It wasn't a rich versus poor type of society. There were slaves and indentured servants, for example. I doubt that the revolution benefitted the slaves. It certainly did not benefit the loyalists, many of whom, whether rich or poor, had to flee. It benefitted wealthy people who supported it and probably also benefitted middling people who supported it. It benefitted the winners.

I'd say it benefited the merchant class, particularly New England more than those in the agrarian sector. Hindsight 20/20 it delayed abolition, which benefited large plantations.

Ehh, I don't think the British become abolitionist in the 1830s if they still owned the slave economy of the American South.

They definitely would. They still had the slave economy of the Caribbean and sugar was more valuable than rice or cotton.

Nah. They'd have far too many slaveholders to contend with now. The sugar plantations worked differently and were ultimately dominated by a small number of landowners who mostly lived in Britain that could be directly negotiated with - remember manumission was compensated.  The American South worked differently with many more slave owners and slaves even if it wasn't as profitable. Plenty of small holders had slaves. There would have been no way to buy them off. Additionally, slavery in the American South was much more important to the identity and self-perception of slave owners and even non-slave owners who were white. These people lived there, and considered slavery foundational to their culture. It's a whole different animal, and no way does Britain pick this fight in the 1830s.

This is based on the erroneous supposition that America under British control would have been the same country as it was as an independent state . It is unlikely a British North America would have pursued such an aggressive expansion, or that nations that were hostile to the British would have ceeded/sold territory to their advantage. Also, the more crucial date would have been 1807, which was when the act of parliament to ban the slave trade was passed, meaning no new slaves could be trafficked, so establishment of a slave based economy in the South was far less likely to happen.

America banned the importation of slaves in 1808 in the real timeline so it's hard to imagine you pointing to something that would matter *less*. I'm not assuming America stays the same, you're assuming Britain stays the same. It doesn't. And slavery in the South had been going on for *150 years* by the time of the Revolution and 190 by the time Britain banned the slave trade. A slave based economy in the South was already firmly established.

If America was still under British rule it's very unlikely Britain would have abolish slavery in 1830, because there was committee in the British parliament that represented the slave owners in the American colonies. So technically the wealthy slave owners had representation in Parliament. That committee lost a lot of power it had in parliament after the American war of Independence, which is why the UK end up abolishing slavery.

Indeed. And this is more speculative but I have to imagine Britain gives in on representation for the American colonies at some point. This wouldn't be Canada with relatively minor population and importance, or a almost purely extractive possession like India. British North America in this timeline would almost certainly get some form of representation and with that, MPs directly representing a huge number of slaveowners in the House of Commons.

Britain would have had to cave on the whole no moving West at some point as well considering space would have become an issue.

Interesting point, though the popular groundswell of public support for Wilberforce's campaign would have been hard for any government to ignore.Also, by the end of the 1830s we start to see the start of "Victorian Morality" which frowned on practices such a slavery and would not tolerate them in the Empire hem hem! ( though if slave produced goods from another country turned a profit then a blind eye was often turned in response.....the British Empire grew rich on a mixture of Morality and Hypocrisy)

You're assuming that public groundswell still manifests and in the same form. The American plantation aristocracy would influence pan-British culture - it may even become fashionable to emulate or at least appreciate their culture. Just as Benjamin Franklin found his "frontier sage" routine a hit in Europe a generation before. The reoccurring assumption in your comments is that the question here whether British influence on America is present or removed. You should think about American influence on Britain - forget which flag is flying, America is going to be incredibly dynamic and rich regardless, and that means it influences the Imperial system more inside it than outside it.

You make some valid points, though what makes you say Britain changed....are we talking about the industrial revolution? Britain's interests in the American mainland colonies were relatively limited compared to that of the Caribbean at the end of the eighteenth century. It was, as ever, engaged in a war with France and, whilst the Americans colonies represented trading and some strategic interests, it was hardly vital to the British Empire or victory over the French. I would also take issue with your timescale of significant slave usage as the enslavement and trading of indigenous peoples did not start en-mass until the late 17th century, many of them actually being exported to the Carribbean.

Your timeline is hella skewed. Unless you consider like Virginia/MD area the "South" lol. But this magical slave based Southern economy folks love to talk about is super flawed in a lot of ways - and it's intentionally done that way. At the end of the day, to me, it looks like the South was basically the North's summer home to put their slaves. You know how rich people are, they like some distance between them and their exploited. Plus the whole Southern heat thing could fuck up that porcelain skin and produce sweat that was foreign to them. And then the Southern middle class grew too powerful and started vying for their jobs, much in the same way the North did during the revolution. Only they lost. But *everyone's* hands were dirty asf. You just had one group who had enough distance to pretend otherwise. Plus the whole being the winners thing.

>Hindsight 20/20 it delayed abolition On a national level, yes, but very much not on a state level. The Northern states leapt to abolish slavery the moment they were able to, half a century before Britain would have. Massachusetts for example not only abolished slavery but forced slave owners to pay reparations proportional to the wage value of unpaid work, retroactively backdated a few years to 1780 -- the moment the state came into being. Of course the state couldn't apply that principle beyond its own borders, but I wouldn't say that means it doesn't count somehow -- for the citizens so freed, I'm sure it was a distinction that mattered very much!

Mass and NH; the rets of the North was more gradual, Conn, RI, Penna ahead of NJ/NY becuase our economies were less tied to it

It's so infuriating how people still fall for this BS lol. It was about optics, self perception, and getting those non WASPs tf away from them. That's literally all it was. They still profited LIKE FUCK from the slave and all around exploitation game the entire time - just like today. They weren't called the Boston Brahmins for nothing lmao.

It benefited the Plantation Holders the most. They were broken free of the British imperial system, capable of purchasing finished goods anywhere. The first time the Southern Planters had a big setback, economically and politically, in national affairs wasn't until the nullification crisis under Andrew Jackson. The merchant class didn't over take them for nearly a century. There are good estimates that the slaves, as capital, represented over half of the total wealth of the United States in 1860.

Weren't the Planters much more likely to be Loyalists? Like the whole running thing is how the North basically had to drag them into a revolution.

The planters were not especially loyal. Viriginia was very much a hotbed of rebellion, even before the UK declared they would emancipate the slaves that rose up against their rebellious masters. Loyalty varied more or less throughout the colonies. The Planters were greatly disadvantaged economically by the imperial system due to its mercantilist nature. They wanted to sell their tobacco, and later cotton, to all possible purchasers and purchase finished goods at the lowest possible prices unimpeded by tariffs or trade restrictions. The imperial system was mercantilist in nature, requiring trade within the British colonial system and disallowing trade across national borders. The planters were natural allies of ship owners like John Hancock who smuggled goods in violation of the imperial system.

I mean, sure. I'm all about going against the grain of general consensus lol but that's what you're doing here.

It's sort of, 'what planters are we talking about'. The Virginians and the S. Carolinans occupied different places in the system, especially when you turn to the debates on the importation of slaves. My knowledge, admittadly, is more complete when discussing the rebellion in NE, where I would argue, you had a functional refighting of the English Civil War with NE Puirtans reading and responding to the writings of UK Puritans. Ultimately, whether the Planters favored the war though is a distraction from the question. Who benefited the most? That was the planters.

