Welcome back to the Fourth Way podcast. Today, we are continuing series on non violent action by taking a look at the American Revolution. Now skipping quite a few centuries here because history becomes a bit more clear the closer we get to the present. If you remember back to the last episode where we talked about antiquity and non violence in antiquity, we had relatively few stories and they were from a long long time ago, and they were pretty short stories because we don't have a ton of information. We talked about that lacunae of information being partly a result of what historians attempt to emphasize.

You know, they emphasize things that we view as important or action oriented which tend to be breakups of peace, right? When things are going great, it's not news, but when things go bad and there's a lot of action, that's newsworthy. And then of course the other reason is because the farther back you go, the less information you have. So we're skipping quite a few centuries and we're coming all the way up to the American Revolution. Now it would have been really easy for me to skip the American Revolution and go straight to like Gandhi who is probably one of the first people that comes to mind when you think of nonviolence.

Gandhi and King, right? India and civil rights. Those are the things that most people think of when they think of nonviolent action. But I wanted to go back a bit earlier, and there are other places that I could go to especially in the eighteenth century. There are other things that we could look at.

But I want to look at the American Revolution. First of all, so we don't go straight to Gandhi, so that you don't get the impression that non violent action didn't exist until him. But also because for at least the majority of my audience, as well as for myself, the American Revolution and understanding more about that is vital to not only understanding our history, but in starting to dismantle this mythology that we've been indoctrinated to believe about how the American Revolution came about, what it entailed, you know, how we were successful and all that kind of stuff. And I'm just gonna scratch the surface today and there are several other resources I'll give you that I think are helpful in understanding a bigger picture of the revolution. But today, we're specifically going to look at non violence prior to the American Revolution.

So one of the things that I I want to highlight as we go through this episode is that history is is a bit different than what we're told. And it's not different because there's, you know, really different facts for different groups of people, it's that different groups emphasize different facts. And what our group tends to emphasize here in The States is that violence is, glory, that war is kind of how we solve conflicts and that's the history of The United States, war solving conflicts, violence solving conflicts. And we discussed this a little bit in our Memorial Day episode in 2020, I believe, talking about the sacrifices of Christ and discussing some of Stanley Howarwas's work. But the point is that Americans think violence won the day for our freedom and it continues to win the day for our freedom now.

For some reason, our soldiers fighting in Vietnam, that wasn't even a threat to us, secured my ability to vote today. That's why I have my freedom. And maybe you can point to certain battles, certain wars where that was, is more true, but we've got this mythology that's just centered around the sacrifices of soldiers, and Harrowas identifies how that for Americans is really a replacement for the sacrifice of Christ in some ways. And lest you think that this is just some ideological concept that, you know, we have in our minds and it doesn't really play out in the real world, I mean, you think about the size of our military and the budget for our military and the other things that we could be spending it on, I don't have it in front of me but you know, Dwight Eisenhower has a quote about you know, like every, I don't know, every airplane is how many schools and this and that. And it's like, yeah, we're talking about priorities and whether we're choosing to build instruments of death or whether we're choosing to give people equal education or access to healthcare, and we're making these decisions and we're showing what we think is important, and we're showing how we think the world works.

And how we think think the world works, in large part, is based off of how we understand history, and how we understand the world to have worked in the past because it's probably gonna work in a similar fashion today. It's really just the scientific experiments just in history. I think that's inductive reasoning, I get them mixed up sometimes, yeah, it's where, because the sun rose yesterday, it's going to rise today, right? This inductive reasoning of the things we see throughout history are probably going to hold true today, and if violence worked in the past, violence is going to work today. And we as American citizens have centered our culture around violence, not just at the national level but at the personal level as well.

So what I'm gonna argue today is that the picture of violence, of The United States being birthed out of this violent revolution that saved the day and earned us our freedoms, I'm gonna cut into that a lot. Not as much as I want to because there are other paths that I would like to take to kind of dispel how the British weren't really as oppressive as we think they were, we deserved a bunch of the taxes. I mean, there's a lot that we could get into, okay? Romans 13 of course which we've talked about before. We could get into a lot of things and I'm gonna do my best not to go down some of those rabbit trails.

But the argument that I want to make clearly today is that non violence in the American Revolution or prior to the American Revolution played a key part, if not the central part, in fostering a successful change in government and freedoms. I think you're gonna have a hard time denying that truth from the evidence, but that of course will up to you to determine at the end. And then at the end, I also want to put forward what I think are reasonable conclusions to draw in regard to how violence might have actually ended up being worse for the colonies and for the world, and I'll give you some concrete examples. I figure if violent people can throw hypotheticals at the nonviolent, then I can come up with some pretty good hypotheticals for what a world might look like had the colonies remain nonviolent. So, turnaround's fair turnabout's fair play, right?

