acting in the name of George III, not the king himself, and by Parliament.

A prince may be hard to remove but George III's ministers could be and were removed at the instance of Parliament at frequent intervals.

On the larger issue in this thread, I doubt the British would have moved so calmly and quickly to concede responsible government to their remaining colonies if the the US had not proved that Britain had no choice. Its interesting that in Ireland, where the population ratio and short distance made it possible, the British held on hard as long as they could.

Hoo boy! And the cradle of democracy was a slave state (Greece). So, were INDIANS men? Were AFRICANS men? Were WOMEN men? Forgive me, Bev - I'm reliving a seminar moment, when we participants were tasked to determine what was meant by "We, the People..." You know, who is we? It reduces down to white men, or more specifically, property owners. F.S. Northrop defined the Constitution as a property law document, and the Bill of Rights was necessary to protect people from it. [ The Meeting of East and West]

Neoboho

aMike Is it fair to suggest that the Declaration of Independence didn't create the American Nation...rather, the Constitution of the United States did? Many of the leading lights of the Revolution were quite dubious about the new Constitution. Patrick Henry wasn't a fan of it, Neither was Sam Adams (the guy who [didn't] brew beer). Jefferson was reluctant to accept the new document without the Bill of Rights. The tension between the Declaration and the Constitution is fairly palpable. Here's to the publication of the Declaration, which we celebrate this day. For those interested in this, the arguments of the Anti-Federalists can be found at http://grid.let.rug.nl/~usa/D/1776-1800/federalist/antixx.htm  or, in slightly different form, at http://www.constitution.org/afp/afpchron.htm

The Soul of America is embedded in the Declaration.  Save for the Bill of Rights, the Constitution retreats from the principals of the Declaration and the self-evident Truths it proclaims.  Perhaps the Anti-Federalists weren't the literary stylists the Federalists were.  Yet there are reasons today to review the cautions found in some of them.

 Happy Fourth (well, it's still the fourth Central Daylight Time and west).  :-)

Look at the Louisiana exercises of 1940 to get a sense of the readiness of US troops to participate in anything on the Western Front. These exercises had numerous positive effects, bringing a young staff brigadier named Eisenhower to notice, and letting Patton develop armored tactics (with a partially simulated force) that was so effective that his division was eventually told to stand down so the exercise controllers could assess the effectiveness of other parts of the army-level exercises.

Look at the isolationist sentiment in 1940, and the lack of aircraft. I do not believe the US forces available in 1940 would have achieved much but getting slaughtered in France. Even after the entry into the war, we were still identifying the useless commanders like Fredendall, as well as anti-armor weapons, resulting in the fiasco of Kasserine Pass.

While there were US desires to intervene cross-channel as early as 1942 (see the proposed SLEDGEHAMMER, BOLERO and ROUNDUP plans), the Dieppe raid disaster (Operation JUBILEE) proved that mid-1942 was too early to go against a serious defense -- North Africa and Guadalcanal weren't France.

In 1940, there were neither the ready troops nor the convoys to get them there. The Normandy invasion was the point, in June 1944, where the pieces really came together, from ways to supply without initially seizing a port, to adequate landing craft, to Hobart's Funnies, to sufficiently large assault forces. Even then, the air support was badly flawed, and Omaha Beach was a very near-run thing.

--
Howard

*equal opportunity offense to both extremes*

I'm surprised no one has mentioned the world war that actually occurred when most of the major figures of the Revolution were still alive - the French Revolution/Napoleonic wars. Since the U.S. (or rather the British colonies) only had about 3 million people at this time, their addition to the British side would not have been as great an impact as in World War I or World War II, but it would have had some effect. If Napoleon had been deposed at an earlier date, or never even come to power at all, the Holy Roman Empire might have existed past 1806, inhibiting German and Italian unification and possibly leading to no World War I or II. But far be it from me to argue that independence was wrong, since a different outcome for the Napoleonic wars could perhaps, by some scenario we couldn't even begin to sketch out, have led to something as bad as (or, if possible, even worse than) Hitler and Stalin. And come to think of it, without our inspiration and the bankruptcy of the French treasury from funding us, there might not have been any French Revolution at all, and who knows what would have happened then? The point is, a scenario in which the world in 1914 or 1939 is exactly the same, except Britain owns the U.S., is an absurd one.

The Battle of France was a much more close run thing than the common imagination allows. Even a not terribly large or well-trained American force might have been sufficient to change the result.

As a Californian, may I humbly point out that without independence, a) Napoleon would have sooner smothered his pate in ketchup than sell Louisiana to the British, and b) Mexico would never have lost the West in 1848, and may even have acquired Louisiana itself. Needless to say, there would have been a smidgen more economic parity between the US and Mexico than there is now. California might even have been fighting illegal immigration along its eastern borders rather than its southern.

I think that's a valid issue here. In creating this alternate history, what if the American colonists actually achieved representation in Parliament? It is concievable that this radical change could have done the opposite of what Mr. Yglesias muses, and made England more like America. As the population of the colonies overtook that of Great Britain, American attitudes would end up shaping British politics more, but without the tempering of independence. The rest of Europe might have united behind the French and Austrians, fearful of British might.

It could be a wonderful setting for a story, but the way this British Empire would have evolved is too unpredictable for me.

A question for Matt that I should have asked earlier: is the title of this post a deliberate reference to William Appleman Williams?  If so, is there a greater ideological significance to it -- or just a nice sound?  And if it isn't a reference to WAW, well, it should be! 

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