Colin Ross, "Unser Amerika", Chapter 19

 19.

Who fought for American independence?

Inevitably linked to the idea of the American War of Independence is the name of Boston, the "Boston Massacre," the Boston Tea Party, Boston's occupation, siege, and liberation as the prelude to the long struggle for America's freedom. Boston and Puritan New England appear as the heart of the Revolution as well as the genius and guiding thought of America from its first beginning. 

One as well as the other is only very partially true. But unfortunately both are striking proof of the experience, hitherto neglected by us Germans, that in the life of nations and in politics it is not so much the facts that matter as their interpretation. It is not so much the event as the myth attached to it that is effective, that builds up or destroys the future.

The Puritan myth had known how to use the great deed of the German Luther's spiritual revolution for its own purposes, even to seize it for itself, so to speak. In exactly the same way, the New Englanders, who repeatedly referred to the Pilgrim Fathers, although they themselves were nothing more than merchants, shipowners and tradesmen, later claimed the myth of the American Revolution for themselves or rather shaped it according to their purposes and goals.

This myth later grew into an "American," a word used to refer only to Americans of Anglo-Saxon descent, or at most to those who were Anglicized, just as French Canadians still claim the term Canadians for themselves. The French in the New World never became hyphenated Canadians, even when growing British immigration pushed them into the minority. The Germans, however, never made it beyond hyphenated Americanism, unless they were absorbed into Anglo-Saxonism in denial of their people. That they could call themselves Americans, "one hundred percent" Americans, with the same right as their fellow citizens of British descent, was something of which only very few were aware.

Thus the Americans of German blood tolerated that the creative basic act of their history, the War of Independence, became a purely Anglo-American affair. Only later, under the pressure of the contempt shown to them, they remembered that Germans had also fought against King George's regiments. But, as always and everywhere, they were content to have been there; they had also fought, had also bled, had also fallen for the young freedom. There is a whole series of books and writings which enumerate all the heroic deeds of individual Germans and German regiments in the War of Independence, but not once has the attempt been made to write the high song of the Germans on American soil. And yet it is only through the strong addition of German and Irish blood that New England has become America. Germans stand at the beginning of the real America, which is not a daughter state of England, but a son of Europe.

The Germans also played a decisive role in the Revolution, and one can say that without the participation and influence of the Germans and the Irish, the Revolution would probably have taken a different course.

It is the essence of myth-making that it simplifies the manifold and ambiguous phenomena of historical events, brings them to a common denominator and to a clear line, which has a shaping effect on the present and the future. That America has taken on English features to such a much greater degree than German ones is not at least the effect of the Anglo-American myth. But America has entered a new phase in its development, and it is time to give it a new myth.

In the light of the old Anglo-Saxon myth, the thirteen colonies appear as a land of industrious, pious, and freedom-loving people. They would have remained loyal to the motherland, had not an incomprehensible king, of German descent, had the foolish idea of subjugating and oppressing these free people. Thus they rose up against the tyrant, in order to fight for freedom for all mankind, or at least to demand it.

The overwhelming majority of the American population still imagines the Revolution in this rather simple way, if they have any idea of it at all. The version of the educated and that of science is, of course, different. Nor has it always been the same. During the World War, under the influence of the high enthusiasm for England, the War of Independence was almost stamped into a regrettable misunderstanding between the motherland and the colony, between the "beautiful Mother and the even more beautiful Daughter." Whatever shape and form the War of Independence took, however, it always remained a British-Anglo-American affair, in which the country's ethnic Germans held no part except as minor figures. The political character of the revolution was always emphasized, the ideal struggle for freedom as an idea and a concept, while the economic and social purposes underlying the defection from England were hardly mentioned.

Reality behaved differently. The American Revolution arose out of the depression that the long war with France had left in its wake. The attempt to shift the burdens of that depression to the colonies kept the riot going. The revolution began as a New England one, and specifically as a revolt against British economic and financial measures. The merchants, shipowners, and tradesmen in the New England ports and cities saw their dividends threatened by the Navigation Act, the Stamp Act, the Townshend Act, and all the other acts by which the British Parliament sought successively to squeeze funds out of the recalcitrant colonists in order to alleviate England's oppressive debt burden.

Times were bad. There was much unemployment. Along with the discontent of the propertied classes went a threatening resentment of the dispossessed, except that they were less numerous than today; for the mass of slaves as well as white serfs were hardly counted as human beings. The economic revolution of the merchants became a national struggle for freedom through the union of a great Southern landowner who was at once an aristocrat and an officer, and who placed the ideal goal of a free, independent country before merchant interests. George Washington came from a circle that was not in itself revolutionary or anti-British. The ruling planter aristocrats of the southern colonies were doing well, both economically and politically. They had no reason to be dissatisfied with the existing rule. However, because the national leader arose from their class, and because the first president as well as the majority of the ministers came from their circle, the planter aristocracy of the South secured political leadership as well as economic superiority; both were snatched away from them only in the War of Secession.

The American Revolution was started by New England merchants. It was led by a Southern aristocrat, but it was fought through to a considerable extent by German soldiers. The tragedy of German-American relations lies in the fact that Germans also fought on the opposite side, shamefully betrayed by their princes and sold to England. It has obscured to this day the role played by Americans of German blood in the decisive battles for the shaping of the American state.