The Luddites were a major problem and source of unrest the period, and of course Ireland rebelled in 1798.
How far did the Luddites go compared to the anything but peaceful Americans?
1798 is a generation after the colonial stuff started, so I'm not sure its relevant to how things were at the time of the mid 1760s to early '70s.
1) Did they know this from the start of the protests?I'm really a bit perplexed here. The war for independence cost way more than paying the tax would have. And the colonists did turn down several peace offers which would have lowered their taxes.
Do you think they were all economically irrational?
2) They'd still be paying them at all, and by the point it got to fighting, they (meaning the Patriots, obviously) had convinced themselves (rightly or wrongly) that Britain was oppressive.
Protests that went far beyond peaceful.This is downright creepy to me. The colonists were doing what we would call appropriate in response to an unpopular bill. Lobbying, boycotts, protests.
I'm not saying the colonists were being all wrong - if it stayed at the level of lobbying, boycotting, and peaceful protesting, I'd say it was the right way to go (if unjustified). But to say that they were oppressed from the first is misleading. It took until years of radicalizing resistance has happened before we see Boston harbor closed.
That may apply to the innocent, but it doesn't apply to the guilty. Which is to say, those who should have been punished.Sure. It was a principle of English law that it's better for a guilty man to go free than for an innocent man to go to jail.
Which would mean a lot more if it wasn't for the Paul Reveres and Sam Adamses blatantly and shamelessly lying about that. Reasonable they most certainly were not.Hrm. This is another example of how the colonists were better at the PR game. John Adams defended the soldiers involved in the Boston Massacre, showing how reasonable and zealous in defense of liberty the colonists were.
And I'm ignoring it because Socrates brought up closing Boston Harbor as the main thing he's referring to as an act of grossly cruel and unusual punishment.Parliament closes a port, galvanizing all of the colonies, as punishment. So in other words, Parliament responded with a bill of attainder, which the US constitution then forbade. Heh.
You're also ignoring the Massachusetts Government Act of 1774, which disbanded the colonial legislature, and the other Coercive Acts.
If you want to talk about those, we can look at those too.
Personally, what upsets me the most is the attitude that the colonists were meek victims of cruel and arbitrary policy, which was specifically designed to oppress them with no relevance to any legitimate exercise of governmental authority.