the tindog coffeehouse

In honor of Independence Day, I’ve been watching the 13-part History Channel series The Revolution, a documentary on America’s war for independence. And over the past couple of days, I’ve kept coming back to the same single thought: The American Revolution should never have happened.

I don’t mean that it was wrong that it happened but rather that there’s no logical reason for why it happened and for why it was successful. Let me explain.

Go back to the early 1600s when English settlers first starting arriving in the New World. The Jamestown settlement in modern-day Virginia was established in 1607, and the Pilgrims arrived in modern-day Massachusetts via the Mayflower in 1620. These two groups of settlers arrived for very different reasons. The Jamestown colony was established for purely economic reasons: initially for gold but later for tobacco. The Pilgrims and Puritans in New England, however, arrived for religious reasons, driven by ideology rather than economics.

As the English colonies in America grew, they largely maintained this dichotomy. The South was built around agriculture and was heavily dependent on slavery. The New England colonies developed a more diverse economy and were less dependent on slavery. White Southerners identified themselves closely with the English gentry, their plantations and class system modeled after their British counterparts. Such influence in the South continued through the years leading up to the Civil War and beyond. Just look at historic Savannah or Charleston, and you can see evidence of this today. New Englanders, meanwhile, disregarded much of the English class system and anything else that resembled royalty. They gravitated toward the ideals of the Enlightenment: reason, intellectualism, advancement of science, and concepts such as liberty and equality — ideals that were a natural extension of the Puritanism of their ancestors.

It seems logical, then, that the Enlightenment sweeping through the northern colonies would play a major role in driving them to declare their independence from Great Britain. But the problem is, it doesn’t explain why the South would join them. After all, the notion that “all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights” doesn’t exactly sit well with a landed gentry that depends on slavery. So why would wealthy plantation owners in Virginia and South Carolina take up arms to fight alongside anti-slavery northerners that they had almost nothing in common with? On paper, it makes absolutely no sense.

The explanation, I think, comes down to how you define “independence”. If you asked John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, or Thomas Jefferson to define the colonies’ war for independence, they would’ve referred you to Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence. They would’ve defined it in terms of America seceding from Britain. But if you asked the average person in Virginia or South Carolina, I suspect they would’ve defined it in terms of Virginia or South Carolina seceding. Yes, they were Americans, but they were Virginians and South Carolinians first.

This “states’ rights” mentality, of course, lasted beyond the American Revolution. Less than a hundred years after declaring independence from England, eleven Southern states declared their independence from the United States over the issue of slavery. And that mentality continues to shape the political spectrum today. For the past 30 years, the Republican Party has dominated the South with its promotion of low taxation and limited federal government — in essence, a states’ rights platform.

The Red State-Blue State electoral map that we see every four years, then, can really be traced all the way back to the early 1600s. In a sense, it’s still a reflection of the difference between the Jamestown colony and the Pilgrims of Plymouth Rock. By all logic, these two vastly disparate regions should never have united to fight for independence. But they did. They should never have held together long enough to defeat the British army. But they did. They should never have been able to maintain unity after the war. But they did. And they should never have been able to draft a Constitution that has lasted for well over 200 years. But they did.

There’s no logical reason why the American Revolution happened, but it did. And that is simply a miracle.

Previously:
A stunning visual guide to the census of 1870
Thankful for the Pilgrims
How much emphasis should be placed on Christianity when teaching history?