Yes this is a great story. I tend to forget the whole period from the first settlements to the revolution - nearly 200 years, which is quite a long time of co-existence. Could we ever attach ourselves to that ship again? The federal system provides for variation and difference, and we could benefit from the energy and opportunity. I know it's not a perfect plan, but after all this time the most positive emotion I can conjure for the British state is indifference.
A week after his Welfare Reform Act gained royal assent. I could bore for Britain about welfare reform - just to say, it was what Blair hoped would be his legacy. How wrong he was…
"Many families were torn. Benjamin’s son William Franklin, governor of New Jersey, was a loyalist, and died destitute and in exile in 1813, cut out of his father’s will. Many more loyalists, facing mob justice, fled to England or to Canada, where they formed a major folkway of that country."
It was only in the aftermath of the American Revolution when "Upper Canada" (which would later become the core of Ontario) became a separate colony in the first place to accommodate the Loyalist refugees (including some of my ancestors)
And don't forget, as the Quebecois do (just like the Scots over the distinctiveness between England and Scotland post 1707) of the Quebec Act of 1774 recognizing Catholicism and the right of those religionists to hold public office, far earlier than the same dispensation in Britain and the remainder of the Empire.
"On top of this, hundreds of towns in the north-eastern United States in particular still testify to the Great Migration of settlers from eight eastern counties of England, the Puritan heartland that stretched from Lincolnshire down to Essex – ancestral homeland to both the Washington and Bush families – and Kent."
I have seen studies showing that the US communities with the highest percentages of self-professed English ancestry are in Upper New England and the Mormon corridor.
That sounds about right. One of my sons-in-law is from a family that has lived in Maine for untold generations; his 23andme test came up as 99% English.
Yep. The authentic English accent has flat vowels - glass not glaaass - and sounds quite “Northern” to a southerner like me. The BBC spread Received Pronunciation or BBC English through the wireless during the interwar years. Anyway, I always thought the US accent had a lot of Scottish and Irish influences historically. And more recently, Yiddish.
"His joke, that ‘If it wasn’t for us, you’d be speaking French’, was the title for a book idea I had, and gave up on, many years ago. The document is still there on my desktop, last opened on 10 May 2007 at 11.30. It’s safe to say that I’ve missed the hook of the 250th anniversary of the United States, now only six weeks away. In fact, my book idea is now so deep into the backburner that its genesis is about eight per cent as old as the United States itself."
Here is one alternate reality where the French still dominate the territory of North America.
"This is why the British made such a huge mistake when in 1765 prime minister George Grenville introduced the Stamp Act. The new tax most affected newspapermen, lawyers, publicans and publishers – all the colonies’ biggest loudmouths. Grenville had form when it came to bad laws – his previous master stroke, the Sugar Duty, cost four times as much to raise as it received in revenue. This, among many other gripes, led over the course of the 1760s and 1770s to a growing conflict between Parliament and the colonies, especially Massachusetts."
A largely forgotten motivator for the American Revolution was the 1774 Quebec Act that gave the dreaded French "Papists" up North more powers that the English colonists spent so much time dying to defeat. This act was specifically listed on the rebels list of grievances for separation. Paradoxically, the fervent anti-Catholicism of the rebels was a big reason why the French Canadians ironically came to see the British Crown as the lesser of two evils. This being a big reason why Canada is a separate nation today!
Not only that - they transferred all the trans-Appalachian lands to the orderly monarchical government they set up in Quebec, thus getting many noses out of joint in the American colonies.
The Royal Proclamation of 1763, an adjunct to the Peace of Paris ending the Seven Years' War, stopped private westward migration by American colonial settlers (not in the woke sense but in the real historical sense!). All land was proclaimed to be Crown land, and that anyone seeing to settle must purchase it from the Crown.
At the outset, the Royal Proclamation of 1763 defined the jurisdictional limits of the British territories of North America, limiting British colonial expansion on the continent. What remained of the Royal Province of New France east of the Great Lakes and the Ottawa River, and south of Rupert's Land, was reorganised under the name "Quebec". The territory northeast of the St. John River on the Labrador coast was reassigned to the Newfoundland Colony. The lands west of Quebec and west of a line running along the crest of the Allegheny Mountains became (British) Indian Territory, barred to settlement from colonies east of the line.
