[deleted] t1_iznvcuy wrote on December 10, 2022 at 2:46 PM

How true is the below answer? (seen on Quora)

How did George III react to news of America declaring independence?

"The Colonies declaring independence was not a big deal, they weren't profitable anyway.

What angered him was the personal attack on him in the Declaration of Independence. Without it, the British wouldn’t have given a flying f***.

But insulting a King’s Honour was something that could not go unpunished."

Elmcroft1096 t1_izpi3dc wrote on December 10, 2022 at 9:37 PM

Oh so much to unpack! So George III was a complex character in history and it's easy to paint a person as good vs bad, tyrant vs benevolent and so on. Now, there are a handful of people throughout history that are easily painted by their character and actions but Mad King George isn't one of them. George was firstly deeply saddened by the loss of the North American colonies and was in agreement that a reform in how they were ruled was needed but obviously disagreed that it the change had to be through a war. He wasn't a tyrant, far from it, he often had to make hard decisions in a time where there wasn't any fast form of communication so, he would send an order and by the time it got to North America was enforced and the people reacted good or bad and he recieved word of it, it was often far too late to change course or tweak it in a way that was meaningful or worked for the people in North America. As for taxes, the majority of people from the early 1600's up until the end of the Seven Years War (1756-1763) came to North America because they often were free from paying any tax at all, it was very hard to enforce taxation especially on the fringes of the colonies. When taxes were finally levied to pay off debts from the Seven Years War, which had begun in North America and plunged the entire world into what some historians have dubbed "World War 0" it was a common tax on the mostlt previously untaxed citizens which was 0.25% of what the same people paid in the United Kingdom proper, for example using modern US currency, if a citizen in England had to pay $1,000.00 annually then the same citizen in British North America paid $0.25. Now that's an extremely oversimplification however, they paid an extremely small fraction compared to their counterparts back in the main part of the Kingdom. What George III actually taxed that angered the "colonists" were imports, exports & luxury goods. This affected the wealthy land owners in coastal and near costal towns & merchants in major port cities, who did pay high taxes and because they were in a major port city the taxation was easily enforced. The tax on tea for example an item from Asia, that had to be specially packaged and shipped was huge but most British North Americans didn't drink it, instead they drank locally made beer and spirits or raw milk, tea was drink for the wealthy of the time. Sugar was taxed but most common people sweetened their food with honey, honey you could farm on your own, sugar had to be shipped from the Caribbean and processed. Postage was taxed but postage was mostly used by the wealthy and merchants when shipping items across the Atlantic or when sending letters concerning business. Most common people never traveled more than 12 miles outside their home town/city on average and had no purpose to send letters or use any postage. So the wealthy felt that they carried an uneven and unfair amount of the tax burden. The King also been having minor attacks of what some think was porphyria (it could've been another mental illness bipolar disorder is also a possibility) since 1765 and continued throughout the Declaration of Independence and the Revolutionary War. He finally had a major attack which spanned 1788-1789 (1789 is when George Washington assumed the office of President) and another which began in 1811 and lasted until he died in 1820. George's mental health was such that in 1788 there was an attempt at establishing a Regency and again in 1811 it was under established under Prince George of Wales (future King George IV) who was a fat fop more interested in his Catholic mistress, food and his own hedonistic pursuits than governing. The US didn't "break free from a tyrant through a just war" as it was led by wealthy citizens and fought a British government in some level of disarray, in an era of poor intercontinental communications, led by a bunch of wealthy land owners and merchants who had an explicit goal of not paying taxes at all, So while it's easy to paint King George III as a tyrant and despot, he actually was a complex leader who was neither sinner nor saint and had the hard task of running a Kingdom that was restricted by the times and technology available.

iamnotfromthis t1_iznw6tj wrote on December 10, 2022 at 2:53 PM

I am not fully certain but I'll argue that the american colonies where profitable due to the taxes that the crown charged from them (the spark of the revolution was raised taxes after all), I would also think that any colony trying to be independent would be a serious issue, if for no other reason thay it could be an incentive for other (and more valuable) colonies to revolt if they were sucessful

TheGreatOneSea t1_izot0ng wrote on December 10, 2022 at 6:44 PM

The profit from the American colonies came mostly from the food that was exported to the more lucrative Caribbean islands, and the lumber industry, which was needed for the ships.

The English tax system itself had trouble taxing America, because Americans didn't have enough gold or silver to make that easy, and customs officials in America were practically on their own, which made them easy to threaten.

The only practical method of tax was thus forcing all goods to come in and out of Britian, which probably caused more problems than it solved.

19seventyfour t1_izoilh5 wrote on December 10, 2022 at 5:33 PM

My understanding was that even though there were high taxes, most were not being paid or even enforced by Americans. I wish I could remember where I heard that (most likely YouTube)

phillipgoodrich t1_izqfv1p wrote on December 11, 2022 at 2:03 AM

Along the lines of financial value of the American colonies to the British Empire, the simple fact that Great Britain enjoyed a monopoly on colonial goods was huge. At the outbreak of the Revolution, the fear was that the colonies if independent would seek favored nation status with British rivals like the Bourbons (France and Spain) along with the United Provinces. In reality, the Revolution changed very little in terms of dealing with the Brits. The French Revolution soured relations with the U.S. remarkably rapidly.

But the reasons for the American Revolution had almost nothing to do with taxes. As pointed out previously, the taxes assessed to American colonists were chump change compared with what the British citizens were paying (and most Brits were also subject to "taxation without representation" as only about 3% of them had suffrage rights (had to be a land-owner in Great Britain in order to vote)). The true reasons for the American Revolution were two-fold: 1) the ongoing quartering of British soldiers in the northern colonies, with the ongoing threat of violence in the streets (along the lines of the Boston massacre), and 2) the threat of abolition of human chattel slavery in the wake of Sommersett v. Steuart at the Court of King's Bench in 1772, which potential absolutely enraged the southern American colonies, and led in turn to the Dunmore Declaration and subsequent escalation of hostilities in the American south.

It was only in the wake of the successful Revolution that leaders like the Adams cousins, Franklin, and Jefferson realized that the story of the Revolution would not sit well with subsequent generations of Americans, and concocted the "taxation without representation" chestnut that filled the history books of the next 50 years. In the last years of Adams and Jefferson, when they had more or less "reconciled," Adams begged Jefferson to come clean and tell the truth of why the southern colonies had joined Massachusetts in revolt. Jefferson politely but firmly refused, as he had spent the last 20 years of his life building a false legacy that endured until the last 25 years or so.