So, without further ado, let's go ahead and jump into the nonviolent actions of the American Revolution. And I will be using a resource that I'm gonna link in the show notes below as the crux of this central argument. But there's also another book that I've heard recommended very highly and I've read that it was reviewed in several journals which gives it some credibility and I think it would be good. I just, it's like 600 pages and my reading list is already full and I haven't gotten to that but I'll put that in the show notes as well And also the historical faith course has some good background information on the revolution. But anyway, let's start with John Adams.

And John Adams said something very interesting in a letter he wrote to Doctor. J. Morse, whoever that is, on 11/29/1815. So about thirty to forty years after the revolution. And Adams said this, quote, A history of military operations from 04/19/1775 to the 09/03/1783 is not a history of the American Revolution anymore than the Marquis of Quincy's military history of Louis the fourteenth, though much esteemed, is a history of the reign of that monarch.

The revolution was in the minds and hearts of the people and in the union of the colonies, both of which were substantially affected before hostilities commenced. What's interesting about this quote from Adams is that he recognizes that the violent revolution which ultimately came about was actually preceded by something important. There's a lot more going on there than, hey, we're gonna stand up and be brave and shoot people, right? That's not the heart of the revolution. Certainly, Adams would have seen that as a significant part, but Adams recognizes that there was a lot more that went into it than just the exciting battle parts that we think of.

And whatever it is that came before this violent revolution, it laid the foundation for the success of it. So, what came before the violent revolution? Do we ever really hear all that much about that? Typically in The States, maybe we hear about the Boston Tea Party, but most of what we learn about is really an emphasis on the British putting a yoke of oppression on the colonies. That's the way that it's put forward.

But that historical information is largely just a preliminary to get to the good stuff, to get to the battle, to get to the part where we finally decided to do something about those oppressive British. You know, until that point, until the point of of the colonists actually deciding to fight, so we think, they're really seen as helpless poor victims. But not only is this a heavily propagandized understanding of events, viewing the British as oppressors so terrible that a revolution was justified even in light of Romans 13, it's also a misrepresentation of the power that the colonists had prior to the violent revolution. The revolution, as Adams identifies, wasn't only years of violent conflict, it was actually a whole lot more than that. In fact, by the battles of Lexington and Concord in April of seventeen seventy five, many of the colonies had gained de facto independence.

You know, and you could argue what that means but in some sense, they were independent. And that's because many of the laws that the colonists didn't like, they had either been repealed or were going absolutely unenforced. So while that independence might not have been as large as it was under the period of Britain's salutary neglect which preceded some of the like Stamp Act and other things. And it wasn't the same level of independence as full autonomy. At the same time, the amount of independence that the colonies were living was pretty big.

They had quite a lot of independence even under these British laws that they were trying to implement or at least feigned an attempt to implement. I mean, if you just take a look at the tax rates, I've seen a huge range of estimates on this. But if you compare the colonies tax rates to how much those in Britain were taxed, you get something to the on the high end of taxation, colonists are paying half of what the British are paying. So they're making out great paying half the tax rate. And I've seen some places say, well really, they're paying about one twenty fifth of what the Brits were paying.

And I'm sure the truth is probably somewhere in between there, but even if we go with half, the colonists were paying half of the taxes that the British were paying, that's impressive. So the colonies had a large degree of autonomy, many of the laws and taxes that Britain had put into place were ignored or unenforced, and the colonies were getting a good deal of benefit from the protection of the crown against the French and Native Americans. The colonists had a pretty good thing going there. And it's important to note then that when we read about the colonial perception of oppression, that this is really relative. What the colonists are doing is they're comparing to their life when Great Britain decides to actually try to enforce some things, they're comparing some taxes with basically no taxes from the period of salutary neglect.

And salutary neglect is just this term that they use for this this period of time when Britain was like, hey look, we're getting a bunch of money from the colonies because they're producing lots of natural resources. Let's just kind of let them do their thing. Let's let them alone. So compared to life under salutary neglect, of course, the colonists could say that, Oh well, you're being oppressive now. But really, were just trying to bring them up to normal and even at the point where the colonists were rebelling, they weren't up to normal with what the Brits on the island were actually experiencing.

So while the colonies might not have made it back to the freedoms that they had under salutary neglect, they did manage to negate a number of the laws that Britain imposed and set up on their governments. And it's in this functional sense that they had de facto independence prior to the Revolutionary War. It's not that the government didn't try to tell them what to do and didn't try to implement laws, but you know, so they did not have de jure independence, which means independence through law, but they had de facto independence. In practice, they were actually independent by and large. And I'm sure that depended on what location you were in.

