Useless employee's, large and small Part 5

A long time ago, in a country that now seems far, far away, I used to go to schools that largely taught the same things when it came to colonial American history. King George was a loon, Parliament was a gaggle of boobs that sat around dreaming up new taxes for the colonies, and everybody in America got fed up with it. Dressing up like fans of Cleveland’s baseball team, they turned Boston Harbor into a very large but poorly-brewed cup of tea, rowed across the Delaware and ruined the Hessian’s post-Christmas hangover, and finally wound up at Yorktown where the Redcoats said “Uncle”. Not too far off, but as any decent chef will tell you, small changes in ingredients make big changes in taste. And so with history, small changes in the story make big changes in perception.
Let’s dispose one of the more common misperceptions about this period, the one that makes us think that most all of the colonists supported a break with Mother England. Not so. Had you lived in those days, you would have seen a population divided on the issue in about the same ratio as we see in our day with Democrats and Republicans. After the British fleet recovered from the humiliation that occurred in Boston Harbor after John Knox finished his ski-trip back from Fort Ticonderoga, they sailed into New York to a very warm welcome at the hands of a large segment of the population, and proceeded to route the colonial army, eventually chasing them into New Jersey. The Tories that had been evacuated the previous winter from the tiny island that constituted Boston thought this was just swell.
Let us also dispel the myth that Parliament consisted exclusively of an oppressive batch of tyrants, hell-bent on taxing the colonies into the proverbial poor-house. Not so. A number of them argued against the coming war, and some even called for granting the colonies independence. In a way, this last group got their wish, but not in the way they would have liked. Certainly, many of them thought the colonies had a lot of cheek, but to put it simply, the amount of oppression visited on the colonies by Parliament would look like a BB rolling down a four-lane highway as opposed to the convoy of double-wides D.C. is sending against us today.
But unlike the majority of the population that has inherited the political entity they created, these men knew that freedom wasn’t measured by what you had left by the time you got your check. They knew that freedom was a clearly defined set of principles, and that infringement upon any one of them was an assault on all of them, and any such assault was properly repulsed by the threat, or the reluctant use, of deadly force until the assault was called off, or the would-be oppressors were all dead.
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