Although this was not meant to be a permanent feature of British North America, it immediately placed a block on westward expansion, this latter being not military in nature but economic and migratory. The Proclamation Line was also not designed as an uncrossable boundary; people could cross it, but not settle past it. And, something that, like the British naval crusade against slavery after 1834, is forgotten by the woke ignorancia, British colonials (i.e. Americans) were forbidden to settle on native lands, and colonial officials were forbidden to grant ground or lands without royal approval. Indeed, the line was moved by negotiation a number of times before 1776, but this did not satisfy the impatient colonials, leading to conflict (legal and armed) with Native Americans, as well as the Crown.
"As the now united Britain evolved into a liberal oligarchy, it grew increasingly wealthy, and globally dominant – and that dominance would prove its undoing in North America, where Albion’s seed no longer need the mother country to protect them. What was emerging was the making of a sequel to the civil war between the progeny of Cavaliers and Roundheads, the theme of Kevin Phillips’s The Cousins’ War, which framed the American revolution as the second of three civil wars in the English world – the ‘Whigs’ would score a hat-trick of victories in 1865."
Paradoxically, I have often viewed the presence of the North American colonies as a safety valve to ensure that the passions of the British Civil Wars were less likely to break out at home. The fact that a disproportionate share of the fanatics, hardliners, reactionaries, hotheads, etc moved to the New World (see the "Seed of Albion") was IMO a big reason why British politics was able to maintain a reputation for sober moderation until recently.
The English were pretty unruly people then, too. They were tamed and made compliant by good and honest Victorian government, which American liberty did not produce. Thus, the Second Amendment.
I've thought that part of the political development of the early colonies was that the English government was too preoccupied with its own struggles in the middle 17th Century to bother with the colonists.
There was significant conflict in the 1680s as the crown (firstly under Charles II after the defeat of the Exclusion Crisis post 1681 and then more aggressively by James II - the York (duke of) of New York fame!) reasserted control over the colonies by appointing royal governors and dissolving or reorganizing (quo warranto) colonial assemblies. This was, to a certain extent, moderated by William III, but the British Crown continued to assert itself periodically (see Maryland, Carolinas, Massachusetts consolidation, etc).
"In the 20th century the United States would be the driving force of feminism, and from the earliest days there were opportunities for women not available elsewhere. New England even had female preachers, among them Anne Hutchinson, who held religious discussion groups every Sunday afternoon. Typically half of the people present were women, and according to their Calvinist theology both sexes could be part of the elect - and it wasn’t the church’s place to decide otherwise."
It's kind of ironic how the Salem Witch Trials are often invoked as a historic example of Christian patriarchy when the Calvinists actually had among the highest FEMALE literacy rates in Christendom at the time. And many of those tried were men and those leading the trials were Harvard grads (funny how some things don't change).
Two of my great great etc. grandmothers, mother and daughter, were charged and tried at Salem but released. Thankfully no Harvard grads on that side of the family, though.
You bet. Somebody did a map of mask compliance and other Covid-culture indicators, and the high compliance map was the same map as the New England diaspora: New England, upstate New York, the upper tier of the Midwest, and the coastal Pacific Northwest. This moral tendency gave us abolition and women’s rights, but also prohibition, anti-abortion, and eugenics. So take your pick.
Washington died at Mount Vernon, the estate he inherited from his older half brother, who named it after Admiral Edward Vernon, his commanding officer when he fought in The War of Jenkins' Ear.
> They rebelled because they’d inherited an English sense of political rights, its religious inheritance and high levels of literacy, just more so;
Expanding on this, because I find this particular thread very interesting.
In "The Radicalism of the American Revolution," Gordon Wood talks about how the colonies, more so than Britain, epitomized the contradictory nature of the post-1688 British system.
In one sense, the colonists were the freest people in the entire world. Abundant land meant British feudal structures never took hold. The supposed aristocracy was poor and weak, with minimal governmental sanction. The crown was distant, and its agents - the British royal governors - ruled entirely at the pleasure of the aristocracy. You see this over and over again: apart from maybe Edmund Andros, the Crown had very little success imposing its direct will on the colonists. Nathaniel Bacon nearly destroyed the entire enterprise a hundred years before the actual Revolution.