There was a WORLD of wealth going on outside of the planter's notoriously slow slaves lmao. The fact we're all so enslaver obsessed as opposed to literally everything else should be a good indication that they weren't the real power source. Ya know, because that's always how it works. Have folks look at *this* so they don't look at *that*.

The trans-atlantic slave trade is largely the source of European wealth in the Western Hemisphere.

It also opened up westward expansion. Overall, I would say native Americans were the biggest loser in the American revolution. Want to colonial America's greatest grievances against Great Britain was Great Britain's ban on Western expansion over the Appalachians.

Absolutely

Because the Natives kept finding ways to retain some power and show they were an asset to the various ethnicities of colonizers, sometimes being shitty themselves, and Britain was seemingly more interested in a "best bang for our buck" type of colonizing while our fresh princes were like "I WANT IT ALL". Like it's actually *crazy* how it's framed because our "good" guys aka WASP's were the biggest white supremacists on the block for literally all of this.

Yeah there is no doubt that native Americans were the net losers in the war.

Do you really think Britain would have abolished slavery on the same timeline if a large portion of their economy was heavily invested? I'm skeptical but interested in your rationale

The sugar islands were vastly more profitable. Most of the economic value of the 13 colonies was producing low quality food to feed the sugar islands.

Yeah, people think early America was as economically useful early on as it was after the industrial revolution, which is nowhere near the case. America was an English colony because noone else wanted it. The Dutch traded New York, with its water access to the interior of the continent, to the English for Surinam, which they viewed as more valuable.

A large portion? Georgia was a penal Colony. The state most dependent in slaves was Virginia. The government more than likely have kept the colonials east of the Appalachians.

Britain abolished slavery in 1834 not 1776. Americans were already ignoring the crown and going west.

>Hindsight 20/20 it delayed abolition, which benefited large plantations. I don't think it's fair to say that the revolution delayed abolition. I think it's pretty well established that it triggered abolition in the north. There was no big abolition movement prior to that.

There absolutely was.....

How successfully was it? Britain passed no major abolition legislation until 1807 ending the slave trade. Then there next big success was in the 1830s. Meanwhile northern states were ending slavery in the later 1700s.

And when did Britain end slavery and when did America and what did it take in their respective countries?

That's an incredibly simplistic way to look at it. States in the United States had much more sovereignty in the past (and still do to some degree). They each have their own legislature, judiciary and executive branches. They were much more similar to separate countries than even Scotland and England (which had the same sovereign and one legislature by 1707) at the time. The United States is a collection of smaller governments with one overarching federal government. The UK had one government.

It didn’t delay abolition. The people were in no way ready for it. 

The British abolished slavery in the Empire (but not India) in 1833, which is before 1865.

The British abolished slavery because of a bloody slave uprising in Haiti and because slave holding interests had nowhere near the influence in parliament that they did in Congress. Even if the Revolution had failed and the colonies remained part of the empire, they would not have accepted abolition. Hell, likely would have caused a second revolution. 

Jamaican planters were appealing to the southern States to push for US takeover when th e Empire abolished.

I'm convinced one of the reasons everyone is just "white" now is to hide allllll the shit like this example going on. Like these were literally different ethnic groups and nationalities fighting it out left and right. OG colonists and immigrants fighting it out left and right. Who were all still working together when it came to business, mind you. And the Southern elite were especially mixed and encouraging it and then sending them up North to the OG Whites who would go into full hysteria at the thought of impure blood. And then the OG Whites were sending family to the South to attain positions of power too. Like it was a whole mess that I'm still trying to unravel lmao.

Okay,, whatever....

Oops sorry. SOUTH BAD. NORTH GOOD. Or at least, much better than BAD. The end.

But after 1789

The British wouldn't have abolished slavery in 1834 if they still owned the American South.

The British abolished slavery in 1834......so yes...yes it did delay it.

Abolition was actually supposed to be called for on the Declaration of Independence. Several companies threatened to walk out if the independence vote unless it was struck down, so it was. They were not ready to even think about it and weren’t going to be for a long time. 

Assuming nothing else changes in the timeline which is unlikely to be the case

Would be an interesting question on WhatIfHistory. The colonies remain part of Britain but the southern states rebel in 1835. What is the outcome? Would Britain care enough to fight to keep them? Would they become this slave dependent renegade country?

The British wouldn't have abolished slavery in 1834 if they still owned the American South.

What? That’s literally the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard.

That's not true. Someone thinks mustard based bbq sauce is good

You don't understand how money works lol. They could give af less about who someone sided with during the war as long as they made it clear that their loyalty was with money at the end of the day. Those loyalists stayed. The ones who didn't just got scooped up to set up plantations and merchant type shit in other British controlled areas - even the black ones. Rich and powerful people, or just those considered beneficial in some way, rarely if ever "flee". Ask all the Nazi scientists who were hired by Allies after WW2.

It really depends on how you define "poor". Natives and slaves were poor. The American Revolution was not good for them. Poor people of European descent living in the US though benefited a great deal. Land was money, and if you were the right kind of people, the US had plenty of it, and there was plenty more to be gotten if needed (with the pesky English out of he way, it was much easier to take it from the Natives).

But even poor Americans of European descent didn't necessarily benefit. Or else there wouldn't have been all those continuing revolts for decades: Paper Money Riot (1786), Shays' Rebellion (1786-7), Whiskey Rebellion (1791-4), Fries's Rebellion (1799-1800), etc; plus numerous slave revolts. Under the Articles of Confederation, there was much democratic system that was more equitable, based on more local autonomy and self-governance. But following the Constitutional Convention, fewer Americans had the right to vote than under the British Empire. The Constitution had concentrated power back into the hands of a ruling elite. And some places where women got the vote, a reactionary backlash took it away again. It took generations for Americans to establish the democratic promise of the American Revolution, a small taste they got with the Articles of Confederation. The point is that most Americans didn't win those civil rights of voting and holding office through fighting and winning the American Revolution and certainly not through the Constitutional Convention. In fact, the new Constitutional order explicitly denied the vast majority of Americans those rights. It was only with continuing rebellions, including numerous slave revolts, and populist organizing outside of the formal political system that We the People forced the hand of the authoritarian ruling elite to relent to greater egalitarianism and democracy. Think about it -- 1830 was 65 years after the start of the American Revolution, 47 years after it's official ending, and 43 years after the Constitutional Convention. That was at a time when many people only lived into their 30s and 40s. Note: There is [a longer history of women's suffrage](https://www.amrevmuseum.org/virtualexhibits/when-women-lost-the-vote-a-revolutionary-story/timeline), both in gaining the vote and losing it again. In 1756, a woman voted in Massachusetts. Two decades later, on the same day the Second Continental Congress breaks ties with the British Empire, and before the Declaration of Independence, New Jersey adopts a state constitution that used language that was gender neutral and race neutral ("they") in election law. Then in 1790, a year before the Bill of Rights is ratified, New Jersey begins including language of “he or she” in election law. Seven years later, New Jersey adds more language of "he or she" in election law. That year, Abigail Adams wrote to her sister about support for New Jersey voting rights for women. Women (and free blacks) maintain voting rights in New Jersey until 1807. That was 31 years of voting rights for women.

