Yet there is something truly historically exceptional about the American colonists recognizing that self-government was so necessary that they overthrew a benevolent monarch who gave them minimal bureaucracy - there were only seventeen royal administrators in Virginia in 1774, for example - and among the lowest taxes in the civilized world. President Obama famously shillyshallied, before essentially denying it. There is a great debate in modern America about whether the United States is an exceptional nation. Indeed, he was almost the personification of an Enlightenment monarch and Renaissance prince. Yet what the Americans did in 1776 was to rebel against a king who was not oppressing them.
History is so replete with such examples that the story is almost banal. Plenty of peoples throughout history have seized their sovereign independence because they were being oppressed: the biblical Israelites escaping the Egyptians the sixteenth-century Dutch throwing off the Spanish yoke the Greeks rebelling against centuries of Turkish rule the nineteenth-century Italians rejecting the Habsburg Austrians. Americans are rarely accused of underestimating themselves, but might they in fact be a greater people than they think? That thought has regularly occurred to me over the past three years while I was researching and writing my new biography of their last king, George III, and especially when I read Richard Brookhiser’s insightful comment in his recent book Give Me Liberty, where he points out that Britain’s thirteen American colonies in the 1760s and early 1770s were among “the freest societies in the world.”
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