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Posted on 11/16/2025 4:54:24 PM PST by whyilovetexas111
Could Great Britain have crushed the American rebellion? An expert argues that, while better generalship and politics might have delayed defeat, the odds were stacked against London from the start. Holding a vast, underdeveloped continent with a small population, across an ocean, was a nightmare even for Europe’s strongest navy and army. Saratoga and French intervention made things worse, forcing Britain to fight a global war while trying to subdue the colonies. In the end, distance, imperial overreach, and political inflexibility meant the empire was likely to lose North America sooner or later.
(Excerpt) Read more at nationalsecurityjournal.org ...
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These pseudo intellectual hypotheticals are so stupid.
That would not have been enough. George III would have recruited more. Rebel militias controlled all the ground redcoats did not stand on.
I think our country is in big trouble and we might be losing our Republic. Tge Left seems to be inviting, even inciting civil war.
Communism now is more popular than capitalism, and Islam is more popular than Christianity
Independence was not inevitable neither militarily or politically. England didn’t need to crush the entire settled continent. They could have held at least several major cities at the behest of their citizens. Offering the colonies their “rights as Englishmen would have gone a long way to settling differences along with light taxation.
I think you’d have to add Thomas Paine to that trio. His writings were a great inspiration for the patriots.
Sad but true.
True.
There may very well be something to that but its important to keep in mind our historians have a very specific goal they want to achieve.
It isn’t telling history as it happened. They want the Founding permanently erased.
If you want a counter factual that has the Revolution failing, you need look no further than Lord Howe’s service during the French and Indian/Seven Years War. He was very impressed with the wood craft, tactical flexibility, and marksmanship of American Soldiers.
He cut the wide brims off the hats, and long tails off the Red Coats of his British Soldiers. He taught them marksmanship, and and to break formation and fight from cover, at the command “tree up!” He had officers put their swords, and sergeants their half pikes, into storage, then issued everyone tomahawks, and brought in Mohawks to train his men in their use.
Lord Howe was absolutely the ideal commander for the British Empire to send to put down a rebellion in the 13 Colonies, because he not only understood how the Americans could fight, he found a lot to admire in it, and was experienced in training an army that combined British discipline and logistics with American fighting tactics.
The Americans liked Lord Howe. The Massachusetts Colony voted £250 to erect his statue in London, and he was the ideal candidate to convert the considerable support the Crown retained in the 13 Colonies into effective civil and military power.
Fortunately, the French did us the service of killing this officer at the end of the French and Indian War, so that when the British sent Lord Howe to America to stamp out the Rebellion is was not the George Howe I have been describing, but his far less able, and more conventional, brother, William Howe.
Had the British army invading New York not been delayed by the Battle of Valcour Island in 1776, they might have occupied Fort Ticonderoga and then Albany, cutting off New England from the rest of the country. And this could have happened later if Benedict Arnold had succeeded in handing West Point over to the British.
The French at that time thought that in order to fight well, soldiers needed to wear pretty uniforms. So the Patriots in their buckskins, moccasins and coonskin hats should have been no match.
Almost did.
Of course we could have. But we didn’t!
Indeed he was. To the great benefit of all freedom loving people in the following decades.
That would have required KIng George III’ s death no later than about November 1775 when Howe’s instructions were written.
The French save their butts.
What did happen was destined by definition, because it happened.
Who knows what the alternate outcome might have been ... with the colonies remaining under colonial rule, there would have been potential for all of British North America to become one giant colony. It’s likely that Americans would have wanted increasing autonomy on a faster scale than Canadians sought it, but even so, Canada had the first stages of self-rule by 1840 and increased that in two major stages, 1867 Confederation and 1931 Westminster full autonomy.
I could imagine that a united British North America might have gone through all these stages faster and while the resulting superpower would have been a member of the British Commonwealth, it would be governed almost the same way that it the two countries are governed now, in a federal system (something like 60 to 65 states or provinces, since Australia calls their divisions states there would be no particular reason why this nation would not have states rather than provinces).
Ironically the answer to the question is that the superpower of North America would be the country Donald Trump envisages and it might have been so strong in the world that a different outcome to both the Versailles treaty and the Russian revolution could have occurred.
But we will never know unless God has alternate earths where these thought experiments meet with reality.
At the same time, there would have been no particular reason why Canada would join the expanding American colonies after this theoretical loss in the Revolutionary War, and two separate countries might have developed like Australia and New Zealand within the empire, then the commonwealth.
I would strongly believe that if so, America would have sought greater independence than the dominions sought on a faster scale, and it might have had a peaceful transition to republican forms of government, and might have left the Empire or later the Commonwealth (although membership in the Commonwealth means almost nothing in terms of political independence).
Yes
Easily
It’s a wonder we-didn’t
Rev War Ping
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