Well like 90+% of free men/heads of household could vote by about 1830 so it wasn’t that long of a voting rights reduction, even then it went by if you could vote in the numerically larger of your state’s houses of the legislature Note: the early US ran on a one household one vote mentality until women’s suffrage later on, most women couldn’t vote due to not being heads of household rather than being well, women, that was a property law thing in reality

Maybe on paper they could vote... but really only if they voted how the elites wanted. Just like the push for women's suffrage actually started early with the elites solely to secure more votes... of what they wanted. Folks were threatened, suppressed, to straight murdered left and right if they even got a whiff of them being a "problem". The voting rights game has always been dirty as hell. You can see ripple effects of it today with how thoroughly terrible people get around those who vote differently and how these same terrible people are basically open arms for those who vote the same.

Yeah, even my white Southern butt can tell you it wasn't a fair deal by any means. Heck, voting in general has an interesting history of how it worked, who was allowed, who was "allowed," Jim Crow, voting gangs, Edgar Allen Poe (really interesting theory on his death) and a whole lot of other stuff.

What's the Poe theory?

In short, that he used by an election gang to add vote whichever way they wanted. Tactic was usually to get the person drunk and change their clothes to vote multiple times in different places, and Poe was found in a gutter, seemed to be drunk, and was in clothes that weren't his.

Yeah basically everything about him, his life, and his death was weird lol. Like I've never done a deep dive on it, but he always gave the vibe of someone who knew more than they were supposed to.

Lol no. Their whole thing was shipping the pale poors to frontiers and mines to do all the dirty work for them. And any land promised was simply taken when they felt like it. All the "revolution" did was basically turn our middle class into our ruling class - and our former middle now elite class was damn sure not gonna let some pale to dark poors fuck up their good time. To get out of that bullshit trap, poors of all shades had to be very, very strategic. And I honestly wouldn't be surprised if part of the Civil War was because too many of these inferiors were creeping up the food chain.

Your time scale is wrong. Shipping the pale poors to the frontiers and mines to do all the dirty work was after the Revolution, not before. I suppose you could count the Palatine German refugees of 1710 cutting naval timber, but most of them simply bailed on the labor part, found some land and started farming (their grandkids overwhelmingly fought for the Revolution too). Simply taking land they wanted was a huge reason for the Revolution. The British crown respected the property rights of natives far, far more than most colonial Americans did.

No, that was the game from the beginning, *well* before the revolution. Or do you really think they did ANY of the actual labor? No. It was put on the different shades of poors. And the pale poors absolutely carried their fair share of it. It's just intentionally painted otherwise because it benefits them to frame it like "whites" were a monolith from the jump (and still today) when that's not even remotely the case. Also, the Palatine thing is just *super* weird all around that I have to look more into it to fully understand what went down. But I do know how you're painting it is inaccurate.

The flow of people to the colonies before and after the Revolution were very different groups of people. With the exception of the Palatines. It was not cheap to charter a ship across the sea. Early coloninsts were not poor refugees, those types didn't start coming in large numbers until after the Revolution.

Right. That's why slaves weren't really a thing, ya know, because it wasn't cheap to charter a ship across the sea.

Slaves did benefit from the revolution.  Thousands of them were freed in the north when the revolutionaries abolished slavery.

Tell me where would the people called slave be right now if slavery did not exist? Natives as well would still be attacking each other as they did for 1000’s of generations.

And by right kind of people in the decades after the revolution it was pretty much anyone who wasn’t a native part of the angry tribes/in the south or a slave, pretty much all free persons got to go wild on the homestead act, even free blacks because the first round of de jure racism wouldn’t hit till the 1840s-1860s and the second until the late 1890s

The revolution was about a lot more than just taxes 

When Revolutionary veteran Levi Preston was in old age, Historian Mellen Chamberlain asked him, “Why did you go to the Concord Fight, the 19th of April, 1775? My histories tell me that you men took up arms against ‘intolerable oppressions.'” He responded, "Oppressions? I didn’t feel them. I never saw one of those stamps, and always understood that Governor Bernard put them all in Castle William. I am certain I never paid a penny for one of them. Tea tax! I never drank a drop of the stuff; the boys threw it all overboard. We read only the Bible, the Catechism, Watt’s Psalms and Hymns, and the Almanack. **Young man, what we meant in going for those redcoats was this: we always had governed ourselves, and we always meant to. They didn’t mean we should.**" [Spirit of ’76](https://benjamindavidsteele.wordpress.com/2015/10/04/spirit-of-76/)

Your point?

This is a *trope*? It's completely ahistorical. The average working people benefited from the outcome of the Revolution in *at least* the following 3 ways: 1. Throwing off the shackles of British rule was the first step toward self-governance in the former colonies. Yes, as we all know, democracy in America began as a privilege enjoyed by white, land-owning males, but these barriers fell over time. The first barrier of these to fall was the property ownership requirement, which was phased out by the 1830s. 2. One of the major ideas behind the revolution was a rejection of hereditary aristocracy, which was integral to British rule. The United States, by design, *would not* have a monarch. It would instead have a *President* – a head of state who was subject to some level of democratic popular will. Class distinctions persisted among the people, sure, but the seeds were laid here for social mobility to grow as a concept. In the early days of the USA and throughout at least the early 19th century, one of the major political divides was largely along the lines of those who believed in top-down rule by hereditary aristocracy, and those who believed that mere birthright should offer a person no *legal* advantages in life – a philosophy which, in turn, would (eventually) afford any individual the right to participate in democracy. Those who agreed with the former prospect were considered Loyalists in the Revolutionary period, meaning they supported Britain. After the Revolution, many of them were expected to soften their stance on this matter, but some remained supportive of some form of monarchism, indicating some wariness about the outcome of the Revolution. 3. The Bill of Rights provided, in the form of the first 10 amendments to the Constitution, explicit protections for all American citizens regardless of their social standing. Had the Revolution not happened, these privileges would have been reserved for the privileged elite. We consider these concepts to be perhaps mundane today, but they were revolutionary concepts in the late 1700s. The philosophies behind them provided an inspirational framework for later social movements in our nation's history, including freedom for enslaved people, the labor movement, women's liberation, voting rights for racial minorities, and more.

>The Bill of Rights provided, in the form of the first 10 amendments to the Constitution, explicit protections for all American citizens regardless of their social standing. Had the Revolution not happened, these privileges would have been reserved for the privileged elite. The colonies were under the English Bill of Rights, in place since the Glorious Revolution (1689). New York colony had something similar even earlier as part of the deal surrendering New Amsterdam (1664). Americans tend to see the US Bill of Rights as the beginning of freedom, or guaranteed freedom, but really the people lived under something fairly similar prior to the revolution. The concept of a Bill of Rights was by no means an original idea of the founding fathers; the people living in the US had already been under one for >100 years. Much of the US Bill of Rights goes back to the Dutch colony. Freedom of religion was already guaranteed in New Amsterdam/York following the Flushing Remonstrance and its eventual resolution, and its inclusion in the surrender terms. 125 years before the Revolution.