You know, if you're in Boston or New York City, maybe that was slight probably New York City was maybe slightly different, maybe they Britain had a little bit more power to enforce things. But by and large, you're going to see that yeah, there's de facto independence pretty much everywhere, most of the time. So I actually wanna go into some specifics here and show you how non violence set the stage for and ultimately I think was the creator of independence. And it's not my goal to discuss whether these rebellious acts were warranted from a Christian perspective, I'm simply gonna look at the methodology of non violence that the colonists used. So let's take a look first at the Stamp Act, and that came about in March of seventeen sixty five and lasted until 1766.

Britain began at one point to require stamps on all legal documents. Now that time that they started to do this, the colonists who were coming out of solitary neglect were like, we don't like that. We didn't have to do it before, we don't want to have to do it now. And so, the colonists decided to participate in a number of methods of non violent resistance. They sent off petitions without executive approval for repeal of the law.

They refused to pay the taxes, they just said, Nope, not gonna do it. There were social and consumer boycotts of goods, and specifically they would also boycott supporters of the act. So if they found out that a certain business was using stamps when they were trying to get people to not use stamps, they just wouldn't use that business. And so there was economic pressure placed on people. And then, there was non importation and non consumption of British goods.

So you know, British who are trying to make a bunch of money, now if you're not gonna buy their produce, they've shipped it all the way across the sea and especially if it's perishable stuff, that's not too good for them. That's a loss of quite a bit of money. But things went even further than the consumer level because it ended up that Boston, Philadelphia and New York merchants actually refused to import British goods until the tax was repealed. So they wouldn't even let the let the goods get to the consumers, the middlemen or the ports, whatever you want to consider those. They said, No, we're not going to even let your ships come in here and unload the goods.

If you can't unload goods, you can't sell them which is a problem for revenue, but depending on how that works, you might not even be able to dock and pick up resources to take back. And that journey across the ocean is not too nice if you have goods that you didn't sell, you took that long journey and you don't have anything to bring back either. Now the tax ended up being repealed approximately a year from its inception, and it ended up earning one twentieth of what was expected, not even half of the cost of printing the stamps. So this was a huge bust for Britain. Now I want to put that into perspective for you because you might be like, well, I mean the tax was in place for a year.

But if you think that it took weeks, potentially months depending on on, you know, if ships from Britain went had other stops and went to The Bahamas or other other places that they might have gone before coming to Boston or New York. I don't know how how the shipping lanes all worked. But if you consider that it at least took weeks to get from Britain to The United States, you think that a law, let's say a law is passed on March 1 and but the news ends up getting over to the colonies several weeks later because they don't have obviously like airmail or phones or anything like that. So it takes a couple weeks to get there. And then by the time the word spreads through all the colonies and things are implemented, that's probably a couple more weeks and then you get people who start to do non violent sorts of things and some news starts get sent back and then more news and then more non violent acts and more news gets back, for a law to be repealed within approximately a year of its inception, that's pretty insane.

Like it was repealed pretty quickly as things go. So this non violent action had a significant impact and it did so very rapidly. After the Stamp Act, there is the Townsend Act, 1767 to 1768. And the Townsend Acts applied duties to a variety of products in the colonies. As with the Stamp Act, there was a there were several means employed to combat this new act.

There were several non violent actions that the colonists implemented to fight the Townsend Acts. First of all, they petitioned the king, they also boycotted goods again, and the ports refused to take goods. So, same methodology here. But they went a step further and they threatened to withhold exports. So tobacco which was a specific threat and that was a huge cash crop for Great Britain.

To not be able to tap into the resources like tobacco or lumber of of the colonies who were were big suppliers for Great Britain, that hurt quite a lot. Colonists even went further and merchants started to charge significantly less for colonial made products, right, made in The USA. And within about a year, due to all of these things, the act was repealed. So to this point, I've been speaking in generalities as to the methodology implemented. So I want to, before moving on to the next act, I want to actually give you several quotes from the article that I used mainly, which demonstrates the types of resistances going on.

Some cool stories that go on in here. Some of it's pretty awesome, some of it's humorous, and I think it gives you an idea of how widespread and unifying these non violent acts were, as well as how diverse the participants were. If you remember back to Why Civil Resistance Works, the diversity of participants and reaching this threshold where you have a lot of participants is very important. So listen to several quotes from the article. Quote, methods of protest and persuasion included demonstrations and parades on behalf of a resistance campaign, the development of political symbols such as the liberty tree, and the publication of papers naming supporters or opponents of the resistance.

A mock funeral in Wilmington, North Carolina in October 1765 illustrated many of these methods. The North Carolina Gazette reported that some 500 Wilmingtonians out of a total population of 800 to a thousand met to protest against the Stamp Act. They paraded an effigy of liberty, symbolizing the rights of colonists under attack. Nonviolent resistance in The Americas by the British Parliament. The crowd put the effigy into a coffin and marched in solemn procession with it to the churchyard, a drum in mourning beating before them and the town bells muffled ringing a doleful knell at the same time.

