We Could Have Been Canada

[IronLionZion]

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/05/15/we-could-have-been-canada

Was the American Revolution such a good idea?

And what if it was a mistake from the start? The Declaration of Independence, the American Revolution, the creation of the United States of America—what if all this was a terrible idea, and what if the injustices and madness of American life since then have occurred not in spite of the virtues of the Founding Fathers but because of them? The Revolution, this argument might run, was a needless and brutal bit of slaveholders’ panic mixed with Enlightenment argle-bargle, producing a country that was always marked for violence and disruption and demagogy. Look north to Canada, or south to Australia, and you will see different possibilities of peaceful evolution away from Britain, toward sane and whole, more equitable and less sanguinary countries. No revolution, and slavery might have ended, as it did elsewhere in the British Empire, more peacefully and sooner. No “peculiar institution,” no hideous Civil War and appalling aftermath. Instead, an orderly development of the interior—less violent, and less inclined to celebrate the desperado over the peaceful peasant. We could have ended with a social-democratic commonwealth that stretched from north to south, a near-continent-wide Canada.

The thought is taboo, the Revolution being still sacred in its self-directed propaganda. One can grasp the scale and strangeness of this sanctity only by leaving America for a country with a different attitude toward its past and its founding. As it happened, my own childhood was neatly divided between what I learned to call “the States” and Canada. In my Philadelphia grade school, we paraded with flags, singing “The Marines’ Hymn” and “Here Comes the Flag!” (“Fathers shall bless it / Children caress it / All shall maintain it / No one shall stain it.”) We were taught that the brave Americans hid behind trees to fight the redcoats—though why this made them brave was left unexplained. In Canada, ninth grade disclosed a history of uneasy compromise duality, and the constant search for temporary nonviolent solutions to intractable divides. The world wars, in which Canadians had played a large part, passed by mostly in solemn sadness. (That the Canadians had marched beyond their beach on D Day with aplomb while the Americans struggled on Omaha was never boasted about.) Patriotic pageantry arose only from actual accomplishments: when Team Canada won its eight-game series against the Russians, in 1972, the entire nation sang “O Canada”—but they sang it as a hockey anthem as much as a nationalist hymn.

Over the years, we have seen how hard it is to detach Americans from even the obviously fallacious parts of that elementary-school saga—the absurd rendering of Reconstruction, with its Northern carpetbaggers and local scalawags descending on a defenseless South, was still taught in the sixties. It was only in recent decades that schools cautiously began to relay the truth of the eighteen-seventies—of gradual and shameful Northern acquiescence in the terrorist imposition of apartheid on a post-slavery population.

The Revolution remains the last bulwark of national myth. Academics write on the growth of the Founding Father biographical genre in our time; the rule for any new writer should be that if you want a Pulitzer and a best-seller you must find a Founding Father and fetishize him. While no longer reverential, these accounts are always heroic in the core sense of showing us men, and now, occasionally, women, who transcend their flaws with spirit (though these flaws may include little things like holding other human beings as property, dividing their families, and selling off their children). The phenomenon of “Hamilton,” the hip-hop musical that is, contrary to one’s expectations, wholly faithful to a heroic view of American independence, reinforces the sanctity of the American Revolution in American life.

Academic histories of the Revolution, though, have been peeping over the parapets, joining scholarly scruples to contemporary polemic. One new take insists that we misunderstand the Revolution if we make what was an intramural and fratricidal battle of ideas in the English-speaking Empire look like a modern colonial rebellion. Another insists that the Revolution was a piece of great-power politics, fought in unimaginably brutal terms, and no more connected to ideas or principles than any other piece of great-power politics: America was essentially a Third World country that became the battlefield for two First World powers. Stirred into the larger pot of recent revisionism, these arguments leave us with a big question: was it really worth it, and are we better off for its having happened? In plain American, is Donald Trump a bug or a feature of the American heritage?

What if?

An American response could be would Canada and Australia and others be the way they are if America hadn't done the original Brexit? Or we could have turned out more like Zimbabwe, Pakistan, or Jamaica.

[First Speaker]

1. The slaveholders panic over the freeing of slaves in Britain in 1772...

...is one of the greatest Dirty Little Secrets in world history. Without it, the small, local rebellion in Massachusetts in 1775 probably wouldn't have mushroomed into a full-blown Revolution. We would have had, indeed, a Whiggish USA, combined with Canada and Britain, maybe a joint Philadelphia-London parliament in the end. The North American colonies would still have predominated over the Mother Country in the end, maybe even sooner, with the resources of the whole continent at their disposal. Maybe--maybe--the world would have had an Augustan Peace since the 1700s, led by the Anglo-American CoDominion. Or maybe not. The causes of the Revolution, slavery or no, were deep--and London certainly was trying to overawe the colonists' local more-or-less democratic--by the standards of the time--assemblies. What-if is fun, and I've played it many times...and few scenarios are more fun to play with than this one...

[hatrack]

2. Oh, and the British saved our ass from the French, and we didn't want to pay for it

There's always that . . .

[LisaM]

4. Britain may have freed their slaves in 1772, but

British interests were heavily involved in slave trafficking in the Americas for a good long while after that, up to, and including the Civil War. I do think, though, that you make a very good point, and one that is conveniently eliminated from the books.

[Spider Jerusalem]

5. Britain outlawed the slave trade in 1807 and abolished slavery throughout the empire in 1833 (n/t)

[Leith]

3. Interesting to Speculate

There's a YouTube channel that does this kind of thing.

https://www.youtube.com/user/AlternateHistoryHub

The closest scenario they have is to speculate on America losing the Revolutionary War.