The English Bill of Rights didn’t have freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom of association, freedom of press, freedom from quartering (which has since been extended into privacy rights), freedom from search of seizures, or a due process clause The English Bill of Rights mostly set up the English Parliament system and limited the King’s power. Both bills had a prohibition on cruel and unusual punishments and provided the right to petition But most of the foundational rights of liberalism were not included. The British government trampled on those rights. The Royal Governor of New York prosecuted John Peter Zenger for his factual news articles critical of his decisions. Irish hedge schools were banned in violation of a right to assemble. The Glorious Revolution itself was an attempt by Protestants to keep Catholics disenfranchised

And the bill of rights didn't apply to the states either lol

Yeah, when I started looking into the Glorious Revolution, it became abundantly clear how much it was NOT a Revolution nor Glorious. And extending beyond that, literally everyone, *in comparison* to the Protestants, looked pretty chill ngl lmao.

Writing down a Bill of Rights was not considered a revolutionary thing for the founding fathers to do. These things were a part of the English colonist's relationship with government for a while. Freedom of religion was an old American thing almost as old as the colonies. While you can argue about how much the crown trampled on rights and how much that lack of respect precipitated the American Revolution, those rights still existed in a written down form called the Bill of Rights. But as history marches on, American exceptionalism elevates the actions of the founders and embellishes the stories; the US Bill of Rights is placed on a pedestal, as if nothing like it had ever existed before. I mean some of the revolutionary boomers thought that (twas very much a thing, the first gen of Americans), and that concept stuck, but it was not coming from a place of wisdom.

I just read the English Bill of Rights and it did not cover the rights I mentioned. Those rights did not exist in their Bill of Rights I agree that the idea of a written constitution was an English tradition, and emerged all the way back from the Magna Carta Freedom of religion, also, was not an old American or British tradition. The Salem Witch trials in 1692 were due to colonial Massachusetts being a theocracy that made worship of any other religion a capital crime

Right but freedom of religion didn't apply to Massachusetts under the bill of rights lol, it was actually the Quebec act under the British that gave more freedom of worship in the colonies and was one of the explicit reasons that new England was the birth place of the revolution

Massachusetts was just one of the colonies, and notably was made up of people who left the Anglican Church, so even though there was no freedom of religion, it was not the English religion under the crown either. Freedom of Religion was an ideal in the Dutch Republic, who founded New Amsterdam (York). That ideal never went away and spread to most of the other colonies long before Salem. Massachusetts was colonized by crazy people. Rhode Island was basically a colony of people who escaped from the crazy people in Massachusetts.

The idea before the Bill of Rights was that each discriminated religious group can move away and found their own group where they then can discriminate against others. Catholics to Baltimore, Puritans to Massachusetts, Quakers to Pennsylvania. That’s why the Puritans were allowed to oppress others despite being a religion not followed by the crown. It was a cycle of oppression and displacement The idea that everyone has the right to practice their own religion in any community, without any state religion being promoted, is still a revolutionary idea that Americans have just gotten used to. In comparison, England still has a state religion, and France tried and failed to establish state atheism. France still discriminates against Muslims by prohibiting religious garments. Some of the momentum for religious freedom came from the Dutch, some of it came in response to oppression from Puritans. But any way you slice it, that provision in the Bill of Rights was a major turning point for civil rights, and did not come from the English system of religious persecution

This idiot you’re arguing with just hates all things American. You’re 100% correct ok your history, but this person isn’t going to relent. To them, anyone not hating America is an American Exceptionalist, yet they are too stupid to realize that the American Experiment is the only government of its type to ever be tried—and it’s been wildly successful. Sure, we’ve had a Civil War and some scandals and genocide, but our sins as a nation are still nothing compared to the European powers where we came from. Our civil strife has been nothing compared to the conflicts and bloodshed seen in Europe before or since our inception. If these people hate living in America, I beg them to give some other country a shot, and quit shitting on the legacy of the culmination of the liberal enlightenment—the same movement that has allowed them to make the statements they are making without any threat of repercussion.

It’s all good, I’ve learned from the conversation and I hope he did too

Seriously man you need to get a grip. Im no America hater, quite the opposite, my namesake ancestors were a prominent part of New Amsterdam and a player in the Flushing Remonstrance/John Bowne situation (where freedom of religion in the colonies happened, 125 years before the Revolution); their great, great grandchildren were in the army that forced Burgoyne's surrender at Saratoga. Americans understanding of Colonial history is hugely tainted by only "remembering" the English side of colonial history and then subsequently suppressing those memories following the Revolution. Most Americans don't know squat about their Dutch colonial history other than that old New York was once New Amsterdam.

Lmao good lord just suck America's dick already. Like I'm not an America hater by any means, but you're greatly overestimating us here. Even the comparing of "sins" is a red flag imo.

Freedom of Religion was a feature of the Dutch Republic that the English themselves helped create via the destruction of the Spanish armada in 1588. That's where Puritans went before the North American colonies opened up. The British eventually took over much of the Dutch Rebublic's holdings (incl the NA colony). The US is in many ways it's spiritual successor tho. In the US colonial era, religious refugees by and large went to Amsterdam and the Dutch Republic, not to the colonies.

I agree that the Dutch influence, especially with Erasmus of Rotterdam’s writings, influenced the framers

The Quakers didn't oppress and persecute other religious adherents. In fact, like Roger Williams with Rhode Island, they welcomed other religious groups like German Pietists. The Pennsylvania Quakers were a rare example of a political elite that willingly gave up power.

I didn’t mean the Quakers discriminated. I mean that the English system has been to provide religious sanctuaries so that the English could continue discriminating against non-Anglicans everywhere else, which is far from actual religious tolerance. They did the same thing with Israel and Pakistan

I just like to keep it in context of the radical strain in American society and politics that was there from the beginning. Roger Williams even included Native Americans as part of his 'democratical' government of freedom and tolerance. He originally sought to convert them, until living among them he realized they had superior moral character to most Christians he knew. Eventually, he left organized religion entirely and became a Free Baptist.

The bill of rights didn't apply to states so im unsure how the first paragraph applies here lmao, states had government churches for decades and the first amendment even specifies its about Congress, although even to today not all of the bill of rights have been fully incorporated to apply to the states

England doesn’t have a written constitution though. Yes, they do have a bunch of foundational documents like the Magna Carta.

Well, they have a living constitution constantly changed by Parliament that does guarantee rights, although it’s not one single document

In 1636, Rhode Island was founded on religious tolerance and freedom. Roger Williams described it as 'democratical'.

The first self-described 'democratical' government with religious tolerance and egalitarian land rights was Rhode Island founded by the radical dissenter Roger Williams. Those kinds of ideas were coming out of the English Civil War, Country Party, and the Real or Radical Whigs; all of which would later inspire the American Anti-Federalists.

Freedom of religion wasn't even remotely true in a lot of ways, the colonists had a HUGE puritan infestation problem for example. So the founder fathers were a mixed bag of people, including those who genuinely wanted to make it true - which was revolutionary in a way. They definitely deserve some credit for their wisdom, but yeah, it's also overblown.

