What if the British had won the Revolutionary War/War of 1812?

[ASU2003]

What would be different in America? What historical events would be different?

1. The Queen would be on our plastic money.
2. There would probably be 8-10 provinces instead of states.
3. I'm not so sure the French would have sold us the Louisiana Purchase, or it would be French-American province.
4. Slavery may have ended earlier, or the South may have re-tried to secede from the crown in the mid 1800s.
5. We would have national healthcare.
6. The Native Americans would probably control a large piece of land (British wanted OH, MI, & IN to be for the Native Americans during the war of 1812).
7. We wouldn't have the bill of rights or the constitution.

[Baraka_Guru]

You had me up until points 6 and 7.

6: Americans would have taken the land eventually, leaving merely a few reserves.

7: Americans would have possibly taken a similar tack that Canada did, eventually drawing up its own constitution and bill of rights/charter of rights and freedoms.

America may have become a constitutional monarchy, like Canada and Australia.

[roachboy]

the more decisive war, strangely enough, was probably the french & indian war/seven years war because that displaced the french model, which was oriented almost entirely on trade/river networks and not so much on colonization with the english model, which is what explains north america as it is today, really.

the american revolution was in significant ways won because of french help (which in the longer run didn't help the monarchy so much as they defaulted on the bonds that paid for messing with the english and that set into motion that chain that resulted in the french revolution) but they weren't interested in going beyond helping. i guess that fucking with the english was gratification enough. plus wars---you know---win/win unless you're in them. lots of money to be made.

the war of 1812 doesn't seem to me to have been that big a deal---i mean the british burned up washington dc which by most reckonings woulda meant Win---but i don't remember how things shook out from there and what the terms were that ended it.

personally i wonder where the british woulda exiled the revolutionaries to after they won--whether they would have replicated what the newly independent americans did to the loyalists or if something else would have happened.

past that, i would agree with baraka.
but counterfactual history admits of all kinds of possibilities.

[Charlatan]

Ummm... The British *did* win the war of 1812.

The Americans invaded what is now known as Canada. At the end of the War, the border was the same as it was when it started.

Invaders being repelled and status quo being restored = win.

[loquitur]

well, Charlatan, in US schools we tend to hear a lot about Lake Erie and New Orleans. Plus the end of impressment. I think the War of 1812 was more of a draw than anything else, though I'm pretty sure President Madison rued the day he got Congress to declare war.

[roachboy]

kids in american schools are taught a whole pile of factually inaccurate stuff that fits into some nitwit nationalist story, loquitor. like most basic "history" it's only secondarily about history. it's a whole lot more about conditioning kids into being nice, docile citizens. you know....to have difficulty thinking critically about the u.s. of a.....building consent.....it's social reproduction, just as marx said it was.

so appealing to what kids learn in primary and secondary school isn't a real compelling historical argument. just saying.

for example, it's interesting that the problems that faced the post-revolutionary american system tend to gloss over the whole articles of confederation period and instead kind of start with the magickal moment of ratification of the constitution and treat the war of 1812 as a kind of system perturbation. reality is very different from that. but i digress.

but i agree with what you say above. it's accurate. and i expect that you're right about monroe.

[samcol]

I too find it odd that the whole Articles of Confederation era is totally glossed over in the history books. It had to be more significant as it was the beginning of the United States and was in use for a decade or so?

Interesting.

[Charlatan]

Originally Posted by loquitur

well, Charlatan, in US schools we tend to hear a lot about Lake Erie and New Orleans. Plus the end of impressment. I think the War of 1812 was more of a draw than anything else, though I'm pretty sure President Madison rued the day he got Congress to declare war.

Lake Eerie and New Orleans were battles.

I stand by the fact that the border was invaded and at the cessation of hostilities it remained as it was. You can call it a draw if you wish, but you can't call it a win.

Hope you like the colour of your president's house... :P

[roachboy]

there are other peculiarities in how kids are taught history. they get the idea that the entire colonial period emanated directly from the puritans, which gives the impression of some fundamentally religious dissident underpinning to the whole of it---which is entirely false. it's curious to think about where the need for a single Origin comes from if not from the idea of nation and the fact that as a name it is singular. so the same logic that prompted henry ford to sponsor an attempt to fashion a single american folk dance tradition in the early 1930s because the idea of multiple traditions didn't seem symmetrical which the notion of nation and that offended his fascist sensibilities.

just an aside.