Just before the crowd interred the coffin, they checked the pulse of Liberty and discovering she was still alive, concluded the evening with great rejoicings on finding that Liberty still had an existence in the colonies. The newspaper account observes, Not the least injury was offered to any person. Here, religious ritual, political protest, and mass action were conjoined within a non violent method of resistance. Urban political theater such as this mock funeral, dramatized resistance issues, enlisted participation, and pressured royal officials. For onlookers, it raised awareness of the controversy and identified their neighbors and friends as supporters of the resistance.

It encouraged all to support the resistance goals in a context that was not particularly threatening for the participants and witnesses, though the meaning of the episode was clear. Also, in 1769, the students and president of the Baptist Rhode Island College, later Brown University, appeared at commencement dressed in American homespun, not imported English, formal gowns. So too, the colonists expanded production of scythes, spades, wallpaper, and liqueur rather than purchasing them from British merchants. End quote. I I don't know why but I love that idea of, you know, going to bury liberty, like it just this I mean, seems like an exaggeration.

It seems like like you said, political theater, right? But I mean that's really creative, it's humorous, I don't know. And he did, the author identified why that is important, know. Neighbors see which side you're on, neighbors, you kind of get this this upswell of people saying, Okay, now look at all the people out there, I can go out there too. Like, I can I can voice my my descent because there are lots of us?

Kind of builds up some of the courage and participation. So these kinds of things might seem cheesy but very very important and we'll talk more in one of the future episodes when we talk about Solzhenitsyn's article Live Not By Lies. We'll discuss how important some of these things that seem symbolic and cheesy are because they they have a very important function. But anyway, I find that humorous. There's another quote that I wanna give you about another incident that I find interesting and humorous as well.

So let me give you that right now. Quote, in 1769, an account in the Boston newsletter described 77 young women assembling at the house of the Reverend John Cleveland with their spinning wheels to make homespun yarn. When they finished, Cleveland observed how the women might recover to this country the full and free enjoyment of all our rights, properties, and privileges. By living upon as far as possible only the produce of this country and to be sure to lay aside the use of all foreign fees, teas, also by wearing as far as possible only clothing of this country's manufacturing. Similarly, in Newport, Rhode Island, Congregational Minister Ezra Stiles hosted 92 Daughters of Liberty who spent the day spinning yarn as their contribution to the resistance.

A variation on these non consumption actions took place in Edenton, North Carolina in October 1774 when 51 women signed this declaration, We the ladies of Edenton do hereby solemnly engage not to conform to that pernicious custom of drinking tea, and that we, the aforesaid ladies, will not promote ye wear of any manufacture from England until such time that all acts which tend to enslave this our native country shall be repealed. Even children got involved. When Susan Boudinot, the nine year old daughter of a New Jersey patriot was offered a cup of tea while visiting the royal governor, she curtsied, raised the cup to her lips and tossed the tea out the window. End quote. I love that story, that last one with the nine year old girl, you know, curtseying and being prim and proper and then tossing the tea out the window.

Like that's, I don't know if she was being sarcastic with her curtsy and stuff and passive aggressive, but I don't know, it's just, I find that humorous. And of course, the amazing thing that you see there which we also talked about in our episode discussing why civil resistance works, is that that whole paragraph, that whole quote was about women, right? Women, various women groups and children, a child who's participating in the act. And that's one of the beautiful things about non violence is that everybody gets on board or can get on board. We'll definitely come back to that, but let's get back to the mainstream here and discuss the Tea Act of 1773.

Now the Tea Act of 1773 basically gave the East India Company a monopoly on tea. And this is the act that led to the Boston Tea Party and subsequent subsequently, the Coercive Acts. The the colonist response was to go back to their economic boycotts of goods, and their backup plan which was the nuclear option was again to refuse to export goods like lumber, tobacco and other raw materials. They also ostracized anyone caught not enforcing the measures that whatever measures they were using at the moment, they would ostracize them. So if you're not supposed to buy British goods and you're walking around in British made clothing, we might not talk to you or do business with you or something like that.

So we're talking major, major non cooperation here. If you go back to, I forget the name of the town, but that one town where they had 500 participants out of a town of 800 to a thousand, you're talking about 50 to 60%, maybe even more some places, probably less some places. You're talking about a good 50% of people who are pro, not revolution at this point, but anti legislation, right? They don't want their rights infringed upon in comparison to how their lives have been up to this point. But there's also another important aspect that came out of this and that was the creation of, maybe not legislative bodies but political bodies of groups that would start to make decisions.

You know, get a continental congress and other sorts of things when we're talking about the revolution but these assemblies, these bodies actually, some of them were formed during this time period when you have these laws going on and people are trying to figure out how do we fight against these in unity, how do we come together against these, you know, and get them repealed? Because they're not thinking revolution initially, they're just like, how do we get rid of these laws? And so they form groups to kind of make decisions together. So here's a quote from this section of the book. Quote, Colonial non cooperation throughout the resistance to the Coercive Acts was not limited to a refusal to buy British goods, but extended to all royal laws.

