American Revolution a Civil War... ?

5fish

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IT can be said our American Revolution was a civil war just like the one that happen 70 years later...

“Every great revolution is a civil war,” as David Armitage has recently remarked. That insight could change the way we think about the American Revolution.

David Ramsay, the first patriot historian of the war, held that the Revolution was “originally a civil war in the estimation of both parties.”

Mercy Otis Warren wrote that the fires of civil war were kindled as early as the Boston massacre. But in the narratives of these historians, the moment the United States declared independence was the moment the conflict stopped being a civil war.


What we tell ourselves...

The assumptions that underpin that story are worth challenging: that the division between British and American became absolute at the moment of the Declaration,
that a new nation was born in that instant, and that the only distinction that mattered was the one between the United States and its enemies. Of course that’s the story early patriot historians told. It was a story that projected backwards the unity and sovereignty they wanted to foster in the new nation.

WE were fight ourselves...

That picture may have looked accurate for Massachusetts, at least until disorder in the western country overtook the state in the 1780s, but on the coast of Rhode Island, in the Hudson Valley and the New Jersey “Neutral Zone”, on the Delmarva peninsula, and all across the South, things were quite different.[2] The Revolution was a story of dissolving sovereignty and contested authority, lawless violence and the search for security. Its true theorist was not John Locke, but Thomas Hobbes

WE fighting ourselves...

Once we consider the American Revolution as a civil war, it’s easier to integrate the broader world of violence and division that often gets left out of the Revolutionary narrative: the Regulator movements of South and North Carolina, the march of the Paxton boys, land riots in Maine and New York, separatist movements in Vermont and Franklin, and the rural insurrections that swept the west up to the conquest of the Whiskey Rebels in 1794.

We were looking for protection...

As imperial sovereignty broke down, first in the borderlands and then in the heart of the colonies themselves, it left a disparate set of ex-colonists to construct new forms of authority. They did so in overlapping and piecemeal ways, creating struggles in the process that would continue for decades and centuries. New authorities won the allegiance of anxious Americans by offering protection for persons and property: in doing so, they promised to crush Indians and open new land for white ownership; in the south, they fought to restore the slave regime and reverse the effects of the slaves’ own “revolution within a revolution.”[4] Among themselves, they struggled to allocate power—and to locate sovereignty—within the federal union.

LINK: https://earlyamericanists.com/2014/02/18/was-the-american-revolution-a-civil-war/

But if you view the Revolution as another civil war, the religious histories of the two conflicts look more alike. In the Revolution, Americans fought against Americans as the Patriots seceded from the British Empire. Many American Loyalists hoped that God was on their side against the Patriot rebels, and after the final battle at Yorktown, Virginia, in 1781, they experienced the same dark disappointment as Confederates did eighty-four years later.

It seems we had internal struggles before the war... It was a failing of British rule that led to our revolution. The failure to protect the colonist in a wild land...
 

5fish

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Here is an event that points towards our first civil war that was hijacked later by Sam Adams... for his revolution...

LINK:https://www.britannica.com/event/Paxton-Boys-uprising

On December 14, 1763, about 57 drunken settlers from Paxton, Pennsylvania, slaughtered 20 innocent and defenseless Susquehannock (Conestoga) Indians, near Lancaster, Pennsylvania, whom they suspected of connivance with other Native Americans who had been pillaging and scalping.

Since the residents of that frontier area were sympathetic to the actions of the Paxton Boys, however, no prosecutions were undertaken. Besides revealing the prevailing bias of frontiersmen against Native Americans, the Paxton Boys uprising also took on a political tone. Residents of the Pennsylvania backcountry were already embittered over the eastern counties’ disproportionate control over the colony’s legislature and the failure of the eastern-dominated legislature to provide adequate appropriations for defense of the frontier. Consequently, sparked by the events surrounding the Paxton Boys massacre (the Conestoga Massacre), about 600 armed frontiersmen marched on Philadelphia in January 1764 to vent their anger against the provincial assembly. A delegation of prominent Philadelphians, including Franklin, met the protesters and restrained them from entering the city by promising them that the legislature would provide a thorough hearing of their complaints. The assembly offered no redress for the protesters’ main grievances, though, and the colony’s Proprietary Party publicized the incident to their advantage in their campaign during the election of 1764.
 

5fish

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Did you read this part armed men marching on Philadelphia sounds like Virginia of today.... sounds like the birthing of a civil war...

600 armed frontiersmen marched on Philadelphia in January 1764 to vent their anger against the provincial assembly. A delegation of prominent Philadelphians, including Franklin, met the protesters and restrained them from entering the city by promising them that the legislature would provide a thorough hearing of their complaints.
From wiki...