And yet, it was spiritually laden with the trappings of monarchy. The aristocracy was poor, but they carried the appearance of patronage, and the people offered them the appearance of deference. The royal governors had the haughty arrogance of a French Intendent or a Spanish viceroy, despite their actual limited power. And the founding fathers, even one from origins as humble as Alexander Hamilton, believed entirely in the British principles of noble gentry, untouched by private interests, leading an enlightened republic of citizens. Ironically, even as they vociferously rejected Parliament's virtual representation for themselves, they sought to impose it on their own people.
Over the 18th century, these latter pretensions grew increasingly hollow. By the 1760s, America was a burgeoning commercial republic straining under British monarchism. When Britain then tried to impose (for the time) basic strictures on the colonies, the dam broke. In Wood's telling, it exposed the base contradictions in British rule. And when the colonists pushed against the system, they didn't find anything pushing back.
Wood then details how the revolution went much further than the Founders' themselves wanted. As Madison and Hamilton wrote over and over again in the Federalist Papers, the revolution was intended to create an enlightened government of the gentry. The goal was to create a population of independent gentry, with stable, proprietary wealth, that could rule a just government for the people. Instead, the revolution empowered a generation of shopkeepers, artisans, manufacturers, merchants, and entrepreneurial farmers, who used republican freedoms to expand their private interests, and used the new democracy to adjudicate between their competing priorities.
By the late 1780s, Hamilton was already disillusioned, and spent the Constitutional Convention trying to bring back monarchical structures (like a President-for-life) to restrain the "venal, shortsighted" population threatening to take power. Jefferson, who ironically was the foremost idealist imagining a yeoman republic, became this class's unlikely champion--probably because he had more eloquence than sense. Hamilton's Federalists' then destroyed themselves with successive secession attempts, and the subsequent two decades of Republican rule set America's future in motion. Jackson's grant of universal manhood suffrage by then was a formality.
America was an unintentional revolution, and its radicalism is the trust it put in its own people. There are many lessons we can all take from that.
The Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia on that hot summer in 1787 and the Federalist Papers that were written to persuade the ratification of the Constitutional that came out of it, display an articulate fear of democracy, or as they saw it, rule by the mob. This is why America is a Republican government, rather than a "democracy" per se. It has much to recommend it. The mob is unruly, it is easily swayed, it is often ignorant and wrong-headed. I know rule by elites is unfashionable and has developed its own echo chamber and arrogance, but the mob destroyed Athens, it led to the Terror in France, Fascism, Communism and untold bloodshed - in the name of the people.
The Puritan heartland stretching from Lincolnshire down to Essex and Kent, was effectively the old region of the Danelaw, where Danish settlers and customs predominated.
It was the Danelaw that caused the success of the English Reformation, of the Whig Cause. But the Danelaw also gave us the Yorkist Cause in the Wars of the Roses; and the crucial Whig Victory was the Yorkist triumph at Towton (Yorks.) on Palm Sunday 1461, when the Whig gentry of the South and East (under their inspired and near-manic teenage commander, the future Edward IV) rode their luck and triumphed over a much larger Lancastrian army comprising the huge serried feudal ranks of the North and West.
The Future had beaten the Past, but it was for hours a knife-edge battle.
And Feudal England, under its indomitable French Queen Margaret of Anjou, might easily have reversed history.
Margaret was not popular in England, being both a woman and a foreigner (French no less). Moreover her regime was noted for lack of competence and for corruption.
Yes, a lot of the senior Lancastrians were corrupt. Enabling the ambitious Richard Duke of York to pose as the defender of good governance.
But when the fighting started, the Lancastrians had to rally behind a leader. It could hardly be the saintly, pacific, broken-down Henry VI; and their son Edward Prince of Wales was only seven at the time Towton was fought.
That left Margaret; and she certainly possessed the necessary qualities.
After the heroism of the American Civil War, a money-obsessed cynicism (which is as American as apple pie and the Stars and Stripes) took over in the late-19th century.
But America recovered from that and saved the world in the 1940's.
Then Money took over in the Fifties and America hasn't recovered, with wokeness simply a travesty of the old idealism.
Will America come back a second time ?
Perhaps - but probably not in its current form or with the current system of government.
It's current system of government would require another revolution and/or amendments to its constitution which are currently highly unlikely given the high bar (2/3 majority in both house of Congress and 2/3 of the states through their won legislatures). But maybe you mean the current incumbent of the White House and the 50/50 split between highly partisan and uncompromising ideologies.
