Free Flight of the Eagle: The Grand Strategies That Brought America From Colonial Dependence to World Leadership by Conrad Black Page A

population of Britain, about 70 percent of the population of Prussia, which had just held the great Austrian and Russian Empires at bay for almost seven years, and a greater population than the Netherlands or Sweden, noteworthy powers that had swayed the destinies of Europe at times in the previous 150 years. (Admittedly, about 8 percent of the Americans were unenfranchised slaves, who had only the rights their owners allowed from one moment to the next.)
    On the other side, the Americans knew that Britain had saved them from a most unappetizing fate at the hands of the French, a prospect made more gruesome and horrifying by any contemplation of what the Indians might have done to make the lives of the colonists shorter and more uncongenial. All informed Americans knew that Britain had gone a long way into debt doing so, and as America was the most prosperous part of the Empire, it had some obligation to shoulder a proportionate share of the cost. It is impossible, at this remove, and buried as these matters now are in the folkloric mythology of the creation of the United States, to guess what degree of unvarnished cynicism might have hastened and made louder the American caterwauling about rights, and the corresponding failure to make any suggestion, apart from Franklin’s worthy improvisation, of an alternative to the stamp tax to retire the debt incurred in the military salvation of America.
    The Pennsylvania Assembly adopted a resolution strenuously condemning the Stamp Act, as did the Virginia Assembly, under the influence of the fiery orator Patrick Henry, who advised George III to contemplate the fate of Julius Caesar and Charles I (as if either the men or their fates were in the slightest similar, and seeming to condone their ends, an assassination and a pseudo-judicial murder, shortly leading in each case to the elevation of their heirs). The Virginians asserted that the tax was “illegal, unconstitutional, and unjust.... The inhabitants of this Colony are not bound to yield Obedience to any law or Ordinance whatever, designed to impose any Taxation whatever upon them,” apart from those legislated in Virginia. This response was known as the Virginia Resolves and was emulated by most of the colonies. The British had designated collectors of the tax, who were pressured into refusing to collect it. With the tax in effect but not being collected, and demonstrations verging on violence around the colonies, nine of the colonies met in New York and declared that taxes could be imposed on the colonists only with their personal consent or that of their elected representatives. This was represented as part of the birthright of Englishmen. It was a stirring stand for individual liberty and rugged individualism, but was nonsense in fact. No sane person will volunteer to be taxed, other than in a severe community or national emergency, and Englishmen were taxed all the time with only a vote of an undemocratically elected House of Commons and a House of Lords that would recoil in horror at the thought that it was answerable to the taxpayers. (It should not be imagined that the colonial houses of assembly had a greatly larger percentage of representation on their voters’ lists, although the procedure of what became known as gerrymandering [after the redistricting artistry of the fifth vice president, Elbridge Gerry] had not had the time to plumb the depths of electoral vote-rigging that existed in England.) The rights Englishmen possessed, which distinguished them from most nationalities, except for some Swiss, Dutch, and Scandinavians, were freedom of speech and assembly, and access to generally fairly independent courts, as well as some participatory legislative processes, and the Americans received them from and shared them with the British.

14. FRANKLIN’S DIPLOMACY IN LONDON, 1764–1767
     
    The Americans, Franklin was convinced, didn’t want independence, but they wanted an end to inferiority. They recognized the