In January 1764, the Paxton Boys marched toward Philadelphia with about 250 men to challenge the government for failing to protect them. Benjamin Franklin led a group of civic leaders to meet them in Germantown, then a separate settlement northwest of the city, and hear their grievances. After the leaders agreed to read the men's pamphlet of issues before the colonial legislature, the mob agreed to disperse.

Many colonists were outraged about the December killings of innocent Conestoga, describing the murders as more savage than those committed by Indians. Benjamin Franklin's "Narrative of the Late Massacres" concluded with noting that the Conestoga would have been safe among any other people on earth, no matter how primitive, except "'white savages' from Peckstang and Donegall!"[5]

Lazarus Stewart, a former leader of the Paxton Boys, was killed by Iroquois warriors in the Wyoming Massacre in 1778 during the American Revolutionary War.[6] In the Wyoming Valley event, one of three famous massacres during many scattered Tory-Amerindian staged attacks on colonial settlements that year in Connecticut, New York and Pennsylvania, Mohawk chief Joseph Brant led a group of Loyalists, Mohawk and other warriors against rebel colonial settlers in the area along the North Branch Susquehanna River. The raids resulted in the Sullivan Expedition the next year which effectively broke the power of the Six Nations of the Iroquois below Canada; and forced the British Colonial powers in Canada to shelter the Amerindians they'd incited into the attacks.
 

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IT can be said our American Revolution was a civil war just like the one that happen 70 years later...

“Every great revolution is a civil war,” as David Armitage has recently remarked. That insight could change the way we think about the American Revolution.

David Ramsay, the first patriot historian of the war, held that the Revolution was “originally a civil war in the estimation of both parties.”

Mercy Otis Warren wrote that the fires of civil war were kindled as early as the Boston massacre. But in the narratives of these historians, the moment the United States declared independence was the moment the conflict stopped being a civil war.


What we tell ourselves...

The assumptions that underpin that story are worth challenging: that the division between British and American became absolute at the moment of the Declaration,
that a new nation was born in that instant, and that the only distinction that mattered was the one between the United States and its enemies. Of course that’s the story early patriot historians told. It was a story that projected backwards the unity and sovereignty they wanted to foster in the new nation.

WE were fight ourselves...

That picture may have looked accurate for Massachusetts, at least until disorder in the western country overtook the state in the 1780s, but on the coast of Rhode Island, in the Hudson Valley and the New Jersey “Neutral Zone”, on the Delmarva peninsula, and all across the South, things were quite different.[2] The Revolution was a story of dissolving sovereignty and contested authority, lawless violence and the search for security. Its true theorist was not John Locke, but Thomas Hobbes

WE fighting ourselves...

Once we consider the American Revolution as a civil war, it’s easier to integrate the broader world of violence and division that often gets left out of the Revolutionary narrative: the Regulator movements of South and North Carolina, the march of the Paxton boys, land riots in Maine and New York, separatist movements in Vermont and Franklin, and the rural insurrections that swept the west up to the conquest of the Whiskey Rebels in 1794.

We were looking for protection...

As imperial sovereignty broke down, first in the borderlands and then in the heart of the colonies themselves, it left a disparate set of ex-colonists to construct new forms of authority. They did so in overlapping and piecemeal ways, creating struggles in the process that would continue for decades and centuries. New authorities won the allegiance of anxious Americans by offering protection for persons and property: in doing so, they promised to crush Indians and open new land for white ownership; in the south, they fought to restore the slave regime and reverse the effects of the slaves’ own “revolution within a revolution.”[4] Among themselves, they struggled to allocate power—and to locate sovereignty—within the federal union.

LINK: https://earlyamericanists.com/2014/02/18/was-the-american-revolution-a-civil-war/

But if you view the Revolution as another civil war, the religious histories of the two conflicts look more alike. In the Revolution, Americans fought against Americans as the Patriots seceded from the British Empire. Many American Loyalists hoped that God was on their side against the Patriot rebels, and after the final battle at Yorktown, Virginia, in 1781, they experienced the same dark disappointment as Confederates did eighty-four years later.

It seems we had internal struggles before the war... It was a failing of British rule that led to our revolution. The failure to protect the colonist in a wild land...
I agree the ARW was a civil war in the sense that Americans fought on both sides.However more Americans backed the Colonial Rebels then the British. The British Army even before the French Army and Navy plus the Spanish Navy intervened required Germanic Principalities to send troops to assist the British Army by paying them just has the US would pay South Korea , the Philippines and Thailand to send troops to Vietnam.
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5fish

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Here it seem the colonist were having little mini revolts....

Regulator movement, designation for two groups, one in South Carolina, the other in North Carolina, that tried to effect governmental changes in the 1760s. In South Carolina, the Regulator movement was an organized effort by backcountry settlers to restore law and order and establish institutions of local government.