Courts were closed, taxes refused, governors openly defied. Throughout the colonies, extra legal provincial congresses were convened in 1774 and early seventeen seventy five to oversee enforcement of the Continental Association. These illegal assemblies at the local county and provincial levels often assumed legislative and judicial functions in executing the wishes of the Continental Congress. As the conservative, Rivington's New York Gazetteer wrote in February 1775, the association took government out of the hands of the governor, council, and general assembly, and the execution of laws out of the hands of the civil magistrates and juries. End quote.

So the colonists essentially said, If you're going to give us these laws and taxes that we don't like, we're just going to make up our own functional government and just bypass what you're going to do for us. We're going to rule ourselves. You can go on saying things and doing what you do, but we're going live how we want to anyway. Now that's just scratching the surface of the the non violence that went on in in the colonies. And I'm sure you can find examples where where violence did occur, and sometimes people bring up like the tarring and feathering of of certain officials, but from my understanding, there were actually very few documented cases of that, and in quite a number of those cases, it you can link those to more personal grudges and they just use this other excuse as an outlet to be able to do what they wanted to do anyway.

So nonviolence was really at the heart of this, of the methodology. Now of course, I'm not saying that the colonists were using non violence because they were dedicated to not killing people. There's probably a lot of self interest there, like if you kill a British soldier, then that's going to escalate things and at the moment, you're in the system, you might as well just get along with the system if you can and if you can have British protection of soldiers and the good things that the British give you and just not pay the taxes, it's easier to not rock the boat too much. So I'm not at all saying that they were committed to nonviolent actions. What I am saying is that they used nonviolent action whether they knew it or not.

So with that in mind, let's go ahead and look at how violence changed the landscape here. When violence began to be used, it escalated tensions very, very rapidly and a number of negative consequences ensued. First of all, there was a loss of life of course, which prior to this point, and again, maybe you can find one or two instances, but prior to this point, people weren't going around and killing each other. And so there wasn't a loss of life. The second consequence is that it really burned some bridges to be able to resolve this issue in a different manner.

And what that means is that third party persuasion stopped being influential. No longer was there really economic pressure that the colonies could place on Britain because they had escalated it to the point where it's like, well, at this point, economics isn't that much of a concern. Our concern is to repress this rebellion because until we repress the rebellion, you're not going to be able to be productive for us anyway. So, you know, here we come. And that takes an option off of the table for resolution.

No longer can you work out an economic resolution, now it's gonna be whoever can beat each other up until the one side has more losses than they can take. Not economic losses here, we're talking about life losses like how much can you take? And as a Christian, the currency of dealing with people's lives as opposed to money is, I mean, that's a significant cost difference. One's invaluable, the other one is valuable to a limited extent. And I understand that we could talk about needing money to live and that kind of stuff but we're not talking about complete sanctions that cut anybody off from life at this point.

And at this point, I want to read another quote from the article because I think one of the things that even the nonviolent position has difficulty doing is defining exactly what violence means and what violence looks like. So I want to read this quote and then talk a little bit about that here and the difference between violence and maybe economic persuasion. Quote, the Boston Tea Party did not endanger physical safety. However, its destruction of property may have been counterproductive. If some people found it symbolically or emotionally satisfying, without doubt it infuriated the British government which introduced the Coercive Acts.

Tarring and feathering of opponents is often cited as an example of colonial use of violence against persons. Yet fewer than a dozen cases of this actually occurred between 1765 and April 1775, usually involving customs informers and being seen as a private as private grudges rather than elements of political resistance. Okay. So here he's saying that obviously physical violence is a problem if you do it but there wasn't much done. However, we can see because if it was done, if you were executing British officials, right, that's gonna bring down a hammer on you.

But we see that the Boston Tea Party brought down the British hammer too. And one of the questions is, okay, is was the Tea Party violence? Because you're not doing violence to a person but you're doing violence to an extension of a person, you're doing violence to their property. And we see this question today with protests, right, and riots. So if you have a riot that is burning down property, we do in a sense, whether that's right or wrong, we can discuss that but we do in a sense view that a damage to property is damage to a person.

Now it's not damage enough to warrant me, I don't think, it's damage enough to warrant me killing somebody who's, you know, hammering the windows of my house. There is something about it that seems violent, and it seems very different, intuitively at least. It seems different than, let's say, refusing to export goods. So both things, destroying somebody's property, the colonist destroying the tea, and the colonist refusing to export goods, both might have the same results on Great Britain. They might cause them economic hardship.

