The Causes of the American Revolution
Third Edition 1973
John C. Wahlke
University of Iowa
INTRODUCTION
Not so very long ago Americans were taught that the American Revolution came about solely and simply because all colonists hated tyranny and loved freedom; because all colonists resented a foreign government's denying their right to share in governing themselves; and because all colonists, therefore, rising in heroic resistance to the government which oppressed them, determined to make America an independent nation founded on the principles of political liberty and equality. The persistence of such a simple, black-and-white picture of the revolutionary struggle is reflected in the widely held belief that the chief point at issue between colonies and mother country was the rightness or wrongness of the principle that "taxation without representation is tyranny."