Sub Terra Vita-- Chronicle # 7: The Price of Liberty—Part I

Sub Terra Vita

By Tim Krenz

Chronicle 7: The Price of Liberty—Part I

Our own Independence Day, celebrated every July the fourth, commemorates the pinnacle of the American revolutionary epoch. On that date, in 1776, the signing of the Declaration of Independence created the new United States out of the then-defunct British colonies in North America. Signed in the midst of a war to claim status as a free and sovereign nation, it took seven years until 1783 for the war to conclude by treaty, and for the King's government to acknowledge an established fact: The fact that the United States had successfully broken the political and social bonds with the Mother Country and its single sovereign, King George III.

Properly defined, the revolutionary epic story of America's founding only concluded in April 1789, when the retired general, George Washington, took the oath of office as the nation's first executive President under the ratified Constitution of 1787. That government has endured, for better or worse, through civil war and world conflicts, ever since; not without struggle or crisis, but having become stronger and more influential with other nations because of those struggles and conflicts. When did the revolutionary journey really begin, since it only ended, by historians' general agreement, in 1789?

The accepted answer places the start of the American Revolution in 1763, when the Kingdom of Great Britain and her American colonies finally drove the French from Canada following the global-wide war from 1755 to that year, 1763. Why did the social-cultural revolution in the King's American subjects begin? Again, the accepted answer: To govern, protect, and make financially solvent the King's investment in his incorporated American colonies, his parliament placed land and property restrictions on those living in the “13 colonies,” and that same ministry assessed taxes to pay for their benefit of defense (against Native Americans) and their subjugation by law (against their own interests) without the consent of those taxed in the New World.

From 1763 until the explosion of war at Lexington and Concord on April 19, 1775 (the original “Patriots Day” holiday), a spark of consciousness had entered the mind of the hard working farmers, traders, mariners, and planters, that some form of home-rule, and self-representative government would better serve them here, rather than a governing ministry in Parliament three months travel beyond the Atlantic Ocean.

Before acts of war, and acts of stupidity, revolutions take place in the mind and hearts of the people. What eventually spawned in the American colonies became a sense of common purpose, and union toward a common goal, of better government, and a freer way of life, a new way of life as the geography opened a frontier of spirit and liberty, as well as new settlements and cheap land. (Albeit, the new country stole land from the Native Americans by war and bribery, and by de facto genocide). People wanted change. Except for those who opposed the revolution and remained “Loyalist” to the King during the war, the citizens of the United States gained for what they had struggled to establish: A new nation, a federal Union of common interests, and a republic and a democracy under their own control, a nation of many sovereigns. Yes, it happened through war, but it did not happen with excessive brutality or unending upheaval, and had some rather good consequences for the world.

America's revolution could have turned out much worse. Beginning on July the 14^th, 1789, in France, it certainly did turn out much, much worse. . . . Tune in next week for Part II of “The Price of Liberty.”