The Quest for Liberty was the cause of the Revolutionary War
The history of the present king of Great Britain (George 3rd) is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over these states”
In my opinion, to suggest that the revolutionary war was merely a product of a quest for liberty is oversimplifying the issue. The quest for liberty was a by-product of the fact that by 1770 the colonists had begun to see themselves as exclusively American. In short, they had an inflated sense of self-importance and had lost touch with their place within the imperial pecking order. The Anglo-American colonies suffered no great economic malaise, nor did they revolt expressing social protests of a threatened or impoverished mass population. The revolution can be identified as a conflict of perceptions, almost exclusively concerned with politics and constitutional rights, between the ancien regime of the British Empire and the latent logic of radical Whig thinking. I shall argue in this essay that the colonists had no major crushing imperial shackles to cast off in search of a “quest for liberty”. In reality it was the newfound American identity, which conflicted with the traditional place which the colonists held in the gr
The Declaration states that if ever any form of government becomes destructive of liberties is the right of the people to alter or abolish it. The colonists viewed monarchical government as doing such and as they viewed their relationship to the British crown as solely contracted and liable to be broken if considerations were not fulfilled. The considerations, which the colonists desired to be filled, were not specifically a quest for liberty. In reality they were quests for self-interest and to further their own wealth. They were overstepping their place within in the Empirical system. This lead to the abolishment of the paternal bond with Britain. They were questioning their status as loyal subjects to the crown not solely in the interest of liberty but more in the hope of self-improvement. The unwillingness to conform to empirical political and social structures meant they did not understand their subjective nature within the British Empire hence a revolution ensued.
and scheme of the British Empire. Here lies the basis of my argument. I hope to justify this statement by examining the polarised mindsets of the Colonists and of the British.
In covering a central range of republican perceptions I have contrasted them with the percep
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