By Tom H. Hastings
As someone who studies and tries to practice nonviolence, it is frankly tiresome to hear the endless refrains of triumphalism when honoring the American Revolution as a violent chapter in human history.
John Adams was there. His conclusion, as a participant and eyewitness, was that the period of at least a decade leading up to the start of rifle-fire was the real revolution.
“An History of Military operations from April 19, 1775 to the 3rd of September, 1783 is not an History of the American Revolution,” he wrote in 1815.
He went on to note, “The Revolution was in the Minds and Hearts of the People, and in the Union of the Colonies, both of which were Substantially effected before Hostilities commenced.”
In short, the actual American Revolution was nonviolent for the most part, with the exception of some incidents of hanging effigies of tax collectors acting on behalf of the British crown.
Historian Walter Conser Jr. authored a thorough historical account in a chapter of Recovering Nonviolent History, published by Lynne Rienner in 2013. Conser focused on the 1765-1775 decade and included a matrix of actions in three distinct campaigns that led from the campaign against the Stamp Act, another against the Townshend Acts, and finally against the Coercive Acts.
Tactics were innovative and wide-ranging from boycotts, to tax resistance/refusal, increasing nonimportation of British goods, accelerating refusal to obey English law, and finally entire colonies creating their own self-governing institutions. American colonial women—more than a century before Gandhi emulated them in India—were spinning homespun cloth to help the boycott of British cloth and clothing.
There was no philosophical commitment to nonviolence, but it was obvious to all that the risks vs rewards were clearly better with nonviolence. But, as so many other long nonviolent campaigns have experienced, frustration can build and precipitate the beginnings of violence and even, as in our Revolution, actual warfare.
Yes, those who picked up the gun to fight the British were brave and heroic. Still, in retrospect, one wonders if the ultimate cost/benefit analysis would favor carrying on with increasingly creative and coercive nonviolent actions until the English would no longer see the advantage in ruling the colonies. The 25,534 who died in that war might have agreed.
Conser and others concluded that, in effect if not recognized by the British king, 12 of the original 13 colonies were free and functionally independent before the first shots were fired. That seems to argue that continuing to build nonviolent pressure while solidifying a denial of economic benefit to the crown might have even gotten American liberation faster, before 1783. After all, there is nothing like being shot at to stiffen resolve and cohesion of the enemy, and that may have been the case for British troops and their officers.
Historical data, accounts, and facts are important. Channeling the past successful tactics and strategies of nonviolent actors and organizations might prevent outbreaks of violence in this day and in the future. Valorizing and even fetishizing the violence can create false myths that lead to further harm, even existential threat.
Dr. Tom H. Hastings is Coördinator of Conflict Resolution BA/BS degree programs at Portland State University. His views, however, are not those of any institution.
