Why is the dominant presumption that Founding Fathers would hang in British ARW win?

Wasn't hanging usual punishment about rebelling on 18th century? Brits even hanged Irish rebels after Easter Rising and it happened over 130 years after ARW.

Just to note, the British did not hang rebels in the aftermath of the Easter Rising. Rebels were tried by field general courts-martial for violating the 1914 Defense of the Realm Act, and fifteen of them, in the American parlance, were ''shot to death with musketry''. In 1920-1921, ten Irish rebels WERE hanged, for offenses under the Restoration of Order in Ireland Act. Another fourteen were shot in the same period by the British under martial law regulations for which the legal sanction thereof might best be described as ''problematical''.

Not that the unpleasantness in Ireland ended the British practice of executing rebels, of course. 140 rebels were hanged by the British colonial authorities in Malaya in the course of the Emergency, over a thousand African insurgents were hanged during the Mau Mau Uprising, and about 40 other executions occurring in scattered locations. The last of these took place in Cyprus in 1957.
 
I suppose it depends on when the defeat happens, but my recollection was that General Howe, at least, was closely associated with anti-war Whigs. It strikes me that, whatever King George and North and Germain might want, it's quite likely that the men on the spot would politely allow most of the ringleaders to escape to Spanish territory rather than actually execute them.

This is not terribly unusual - of course there would probably be some hangings, but most defeated rebellions of this sort in the eighteenth century saw far more of the top leaders going into exile than actually executed.
 
There's also a difference between killing someone in a messy way and mutilating their body after they were dead. Otherwise I doubt any Hindus would have joined the army in the first place, seeing as how getting blown up is kind of an occupational hazard there...

Also, the Indian Mutiny had been a far more brutal conflict than the American Revolution. (There was no American equivalent of the Cawnpore Massacre, for example.) So even if the British government had been inclined to execute the rebel leaders, there wouldn't have been the sort of thirst for vengeance seen in the Mutiny.

Unfortunately for Britons everywhere, and for historical knowledge in the minds of the ignorant John Q. Public-Dumbass, there are plenty of people who believe the lies:(:mad: told by that &@*#) Mel Gibson in his crime-against-history American Exceptionalist crap of a movie "The Patriot". That bastard Gibson had British Regulars enthusiastically (and American Tory Militia LESS enthusiastically (1)) committing atrocities worthy of the Waffen SS in WWII, but never committed by the armies of British Regulars or their American Tory allies fighting under the Union Jack.:mad::cool:

1) Ironically, while the film depicted the Tories more sympathetically compared to British Regulars, it was in fact the Tories who were the more brutal, and just as brutal as the Rebel Militia when it came to fighting each other. But in yet another piece of Gibson bullshit, he had these "SS crimes against humanity" being committed by British troops when in fact NEITHER side at any level committed the atrocities depicted against civilians like the aged, women, children, and the clergy!

There was butchery enough committed between militias, as I said, but both the American Continentals and ALL British forces when fighting each other kept to the proper rules of warfare.:)
 
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