Back to the topic at hand, do you think the Era of God Feelings would be a plausible time for amnesia about loyalism to set in?
How Long Did it Take For Awareness of Loyalism in America to Fade?
- Thread starter frustrated progressive
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I wouldn't say it was explicitly designed to be undemocratic. The sole function of the electoral college is to add an insulatory layer from democracy. That is not the case with MPs.
There is also the case that MPs can later withdraw their support from the PM due to ongoing democratic pressure. Electors vote is a one off that cements their decision for four years, and their position isn't their main job so they don't worry much about not getting in again.
Pretty much dead well before then. Any remaining Tories would long ago have joined the Federalist Party, and lost any separate identity. By 1820 even that was gone.
Ironically, quite a few Americans from New England and NY settled (temporarily or permanently) in Upper Canada. To get land there, many quite cheerfully claimed to have been Loyalists, whether they ever really were or not.
I read once that when the American Revolution began, the population was like 1/3 Patriot, 1/3 Loyalist and 1/3 undecided. I'm sure the breakdown was very different from that by the end of the war though.
I imagine it was like a lot of national liberation-type situations, where at first the odds of victory seem long, so a lot of people are hesitant or even dismissive of the cause, but then as the war goes on victory seems more and more possible and by the end, almost everyone is claiming to be on the side of the "good guys".
We know the really hard-core Loyalists were driven into exile but I'm guessing a lot of other people, late converts to the cause, just kept quiet about the war afterwards.
I imagine it was like a lot of national liberation-type situations, where at first the odds of victory seem long, so a lot of people are hesitant or even dismissive of the cause, but then as the war goes on victory seems more and more possible and by the end, almost everyone is claiming to be on the side of the "good guys".
We know the really hard-core Loyalists were driven into exile but I'm guessing a lot of other people, late converts to the cause, just kept quiet about the war afterwards.
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That's from a quote by John Adams. Let's just say it wasn't very accurate and leave it at that.
Which basically happens any time you back the wrong side in the war.
I have read before that it was likely 40% patriot, 40% on the fence and 20% loyalist at the beginning of the war. Of course this varied substantially, with places like NYC being loyalist cities and the Irish frontier much more rebel. It was likely much more patriot at the end (due to the Brits often selling the loyalists down the river in the south) and much more loyalist prior to the intolerable acts.
Incidentally, Istr that the figures attributed to John Adams referred to support for the Declaration of Independence, rather than support for the war, which had been going on for a year before the DoI.
ManintheField
Banned
You're off by practically a century. The US had universal white manhood suffrage by 1843 (when the last hold-out by a very wide margin, Rhode Island, adopted a tax-payer suffrage law, with the 'tax' in question being a $1 poll tax) and had enjoyed that status for decades on most other states. The UK didn't achieve that until 1918.
The UK has the US beat when it comes to real universal suffrage in practice (as far as I know, the UK never had anything like Jim Crow laws limited the ability of racial or ethnic minorities to vote), but that wouldn't be the kind of universal suffrage the white men fighting the Revolution would have cared about, anyway.
Going from 'no representation' (which is what they had in Parliament, for the most part) to 'some representation, with a few of them indirectly elected' is a pretty massive difference. Especially because you entirely ignore the important role played by the state governments, which began a race in 1776 to full manhood suffrage that quickly blew past even the radicalism of some of the colonial assemblies.
This kind of statement is an embarrassment on a forum ostensibly dedicated to historical knowledge. You should know better than to say crap like this.
ManintheField
Banned
And this!
Holy crap this!
Even today the Federal government has essentially no role in funding criminal courts. Where do people get this crap?
What of there was a Loyalist Party or a Party that supported Dome dort of Commonwealth ? Also, were there OTL any people in British Oregon having a problem being part of the Union ?