But the one intuitively seems like violence where the other one doesn't because the negotiating exports and imports, that has to do with two people's wills and one person just says, No, I'm not going to sell you things. And that seems different than actually going and physically destroying somebody's property. So we could quibble about what is determined violence here, but regardless, what we do see is that with the tea party, if you want to consider that the first violent act, soft violence, then after that, things escalated very rapidly. Right up to this point, there's a lot of symbolism, there's a lot of interaction of two wills, choose to sell you things or I choose not to, I choose to buy some things, I choose not to. But when we started destroying property and doing harm, that escalated things which then we get the Coercive Acts and that escalates things to when the British tried to take this garrison and confiscate weapons, then you get this clash between the British and the colonists, and at that point, physical harm, physical violence is done and it's, you know, the rest is history as they say.

So, violence escalated tensions rapidly. We had a loss of life, there was third party persuasion as a means kind of went out the window and we lost options to resolve conflict. The next thing that you're going to see is that women and other participants that are usually relegated to the background in society had flourished under non violence. I mean, you had lots and lots of women's groups that were doing something of substance during non violence. And what you see is that children and women, especially women, female children, they lose a lot of opportunity to be able to be in the foreground of a movement.

And women who might have a lot of power over the purchases that a house makes or who can spin clothes to boycott the British, they have a lot of power in a nonviolent movement and they're kind of heroes alongside of the men. Children can be heroes alongside of the adults. But when things move to violence, you know, who are the heroes of revolutionary America? Pretty much all men. Betsy Ross, she made a flag, right?

I don't think I can name any other women. I'm sure somebody who knows history better than I do could, but it's all men at that point. And there are lots of individuals who are highlighted. Whereas prior to the revolution, I'm sure that there were individuals who were very prominent and influential, but there's not a lot of like naming going on. It's a lot of groups like, well, women, this society did things.

There's like everything riding on the backs of one person, it's a lot of people working together to accomplish something. When you get violence, just like we saw in our episode Why Civil Resistance Works, when you get violence, you push people who are on the fringes of society in terms of being useful during violence, you push them to the background and you get these, you just get a bunch of men that come forward and a small group of men within a certain age range. And a lot of times with economic characteristics, you know, people of prominence. And finally, you what you see is after violence starts, that the colonies end up being polarized and a lot of people are pushed out of the movement. It really wasn't a unifying force.

It's not like the colonists were kind of independent or like doing things on their own up to this point and then they decided to come and band together and finally do something as a cohesive group. Now what happened was there was a pretty large group, we said probably over 50% participation judging by the information we had, and what ends up happening is you get that participation to dwindle significantly lower once it moves to a violent movement both because the stakes are higher, now you're putting your life on the line because violence to another person, to governmental officials carries significant weight, but also because your group is smaller, so now it's easier for the government to come down on smaller units of people, and because as a woman or a child, you just really don't have nearly as much to offer in a violent fight. And so a lot of people are polarized and pushed out. And I'm sure you also have moral issues like, Well, I can't fight against my government or I can't kill people. And once you go violent, you're pushing a lot of people out of the movement.

Let me read you another couple quotes from, from this book. Opponents of the colonial cause were treated differently. During the previous decade, colonists who disagreed with civil resistance were boycotted. While some were threatened, few were actually attacked. After the battles of Lexington and Concord, fear of Loyalist opposition grew and some committees proposed violence against Loyalists to intimidate them into submission.

Also worthy of consideration are the effects of strategy shift on mobilization of the people. By its very nature, civil resistance aims to enlist the participation of a large proportion of the population, people willing to act nonviolent resistance in The Americas even under the threat of repression. As already noted, the participation included men, women, and even children. Here's another quote as to the participation. Once the war began, Robert Calhoun observes approximately 50% of the colonists of European ancestry including the loyalist contingent tried to avoid any involvement in the conflict or supported the British.

Perhaps only 40% to 45% of the white populace actively supported the Patriot cause. Beyond that, while critics of civil resistance claimed that some merchants did not observe the non importation agreements, Don Higginbotham's estimate of the desertion rate from the Continental Army at 20% suggests that armed resistance was more polarizing and weakened American social unity. Consequently, despite the nostalgic rhetoric about the Minutemen and the Continental Army, surprisingly large numbers avoided and opposed participation or deserted once the strategy shifted to military struggle. End quote. Alright, let me give you one more quote that kind of summarizes things up to this point, when we went from de facto independence to war.

Here's a quote. Quote, perhaps US citizens and others looking back at their national origin should ponder this alternative to the familiar narrative of military struggle. The result of the decade of American non violent resistance between 1765 and 1775 was de facto independence. Allegiances had shifted and the functions of government passed from royal to colonial institutions, and all this before the battles of Lexington and Concord. Indeed, regarding the development of political and social institutions, one could even claim that the war achieved little that had not already been gained by the parallel governments.

