As the United States of America celebrates its Independence Day in the most American way possible, with yet another mass shooting in Illinois, I was posed the question of what I think would have happened if the American Rebellion was put down and there was no Independence Day. The question is certainly worth asking because it constantly seems from the outside looking in, that the United States of America was a bad idea in the first place and it has never ever come to terms with its own existence.
The Declaration of Independence states that "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."
The history of the nation consistently proves that as a nation, it holds these "truths" either in contempt or not to be true at all, and if you actually read through the list of claims directed at King George III, they also turn out not to be materially true either.
So, on this July 5th as the rest of the world stares in horror at yet more people's lives, liberty and happiness, being destroyed in an instant at the point of a gun, I will attempt to answer the question of what would have happened had America not gained its independence and remained within the realm of Empire.
The original agitation against the British Government had to do with an imposition of taxation on the import of goods coming unto the American Colonies, which undercut the prices being charged by the East India Company. Most famously the residents of Boston decided to make the world's biggest, weakest and saltiest cup of tea, when they threw many many cases of tea into Boston Harbour. The actual effective rate of taxation on those goods works out to be about 2.9%.
The less famous story is why the British Government reacted the way that it did. Quite apart from wanting to fund the administration in America, the sheer volume of slave labour in America meant that goods being produced in America were way cheaper than home in England. When your labour costs are next to nothing for producing things like cotton and metal goods, then this quite naturally caused outrage.
Already there was dissent in England over the issue of slavery and while anti-slavery cases were slowly rattling through the English court system, the idea as Hansard suggests, is that taxation might dissuade the practice of slavery in the colonies. Part of the reason for imposing taxation and enacting the so-called Punitive Acts was .to try and impose some kind of costs inward because of the outrage of slavery,
It also is true, that having fought a war with France on the North American continent in the 1750s, that Britain thought that fighting a war on the other side of the ocean was expensive. Part of the reason for imposing taxation was about recovery of costs from the people who benefitted the most from driving out the French.
If we for instance assume that General Burgoyne didn't surrender at the Battle of Saratoga in 1777, then I suspect that the outcome would have been vastly different.
News of Somerset v Stewart in 1772 and Knight v Wedderburn in 1777, which together held that slavery was repugnant at English Common Law, would have leaked their way into the American Colonies. Remember, the so-called Punitive Acts were in part to dissuade the practice of slavery in the colonies and the news that it had been abolished at Common Law would have changed both the available force and the propaganda of the rebellion.
No longer is this a purely war for independence but a war being fought with the now open and uncomfortable truth that rich people are fighting for the right to keep and retain slavery in the American Colonies. The United States never really resolved this problem and in the 1789 Constitution, in counting the number of citizens by which Representatives and ergo Electoral College votes are apportioned, it counted people who were considered as chattel goods (aka slaves) as only being worth 3/5ths of a person. Assuming that this truth the rich people of the American Colonies have commandeered the bodies of poorer people to keep the institution of slavery, then we have a very different set of demographics at play.
America is now a seething battle of internal contradictions and I suspect that the American armies which were raised internally, would have been fought from within as well as from without.
If the American Rebellion is put down by about the end of 1778. Then the internal agitation to remove slavery at statute law would have accelerated. When the French Revolution kicked off in 1789, then ideas such as a Constitution and a more open form of democracy would have spread like wild fire in the American Colonies. I suspect that the Slave Trade Act of 1803 in Britain and the Abolition of Slavery Act in 1833 would have both been telescoped to the early 1790s.
All of this leads to an interesting question. What happens to the law as applied in the American Colonies? My suspicion is that an even bigger American Confederation which would have included what is now Canada, would have been granted dominion status a lot lot sooner.
The Dominion of America would end up looking very much like Canada or Australia eventually did. It still would have had a series of bicameral parliaments, with Premiers inside the parliaments and with relatively impotent Governors as that last check on power.
If the Dominion of America exists, then the US Constitution doesn't exist with its very strange form of government and daft Bill of Rights also doesn't exist. Instead, the positive rights at law will have been deemed to exist in the first place and the existing Bill of Rights 1689 would have still been in force.
America's insane worship of guns almost certainly would have never have happened and the really really wild thing is that very possibly the entire North American continent may very well have been incorporated into one very very big country.
That puts America on a very different path; which is shaped by a less militant birth and would have meant that the idea that "all men are created equal" would have been an idea enshrined in law; instead of being a glib statement which was consistently proven by law to be a lie for 189 years. Things like the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act simple do no need to exist if the statement that "all men are created equal" was held to actually be true in the first place.
I still think that given the space and the amount of resources across the vast and unwieldy North American continent, that the Dominion of America would have been the world's biggest economic superpower, except more so and even faster.
Of course I realise that what this means is that the country which I live in, that is Australia, would have never been taken as a British possession and would more than likely be a French Overseas Department. That also means that the game of Cricket also would have probably taken off in America and we'd have this massive powerhouse of the game.
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