A Revolution Like You’ve Never Seen: 10 Facts You Don’t Know About America’s Revolutionary War

A Revolution Like You’ve Never Seen: 10 Facts You Don’t Know About America’s Revolutionary War

Larry Holzwarth - December 29, 2017

A Revolution Like You’ve Never Seen: 10 Facts You Don’t Know About America’s Revolutionary War
George III in his coronation robes. The third monarch from the House of Hanover he was the first to speak English. Wikimedia

King George III was a not a hated tyrant and despot

With a few exceptions, the Founders who led the American Revolution which preceded the Revolutionary War were insistent on obtaining and protecting their full rights as Englishmen, under English law, protected by a benevolent English king. George III was seen as their legal and legitimate sovereign. As the war progressed and gradually shifted in scope, King George fell into more and more disfavor, to become depicted as a grasping tyrant stubbornly refusing to grant Americans the independence they deserved.

Ceding a continent to another nation would be against the principles (and common sense) of any ruler, and in essence that is what George was asked to do. It was more than just a continent, it was a country which England had spent considerable manpower and wealth securing from its continental rival, France. And it was a collection of colonies, peopled in 1770 largely by Englishmen who at the time enjoyed the highest standard of living anywhere in the known world.

That is one of the truly unique aspects of the American Revolution. It was led and conducted not by an oppressed, starving, and abused constituency but by a largely well-to-do, well-fed, healthy (for their day) and unrestricted people who enjoyed freedoms unavailable anywhere else, including in the mother country against which they rebelled. It isn’t any wonder that even the most intractable revolutionaries blamed the problems with England on Parliament rather than on the King, under whom these blessings had been bestowed.

Despite receiving the good wishes of most of even his disloyal subjects, George III managed to squander what good will he had early in the war, through the hiring of German troops. Once the troops known collectively as Hessians appeared on the scene – hired outsiders in what had been a family quarrel – his standing among the citizens of North America deteriorated.

During the years in which colonial resistance to Parliamentary attempts at taxation was limited to protests and embargoes, George III acted well within his duties as a constitutional monarch, and was widely recognized as such by most Americans. Not until the Revolutionary war was well underway was George III considered to be a tyrant and a leading cause of the war.

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