Pardon me Ed. I was curious if you can detect a certain level of similarity of the opinions of different generations on the US in Britain.
British Gen X-ers seem to be more Americanophile as they grew up and came of age in the 1980s and 1990s when the USA was seen as big, rich, and glamorous. Millennials and (especially) Gen Z less so because they came of age during the post-9/11 wars, Great Recession and Great Awokening. The Boomers are I would guess somewhat more Americanophile than Millennials/Gen Z but less so than Gen X as they came of age at a time of the Vietnam War, turbulence related to the Civil Rights Era, and even the weakening of the USA's usual pop culture monopoly in those years.
“Gen X […] came of age at a time of the Vietnam War”? Generation X - nearly me - were born after 1965, while ‘The Quiet American’ by Graham Greene about the beginning of the Vietnam War was published in 1955. The war ended in 1975, when the oldest Gen Xers were just 10 years old. Surely some mistake?
I am an older Xer and I have only some vague memories of the Vietnam War. Apart from Nixon's resignation (my Republican father was outraged and that stuck in my youthful memory) my political memories really begin with the Iran hostage crisis and the second energy crisis and inflation of the late 70s.
Yes this is a great story. I tend to forget the whole period from the first settlements to the revolution - nearly 200 years, which is quite a long time of co-existence. Could we ever attach ourselves to that ship again? The federal system provides for variation and difference, and we could benefit from the energy and opportunity. I know it's not a perfect plan, but after all this time the most positive emotion I can conjure for the British state is indifference.
'There is no Texas for us'
"last opened on 10 May 2007" what was it about Blair announcing his resignation on that day that made you give up on the book?
I never thought about that, but yes, it is Blair's fault.
A week after his Welfare Reform Act gained royal assent. I could bore for Britain about welfare reform - just to say, it was what Blair hoped would be his legacy. How wrong he was…
"Many families were torn. Benjamin’s son William Franklin, governor of New Jersey, was a loyalist, and died destitute and in exile in 1813, cut out of his father’s will. Many more loyalists, facing mob justice, fled to England or to Canada, where they formed a major folkway of that country."
It was only in the aftermath of the American Revolution when "Upper Canada" (which would later become the core of Ontario) became a separate colony in the first place to accommodate the Loyalist refugees (including some of my ancestors)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Upper_Canada
And don't forget, as the Quebecois do (just like the Scots over the distinctiveness between England and Scotland post 1707) of the Quebec Act of 1774 recognizing Catholicism and the right of those religionists to hold public office, far earlier than the same dispensation in Britain and the remainder of the Empire.
"On top of this, hundreds of towns in the north-eastern United States in particular still testify to the Great Migration of settlers from eight eastern counties of England, the Puritan heartland that stretched from Lincolnshire down to Essex – ancestral homeland to both the Washington and Bush families – and Kent."
I have seen studies showing that the US communities with the highest percentages of self-professed English ancestry are in Upper New England and the Mormon corridor.
That sounds about right. One of my sons-in-law is from a family that has lived in Maine for untold generations; his 23andme test came up as 99% English.
A lot of Southerners too.
"I fear that if I went there this would no longer be true, and they’d all say ‘like’ four times in every sentence and tell you they’re ‘reaching out’.
Actually they'd say"loik" and "reaching oot" if there are any traces of that accent remaining.
Here's a sample of a very similar accent that sounds like old fashioned rural English speech:
https://youtu.be/AIZgw09CG9E?si=YHqf7tUtS-Shkwo8
Yep. The authentic English accent has flat vowels - glass not glaaass - and sounds quite “Northern” to a southerner like me. The BBC spread Received Pronunciation or BBC English through the wireless during the interwar years. Anyway, I always thought the US accent had a lot of Scottish and Irish influences historically. And more recently, Yiddish.
"His joke, that ‘If it wasn’t for us, you’d be speaking French’, was the title for a book idea I had, and gave up on, many years ago. The document is still there on my desktop, last opened on 10 May 2007 at 11.30. It’s safe to say that I’ve missed the hook of the 250th anniversary of the United States, now only six weeks away. In fact, my book idea is now so deep into the backburner that its genesis is about eight per cent as old as the United States itself."