Your "race to manhood suffrage" leaves out women and non-white people (the latter you even neglect to mention in your response to me). These people are not asterisks. They collectively constitute the majority of both Americans and the human race. Its frankly a disgrace you handwave them away from the term "democracy", which is what you were talking about. Democratic rights also extend beyond the right to vote into the full spectrum of political rights, which were in their entirety denied to the vast majority of black people in the fledgling United States. In classifying how democratic a place is, a small minority of people getting a slight increase in representation pales in comparison to human beings being owned in a system complete bondage, filled with torture and rape, enforced by the state. Unless of course you only care about white men.
The fact you consider such beliefs an "embarrassment" says a lot about you. Your views represented here will colour my reading of all your future posts, and not for the better.
You don't need the federal government to intrude in criminal courts for illiberal attitudes among juries to abrogate individuals' democratic rights. White murderers were still getting away with lynchings in the 1950s because white juries often wouldn't convict. Incidentally, the 1950s was when the US still hadn't become properly democratic, several decades after the UK.
The UK, as with Canada, the descendant of the loyalist colonies, has also maintained its democracy. The EIU's assessment of the US has now downgraded it to a flawed democracy, given the long existing paranoid tendency in American politics has finally gotten too outrageous to ignore.
ManintheField
Banned
Or, alternatively, you're engaging in a hefty dose of presentism.
Should every movement for wider political rights prior to 1954 be considered 'non-democratic'?
I'll be honest, saying 'All white men can vote' and 'only ~5% of white men can vote' are essentially the same thing because it is not true universal suffrage is committing essentially the complement of the sin you accuse me of. These advances were important steps on the road to full, universal suffrage, regardless of race or gender.
Aaaand the political agenda rolls out.
Keep it to Chat.
ManintheField
Banned
Also, just to be clear, I was responding to that post which implied that local courts were biased and likely to find guilty parties innocent because the Federal government did not fund them, with the implicit point that it's different today because it does. A. The Federal government does not fund criminal courts today and B. That likely wouldn't make a massive difference in outcomes.
You are interpreting the past events in the times of the 13 colonies, in terms of modern day values and concepts. Slavery and other taboos you are disagreeing with were acceptable back then. It would be complete and utter ASB to give slaves and women the rights to vote in those days.
ManintheField
Banned
New Jersey did, by accident, because its election laws didn't specify male property owners of a certain value. It was gone soon.
Several states did let blacks vote, too, although the law and the practice could differ (there's a story of a black business owner bringing his white employees to vote -- and them voting the way he told them to -- in Pennsylvania, where it was technically legal for him to do so, but him not daring to vote himself because of the violence he knew would follow). This also was gone soon.
The presentism of it isn't really entirely on the moral side, it's on the definition side. The people of this period called what they had democracy, both those in favor of it and those against it. The white men speaking up and voting in this time (occasionally over the objections of local electoral law! Massachusetts was rife with men who didn't meet the property requirements showing up at elections and voting anyway) are the people who made democracy not a dirty word, like it had been in ages prior. While they were some of the people most ardently against suffrage for blacks (just as an example, the wealthy Federalists often had what we might call more enlightened views on race than the poor Democratic-Republicans, but from a perspective that wealth whitens and what matters is class, not race. Wealthy black gentlemen are just as much welcome members of the aristocracy as wealthy white gentlemen), they blazed the trial that Civil Rights activists would tread more than a century later.
Saying the democratic ferment of late 18th and 19th century America was 'essentially the same' as the wealth and class limited suffrage of the contemporary UK is an absolute crime against history and would be enough to pull someone's license if you needed to be licensed to be a historian (amateur or not). It both devalues of the struggle of regular American whites in that time period and of the British middle and working classes that spent the 19th century fighting for political equality that they only achieved in the 1920's, after the greatest battlefield blood-letting British arms had ever suffered.
It was claimed opposing the American Revolution was opposing democracy. I pointed out this demonstrably was not the case. You tried to move the goalposts by redefining the time period to include several decades after the Revolution itself, and redefining democracy to be only about white men. I showed that was incorrect. You then start arguing against strawman arguments I never put forward.
I was using objective measures to show how the US was slower to move to democracy after the supposedly democratic revolution, and how it was a more fragile democracy even when it finally got there. That's not a political agenda. That's you losing the argument.