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Constitution,  Culture,  Education,  The Republic

Key Events and People Driving the American Revolution

This short piece fills in the gaps tradition education, even when it teaches the founding of the American Republic, leaves out the buildup to the revolution. It is important because the revolution is based on the cultural and philosophical concepts in these events. A country that does not draw upon these concepts and culture may have a great deal of trouble forming a democracy out of whole cloth, as I discussed in Democracy: Is the US Defining the Right Target for National Security?

The American War for Independence is often called the Revolutionary War. Strictly speaking, this is a misnomer. The war was technically a civil war. The revolution was the concept that governments serve the people. The Declaration of Independence and the Constitution book ended the revolution. But the revolution did not spring like Athena fully formed from Zeus’s head. There were many people and events that paved the way to include the Magna Carta in 1215, well before the timeline in the graphic. So let us look at these key events and people.

Elizabethan Era. Events and people in the Elizabethan Era laid many of the foundations for the Enlightenment and the exploration of the New World. Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis was instrumental in the exploration of the New World and its settlement. While I cannot prove it, I suspect John Dee was instrumental in founding the Freemasons, which help to drive the Enlightenment and the Scientific Revolution. Dame Frances Yates, in her book, John Dee, discusses how he translated mathematical texts into English and helped to move math from the realm of magic into science.

King James. His daughter married Frederick, Elector of the Palatine. This had two key events. When Frederick declared himself king, it triggered the Thirty Years War. Later, when the British needed a new king, they went to Germany to get descendants of Elizabeth and the House of Hannover become the British royal house. During the French and Indian War/Seven Years War, George II of the house of Hannover wracked up a great deal of debt to protect his German holdings. It is also why George III brought Hessian and other Germanic mercenaries to fight in the American War of Independence.

Thirty Years War. The Thirty Years War pitted Protestants against Catholics. It was truly horrific and tore Germanic states and other parts of Europe apart and devastated the region. It had three key results that set the American Revolution in motion.

  • The horror of the religious war broke religions hold on Europe. While religion still had power, it no longer control virtually all aspects of life and governance. This lead to the beginning of the Enlightenment. While the figure shows the Enlightenment starting in 1600 with Gallileo and Giordano Bruno’s execution, it really did not effectively establish itself until after the war.
  • A core group of intelligentsia fled Bohemia to Britain to escape the war. This group worked with the groups formed during the Elizabethan Era to jumpstart the Enlightenment and Scientific Revolution in Britain.
  • The Peace of Westphalia that ended the war also created the concept of the modern nation-state. This moved power away from the monarch to a state government and created the concept of modern standing armies.

The Enlightenment. The Enlightenment allowed philosophers and scientists to question humanity’s place in the cosmos and develop a rational approach to life, governance, and the world. While it did not eliminate the deity, it restructured humanity’s relationship with the deity. In many ways, it eliminated the concept of original sin the church used to control governments and people. Jefferson’s Nature’s God in the Declaration of Independence is a prime example of this new approach to deity and humanity. Jefferson and the writers of The Federalist Papers drew on the authors in the chart for inspiration and justification.

French and Indian War. George Washington started the French and Indian War (Seven Years War) when he attacked a group of Frenchmen in what is now Pennsylvania. Fred Anderson’s The Crucible of War covers the war and its aftereffects very well. There were two key results that shaped the American War of Independence and the American Revolution.

  • Americans learned to fight as a professional army when they fought alongside the British. As a result, Washington sought a commission in the British Army, but they denied his petition.
  • George II went into debt protecting his German possessions during the European part of the war. The British also had concerns about demobilizing their Army over concerns that mass demobilization could destabilize society. The solution was to pass the burdens on to the American colonies through boarding soldiers with the colonists and a series of taxes. These taxes triggered the War for Independence and were a significant driver behind the Bill of Rights. The Third Amendment is a great example.

The American Revolution was/is a complex event. We cannot pick just a few causes. There were many, and they intertwined as shown by the daughter of James marrying a German, bringing a German family to the British throne, who then spent a fortune defending their possessions on the continent, which caused taxes on the colonies, which were the match that lit the fuze of the American Revolution. The American Revolution sets the US apart from just about every other country and the reason for what other countries see as our quirky system of government.

US education needs to help Americans to understand this rich history and how it affects our culture and governance.

 

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