These campaigns of civil resistance spanning ten years displayed impressive self discipline, used largely improvised strategies until the very end, and achieved serious gains. They cultivated third party support in Britain as well as neutralized domestic opponents without shedding blood. Their broadly democratic nature was matched by new extra legal political institutions that wrested control out of the hands of British authorities. Making legislative policy, enforcing judicial decisions, even collecting taxes in some cases was carried out by colonists on their own and outside the imperial orbit. Beyond that, although the campaigns were largely improvised, the colonists showed in the implementation of non importation and non exportation as part of the continental association, a conscious level of strategic planning.

In hindsight, perhaps they were mistaken to delay the implementation of non exportation. Nevertheless, the very fact of deliberate strategic decision making is significant. Finally, the tactics of the resistance campaign and the enforcement of their policies were carried out nonviolently, not as a matter of principled opposition to violence, but rather as a pragmatic response to the need to resist perceived injustice. That the participants in these successful non violent campaigns had so little prior training that their leaders knew little of strategic precedence, and that their applications of non violent struggle were so often improvised make their accomplishments all the more remarkable. End quote.

I think that's a pretty good summary and it also highlights an aspect which is important to understand about non violence. Hardly anyone who ever uses non violence is trained in non violence. You know, very recently, non violence was a spontaneous act a lot of times. Or maybe the act was planned but nobody really understood anything about the philosophy behind it and how it works. And of course, the colonists were no different.

They didn't have an education in nonviolence strategy and how nonviolence places pressure on people. They just didn't know how that worked. Maybe they did some of them intuitively, you know, if you hurt somebody's purse strings that's gonna influence them in a particular way. But how to go about those actions and why not to implement violence and all that stuff, they just didn't know that it's only in the last fifty to one hundred years that such studies and strategies have really been done. And even still, very few people are trained in nonviolent strategies.

So it's always important to highlight that when we see nonviolence in action, we always have to remember that these are like untrained people. It would be almost like, no, it the Zulus? I forget, like you had the Zulus, they had like spears and wooden shields and stuff, and I think the British fought them at one point. And it would be like if the Zulus defeated the British with the Zulu wooden spears and shields and the British had machine guns. Like, of course the British won.

They were better equipped, they had far more resources and they were trained for years. They had a professional army, of course they're gonna win, right? When you see non violence as being successful, I mean even still because nobody's trained for it, but especially prior to Gandhi, nobody knows really the strategies that they're doing. Nobody prepares for it. And so you think, what might non violent action look like if we spent the amount of money and training on it as we do with our military?

Take the military budget, take the personnel, the amount of personnel, take the time trained, and put that towards non violence and training us for non violence. There's nothing even close to equivalent in any history, but even in modern history. So the fact that the colonists gained de facto independence without ever firing a shot is insane. And the fact that violence actually, possibly, probably ended up being worse for them, for unity and everything is interesting. Now you might say, What do you mean it was worse for them?

Because we have our independence today and if if we didn't, we'd still be under British rule. Well, you know, today we we pay what, like 30 percent in taxes or something? And the colonists were paying half of what the Brits were paying? So, I mean, we're we're under a centralized government's thumb as we speak. I don't know that it would it would be that much different if it was under under British rule.

But regardless, I assume that had the colonists continued to do what they're doing, either Britain would have gave them their de jure independence, or they would have made a lot of concessions to the states and the states would have remained, the colonies would have remained under British rule. But what I want to do at this point is I want to delve into the hypothetical realm. People always bring up hypothetical situations against pacifists and you know, like, Well, what would you do if a deranged serial killer came into your home and wanted to sodomize and slaughter your family? And it's like, Well, how often does that happen? It could, so it's a fair question, but how often does that happen?

So it's a hypothetical. So I want to provide a hypothetical here. And I think it's a reasonable hypothetical given the history that we know. Knowing that the colonists' non violent actions were working and knowing what we know about war, I think the hypotheticals that I'm gonna put forward are legitimate. I think that they're very reasonable and possible.

All right, so let's start with hypothetical one. I think there would have been less death than through violent means, right? If we would have remained non violent, we probably wouldn't have killed a bunch of British and the British killed a bunch of colonists. So, a lot more people alive than dying during war. That's an easy one, think you can give me that for sure.

Okay, hypothetical number two. Slavery may have ended sooner and without bloodshed and creating some of the rifts that it has created in our society which we see come to the surface in the last couple years. If you look at so you might say, Well, no, because then the British would have had slave interests in the South here, and so it would have actually extended slavery because they wouldn't have ended slavery as soon as Britain did. But the beginning of the end of slavery in England began in 1772, several years prior to the American Revolution. And though the road was a long one, slavery did eventually end in England and I know it phased out in some places, so perhaps it would have phased out in The Americas like it did in I think India or with the East India Company.

