IT was not so very long ago that all
Americans were taught that the Amer-
ican Revolution came about solely and
simply because all colonists hated tyr-
anny and loved freedom; because all
colonists resented the denial by a for-
eign government of their right to share
in governing themselves; and because all
colonists, therefore, rising in heroic re-
sistance to the government which op-
pressed them, determined to make of
America an independent nation, founded
on the principles of political liberty and
equality. The persistence of such a sim-
ple and clear-cut picture of the revolu-
tionary struggle is reflected in the widely-
held belief that the chief point at issue
between colonies and mother country
was the rightness or wrongness of the
principle, "taxation without representa-
tion is tyranny."

The labors of historians of the past two
generations, however, have made it im-
possible to believe quite so surely that
the Revolution was no more and no less
than a conflict produced by verbal dis-
agreements between a people united in
the cause of freedom and a regime which
refused to accept freedom as the neces-
sary basis of all governments. The re-
appraisal of the colonial and revolution-
ary era, begun by such scholars as
Charles M. Andrews, George Louis Beer,
Herbert Levi Osgood, and others has
made it dear that, to see selfless devo-
tion of the patriots to political ideals as
the sole cause of the Revolution might
well be a national tradition, but it is
hardly sound history. Significant facts
which today seem obvious -- for exam-
ple, the extreme tardiness of the patriot
leaders in formulating the demand for
independence, or the apparent lack of
unanimity among the colonists concern-
ing what they wanted, why they wanted
it, and how they proposed to get it --
were long overlooked by the traditional
explanations of why the revolutionists
fought. Beginning in the 1890's, his-
torians directed their attentions more
closely to the revolutionary use of the
political ideals of freedom and equality,
of independence and self-government;
they patiently considered the influence
of such factors as economic interests,
the accidental conjunctures of men and
events, and the personal ambitions and
prejudices of revolutionary leaders or
members of Parliament; and they sought
to discover all the possible logical con-
nections between one step in the con-
flict and the next. As a result, there is
today general agreement among histo-
rians that to understand why the Revolu-
tion was fought, one must do more than
accept at face value the familiar political
slogans and catch-words, that he must
consider the actions and the motives of
diverse individuals, groups, sections, and
classes, and must be aware of the rela-
tion of the British-American conflict to
British imperial problems and to larger
problems of world affairs. There is no
longer doubt that the causes of the

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