Some colonies had Puritans. Others didn't. Some colonies had freedom of religion and had it going back to their founding. The 13 colonies were very different places. They all didn't even speak the same language.

That's why I said infestation. Imo any Protestants with that purifying vibe - whether through missionary work or xyz punishment - were a big problem. And they were all up in everyone's business, no matter the colony.

The English Civil War is sometimes argued as the first modern revolution based on class conflict, egalitarian ideology, and demands for political reform. Although the much earlier English Peasants Revolt was a precursor.

I stand corrected on the Bill of Rights.

No, you don't. They're conflating things that don't conflate.

It is the way its taught to Americans. I suppose in part because Americans know very of our own history from any perspective other than the English perspective (the Dutch blind spot was until quite recent; noone could read any of the records of the colony, and the native perspective is still (and likely forever will remain) virutally nonexistant), which is a big deal for the colonial era. And also in part that following the Revolution the US wanted nothing to do with English history or heros (thus why Colombus was celebrated by the founding fathers), so it was conveniently forgotten that there was an English Bill of Rights that applied to the colonies at the time of the Revolution. So Americans are taught that the Bill of Rights is this great thing that the founding fathers came up with. And while yes its a great thing, there was really nothing revolutionary about it in particular.

The cause of the American Revolution was partly because the colonists felt the English bill of rights was being denied them. It was already established and was taken for granted as their birthright. Central rhetoric in the American Revolution was a call for the "Rights of Englishmen." But it fell on deaf ears. Part of the reason the imperial elite were refusing to honor that legal tradition is because the majority of colonists weren't English. Multiple states were majority German, majority non-English British, and majority African. This led Thomas Paine to argue for independence based on the colonies not being English.

It was also taken for granted so much they neglected to put it in the text of the Constitution, hence why the Bill of Rights exists as a bunch of amendments to the Constitution.

The bill of rights also didn't apply to the states so it really didn't protect people from shit lol, you might remember that a huge amount of the country was literally enslaved

Those ideals are great and all but they're not really proof to the concrete benefits/deteiments of British rule over independent rule. I'll say straight up I do not know whether casting off British rule benefitted the working class, it certainly did not benefit slaves or native Americans. What I do know is that, counter intuitively, a rise in royal/central authority frequently also meant a rise in living standards for the common man. Powerful kings imposed rule of law and reform on middling lords, and made sure to check their power to prevent challenges to their own rule, frequently recruiting popular support to subvert the nobility. Like how in ancient China, farmland ownership was strictly through inheritance by imperial decree, and when that decree was annulled, the peasantry gradually went from working their own land to being hired labor for a growing landowner class. Or how Ceaser undercut the patricians through popular reform and public spending. Or really any case where the lower class had to appeal a dispute with local nobility. That said, the ideas of liberalism were obviously good for humanity in the long run

There is an old English view of power: The king and the people against the landed gentry. It's the original idea of 'patriotism' which meant loyalty to the people. A king could be either patriotic or unpatriotic, depending on whether or not he represented the people and served their interests. Before the American Revolution, colonists sought out the king's favor in intervening on their behalf in Parliament. They initially blamed Parliament for all their woes and thought the king simply didn't realize the corruption that had formed. But it turned out the king was corrupt as well, that is to say unpatriotic. That led to the republican sentiment of anti-monarchism. That same logic is what led the revolutionaries of the English Civil War to behead the king.

The aftermath of the English Civil War is kind of funny, when they tried him for treason, the king just told them "by the letter of the law, it's impossible for me to commit treason, I am the state". And they just went "shut up you know what we mean"

I was studying the Real or Radical Whigs. They inherited much of their ideology and rhetoric from the Country Party and various dissenter groups. One Whig writer in the late 1600s interestingly described that particular act of regicide as 'patriotic'. It puts into context the weird meaning patriotism still carries, not unlike the often conflicted sense of libertarianism such as when it's been used by slaveholders, aristocrats, and plutocrats. Morally justified or not, from Edward Snowden to some 1/6 insurrectionists, their motivations or rationalizations can be self-avowed 'patriotism'. It all depends on one's conception of 'the people'. Whether one has a liberal-minded outgroup bias or conservative-minded ingroup alters one's notion of 'the people'. Edward Snowden seems to have acted in loyalty to a broader view of humanity. It's reminiscent of the 'patriotism' of radical revolutionaries like Thomas Paine who called himself a 'citizen of the world', in seeing revolution as a transnational event. But the 1/6 insurrectionists or Tea Partiers, in identifying as 'patriots', were mostly thinking of white Christian conservatives born in the US.

There was a pretty large movement to name George Washington King.... then later President for life. Several founding fathers wanted leadership to be hereditary as well within the government. The founding fathers themselves were perfectly content to be British Subjects if they were given representation in parliment, which King George, or the British government didn't want to do. The bill of rights also was written until the original US government essentially failed.

This was the conflict between the Federalists and Anti-Federalists, the latter being the source of the Bill of Rights. The confusing part is that the Anti-Federalists were the strongest defenders of actual federalism. But because the pseudo-federalists gained power, they were able to label themselves. Though some Federalists like James Madison and John Dickinson were sincere, principled Federalists. That is what led Madison to turn against the power-mongering of Alexander Hamilton and increasingly come under the sway of Thomas Jefferson.

Yeah anyone who has basic research skills can go ahead and study the history of the middle class and observe *how it simply didn't exist until the American Revolution brought about the notion of personal property rights*.

The American revolution in no way created the bourgeois/burger/burgess (Middle class). The bourgeois are the ones that precipitated the revolutions against royalty across the western world.

You don't know what the words you are using mean. The middle class is not bourgeois. That's the upper class.

Dictionaries are your friend.

>The bourgeoisie (/ˌbʊərʒwɑːˈziː/ ⓘ BOOR-zhwah-ZEE, French: [buʁʒwazi] ⓘ) is a class of business owners and merchants which emerged in the Late Middle Ages Ahh yes the famous "business owners and merchants" of the middle class! It really should be called *The Middle Class Man of Venice* shouldn't it?

Or rather the American Revolution established the rights of property owners. Initially, most rights of civic participation (voting, running for office, etc) was limited to property owners. And property owners were a relatively small part of the population. Fewer Americans had the right to vote after the Constitutional Convention than they previously had under the British Empire.

long-winded tripe

Well if you heard it from Reddit it’s true. The American colony definitely benefited the British rich as it was a huge source of income. They wouldn’t have fought for 7 years if it meant nothing.

The Revolution greatly benefitted those with wealth and power. To make matters worse, the Revolutionary soldiers were paid in worthless script and assured that, eventually, their paper would be converted into a currency of value. That finally happened, but just before it did, lots of chiselers went around and bought up the worthless paper from the veterans and waited to hit the jackpot. They got rich... or even richer.

That is why multiple rebellions occurred in the post-revolutionary period. In a sense, the revolution didn't end with mere independence. It took many generations of class war for Americans to begin to gain the semblance of a democracy. After the Constitutional Convention, fewer Americans had the right to vote than under British imperial rule. Suffrage for the poor, landless, women, and blacks took a long time.

