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By Root 2508 0

(which wouldn’t in fact generally be called that for another half-century) and six since the infamous, if widely misreported, Boston Massacre. It had been nine months since some unknown soul had stood at Concord green and fired, in Emerson’s memorable phrase, ‘the shot heard round the world’, and not much less since the bloody, curiously misnamed Battle of Bunker Hill, which did not take place on Bunker Hill at all (or Bunker’s Hill as it was then more commonly called). Though the battle was intended to take place on Bunker Hill (these matters being rather more formally arranged in the eighteenth century), for reasons unknown colonial troops under Col. William Prescott fortified the wrong hill, the neighbouring Breed’s Hill, and it was there that the first pitched battle of America’s war for independence was fought. To complicate matters, Breed’s Hill was often thereafter referred to as Bunker Hill. At any rate, and by any measure, in January 1776 Britain and a significant portion of its American colonies were at war.

We might reasonably ask why. In 1776 Americans already were ‘the freest people in the world’, as Samuel Eliot Morison has noted.1 Most Americans enjoyed economic mobility, the right to vote for their own local representatives, a free press and the benefits of what one English contemporary tellingly called a ‘most disgusting equality’. They ate better, were more comfortably housed and on the whole were probably better educated than their British cousins. (In Massachusetts, for instance, the literacy rate was at least double that of Britain.)2 The Revolution when it came would not be to secure America’s freedom, but to preserve it.

What the colonists did lack were seats in Parliament. They resented – not unreasonably, it seems to us today – being required to pay taxes to the mother country when they were denied a voice in the House of Commons. To the British such a notion was overambitious, if not actually preposterous, since most Britons did not themselves enjoy such a lavish franchise. Only about one Briton in twenty had the right to vote and even some large thriving cities such as Liverpool and Manchester had no directly elected Member of Parliament. Why should mere colonists, the semi-British, be accorded greater electoral privilege than those reared on British soil?

Nor, it should be noted, were the taxes levied on the colonists by any stretch onerous or unreasonable. The principal aim of the stamp duties and other revenue-raising measures was to fund the protection of the colonies. It was hardly beyond the bounds of reasonableness to expect the colonists to make a contribution towards the cost of their own defence. In the 1760s, it was estimated, the average American paid about sixpence a year in tax. The average Briton paid twenty-five shillings – fifty times as much. And in any case, Americans seldom actually paid their taxes. The hated Townshend duties raised just £295 in revenue in their first year and cost £170,000 to implement. The equally reviled Stamp Act duties were never collected at all.

None the less, as every schoolchild knows, throughout the 1770s America rang with the cry ‘Taxation without representation is tyranny.’ Actually, not. James Otis, to whom the phrase is commonly attributed, appears never to have said any such thing or at least if he did no one at the time noticed. The famous words weren’t ascribed to him until 1820, nearly forty years after he died.3

The American Revolution was in fact an age drowning in myths. Many of the expressions that are proudly associated with the struggle for independence were in fact never uttered. Patrick Henry almost certainly didn’t issue the defiant cry ‘If this be treason, make the most of it’ or any of the other deathless remarks confidently attributed to him in the Virginia House of Burgesses in May 1765. The clerk of the convention made no notes of Henry’s speech, and none of those present gave any hint in their correspondence that Henry’s remarks had been particularly electrifying that day. According to the one surviving eyewitness account