A Question For Catholics: Was the "American Revolution" Wrong?

[starshiptrooper]

Starshiptrooper:

While I don’t fully disagree with this, I do disagree: it wasn’t quite that simple. Slavery, in the South, was almost completely married to the South’s various forms of economy. Southerners rightly believed that the outlawing of slavery would bring a rather violent end to the South’s way of life. Had the US modeled its extrication from that economic form, as Brazil did, under one of the Kings Phillip, I believe, we might not have the racial problems we currently have. I think the US’s problem was less a problem of humaneness and more a problem of political-ness.

Even here the South got it wrong. The Republicans only wanted to prevent slavery in the new territories, they felt that the Constitution did not give the central government to power to outlaw slavery.

The genteel life of the land-endowed, of the South, was not well liked by the not similarly endowed Northerner. The racial inequality/inhumanity argument was a straw-man: at that time. Such an argument would not be a straw-man now.

Interestingly, there were slaves kept in areas of the North as well; except, the enslaved were white. Take a tour through Carbon County Pennsylvania. From what I saw, it would appear that those enslaved whites were perhaps much more mal-treated than the enslaved blacks in the South.

So, the miners and the slaves were worked hard, but that is where the similarity ends. Those miners could vote, unionize, and quit their jobs. When you can find an example of a cotton planation voluntarily worked on by unionized slaves who could vote, I will concede that the Northern worker’s lot was comparable to that of the slaves.

Again, I argue NOT for slavery, but, for the lost potentiality of undoing that wrong while maintaining the economic systems of large areas of the US.

That was the fault of the paranoid South. Again, the Republicans who were the only party not pro-choice on the issue of slavery, only wanted to phase slavery out, not eliminate it in one fell swoop!

Had the American Revolution been fought solely for the purposes of Freedom, then the AR would have been a moral duty for the Catholic; although there probably were some Catholic citizens and statesmen who embraced that view.

It seems like you don’t believe that the AR was fought over freedom. What was the war fought over then in your opinion?

 

[jfoges]

The American Revolution was wrong because the King and Parliament was the government of the Colonists. They had a legal obligation to pay whatever taxes were imposed on them. They had no right to try and break off from Britain just because they thought taxes were unfair. Today Americans pay a lot of taxes. Can a state break off from the United States because it doesn’t like paying taxes? How about California? After all it is 3,000 miles from Washington, DC, just as Boston was 3,000 miles from London.