But slavery was ended in England without bloodshed before it was ended in The States with bloodshed and that's only if you consider consider slavery ended in 1865. But if you know anything about sharecropping and how that worked and the Great Migration, how people even in 1950s had to fear for their lives if they were gonna take their family up north, which was a very common experience, it's not like that's a one off story. I would consider slavery as only ending technically with, you know, with the end of sharecropping as it as it stood in the South. So probably probably 1965 is when slavery really ended. So of course, this is a hypothetical and we don't know what would have happened, but knowing what we know about England having interests in slavery elsewhere in the world, yet still phasing it out over time, and it ending without bloodshed prior to 1865, I would guess that slavery would have phased out in The US before 1865 since it was already on that trajectory prior to the revolution.

And maybe even, I don't know, but maybe even that had some influence on the revolution. I don't know how connected that is, but it would be interesting to explore. Because slavery was certainly a big part of the constitution. So yeah, it wouldn't surprise me if slavery was an influencing factor in the revolution. But regardless, right, we might have a past if we would have stuck non violently and remained basically with Britain or connected to it in some ways.

We might have a past that not only freed slaves sooner, but a past which didn't divide the states and cost seven hundred and fifty thousand casualties with two thousand deaths. That's a lot of loss of soldiers' lives, soldiers' arms, legs as well, sanity. But it's also a lot of years that we continue to enslave people and break up families. That's it's just devastating. It's probably the biggest scar we have or maybe not a scar, open gaping wounds that we have on the society of The United States right now.

And that might be different. Hypothetically, it seems like it would be different, I don't know how different, but it would be different had we remained non violent. Number three, hypothetical number three, our legacy with the Native Americans might be much better today. While a lot was done to the Native Americans by settlers, the British had stopped westward expansion prior to the revolution. Now who knows if they would have eventually reopened this, of course this is a hypothetical, but assuming that they were sticking to their word at the moment, and assuming that they continued to stick to their word, we might not have went and tried to conquer the West.

Maybe somebody else would have, maybe their relationships and their guilt would be different than ours is. But we would not have that huge blight on our nation, on our consciences, possibly had the British, had we maintained our connection with them because they had stopped westward expansion. In fact, it's because Washington and others who, you know, at that time you get ahead by owning land and accruing land, Washington owned a bunch of land on the other side of what the British deemed the border that you can no longer cross. So Washington losing his land was influential in him as well as other people wanting to throw off the yoke of the British. So the yoke of the British to some people, at least to a certain extent, was not being able to go and conquer land from the natives.

So imagine what a world would look like, could look like, if westward expansion had been enacted by the British and we had adhered to it? Would we be guilty of the same level genocide and atrocity that we are as a nation and that we deal with, with Native Americans and the statistically different lives that they have and the things that they're prone to because of the past, because of what we did to their ancestors and their communities. Today, there might be a thriving Native American society or who knows if there might actually be Native Americans who don't live on reservations and we're thriving in our society today as more larger communities that are of their own making as opposed to having these blights of reservations that we kind of create for them. There are a number of, for the next point, there are another of other peripheral sorts of things which might be different, hypothetically. For instance, if we didn't have westward expansion, not only would our relationship with the Native Americans be different, but it might be with Mexico as well.

We wouldn't have fought a war with them over territory, there are more deaths that aren't on our conscience. And that would probably have led to a different relationship, but definitely less war deaths. You can extrapolate our history from 1776 to the present and figure out all the places that things might be different, right? Another obvious one would be like the War of eighteen twelve with Great Britain. So lots and lots of places that things might be different there.

Let's get on to the final point, and I'm sure you could come up with a lot of other hypotheticals, but this is the final one. The gun culture in The United States might be different today. So I don't know exactly what creates gun culture today. It might be our ethos of being a nation born out of the use of weapons, right? This glorification of violent history.

Or it could be that we were a frontier nation that used guns a lot and it just became a part of our life. However, with the Second Amendment and gun idolization, we'd likely look a lot more like Great Britain today if we didn't have that. That would mean far fewer deaths over time due to suicide, accident, and murder as guns make those things much easier. So if you include war deaths, gun deaths, slave deaths, and Native American deaths, which resulted from our violent rebellion, it's possible that we're looking at tens of millions of straight up deaths which resulted from the revolution down through history. And that's not even considering the quality of life issues that might be different today when considering things like our race relations.

And on top of all of that, we'd likely be an independent democracy just like Canada is, a former British territory. We were already heading that way non violently, and I think that hypothetical is pretty reasonable. Well, that was a lot of information today. I challenge you to read the article linked in the show notes, as well as maybe following up with some of the other resources. There is a lot more to American history than just the violent bits.

We discussed at the beginning of the season how the non violent aspect of history is often overlooked as historians write about the exciting parts. I hope you enjoyed this episode and I hope that you'll do some more digging on this because it's a topic largely left undiscussed in the mainstream. That's all for now. So peace and because I'm a pacifist, when I say it, I mean it.