“The cause of America is in a great measure the cause of all mankind.” – Thomas Paine
When and where to begin a history is a choice with no right answer. Except for the Big Bang, everything that has ever happened has been preceded by something else, so the story is starting somewhere in the middle no matter what. And while including all context from the theoretical start of time is perhaps a tad extreme, something billions of years more recent, yet still a very, very, very, long time ago – like our 4ft tall ancestors evolving into the most lethal species in the existence of the planet – bears directly on war and revolution.
The Earth had never seen anything like us: a global apex predator, capable of crossing any geographical barrier and living comfortably in any climate. Aspects of our humanity so basic that we rarely think about them – language, thumbs, highly acidic stomachs that can digest anything Taco Bell scientists achieve – put us at an overwhelming natural advantage. Everywhere people went, whole environments and ecosystems were terraformed to suit our needs: large animals hunted to extinction; smaller animals captured and domesticated; deserts, forests, jungles, and grasslands remade through burning, planting, chopping and irrigation; rivers and canyons netted to catch prey on unprecedented scales.{1} Inevitably, we turned these skills on ourselves.
There have been examples of non-violent societies, archaeological sites with no evidence of battle or pillage, where centuries passed without anyone feeling the need to build walls or fortifications; but those are the exceptions. In most places, some putz decided he should be in charge, backing it up with weapons and violence (and, having done that, usually started eyeing the neighbors as the next target). The most successful of these guys became kings, and that’s how written history begins: with lists of kings that somehow managed to endure for thousands of years on stone or clay or papyrus.* Rulers everywhere carved their names into mountains, bragged of their victories on the walls of their palaces, and constructed monumentally arrogant graves for themselves. An awful lot of them declared themselves gods.
(*Well, except for all the trash. Huge amounts of humanity’s oldest surviving text are notes, receipts, and other disposable flotsam.)
Kings weren’t divine, of course; that most of their self aggrandizing tombs were looted almost immediately testifies to that. And while from our time even the greatest khans and mightiest emperors kinda blur together, the pattern is clear: the fanciest people in every kingdom, the most civilized elite of every empire, were generally some combination of mean drunks, pious murderers, and world class lovers of incest. They stayed in charge until they croaked or someone murdered them, raising their sons as killers and their daughters as currency. And even when one of them managed to die peacefully in bed, half the time the rest of the family went to war with each other the moment the monarch’s eyes closed.
They got away with it by being well armed and good at violence, and by knowing how to recruit other people who were also well armed and good at violence. For millennia, across the globe, as technology and human capacity improved, as cultures and societies grew and evolved, the ideas at the top remained stubbornly primitive: warrior clans and their retainers using tradition and finery to cloak hereditary barbarity.
As our story begins, soldiers loyal to an inheritor of that bloody patrimony are marching on a small village three-thousand miles from their king’s house. They are part of a military occupation that has been going on for seven years at this point; and they are about to have a very bad day.
The villagers in that part of this particular empire, capable and well read folks who spoke freely, had gotten a dangerous idea into their heads. They thought the king had forfeited his rule over them. Worse, they now also thought they didn’t need a king at all, especially a 37-year-old manchild on the other side of the sea who was ordering their front doors kicked in.
Like all kings, George William Frederick (usually styled ‘George III’, hereafter known as ‘George 3’) had a very complicated set of titles and names, none of which are worth the page space to recount here. He was a German-English offshoot of the sprawling inbred multifamily that lorded over Europe for centuries; they all proudly claimed descent from Charlemagne, a guy who killed people for praying wrong and once got tricked by an otherwise inept Pope*. In Britain, George’s role was less to govern directly and more to serve as a sort of playboy keystone, an agreed upon source of wealth, mediation, and direction for the rich commoners and landed aristocracy that ran the rackets.
(*140 years after this, they blew up themselves – and everyone else – in World War I.)
The troops, a handpicked 800 of the most capable soldiers on the continent,{2} had been dispatched from Boston, a once prosperous harbor town that was now little more than a garrison. Years of occupation had boarded up houses, closed shops, and forbidden perfectly good piers from docking any ships. Now the civilian governor had been replaced by a general who’d promptly locked down the only way in and out of town. That slowed food supplies to a trickle; and when informed that people were starving, British officials replied that it was “not their intent to lessen these difficulties”.{3}
What had Boston and greater Massachusetts done to deserve this cruel punishment? From the king’s perspective: kind of a lot, actually. From the people’s perspective: not a goddamn thing.
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Section 1
{1 – These first two paragraphs are my generalized/butchered summation of common “big history” basics. For a longer but far more professional recent summary, see Frankopan, Peter; The Earth Transformed, p63-158}
{2 – Ward, Christopher; The War of the Revolution, Vol. I, p35}
{3 – Carr, Jacqueline Barbara; After the Siege, p16-17}
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