The War of the Regulation, also known as Regulator Movement, was an uprising in the British North America's Carolina colonies, lasting from about 1765 to 1771, in which citizens took up arms against colonial officials, whom they viewed as corrupt. Though the rebellion did not change the power structure, some historians consider it a catalyst to the American Revolutionary War. Others like John Spencer Bassett take the view that the Regulators did not wish to change the form or principle of their government, but simply wanted to make the colony's political process more equal. They wanted better economic conditions for everyone except slaves and Native Americans, instead of a system that heavily benefited the colonial officials. Bassett interprets the events of the late 1760s in Orange and surrounding counties as "...a peasants' rising, a popular upheaval."[1]
 
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Wehrkraftzersetzer

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Any revolution is a civil war. The American Revolution only was a revolution since America won, otherwise it would be a well done police action inside the British empire. It only was successful since the British had a real war in Europe.

Remember You independence wasn't uncondicional. Her majesty has the right to revoke it (she hasn't the power).
 

Kirk's Raider's

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Any revolution is a civil war. The American Revolution only was a revolution since America won, otherwise it would be a well done police action inside the British empire. It only was successful since the British had a real war in Europe.

Remember You independence wasn't uncondicional. Her majesty has the right to revoke it (she hasn't the power).
During the the ARW , Great Britain was ruled by a King not a Queen nicknamed "Crazy George". If I recall the King barely spoke English his native language was German. I have to double check that.
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rittmeister

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During the the ARW , Great Britain was ruled by a King not a Queen nicknamed "Crazy George". If I recall the King barely spoke English his native language was German. I have to double check that.
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she kinda got his job now, hasn't she?




... and don't tell the english confetti party
 

Kirk's Raider's

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she kinda got his job now, hasn't she?




... and don't tell the english confetti party
Actually I was wrong although I wasn't certain to begin with but King George the III was born in the UK his wife was Germanic. No Queen Elizabeth doesn't have his job because back in the day a King or Queen actually had power.
King George only became crazy later in life well past the ARW.
Many Americans have no idea how America became independent and many of the Pro Confederate posters on the site that will not be mentioned think the Colonial Rebels won independence all by themselves.
The ARW was not unique in that it is far from uncommon for foreign nations to militarily intervene in a civil war if it suits their national Interest.
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O' Be Joyful

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King George only became crazy later in life well
Sounds familiar...

Using the evidence of thousands of George III's own handwritten letters, Dr Peter Garrard and Dr Vassiliki Rentoumi have been analysing his use of language. They have discovered that during his episodes of illness, his sentences were much longer than when he was well.
A sentence containing 400 words and eight verbs was not unusual. George III, when ill, often repeated himself, and at the same time his vocabulary became much more complex, creative and colourful.
These are features that can be seen today in the writing and speech of patients experiencing the manic phase of psychiatric illnesses such as bipolar disorder.

https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-22122407
 

5fish

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What were the early colonist.... Did we have the right to change sovereign's?

The company of the exiled royalists led Hobbes to produce Leviathan, which set forth his theory of civil government in relation to the political crisis resulting from the war. Hobbes compared the State to a monster (leviathan) composed of men, created under pressure of human needs and dissolved by civil strife due to human passions. The work closed with a general "Review and Conclusion", in response to the war, which answered the question: Does a subject have the right to change allegiance when a former sovereign's power to protect is irrevocably lost?[citation needed]

The work had immediate impact.[citation needed] Soon, Hobbes was more lauded and decried than any other thinker of his time.[
citation needed] The first effect of its publication was to sever his link with the exiled royalists, who might well have killed him.[citation needed] The secularist spirit of his book greatly angered both Anglicans and French Catholics.[citation needed] Hobbes appealed to the revolutionary English government for protection and fled back to London in winter 1651.[citation needed] After his submission to the Council of State, he was allowed to subside into private life in Fetter Lane.[citation needed]


In Leviathan, Hobbes set out his doctrine of the foundation of states and legitimate governments and creating an objective science of morality.[citation needed] Much of the book is occupied with demonstrating the necessity of a strong central authority to avoid the evil of discord and civil war.

According to Hobbes, society is a population and a sovereign authority, to whom all individuals in that society cede some right[30] for the sake of protection. Power exercised by this authority cannot be resisted, because the protector's sovereign power derives from individuals' surrendering their own sovereign power for protection. The individuals are thereby the authors of all decisions made by the sovereign,[31] "he that complaineth of injury from his sovereign complaineth that whereof he himself is the author, and therefore ought not to accuse any man but himself, no nor himself of injury because to do injury to one's self is impossible".

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De Cive

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Leviathan
 
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