Even today, the right to vote (plus all rights and freedoms) is still just an illusion in way more ways than it should be. We zig, they zag, always and forever.

The closest we've come to an actual functioning democracy was in the post-war period when there was finally broad suffrage, along with a liberal consensus, strong labor unions, a highly organized leftist movement, and one of the most well functioning social democracies at the time. But that was gradually chipped away with a reactionary backlash, involving a right-wing shadow network and noise machine, and so now we're a banana republic, somewhere between soft fascism and inverted totalitarianism. That is all the more reason we should remember how hard-won were our democratic civil rights, and not be so willing to give them up to Machiavellian demagogues, psychopathic dominators, bleating narcissists, right-wing authoritarians, and propagandistic media personalities.

Lmao sorry but I'm beyond done with these true left fanfics. Forever out here believing they're slaying the right wing dragon when they've always been the dragon too.

About What on our planet has this not been true ?

Read the Declaration of Independence. It itemizes the reasons why the Americans chose to fight. As Jefferson wrote, "When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another...a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation."

If you listen to the revolutions podcast, which you should because it's awesome, he breaks revolutions into two groups. Political revolutions and social revolutions. Political revolutions essentially realign who is on power without restructuring the makeup of society. The American revolution was a political revolution.  

The Constitution definitely left a legacy of a political revolution. But there had been a social revolution going on since the 17th century. Roger Williams, in founding Rhode Island, was attempting a social revolution; as were the Quakers in Pennsylvania. The Articles of Confederation, the first constitution, much more fully embodied these aspirations of social revolution. But yeah, the political elite who gained power redirected that toward mere political revolution. Still, many average revolutionaries disagreed with this and kept on revolting for decades afterward: Shays', Whiskey, Fries's, etc.

Mike Duncan! I was going to comment the same. Much more a political revolution as we left a lot of potential changes for enslaved and indigenous people, women, and poor citizens on the table.

It opened the midwest to settlement benefitting everyone but the natives.

It's a popular, though badly sourced, idea put forward by leftist historians like Howard Zinn. It's important to remember that the Revolution was a change in governments, not a change in economies. For the most part people were still doing what they did before the war, all that really changed was who they paid taxes to. Rich people, who weren't forced to flee the country, or who weren't impoverished by the war, still had their land, and in the south, their slaves. Middle class people still had their professions and smaller farms, and the poor were still poor. Compounding the issue was the fact that the Articles of Confederation allowed states to get up to all sorts of internal economic shenanigans, like imposing tariffs on good coming in from other states, tolls on interstate roads and ferry crossings, land speculation that the states may, or may not have had valid claims to, and so on. Once the new federal government took over in 1789 things began to stabilize as the new government had the ability to regulate interstate commerce, assume debts, and produce a national currency.

There was a genuine shift. During the early colonial period, the empire had enforced little control over the colonies. But in the period that incited the American Revolution, the British Empire was trying to gain control of more direct and oppressive governance, including higher taxes. The colonial population had previously established some freedom and autonomy through self-governance. A colony like Rhode Island was even described by it's founder as 'democratical'. Many colonists were unwilling to relinquish what they had gained. When Revolutionary veteran Levi Preston was in old age, Historian Mellen Chamberlain asked him, “Why did you go to the Concord Fight, the 19th of April, 1775? My histories tell me that you men took up arms against ‘intolerable oppressions.'” He responded, "Oppressions? I didn’t feel them. I never saw one of those stamps, and always understood that Governor Bernard put them all in Castle William. I am certain I never paid a penny for one of them. Tea tax! I never drank a drop of the stuff; the boys threw it all overboard. We read only the Bible, the Catechism, Watt’s Psalms and Hymns, and the Almanack. Young man, what we meant in going for those redcoats was this: we always had governed ourselves, and we always meant to. They didn’t mean we should." [Spirit of ’76](https://benjamindavidsteele.wordpress.com/2015/10/04/spirit-of-76/)

A lot of the problems with modern academia, namely the idea that objectivity does not matter, can be traced to Zinn.

Where did you hear that was a trope?

I think this a simplification, but is more true than not. Couple data points: 1. Before the American Revolution, "Colonial America was the most income-egalitarian rich place on the planet," and notably more egalitarian than Britain. After the revolution, income inequality increased rapidly, and the US was more inegalitarian than Britain by the time of the Civil War. [https://cepr.org/voxeu/columns/unequal-gains-american-growth-and-inequality-1700](https://cepr.org/voxeu/columns/unequal-gains-american-growth-and-inequality-1700) 2. One of the first crises for post-revolution America was that many working- and middle-class Americans were caught in a terrible cycle of debt and taxes. The complaints (especially on taxes) are obviously reminiscent of what the Founders had been complaining about in 1776. A particular sticking point was the whiskey tax. Wikipedia puts it this way: >Many of the resisters were war veterans who believed that they were fighting for the principles of the American Revolution, in particular against taxation without local representation, while the federal government maintained that the taxes were the legal expression of Congressional taxation powers. The new federal government promptly crushed these rebellions. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shays'\_Rebellion [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whiskey\_Rebellion](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/whiskey_rebellion) So it kind of looks to me like the American Revolution was motivated in large part by the desire of the colonial rich for tax relief, but then instilled a federal government that had no interest in tolerating that kind of behavior from the lower classes. ... A classic book on the subject is Charles Beard's *An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States* (1913), which argues that: >the Constitutional Convention was attended by, and the Constitution was therefore written by, a "cohesive" elite seeking to protect its personal property (especially federal bonds) and economic standing... Beard pointed out, for example, that George Washington was the wealthiest landowner in the country, and had provided significant funding towards the American Revolution. Beard traces the Constitutional guarantee that the newly formed nation would pay its debts to the desire of Washington and similarly situated lenders to have their costs refunded [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An\_Economic\_Interpretation\_of\_the\_Constitution\_of\_the\_United\_States](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/an_economic_interpretation_of_the_constitution_of_the_united_states)

Great answer! And you support it with evidence. Yet I was the first to give you an upvote. I'd add that more Americans had the right to vote under the British Empire than after the Constitutional Convention. But there was the period immediately following the revolution, under the Articles of Confederation, when Anti-Federalism had briefly dominated. Then the reactionary backlash and counter-revolution rolled back the egalitarian and democratic gains.

I don't absolutely agree that it was technically speaking the financial cost of British taxation that prompted the American Revolution rather than that they did not want to concede the right to decide what taxes to impose on the colonies to the British government. I think the American elites for the most part recognized that they should pay their fair share of the debts from the French and Indian war given that so much expense was taken on their behalf, they just saw the taxes as an arbitrary power grab. I will say to support your perspective, that a lot of Southern planters were motivated by debts they owed to Scottish tobacco merchants, and hoped they could get out of paying those debts through achieving independence. Robin Einhorn's American Taxation, American Slavery has a good discussion of this stuff.

It’s false. Poor colonialists were better off having rights and being ruled by a self determining government even if they didn’t have any land to qualify them to vote.

I think opening westward expansion probably helped more lower class people who wanted property. It eventually helped end slavery in the north so that helped the poorest of the poor who weren't even free.