[genuinegirly]

If the revolutionary war never happened, I bet that California would be its own country, perhaps allied with areas now occupied by Western states as far East as the Rockies. California is so distantly West, yet was settled relatively early. The Gold Rush would have offered enough coinage for a substantial national currency.

[loquitur]

The articles of confederation actually weren't a total disaster. The confederation passed the Northwest Ordinance, which set in motion the process by which much of what we now call the Midwest became states, plus it prohibited slavery there. It might have been nice to have similar treatment of land acquired in the Louisiana Purchase, but I don't think Pres Jefferson was temperamentally inclined to any such thing, especially given that the Purchase was a stretch of his constitutional authority as it is (or at least so he thought).

The war of 1812 always struck me as sort of pointless. No one ended up with much to show for it afterwards. Although it's fun nowadays to visit Fort Henry in Eastern Ontario, get the kids to dress up in redcoats and listen to the guide tell them to scream at the Americans across the St Lawrence.

[Charlatan]

It also resulted in the construction of the Rideau canal which allowed the movement of troops and goods from the Ottawa River down to Kingston (the location of Fort Henry) and Lake Ontario (ie Toronto or York as it was then called). This by pass meant that it didn't have to travel along the St.Lawrence (too close to the US).

It was never used for war but it is still maintained and is a great tourist attraction and is part of the centrepiece Ottawa's National Parks. The best part is when they drain it in the winter and you can skate on it.

So, thank you America for being so acquisitive! We probably wouldn't have built it otherwise.

[Daniel_]

Of course, if you look at the factions in the English speaking world in the period between the creation of the United Kingdom with the accession of James I & VI to the throne of England & Scotland, up to the reign of Victoria there is an argument that the two main groupings of the Royalists and the Parliamentarians in the civil war of England continued their struggle right through.

The English Civil War lead to the brief establishment of the Protectorate, and the Restoration caused the pressure for a number of those defeated Puritans to leave for the New World. As I understand it, the Puritan/Republican grouping had their power mainly in the North, the Royalist/Tory faction mainly in the South of what is now the USA.

The revolution pitted not just the New World against the Old, but found the Republicans (supported by the French, who strongly allied themselves to anyone fighting the English crown) against the Royalists (who were supported by the newly resurgent English state, united now the Jacobite threat was defeated - a threat also fostered by the French).

This time the Republicans won, but not so decisively that the Royalists in the South were comfortable with a fully unified nation. Hence the federal system, articles of Confederation and so on.

With Canada outside the new Union, the Royalists and Loyalists had a place to stay and the new Union was worried so invaded - they fought to a standstill, mainly because the English could not send forces to Canada for the war, due to the involvement on the continent against Napoleon. Once again the French helped the Americans out!

Another generation later, and the Royalists in the South re-named themselves the Confederates (interesting harking back to the original "Articles of Confederation" there) and fought against the Republicans.

So to look at the original question, if the English & Royalist faction had won the Revolutionary War I think that the factions would still have been there (after all, in Ireland they are STILL there, even thogh armed conflict is fading from popularity, thankfully) and unless a good settlement could have been made the civil war may still have happened in some way. Probably with a core of Republican Dissenters in the north trying to link up with the French in Louisiana and Quebec during the various Anglo/French wars of the time.

That said, if the issue was still not settled at the time of Victoria, I think it would have been quite possible that the American Dominions would have been happy to be part of the Empire, if given similar freedoms that Canada, Australia, New Zealand and India received.

With English backing, the American Dominion would probably have declared war on Mexico in parallel with the English war against Napoleon, and supported by our strong Naval presence in the Caribbean and Pacific would have had a good chance of the American Dominion extending all the way down to the English territories in Guyana.

Given the way the English worked in India as a template, the subjugation of the indigenous population would possibly not have been so harsh, and the access to Americans to join in the British colonialist expansion into Africa would have created interesting outlets for many of the people who ended up in the Western expansion of the USA.

If the colonies of Africa and the Dominion in America were both under the Imperial banner, the repatriation of slave descendants to Africa (which failed so badly in Liberia) would have been better resourced and better handled, and maybe the establishment of a well funded country in North Africa with good governance would have prevented the hideous mess of corruption that Africa has been since colonialism ended.

You can take any idea and spin it out in very interesting directions...