They viewed American independence as a means of securing and broadening domestic liberty, and they spearheaded the Revolution’s opening stages.Īt the other end of the Revolutionary coalition were the American nationalists-men such as Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, Gouverneur Morris, Robert Morris, and Alexander Hamilton. Although by no means in agreement on everything, the radicals tended to object to excessive government power in general and not simply to British rule. At one end of the Revolutionary coalition stood the American radicals-men such as Samuel Adams, Patrick Henry, Thomas Paine, Richard Henry Lee, and Thomas Jefferson. Like all major social upheavals, it was brought off by a disparate coalition of competing viewpoints and conflicting interests. It’s true that the American Revolution had some mixed results from the standpoint of liberty. Indeed, a far stronger case can be made that without the American Revolution, the condition of Native Americans would have been no better, the emancipation of slaves in the British West Indies would have been significantly delayed, and the condition of European colonists throughout the British empire, not just those in what became the United States, would have been worse than otherwise. Speculations that, without the American Revolution, the treatment of the indigenous population would have been more just or that slavery would have been abolished earlier display extreme historical naivety. In fact, the American Revolution, despite all its obvious costs and excesses, brought about enormous net benefits not just for citizens of the newly independent United States but also, over the long run, for people across the globe. In fact, with 20/20 hindsight, independence had two massive anti-libertarian consequences: It removed the last real check on American aggression against the Indians, and allowed American slavery to avoid earlier-and peaceful-abolition.” 1 One can also find such challenges reflected in recent mainstream writing, both popular and scholarly. Thus, libertarian Bryan Caplan writes: “Can anyone tell me why American independence was worth fighting for?… hen you ask about specific libertarian policy changes that came about because of the Revolution, it’s hard to get a decent answer. It has become de rigueur, even among libertarians and classical liberals, to denigrate the benefits of the American Revolution.
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