Here is one alternate reality where the French still dominate the territory of North America.
https://www.clockworksky.net/gurkani_alam/ah_mughal_top.html
https://www.clockworksky.net/gurkani_alam/ah_mughal_world.html
"This is why the British made such a huge mistake when in 1765 prime minister George Grenville introduced the Stamp Act. The new tax most affected newspapermen, lawyers, publicans and publishers – all the colonies’ biggest loudmouths. Grenville had form when it came to bad laws – his previous master stroke, the Sugar Duty, cost four times as much to raise as it received in revenue. This, among many other gripes, led over the course of the 1760s and 1770s to a growing conflict between Parliament and the colonies, especially Massachusetts."
A largely forgotten motivator for the American Revolution was the 1774 Quebec Act that gave the dreaded French "Papists" up North more powers that the English colonists spent so much time dying to defeat. This act was specifically listed on the rebels list of grievances for separation. Paradoxically, the fervent anti-Catholicism of the rebels was a big reason why the French Canadians ironically came to see the British Crown as the lesser of two evils. This being a big reason why Canada is a separate nation today!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quebec_Act
Not only that - they transferred all the trans-Appalachian lands to the orderly monarchical government they set up in Quebec, thus getting many noses out of joint in the American colonies.
The Royal Proclamation of 1763, an adjunct to the Peace of Paris ending the Seven Years' War, stopped private westward migration by American colonial settlers (not in the woke sense but in the real historical sense!). All land was proclaimed to be Crown land, and that anyone seeing to settle must purchase it from the Crown.
At the outset, the Royal Proclamation of 1763 defined the jurisdictional limits of the British territories of North America, limiting British colonial expansion on the continent. What remained of the Royal Province of New France east of the Great Lakes and the Ottawa River, and south of Rupert's Land, was reorganised under the name "Quebec". The territory northeast of the St. John River on the Labrador coast was reassigned to the Newfoundland Colony. The lands west of Quebec and west of a line running along the crest of the Allegheny Mountains became (British) Indian Territory, barred to settlement from colonies east of the line.
Although this was not meant to be a permanent feature of British North America, it immediately placed a block on westward expansion, this latter being not military in nature but economic and migratory. The Proclamation Line was also not designed as an uncrossable boundary; people could cross it, but not settle past it. And, something that, like the British naval crusade against slavery after 1834, is forgotten by the woke ignorancia, British colonials (i.e. Americans) were forbidden to settle on native lands, and colonial officials were forbidden to grant ground or lands without royal approval. Indeed, the line was moved by negotiation a number of times before 1776, but this did not satisfy the impatient colonials, leading to conflict (legal and armed) with Native Americans, as well as the Crown.
(Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_Proclamation_of_1763).
"As the now united Britain evolved into a liberal oligarchy, it grew increasingly wealthy, and globally dominant – and that dominance would prove its undoing in North America, where Albion’s seed no longer need the mother country to protect them. What was emerging was the making of a sequel to the civil war between the progeny of Cavaliers and Roundheads, the theme of Kevin Phillips’s The Cousins’ War, which framed the American revolution as the second of three civil wars in the English world – the ‘Whigs’ would score a hat-trick of victories in 1865."
Paradoxically, I have often viewed the presence of the North American colonies as a safety valve to ensure that the passions of the British Civil Wars were less likely to break out at home. The fact that a disproportionate share of the fanatics, hardliners, reactionaries, hotheads, etc moved to the New World (see the "Seed of Albion") was IMO a big reason why British politics was able to maintain a reputation for sober moderation until recently.
The English were pretty unruly people then, too. They were tamed and made compliant by good and honest Victorian government, which American liberty did not produce. Thus, the Second Amendment.
I've thought that part of the political development of the early colonies was that the English government was too preoccupied with its own struggles in the middle 17th Century to bother with the colonists.
There was significant conflict in the 1680s as the crown (firstly under Charles II after the defeat of the Exclusion Crisis post 1681 and then more aggressively by James II - the York (duke of) of New York fame!) reasserted control over the colonies by appointing royal governors and dissolving or reorganizing (quo warranto) colonial assemblies. This was, to a certain extent, moderated by William III, but the British Crown continued to assert itself periodically (see Maryland, Carolinas, Massachusetts consolidation, etc).
Thank you, I did not know that about the 1680s and 1690s.
