this post was submitted on 01 Oct 2026
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Some did. Some were merely opportunists who didn't want the government getting in their way. Most of the US founding fathers were smugglers and land speculators. They didn't like that the US had ended the French and Indian war by promising that in exchange for peace, their colony would stop expanding westwards. That pissed off the founders who had bought land to the west and wanted a return on their investments.
Other American people were just fine with the arrangement with the crown. They didn't want a brand new government, they thought things were fine as they were. These people were either killed or driven off their land by the rebels who wanted a new government, and were forced to head to England or up into Canada.
Just look at the other places that didn't consider the British monarch to be an oppressive tyrant: Canada, Australia, NZ, etc. Did they suffer under the grinding boot of the king and lead miserable lives as a result? Were they forced to hand all their wealth over to England? Hardly. Within a few decades the British gave their local governments more power. Now they all merely have the king as a figurehead and are fully controlled by the people.
Meanwhile, the rebel colonists in the US went only a couple of decades before descending into a civil war. Plus, there's the war of 1812 which, in large part, was due to these people who famously hated tyrants and oppression ignoring treaties and killing off natives so that they could expand westward.
It seems to me that if you look past all the propaganda that is part of the US school system, the British king being a "tyrant" was more of a convenient excuse rather than the actual legitimate reason for the rebellion.
What I find interesting is that all of this was happening after a civil war more bloody per capita than the First World War, the trial and execution of a king, a period of rather repressive republican rule, a restoration of the monarchy, and yet another revolution/coup which established monarchs couldn't rule without Parliament's consent. Part of the reason Britain wasn't revolutionary later on like France was because multiple revolutions had already happened in the 17th century. The Americans were by the point of the revolution arguing George III was an absolutist and a tyrant, but that form of monarchy had already had its back broken in an English and later British context by the time the American colonies were being settled in large numbers (with some exceptions). It was an accusation much more apt towards say the French king at the time who in fact supported the Americans, and we all know how that eventually went for the Ancien Regime.
The colonist's grievance was actually more with Parliament for the most part, they actively wanted the king to intercede on their behalf. George III wasn't willing to do that being a constitutional monarch, which ironically got him labelled a tyrant.
Also, the whole "no taxation without representation" does make sense. But, it's not as if a typical British person had significantly more rights than the colonists. The UK didn't deal with its problem with Rotten and Pocket Boroughs until the 1830s. That meant that there were cities in the UK who had no MPs, and there were MPs representing places where nobody lived.
While I completely understand and mostly agree with your point, speaking as a Canadian millions of people suffered under the grinding boot of the king and were forced to give up not only their wealth, but also their languages and cultures. The genocide of the indigenous peoples in Canada is an atrocious part of our history, and the last Residential School wasn't closed down until the 1990s.
Yeah, but a prime driver of the American Revolution was that the king wouldn't let the Americans genocide the natives even more than they were at the time.
Part of the American independence movement was backlash against the result of the "French and Indian Wars", in which the British agreed to limit their westward expansion.
Sure, the British (and early Canadians) did some horrible things to people they saw as less worthy than themselves. But, in this case, the "oppressive tyrant" was less brutal towards the Indigenous than the American colonists wanted. The monarch actively held the colonists back from what they wanted to do, and that's why what happened to the Indigenous people in the US is generally much worse than what happened to them in Canada.
The residential schools were awful, but the mindset that led to them was "these savages can be civilized as long as we remove them from the terrible influences as children and have good, catholic nuns break them of their savage ways and make them into good British subjects". Meanwhile, the US solution was "these savages have good land, let's drive them off that land and take that land for ourselves".
From the viewpoint of someone in the 21st century, both of these are awful. But, from the viewpoint of the 19th century, one is definitely a more worthy undertaking.