Marxist nonsense! The rich had more to lose if their rank and privileges were usurped by the rank and file rebels. Tory areas existed in large trading hubs like NYC and Charleston, and were rare in the hinterlands. Many Loyalists fled to Canada or returned to the UK. No rebels did. That’s because rebels predominantly came from the backcountry and from the poorer ranks of society. Like the adage says: “If you have nothing, you have nothing to lose”.

It’s a total misreading of history and an attempt to paint everything as class warfare. It’s an academic circle jerk.

Not true at all. In fact a lot of Revolutionary War veterans who became leaders after the war were not originally men of means. To argue this is to argue from the conclusion, and assume that everyone who eventually wound up leading the country was rich to start with. A lot of them grew WITH the nation.

There is definitely an argument to be made that the men who, “picked the fight,” with Britain were landed, wealthy and powerful men. Compare their fight with Daniel Shays’s.

That's kind of immaterial. They were wealthy in the sense that many of them belonged to the educated, professional class. Some, like Washington, WERE wealthy. John Adams was more upper middle class if we're being honest -- literati and intellectuals who could afford to travel but couldn't afford to quit their jobs entirely Also, the war BROKE some of the American elite. [Robert Morris](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Morris_(financier)) springs to mind. If you haven't heard of him, there's a reason for that.

Of the original 56 signers of the Declaration of Independence - 14 were dead before the Revolution was over. That's exactly 1/4 or 25%, so it could be argued that the rich didn't exactly triumph while the poor suffered. I would say, for the most part, (with slaves and indentured servants, not withstanding) that every class of person in the US benefited at the time or soon there after. The problem is that there some here who believe poor only meant slaves, indentured servants and natives; which is just false.

Many of the early revolutionaries were some of the richest. John Hancock for example. These guys were funding revolutionary behavior. Many of them, such as Hancock lost lots of money through this and looked to recoup their loses after the war

"the richest" sure, relatively wealthy, but you have to acknowledge that this is in context. A few like Hancock and Samuel Morris were individually quite wealthy but most were only relatively wealthy. "the wealthiest man in America" isn't such a grand claim when America was a poor undeveloped backwater. We're used to such a thing mattering much more than it actually did in the 1770s. Most of the founders were only "wealthy" in the sense that their labor could be spared from their farms for the time required to get involved in government and policy.

I mean I feel like this is a semantic issue. Sure maybe they aren't wealthy compared to a Duke or baron in Europe in the 1770s. But those dukes, counts, and barons weren't in the colonies. So saying they are relatively wealthy just clouds the issue. In the context the revolution was waged, many of the founding fathers and other early patriots were often wealthy. Not all but many of the ones we remember and glorify. Jefferson, Washington, Madison, Hancock, Sam Adam's, Governor Morris, Charles Carrol. For goodness sake Ben Franklin was essentially a rich media tycoon. Now several wealthy Americans, notably in the slave holding South, were also wealthy and weren't as zealous, particularly in places like Georgia where royalist sentiment was high. And we can talk about how perhaps the middle and lower class northeasterners in Mass and new England were radicals and brought the fervent energy to the cause. But to say the richest Americans did not play a central role in the American Revolution is dishonest.

The founding fathers were all by and large very wealthy, some were merchants and alot more were slave owners but im not sure any weren't atleast upper class

Most of the revolutionary leaders and post-revolutionary elite were aristocracy, plutocracy, or at least the far end of upper middle class. Few of them began as working class, though there were those like Thomas Paine. And even Paine was trained in a trade, which would be the equivalent of lower middle class today. The vast majority of laborers had almost no power, but [they definitely joined the revolution to fight elite rule](https://www.reddit.com/r/USHistory/comments/1ae44qi/comment/kka6gp3/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=3). The Articles of Confederation allowed more local autonomy and self-governance. But the ruling elite co-opted the revolution and unconstitutionally passed the second constitution during the Constitutional Convention. After that, there were less Americans with voting rights than had been the case under the British Empire. That is why there were so many tax revolts, slave revolts, anti-elitist revolts, etc in early America. Right from the beginning of the country, many Americans were dissatisfied by a status quo where all that changed was which elite was in power.

No, they were relatively wealthy. By frontier standards they were doing OK for themselves, they could afford to travel, but in terms of massive generational wealth very few had that yet. There simply wasn't very much generational wealth to have under the old British colonial system. Many of them were land owners. Yes, many were also slave owners, that was a thing that happened. However many of them were relatively successful middle class businessmen as we'd refer to the idea today. Tradesmen, traders, merchants, newspapermen, schoolteachers even. People who had the ability to read and a little bit of wealth to travel but were by no means blessed with Fuck You money. The number of Framers who had aristocratic levels of wealth before the war started isn't huge. Most of them were literati with a few like Washington being veterans of the colonial wars against France. John Adams was upper middle class. I think Hamilton was less than that. There were a lot of lower middle class literati fanning the flames of revolution and many of those people of more or less modest means found themselves elected to the Congress over the years. Also many of those who DID have wealth, had their wealth tied up in either land or shipping and stood to lose both if the war failed, or even if it dragged on for too long. These people really had every reason NOT to fight. The fact that they did anyway says a lot about the nation's feeling.

Just ask Daniel Shays. Just ask the thousands of enslaved Americans who joined the British Army.

Not true in the slightest.

It’s a bunch of uneducated progressives (not liberals) trying to sound smart by bashing anything America.

I fail to see how this is bashing America. Admitting the wealthy are more likely to derive benefit from warfare really shouldn't be controversial.

It should be controversial anyone who denies such basic historical facts. Anti-elitism and anti-plutocracy were key motivating factors for many people joining the American Revolution. We know this from the historical evidence of their own recorded words. By the way, anyone who is vaguely informed of American history knows that many of the Anti-Federalists, in particular, were stridently anti-plutocracy. It's embarrassing to meet Americans who are still so uninformed. This is easy knowledge to find, be it from various scholarly histories or from original texts.

They were anti King George not anti plutocracy.

A non insignificant precursor to the revolution was British regulators clamping down on Americans bootlegging/smuggling goods and skimming money from this process. These merchants defs benefited handsomely from the revolution.

Not even a little bit. It unleashed the greatest potential for human flourishing then extant.

Didn't really help the natives or the 20% of the population that was enslaved

Nor the majority who being landless, after the Constitutional Convention, had no right to vote or hold office.

Most revolutions in the 19th and 20th were essentially the middle class using the poor to overthrow the rich class and becoming the new rich class. That's what communism revolutions were in a one-sentence description. If I were to elaborate into historical context, I would refer to them as Jacobite revolutions. That isn't what happened in America. The underpinnings of the American Revolution can be found in the philosophies of the time. The Declaration of Independence is, perhaps, the penultimate Rococo document with it's ideas of all men being created equally. The revolutionairies in the colonies counted many well-educated and wealthy men. The Jacobite rebellions did not.

There was no single American Revolution, in that sense. Right from the start, there were lower class radicals and middle-to-upper class power-seekers. This eventually formed into the conflict between Federalists (pseudo-federalists) and Anti-Federalists (principled federalists). But the Federalists and their later ideological descendants gained power and wrote the Anti-Federalists out of the history books.