"In the 20th century the United States would be the driving force of feminism, and from the earliest days there were opportunities for women not available elsewhere. New England even had female preachers, among them Anne Hutchinson, who held religious discussion groups every Sunday afternoon. Typically half of the people present were women, and according to their Calvinist theology both sexes could be part of the elect - and it wasn’t the church’s place to decide otherwise."
It's kind of ironic how the Salem Witch Trials are often invoked as a historic example of Christian patriarchy when the Calvinists actually had among the highest FEMALE literacy rates in Christendom at the time. And many of those tried were men and those leading the trials were Harvard grads (funny how some things don't change).
Two of my great great etc. grandmothers, mother and daughter, were charged and tried at Salem but released. Thankfully no Harvard grads on that side of the family, though.
Also, they kicked Anne Hutchinson out for having the wrong religious ideas, and also hanged some Quaker ladies for the same reason.
the intolerant, zealous, cancelling strain in American life can clearly be traced to them.
You bet. Somebody did a map of mask compliance and other Covid-culture indicators, and the high compliance map was the same map as the New England diaspora: New England, upstate New York, the upper tier of the Midwest, and the coastal Pacific Northwest. This moral tendency gave us abolition and women’s rights, but also prohibition, anti-abortion, and eugenics. So take your pick.
You win some, you lose some!
Washington died at Mount Vernon, the estate he inherited from his older half brother, who named it after Admiral Edward Vernon, his commanding officer when he fought in The War of Jenkins' Ear.
Interesting that the Second Barons' War isn't called The War of Montfort's Testicles.
Shame! The War of Jenkins' Ear is very evocative!
🏆
> They rebelled because they’d inherited an English sense of political rights, its religious inheritance and high levels of literacy, just more so;
Expanding on this, because I find this particular thread very interesting.
In "The Radicalism of the American Revolution," Gordon Wood talks about how the colonies, more so than Britain, epitomized the contradictory nature of the post-1688 British system.
In one sense, the colonists were the freest people in the entire world. Abundant land meant British feudal structures never took hold. The supposed aristocracy was poor and weak, with minimal governmental sanction. The crown was distant, and its agents - the British royal governors - ruled entirely at the pleasure of the aristocracy. You see this over and over again: apart from maybe Edmund Andros, the Crown had very little success imposing its direct will on the colonists. Nathaniel Bacon nearly destroyed the entire enterprise a hundred years before the actual Revolution.
And yet, it was spiritually laden with the trappings of monarchy. The aristocracy was poor, but they carried the appearance of patronage, and the people offered them the appearance of deference. The royal governors had the haughty arrogance of a French Intendent or a Spanish viceroy, despite their actual limited power. And the founding fathers, even one from origins as humble as Alexander Hamilton, believed entirely in the British principles of noble gentry, untouched by private interests, leading an enlightened republic of citizens. Ironically, even as they vociferously rejected Parliament's virtual representation for themselves, they sought to impose it on their own people.
Over the 18th century, these latter pretensions grew increasingly hollow. By the 1760s, America was a burgeoning commercial republic straining under British monarchism. When Britain then tried to impose (for the time) basic strictures on the colonies, the dam broke. In Wood's telling, it exposed the base contradictions in British rule. And when the colonists pushed against the system, they didn't find anything pushing back.
Wood then details how the revolution went much further than the Founders' themselves wanted. As Madison and Hamilton wrote over and over again in the Federalist Papers, the revolution was intended to create an enlightened government of the gentry. The goal was to create a population of independent gentry, with stable, proprietary wealth, that could rule a just government for the people. Instead, the revolution empowered a generation of shopkeepers, artisans, manufacturers, merchants, and entrepreneurial farmers, who used republican freedoms to expand their private interests, and used the new democracy to adjudicate between their competing priorities.
By the late 1780s, Hamilton was already disillusioned, and spent the Constitutional Convention trying to bring back monarchical structures (like a President-for-life) to restrain the "venal, shortsighted" population threatening to take power. Jefferson, who ironically was the foremost idealist imagining a yeoman republic, became this class's unlikely champion--probably because he had more eloquence than sense. Hamilton's Federalists' then destroyed themselves with successive secession attempts, and the subsequent two decades of Republican rule set America's future in motion. Jackson's grant of universal manhood suffrage by then was a formality.
America was an unintentional revolution, and its radicalism is the trust it put in its own people. There are many lessons we can all take from that.
The Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia on that hot summer in 1787 and the Federalist Papers that were written to persuade the ratification of the Constitutional that came out of it, display an articulate fear of democracy, or as they saw it, rule by the mob. This is why America is a Republican government, rather than a "democracy" per se. It has much to recommend it. The mob is unruly, it is easily swayed, it is often ignorant and wrong-headed. I know rule by elites is unfashionable and has developed its own echo chamber and arrogance, but the mob destroyed Athens, it led to the Terror in France, Fascism, Communism and untold bloodshed - in the name of the people.
You are a gifted and amusing writer!! Excellent piece!!
Thank you very much!
The Puritan heartland stretching from Lincolnshire down to Essex and Kent, was effectively the old region of the Danelaw, where Danish settlers and customs predominated.
It was the Danelaw that caused the success of the English Reformation, of the Whig Cause. But the Danelaw also gave us the Yorkist Cause in the Wars of the Roses; and the crucial Whig Victory was the Yorkist triumph at Towton (Yorks.) on Palm Sunday 1461, when the Whig gentry of the South and East (under their inspired and near-manic teenage commander, the future Edward IV) rode their luck and triumphed over a much larger Lancastrian army comprising the huge serried feudal ranks of the North and West.
The Future had beaten the Past, but it was for hours a knife-edge battle.
And Feudal England, under its indomitable French Queen Margaret of Anjou, might easily have reversed history.
Margaret was not popular in England, being both a woman and a foreigner (French no less). Moreover her regime was noted for lack of competence and for corruption.
Yes, a lot of the senior Lancastrians were corrupt. Enabling the ambitious Richard Duke of York to pose as the defender of good governance.
But when the fighting started, the Lancastrians had to rally behind a leader. It could hardly be the saintly, pacific, broken-down Henry VI; and their son Edward Prince of Wales was only seven at the time Towton was fought.
That left Margaret; and she certainly possessed the necessary qualities.
There were some amazing women in English history ( as well as Margaret of Scotland) during the late medieval period.
Oi! Kent wasn’t conquered by the Scandinavians! Well, maybe Thanet…
After the heroism of the American Civil War, a money-obsessed cynicism (which is as American as apple pie and the Stars and Stripes) took over in the late-19th century.
But America recovered from that and saved the world in the 1940's.
Then Money took over in the Fifties and America hasn't recovered, with wokeness simply a travesty of the old idealism.
Will America come back a second time ?
Perhaps - but probably not in its current form or with the current system of government.
It's current system of government would require another revolution and/or amendments to its constitution which are currently highly unlikely given the high bar (2/3 majority in both house of Congress and 2/3 of the states through their won legislatures). But maybe you mean the current incumbent of the White House and the 50/50 split between highly partisan and uncompromising ideologies.
Even the Civil War was labeled "A rich man's war and a poor man's fight".
Pardon me Ed. I was curious if you can detect a certain level of similarity of the opinions of different generations on the US in Britain.
British Gen X-ers seem to be more Americanophile as they grew up and came of age in the 1980s and 1990s when the USA was seen as big, rich, and glamorous. Millennials and (especially) Gen Z less so because they came of age during the post-9/11 wars, Great Recession and Great Awokening. The Boomers are I would guess somewhat more Americanophile than Millennials/Gen Z but less so than Gen X as they came of age at a time of the Vietnam War, turbulence related to the Civil Rights Era, and even the weakening of the USA's usual pop culture monopoly in those years.
I’d need to see polling but sounds plausible!
Pre-Boomers are probably more Americanophile as well as they came of age during WWII and the post-war "Golden Age" as some call it of that country.
As a "cusper" (late boomer/early Gen X (1964)), I couldn't agree more with this diagnosis.
“Gen X […] came of age at a time of the Vietnam War”? Generation X - nearly me - were born after 1965, while ‘The Quiet American’ by Graham Greene about the beginning of the Vietnam War was published in 1955. The war ended in 1975, when the oldest Gen Xers were just 10 years old. Surely some mistake?
I am an older Xer and I have only some vague memories of the Vietnam War. Apart from Nixon's resignation (my Republican father was outraged and that stuck in my youthful memory) my political memories really begin with the Iran hostage crisis and the second energy crisis and inflation of the late 70s.
Boomers are less Americanophile than Gen X because they came of age around the time of the Vietnam War...
Ah, syntax