Mom, We Didn't Really Want to Leave

glad we made up

With all the fiery rhetoric around July 4th, have you ever taken time to ponder a bit our first national flag?

Since it was first raised by John Paul Jones on the USS Alfred at the end of 1775, through June of 1777, the Grand Union Flag was our flag.

That is not a flag of a group of revolutionaries that despised the United Kingdom.

Though the language of July 4th 1776 had a bit of the “burn the ships” feel to it with Thomas Jefferson’s prose, the people of the 13 Colonies were still a 33/33/33 group of people.

Especially in the Southern colonies, many wanted nothing to do with the revolution and a large part of the British forces fighting in North America were loyal militia (a large portion of which became “Canadians”).

There was still time at the start of the fighting for a political compromise - but a lot of that goodwill was burned through the decade prior and would not have been easy - but not impossible.

British North America would probably still been “a thing” from coast to coast - maybe. What would have come of French Louisiana? Hard to know. Would there have been a French Revolution and Napoleon without the American Revolution? No. Would what is now the balance of the American West remained part of some post-colonial Spanish speaking entity? Maybe.

What is clear is that were it not for the inability of politicians in London to see what was coming in their richest colony and made steps to compromise … we’d all be at work today.

Wars, civil wars, revolutions - all the death and destruction (and to be fair, creation too) that come from them are rarely inevitable. Sometimes they come from ambition, but more often than not they come from the human failures of pride, greed, and self interest.

America … not a bad lemonade in the end.