The American Revolution
by Kit Lange on December 10, 2013

We all know the story of the American Revolution; at least, some of us do. Many just know the sanitized version of pseudo-facts taught in public school—that a bunch of old, privileged white men who hated black people and Indians fought some war or two, and we ended up free to go torture Native Americans and wagon train all over the place for gold. Something like that. The real story is lost somewhere in the telling, between the racism and the imperialism that the “progressive” powers that be would like you to think permeated the Revolution.

They don’t want you to know who these men really were, or what they did for us; a people with hope is a people who will fight, and nothing breeds hope like knowing that others have fought the same odds as you and won. Those who are taking your liberty want you compliant, unquestioning, easy to herd. Our forefathers were none of these things.

These were not perfect men. They had faults; those are documented elsewhere. But they knew oppression when they saw it. They knew, as Madison wrote later in The Federalist #47, “The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands, whether of one, a few, or many, and whether hereditary, self appointed, or elective, may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny.” They knew that one man with an abundance of power would be corrupted. The only way that the people could be governed was if they were free men, governed through a very simple system of representation. Madison explained further in The Federalist #48 that “the existence of subordinate governments, to which the people are attached and by which the militia officers are appointed, forms a barrier against the enterprises of ambition, more insurmountable than any which a simple government of any form can admit of.”

No one man was ever meant to hold enough power to rule. In King George III, all power had been consolidated. He ignored the pleas for redress, laughed at their requests for representation, and made edicts without even so much as input of the people he ruled. Even with all of this, however, the final straw—and the first shot—came when the British government did the unthinkable and unforgivable.

They came for the colonists’ guns.

“But I thank God,” John Hancock said a year before, “that America abounds in men who are superior to all temptation, whom nothing can divert from a steady pursuit of the interest of their country, who are at once its ornament and safeguard.” Those men, the safeguard of their nation, refused to live in anything but freedom. They considered revolution their sacred duty, the only possible course of action when faced with what was so obviously tyranny. They stood up to a tyrant, and said no. They said it with their ink, and then they said it with their blood.

Certainly there were those who were afraid. There were those who were convinced that waiting was the best option, that it could get better, that leading the colonists into war was a horrific prospect that stood no chance of success. There were cowards. There were fools, and sheep.

But there were also lions.

There were men who felt the force of the wind and leaned into it. Men who felt the fire and kept marching, kept fighting. Without food, without gear or proper clothing. What makes men fight like this? What makes them set aside their homes and families and all the comforts of their lives, to trek across the country and fight for a nation that did not even exist yet? Freedom.

John Adams wrote that “The Revolution was in the minds and hearts of the people; a change in their religious sentiments, of their duties and obligations…This radical change in the principles, opinions, sentiments, and affections of the people was the real American Revolution.” That change—that chance at liberty—gave men strength. It gave them hope, and the courage to “let justice be done, though the heavens should fall.” It gave John Parker, head of the militia at Lexington, the strength to tell his men, “If they want a war, let it begin here.”

And so it did.

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