AHC/WI: Ultra-Bloody ARW

In stark contrast to the French Revolution, the American Revolution was quite organized and there was not much bloodshed between rebels. Rather they focused their attention on battling Britain. My challenge to you is to make a bloody and chaotic American Revolution more like the French one.
 
Washington marches against the government.it fails and turns into a civil war .britian jumps back in to retake their former colonies or puppet them. France joins against britian
 

TinyTartar

Banned
The fact that the Revolution was so decentralized has a huge impact on this. Without anyone really trying to assert more authority than they should have, the kinds of power that could allow for that kind of action to make the Revolution that bloody could not happen. The only one who could have wielded centralized American power would have been Washington, and even for him, there were limits to his influence.

You'd also need for a truly bloody revolution to occur for it to be more than what it was, a political revolution in the context of anti-colonial struggle. It would have needed to be a social revolution, like in France, and American society was not nearly as divided as French society was. In the South, you had slaves, sure, but slavery was never a huge thing at this point in time (at least in the US; the West Indies are different) due to its lack of true profitability. Slavery never really offered the kinds of conditions, at least at this point in time, for a social revolution to come along with the political, mostly because many slaveholders who themselves were ambiguous about the institution joined the political revolution. As for the North, the Tory Colonial Administrators were indeed targets of social frustration, but a mostly agrarian society with an urban artisan class and mercantile class that did not lend itself to true class power flexing did not allow for a social revolution either. The American concept of personal property and landholding also did not lend itself to the kinds of struggles over land and the means of production and power that France did.

Basically, the American Revolution was too spread out and willfully weak, partially for reasons of self preservation of a contentious union, to allow that kind of bloodshed to occur.
 

TinyTartar

Banned
One of the reasons the French Revolution was so bloody was because it was a people's revolution against the rich. Meanwhile the American Revolution was't so much a revolution as it was a War of Independence led by the American rich.

The French Revolution was a bit more complicated than that, being more of a struggle by the middle classes to obtain denied political power as well as a struggle to eliminate the last vestiges of feudalism. The bloodiness came from the dense population of France as well as from the fact that it turned into an existential war of survival in which common decency and justice went out the window.

The American Revolution was in a less densely populated region, allowing for less easy bloodshed. The classification of it as a War of Independence and an Anti-Colonial and Anti-Imperialist Struggle is more accurate, seeing as it did not lead to society being all that impacted, but led to a huge shakeup in the political order of things. It was not completely led by the upper classes; it was, like the French Revolution, significantly supported by the artisan and mercantile professionals in the middle classes, and many leaders came from this group, but it also did have the support of upper class landowners and lawyers who also played leadership roles. Some social overthrow occurred in that the class of government officials and their substantial patronage networks were eliminated, but it was not enough to be a true reorder of things like in France.
 
How about retribution against Loyalists that makes the Reign of Terror look like a picnic? Under the Articles of Confederation, the national government had very little they could do if things got out of hand. New York City, immediately following the British evacuation could have been very, very messy.

...and if some warships were engaged in an effective embargo of Loyalists escaping to Nova Scotia, Britain, and the Caribbean,...
 
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