A tired canard is surfacing again in the era of wokery -- “Estimates suggest that only about a third of the colonial population actively supported independence.” 

This misconception originates from misreading an 1815 letter written by John Adams.  Adams referenced Americans’ attitudes toward the French, not the American Revolution.  English tyrannies weren’t welcome here by 1776. 

Straightforward facts tell the story, beginning with the Revolution’s impetus, the Stamp Act, effective Nov. 1, 1765, long before Boston’s December 1773 Tea Party. 

It was indeed a relatively modest tax. 

What enraged colonists was its purpose: subsidizing British continental wars which had stretched crown finances. It wasn't unlike today’s Ukraine conflict. 

Not much has changed since: American populists opposed both wars and lacked any say in them (taxation without representation).  It was not the tax rate, but its genesis, that inflamed Americans. 

The 13,000-word Stamp Act collected only £27 of revenue, equivalent to roughly $8,300 today. 

Parliament hastily repealed it the following March. 

But the damage was done. 

As our House Speaker emerita once advised, Americans needed to read the bill to learn its contents.  They did, and weren’t happy.  Royal tax agents' lives and properties were threatened by freedom-loving colonists.  Many were hung or burnt in effigy. Tar and feathers (or worse) awaited anyone enforcing it, so it wasn’t enforced.

Connecticut is the world’s oldest continuous democracy, self-ruled since 1639. 

Unlike the other colonies, it held a separate royal charter and elected its governor.  It was the only colony officially siding against the king when the Revolution began. 

Connecticut hosted the Revolutionary army’s headquarters, overseen by Gov. Jonathan Trumbull, “Brother Jonathan” to George Washington. 

The port of New London was the principal supply depot for Washington’s army and was a hub of privateers attacking British shipping, Houthi-style.  Connecticut became known as the Provision State. 

On Dec. 10, 1765, soon after the Stamp Act’s effective date, New London citizens issued a declaration of defiance.  That resolution’s key points were memorialized in the version Jefferson eventually assembled from subsequent ones enacted by various colonies and municipalities in his Declaration of Independence. In this, he was more an editor than an author. 

The month after New London’s resolution, a New York City delegation arrived to negotiate a mutual defense pact. 

History is written by victors, glossing over their defeats.  Here’s what’s not told about Americans’ worst Revolutionary war defeat. 

On Sept. 6, 1781, Benedict Arnold led British forces attacking New London to interdict the flow of provisions and disrupt local privateers.  A series of forts and batteries (construction of which Arnold had overseen before he defected) lined the harbor between the towns of New London and Groton.  Ships entering the harbor faced a crossfire.  Cannon balls were heated red-hot to ignite the decks of ships they landed upon. 

Knowing this, Arnold’s 1,700 troops put ashore on the coasts of both towns and marched inland.  New London was burnt, a war crime. 

Fort Griswold, high above the harbor on the Groton side, was the primary defensive fortification and where colonists (age 12 and above) assembled for the ultimate battle.  When the British reached the fort, a delegation approached, demanding surrender.  The Americans refused and the battle commenced.  Eighty-eight defenders wound up dead or would die from their wounds.  Forty of 41 wives from the local church were widowed.  The American commander, Colonel William Ledyard, surrendered to a British officer by handing over his sword.  The Englishman ran it through Ledyard.  Ledyard got a town named after him. 

Most of the fort’s wounded were massacred after the surrender.  The British dead were hastily thrown into a ditch outside the fort’s entrance. 

On their retreat, Hamas-style, before incoming militia converged on the harbor, the British took hostages to New York prison ships; floating concentration camps. 

Many didn’t survive. 

Probably more American POWs in this war were killed in captivity than total battlefield casualties. 

The father of one local teenager who didn’t survive his New York captivity was Captain Adam Shapley.  Shapley and a young black youth were credited with spearing the British commander when he came over the fort’s wall. 

Five months later, Shapley succumbed to his wounds, one of the last to fall in the Revolution. 

A Pequot Indian was also among the dead.  Contrary to later mythology, multiple ethnicities participated in the Revolution.  One local Mohegan family lost four sons, including one at Bunker Hill. 

Ten percent of the integrated Continental army were Blacks.  Crispus Attucks, of mixed Native American and African race, was among the first five martyrs of the Revolution killed in the 1770 Boston Massacre. 

Americans were outraged by the Groton atrocities. 

Washington redirected that anger, yielding victory at Yorktown six weeks later.  A twin obelisk to the one at Bunker Hill now stands as a silent monument atop the Groton hilltop, visible from I-95 when driving north along the coastline.  Schoolchildren's pennies helped fund its construction.  

Connecticut's dramas were hardly unique.  Similar ones consistently played out across five years of warfare. 

Fast forward to 1812, when the British sought to replicate their "success." 

The Americans stretched an immense iron chain across the New London harbor entrance, preventing entry.  When the frustrated British arrived, they continued sailing along the coast to the next town, then wasted ammunition shelling insignificant targets. 

Commodore Stephen Decatur’s fleet was bottled up inside the chain for much of that war.  Decatur, the great naval hero acclaimed for fighting the Houthis’ role models at Tripoli, is memorialized in the Marines’ hymn.  Decatur was considered a presidential contender.  If not for having been killed in a duel, he might have been among our early presidents.

In an ironic twist, the Groton hilltop where the colonists were slaughtered witnessed the start of New England’s Indian wars. 

In 1637, also on Sept. 6, Massachusetts and central Connecticut forces converged on the hill and conducted a half-hearted assault on a Pequot fort located there, commencing 30 years of New England’s Indian wars.  They returned the following Spring, attacked another Pequot fort to the east, and slaughtered hundreds.  One-hundred forty-four years later, descendants of those killed were by then thoroughly assimilated into the American experiment, defending it to the death. 

Assimilation peaked under Biden, who appointed the Mohegan tribal chief as Treasurer of the United States, responsible for signing all the currency ActBlue supposedly collects. 

Democrats’ politics of division (by gender, sexual orientation, race, class, ethnicity, and religion) includes revisionist propaganda, claiming that groups treated as inferiors during the early colonial era weren’t Americanized by that era’s close, and have remained estranged since. 

Don’t believe it.  The Civil War sought to end racial inequalities. 

Subsequent legal remedies served to end lingering divisions. 

Once full equality was essentially attained, mythologists then began dividing us, successfully incubating phenomena such as consistently declining levels of patriotism among the Left, and kindling endemic Leftist hatreds.  Pronoun Police represent divisiveness taken to absurdity.  The party which started the Civil War to protect slavery has taken us from Lincoln’s “last full measure of devotion” to division’s last stand. 

Despite all contrary evidence, the sins of early English entrants into America are now projected onto the multicultural coalition which defeated English tyranny.  The Revolution was indisputably not “a well-organized coup by the colonial elite.”  (Is this what’s taught in British schools?)  Unless history is inherited unadulterated, its lessons can’t be retained. 

Douglas Schwartz blogs at The Great Class War, applying pattern recognition of historical cycles to place current events into context. 

Image: U.S. Army via Wikimedia Commons, via Picryl // public domain