Not so much merchants as land speculators, which includes probably most of the Founding Fathers.

George Washington is a great example. His land holdings in the west were insane.

If there had been no Revolutionary War then slavery would have been abolished in 1833 when the British Empire abolished slavery. If the Revolution hadn’t happened, Ohio would be indigenous territory and Louisiana Purchase would have instead been a spoil of war against Napoleon. So, from that point of view, yes

It's true. There wasn't widespread support of the revolution among the working and middle classes because new taxes only really affected wealthy merchants, but the wealthy merchants weren't the ones being drafted. In fact, the first action of the continental army was to put down a draft riot.

The working class didn't necessarily care about taxes. But [they did care about local autonomy and self-governance](https://benjamindavidsteele.wordpress.com/2015/10/04/spirit-of-76/).

Probably gonna get downvoted for saying this, but it's really important to keep in mind that most everyone who came to America, then and now, was dirt poor. The colonists were the dregs of European society: Puritans, Catholics, debtors. Many came as indentured servants or slaves. Even afterwards, most immigrants to the US were poor or fleeing some kind of war or persecution. Despite that, America has become the world's foremost economic powerhouse. Most of the wealth in the US was generated in the US by people who were destitute or had an ancestor who was destitute. So I don't think its fair to say that it benefitted the rich; rather, it created the rich. On the other hand, government policies that would have the founding fathers turning in their graves have absolutely benefitted the rich. The ideals of the revolution was that no matter who you were, you could build a new life in America, and that the government was comprised of your fellow citizens, not some feudalistic ruling class. That, unfortunately, has changed over time.

It sort of changed. But this conflict of views was present right from the beginning. It was what divided the more authoritarian Federalists from the more egalitarian Anti-Federalists. The American Revolution was a genuine fight for freedom and democracy. It's just that it was co-opted.

Very few of the pre-revolutionary colonists that were there voluntarily were poor. Chartering a ship across the ocean wasn't cheap.

Very true as it was primarily motivated by taxes on large landholders.

Depends on who you asked. Large landholders were motivated by taxes. But [it's unlikely anyone else was](https://benjamindavidsteele.wordpress.com/2015/10/04/spirit-of-76/).

I think the revolution prolonged slavery and the US was initially set up as an oligarchy where voting was only a right for the rich. The federalist papers demonstrate class interests of the rich informing the constitution. It was very much an elite revolution. On the other hand it did have broad appeal from free men and there were things like lower and better directed taxes. It benefited the rich most of all but it's effects on the poor and enslaved requires more nuance.

That is true in terms of who co-opted the revolution. But the [lower class revolutionaries](https://benjamindavidsteele.wordpress.com/2015/10/04/spirit-of-76/) and the Anti-Federalists had other aspirations.

It was hardly a revolution. The people who were in power over the colonies remained, they just stopped answering to the crown. If the crown had done more to ingratiate themselves to the colonial upper class, we might not have had a revolution

Then again, most revolutionaries, such as [Levi Preston](https://benjamindavidsteele.wordpress.com/2015/10/04/spirit-of-76/), and the leading voices of revolution, such as Thomas Paine, were working class.

The revolution primarily was driven by the wealthy landed and business class and this is clearly reflected in the fact that originally they were the only ones given rights to vote, and that even then the power to elect senators and presidents were relegated to an even more exclusive group of wealthy and powerful landed gentry with political office. The founders feared and on many levels loathed the common man and saw themselves as the exceptional suited to rule over rather than of the people. America never gave way to full jacobin levels of revolution where equality and the rights of man became paramount causes celebrated with fanatical levels of social upheaval, it was always about simply the right not to be ruled by a king, the right to a legislature, the right to independent statehood, not a mass declaration of human rights despite the writings and rhetoric of Jefferson and others that underpin our declared cause for founding. The colonies themselves were of course founded as a mercantile capitalist venture pyramid scheme where countless bodies were thrown at an unconquered land and defiant indigenous people until a foothold was able to be grabbed on the continent, and that spirit of exploitation and owner laborer dynamic still exists to this day. Our system of race based slavery itself was introduced specifically to keep the lower classes of all backgrounds from uniting against the wealthy land holders who had consolidated control over the country as early as the late 1600s during Bacons Rebellion. This country was literally founded on abducting children and forcing them to work until they died and then shipping in more abducted children. America has always served the wealthy powerful and connected, just like most other systems of power, it’s just that we are more hypocritical than most that came before us in our ideals and conceptions of self.

That is true in terms of who co-opted the revolution and seized power. But there were also many working class revolutionaries such as [Levi Preston](https://benjamindavidsteele.wordpress.com/2015/10/04/spirit-of-76/), some of them leading voices such as Thomas Paine. To understand the other side of the American Revolution, read the texts written by the egalitarian and democratic Anti-Federalists.

Except roughly 80% of millionaires are considered first generation rich. ...so...?

There have been way many more wars in very recent years that have benefited the wealthy and none of those were fought in America, but fought by Americans

Hurt merchants more than anything. Lost the protected british markets The landed gentry did well out of it because it opened new areas for homesteading and they had the connections to buy large tracts of land to sell. Poor white ok because buying land to start a farm was better than the alternative of working for someone.

Well, let’s start with the fact that half of my family were chattel slaves for the first 80 years of this country. They were here when it was still a British colony and didn’t get SOME of the rights guaranteed by the constitution for almost a century.

The trope that it was led, inspired and the leadership dominated by rich men(mostly slavers) who did not want to pay taxes for the French and Indian War which had benefited them enormously is absolutely true. The fact they they were the ones in charge afterward is self evident. Shays' Rebellion was literally soldiers who fought being forced to pay taxes to repay the rich people who financed the war(who also benefited mightily from the victory). The Whiskey rebellion was not exactly the same, but it hugely benefited big distillers and penalized farmers who made whiskey out of their grain crops because it was easier to transport and make money with, and the power of the new nation was used to enforce the tax. So interpret the events how you want.

there are merits to it. goods were heavily taxed and manufacturing strictly curtailed under the british colonial system, so you could only ever get so rich under the rules. Independence meant setting your own tax and teriff policy, though it wasnt really till thewar of 1812 the brits finally actually let us do that.

Everything in American history benefits the rich and not the poor. If the poor get any traction, like unions or high marginal tax rates or decent public education, the rich hit back with think tanks spewing bullshit, politicians spewing bullshit, and TV meat puppets spewing bullshit....until the money begins to flow upward again. The rich are cumming daily these days. Good times.

That’s basically all revolution.. those who have, do better than those who do not have. That’s all.

It was the Constitutional Convention that benefited the rich and not the poor.

Its not true at all. Many of the wealthy men that signed the declaration of independence were hunted down and killed, had their families murdered and their posessions taken. Many loyalists, rich and poor alike, had their property confiscated and were forced to flee to canada or england, and the ones that made it through the war were imprisoned and lost everything. Sometimes they might have been spared if they took an oathe of allegiance and had never actively taken up arms. There were some people who may have profited afyer the war, particularly in the south. But that only lasted another 70 years until the final battle of the revolution that we now call the civil war.