Untold Truths About the American Revolution
By Howard Zinn
The Progressive, July 3, 2009
http://www.progressive.org/zinn070309.htmlThere are things that happen in the world that are bad, and you want to do
something about them. You have a just cause. But our culture is so war prone
that we immediately jump from, "This is a good cause" to "This deserves a
war."
You need to be very, very comfortable in making that jump.
The American Revolution--independence from England--was a just cause. Why
should the colonists here be occupied by and oppressed by England? But
therefore, did we have to go to the Revolutionary War?
How many people died in the Revolutionary War?
Nobody ever knows exactly how many people die in wars, but it's likely that
25,000 to 50,000 people died in this one. So let's take the lower
figure--25,000 people died out of a population of three million. That would
be equivalent today to two and a half million people dying to get England
off our backs.
You might consider that worth it, or you might not.
Canada is independent of England, isn't it? I think so. Not a bad society.
Canadians have good health care. They have a lot of things we don't have.
They didn't fight a bloody revolutionary war. Why do we assume that we had
to fight a bloody revolutionary war to get rid of England?
In the year before those famous shots were fired, farmers in Western
Massachusetts had driven the British government out without firing a single
shot. They had assembled by the thousands and thousands around courthouses
and colonial offices and they had just taken over and they said goodbye to
the British officials. It was a nonviolent revolution that took place. But
then came Lexington and Concord, and the revolution became violent, and it
was run not by the farmers but by the Founding Fathers. The farmers were
rather poor; the Founding Fathers were rather rich.
Who actually gained from that victory over England? It's very important to
ask about any policy, and especially about war: Who gained what? And it's
very important to notice differences among the various parts of the
population. That's one thing were not accustomed to in this country because
we don't think in class terms. We think, "Oh, we all have the same
interests." For instance, we think that we all had the same interests in
independence from England. We did not have all the same interests.
Do you think the Indians cared about independence from England? No, in fact,
the Indians were unhappy that we won independence from England, because
England had set a line--in the Proclamation of 1763--that said you couldn't
go westward into Indian territory. They didn't do it because they loved the
Indians. They didn't want trouble. When Britain was defeated in the
Revolutionary War, that line was eliminated, and now the way was open for
the colonists to move westward across the continent, which they did for the
next 100 years, committing massacres and making sure that they destroyed
Indian civilization.
So when you look at the American Revolution, there's a fact that you have to
take into consideration. Indians--no, they didn't benefit.
Did blacks benefit from the American Revolution?
Slavery was there before. Slavery was there after. Not only that, we wrote
slavery into the Constitution. We legitimized it.
What about class divisions?
Did ordinary white farmers have the same interest in the revolution as a
John Hancock or Morris or Madison or Jefferson or the slaveholders or the
bondholders? Not really.
It was not all the common people getting together to fight against England.
They had a very hard time assembling an army. They took poor guys and
promised them land. They browbeat people and, oh yes, they inspired people
with the Declaration of Independence. It's always good, if you want people
to go to war, to give them a good document and have good words: life,
liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Of course, when they wrote the
Constitution, they were more concerned with property than life, liberty, and
the pursuit of happiness. You should take notice of these little things.
There were class divisions. When you assess and evaluate a war, when you
assess and evaluate any policy, you have to ask: Who gets what?
We were a class society from the beginning. America started off as a society
of rich and poor, people with enormous grants of land and people with no
land. And there were riots, there were bread riots in Boston, and riots and
rebellions all over the colonies, of poor against rich, of tenants breaking
into jails to release people who were in prison for nonpayment of debt.
There was class conflict. We try to pretend in this country that we're all
one happy family. We're not.
And so when you look at the American Revolution, you have to look at it in
terms of class.
Do you know that there were mutinies in the American Revolutionary Army by
the privates against the officers? The officers were getting fine clothes
and good food and high pay and the privates had no shoes and bad clothes and
they weren't getting paid. They mutinied. Thousands of them. So many in the
Pennsylvania line that George Washington got worried, so he made compromises
with them. But later when there was a smaller mutiny in the New Jersey line,
not with thousands but with hundreds, Washington said execute the leaders,
and they were executed by fellow mutineers on the order of their officers.
The American Revolution was not a simple affair of all of us against all of
them. And not everyone thought they would benefit from the Revolution.
We've got to rethink this question of war and come to the conclusion that
war cannot be accepted, no matter what the reasons given, or the excuse:
liberty, democracy; this, that. War is by definition the indiscriminate
killing of huge numbers of people for ends that are uncertain. Think about
means and ends, and apply it to war. The means are horrible, certainly. The
ends, uncertain. That alone should make you hesitate.
Once a historical event has taken place, it becomes very hard to imagine
that you could have achieved a result some other way. When something is
happening in history it takes on a certain air of inevitability: This is the
only way it could have happened. No.
We are smart in so many ways. Surely, we should be able to understand that
in between war and passivity, there are a thousand possibilities.
Howard Zinn is the author of "A People's History of the United States." The
History Channel is running an adaptation called "The People Speak."
This article is an excerpt from Zinn's cover story, "Just Cause Does Not
Equal Just War" in the July issue of The Progressive.
