compare and contrast the British and American points of view concerning the pre-revolutionary years?

Answer 1

~Prior to the Treaty of Versailles in 1783, there was no "American" view - there was no "America" or even a United States of America. The folks living in British North America were British subjects. Their points of view were, then, necessarily British.

Bear in mind that only about 1/3 of the Colonials supported the war, 1/3 remained loyal to the rightful government and 1/3 sat the fence.

The rhetoric of the rebels was bogus. "Taxation Without Representation" had a nice ring to it, but anyone with a lick of knowledge of the topic and the times knows that the colonies were represented in Parliament and that the taxes being objected to were lower than the ones they replaced. The difference was that the homeland British were suffering from a devastating depression brought on in large part because of the expense of the Western Hemisphere component of the Seven Years War and Parliament and the Crown decided that it was high time the Colonials footed at least some of the cost of maintaining, supporting and defending the colonies and they started to actually try to collect the taxes. The locals, of course, having reaped the benefit, had no desire to pick up any part of the tab.

"Give me liberty or give me death" is another good example. British subjects enjoyed the most personal freedom and liberty of anyone on the globe at the time. What Tommy Paine and company really wanted was to be able to trade in whatever markets they chose regardless of the consequences to their homeland, to expand their borders beyond the Appalachians and steal free land from the natives, to disregard logical and rational constraints imposed by their sovereign for the good of the entire nation (Great Britain) and to do pretty much as they darn well pleased.

The ideas of the colonials were hardly new or unique and as Thomas Jefferson himself said when he and the Committee of Five presented their final working draft of the Declaration of Independence, they borrowed heavily from earlier sources (many of them British) and intended to say nothing new. The Declaration itself was redundant, Independence having been formally declared on July 2 with the adoption of the Lee Resolution.

The views of a loyal colonial were akin to those of a British subject living in England, while the views of a rebel more closely resembled those of a disgruntled Scot or Irishman.