from Made in America (Bill Bryson)Chapter 3 A Democratical Phrenzy: America in the Age of RevolutionWhen dawn broke on that epochal year 1776a year that would also see the publication of Adam Smiths Wealth of Nations and the first volume of Edward Gibbons Decline and Fall of the Roman EmpireAmericas war with its British masters was already, in a sense, several years old. The much despised Stamp Act was eleven years in the past. It was nearly three years since the Boston Tea Party (which wouldnt in fact generally be called that for another half-century) and six since the infamous, if widely misreported, Boston Massacre. It had been nine months since some unknown soul had stood at Concord green and fired, in Emersons memorable phrase, the shot heard round the world, and not much less since the bloody, curiously misnamed Battle of Bunker Hill, which did not take place on Bunker Hill at all (or Bunkers Hill as it was then more commonly called). Though the battle was intended to take place on Bunker Hill (these matters being rather more formally arranged in the eighteenth century), for reasons unknown colonial troops under Col. William Prescott fortified the wronghill, the neighboring Breeds Hill, and it was there that the first pitched battle of Americas war for independence was fought. To complicate matters, Breeds Hill was often thereafter referred to as Bunker Hill. At any rate, and by any measure, in January 1776 Britain and a significant portion of its American colonies were at war.We might reasonably ask why. In 1776 Americans already were the freest people in the world, as Samuel Eliot Morison has noted. Most Americans enjoyed economic mobility, the right to vote for their own local representatives, a free press and the benefits of what one English contemporary tellingly called a most disgusting equality. They ate better, were more comfortably housed and on the whole were probably better educated than their British cousins. (In Massachusetts, for instance, the literacy rate was at least double that of Britain.) The Revolution when it came would not be to secure Americas freedom, but to preserve it.What the colonists did lack were seats in Parliament. They resentednot unreasonably, it seems to us todaybeing required to pay taxes to the mother country when they were denied a voice in the House of Commons. To the British such a notion was overambitious, if not actually preposterous, since m o s t Britons did not themselves enjoy such a lavish franchise. Only about one Briton in twenty had the right to vote and even some large thriving cities such as Liverpool and Manchester had no directly elected Member of Parliament. Why should mere colonists, the semi-British, be accorded greater electoral privilege than those reared on British soil?Nor, it should be noted, were the taxes levied on the colonists by any stretch onerous or unreasonable. The principal aim of the stamp duties and other revenue-raising measures was to fund the protection of the colonies It was hardly beyond the bounds of reasonableness to expect the colonists to make a contribution towards the cost of their own defense. In the 1760s, it was estimated, the average American paid about sixpence a year in tax. The average Briton paid twenty-five shillingsfifty times as much. And in any case, Americans seldom annually paid their taxes. The hated Townshend duties raised just 295 in revenue in their first year and cost 170,000 to implement. The equally reviled Stamp Act duties were never collected at all.Nonetheless, as every schoolchild knows, throughout the 1770s America rang with the cry Taxation without representation is tyranny. Actually, not. James Otis, to whom the phrase is commonly attributed, appears never to have said any such thingor at least if he did no one at the time noticed. The famous words werent ascribed to him until 1820, nearly forty years after he died.The American Revolution was in fact an age drowning in myths. Many of the expressions that are proudly associated with the struggle for independence were in fact never uttered. Patrick Henry almost certainly didnt issue the defiant cry, If this be treason, make the most of it or any of the other deathless remarks confidently attributed to him in the Virginia House of Burgesses in May 1765. The clerk of the convention made no notes of Henrys speech, and none of those present gave any hint in their correspondence that Henrys remarks had been particularly electrifying that day. According to the one surviving eyewitness accountwritten by a French hydrologist who just happened to be present, and found quite by chance in the archives of the National Hydrological Institute of France in 1921Henry did make some intemperate remarks, but, far from being defiant, he immediately apologized to the House of Burgesses if the heat of passion might have lead [sic] him to have said something more than he intended and timidly professed undying loyalty to the kingnot quite the show of thrust-jawed challenge portrayed in countless school books.