“American history,” said Gore Vidal, “is a big subject.”
As quoted by Seymour Morris, Jr., American History Revisited.
We like to think that the American Revolution (1776-1781) was kind of a spur-of-the-moment thing, maybe brought on after vexing for a few years over the taxation without representation thing, English soldiers showing up at the door and making themselves home without an invite, dukes and duchesses lording themselves all over the place making sure the common colonists kept to their places.
But just as we’re now fairly certain that the early Pilgrims/Puritans weren’t naive about what to expect when they reached the Virginia shores, perhaps we can be fairly certain that the run-up to revolution had been tinkered with for decades, if not more than a century.
Folks in England didn’t have a clue – maybe they should have – about all of those guns, all of that paper exported to the colonies. And, what was the deal with something called a middle class?
So guns, paper, a middle class…are there some clues here that were missed, clues that helped the nascent America win the revolution? Let’s explore this….