Justified

When the thirteen colonies declared their independence from Great Britain, it was a turning point that would alter the course of human history. The Americans’ unlikely victory over their despotic parent country sparked the French revolution only a few years later, and instigated of the spread of the revolutionary idea of democracy. Never before had the idea of a free people electing its government been voiced. The founding fathers birthed the radical idea that the individual had the right to choose his governor. A popular notion is the impression that the colonists began a war over taxes. The Colonies were not justified in waging war against Great Britain because of taxes However, the colonists were absolutely right to fight for their freedom from the cruel tyranny of Great Britain. Unfair taxation was merely the last straw placed upon the colonies’ breaking back that was the catalyst for revolt.

Thomas Whately, architect of the Stamp Act, may have been correct in saying that Great Britain had the right to tax the American colonies because “We [Great Britain] are not yet recovered from a War undertaken solely for their [the Americans’] protection…they should contribute to the Preservation of the Advantages they have received.” However, the tax was not the problem, it was the fact that the colonies were being taxed without their consent that infuriated them so. The thirteen colonies did not go to war over taxes. This is a misconception. Unjust taxation was certainly added to a long list of wrongs, but it was not the only grounds for war.

The reasons for what became known as the Revolutionary War are defined clearly in a document known as the Declaration of Independence, in which the founding fathers stated exactly their motive for going to war. In the middle of the second paragraph can be found this line, which sums up the Declaration as a whole: “But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.” This radical idea was the basis of the Declaration: that the people themselves had the inherent right to decide whether or not their rulers were satisfactory.

For 150 years the American people had suffered, subjected to the whims of a pampered English king thousands of miles away. Thomas Jefferson, the author of the Declaration of Independence, and John Dickinson together wrote a “Declaration of the Causes and Necessity of Taking up Arms” in order to explain to the American people why the colonies were going to war. In it, they say of the British government, “What is to defend us against so enormous, so unlimited a power?…We are reduced to the alternative of choosing an unconditional submission to the tyranny of irritated [British officials], or resistance by force. - The latter is our choice.” The signers of the Declaration of Independence believed in the ideas stated therein so passionately, that they were willing to risk open war with the world’s superpower. They were invoking one of their “unalienable rights” stated in their new Declaration: “…whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government…”

During the century-and-a-half of the forming of the colonial thirteen states, the people who lived in the New World removed themselves more and more from Great Britain as Great Britain pushed and shoved the colonies further and further away into the corner, seeing them as nothing more than a money machine. American colonists should have been awarded the rights of British citizens, but were instead subject to conviction without trial, unlawful imprisonment, and other such oppressions. The Declaration cites, “He [King George III] has plundered our seas, ravaged our coasts, burnt our towns, and destroyed the lives of our people.” Because the British government that should have been protecting them had instead turned its back upon the colonists and was the cause of such injuries, the signers of the Declaration of Independence knew that a proclamation of their freedom from Great Britain was their only choice, even if it meant engaging in war.

A large portion of the Declaration of Independence is occupied by the colonists’ complaints against the Crown. These complaints begin with the assertion, “The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these states.” The Declaration goes on to say that, “He [King George III] is at this time transporting large Armies of foreign mercenaries to compleat the works of death, desolation and tyranny, already begun with circumstances of Cruelty and perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages, and totally unworthy the Head of a civilized nation.”

As the Declaration of Independence makes plain, Great Britain did not just tax the American colonists unfairly and without representation, but it committed a multitude of crimes against them. These colonists should have been treated as British citizens, but were instead abused and were treated, in general, appallingly. Because of Great Britain’s long, long history of mistreatment and exploitation of the American colonies, these colonies had every right to declare their independence and throw off their insufferable chains of bondage.