Was the Revolutionary War More a Revolutionary or Civil War - Essay Example

The Revolutionary War was a result of the British colonies in America banding together and revolt against a tyrannical government.  Though about half of the colonial population remained loyal to the British, the conservatives of their time and the country were divided with regards to how the new country might be structured, a civil war between the colonists never broke out.

  The divide actually helped create then form the new nation.  The British had to placate the Loyalists, the conservatives of their time, by not using brutal or intimidating tactics against the revolutionaries, the liberals of their time, whose ideological divide was bridged by compromising, which ultimately improved the content of the Constitution.  A civil war would have doomed the Revolution, a war that started predominantly because of financial reasons.  Britain had ruled over the thirteen colonies in America for more than 200 years prior to the Revolution.

  The colonists had no industry, as mandated by British law, so to create wealth.  Farmers were forced to sell crops such as tobacco and corn exclusively to the British government at less than wholesale rates.  The ‘Mother Country’ in turn made huge profits by reselling these products.  This loss of revenue began in earnest the widespread grumblings demanding freedom from Britain.  By the beginning of the Revolution, the wars against France fought on both sides of the Atlantic had burdened Britain with the massive national debt.

 To ease the national debt, Parliament imposed taxes on the colonists believing it only fair that they bear part of the expenses incurred by the British military in protecting them from Indian attacks and French invasions.  The Stamp Act taxed paper goods sent to the colonies.  It was the first of these laws while, with the tea tax, was one of the most infamous.  The colonists thought taxation without representation in the British government to be unjust and openly protested these laws which led to hostilities between British troops and the Massachusetts Minutemen in 1775.