Thoughts on the Fourth of July: What if.

Yesterday was July the fourth, Independence Day. As I was walking away from watching fireworks over Middle Bay, I pondered the “what ifs,” which I do a lot.
What if there had been no Revolution. After all, the taxes the British government was levying on the American colonists were to defray the cost of their defense, a fair request, in my mind, since the taxpayer in England was doing it for them.
Many colonists felt that way, and while they may not have liked having more taxes laid on them, no one does, they believed that King George represented the legal government. It is a fact, not taught in high school history, that, in fact there was a rather large number of people who remained, at least quietly, loyal to the Crown, and many of the troops wearing red coats, were not brought over from England at all, but were native born Americans.
So what would it have been like if the radicals (as they were seen at the time) had not prevailed? What would the current United States look like today?
I don’t really know, but I can guess, and since this is my space, I’m going to. First off, we would eventually have become a dominion of the British Empire and finally independent as has Canada, Australia, and South Africa. At some point, probably fairly early in our history, a central government would have been created, as was done in Canada. So, we would be pretty much where we are now.
But what would have been different? Settlers would have arrived from other countries, as they were doing at the time, and they would have pushed west towards the Mississippi. But without exuberance of having become a new nation and idea of Manifest Destiny, what would have been their relationships to the nations and confederations of Native Americans they encountered? Perhaps there would not have been the belief in a God given right to drive them out. Many Native Americans did indeed move north into Canada where they found better treatment at the hands of the Canadian authorities.
Would Lewis and Clark have explored the Louisiana Purchase? Probably, but it would not have been the Louisiana Purchase but rather Louisiana Land Grab, taken from Napoleon when he was defeated.
Would the Southwest be part of the US or a larger Mexico? My feeling is, the latter may well have been the case. Without the revolutionary zeal to conquer all of North America, settlers certainly would have moved into Mexican territory, as they were invited by the Mexican government to do, but may well have become Mexican citizens, and would not have been supported by royal government. The Republic of Texas might have come to pass, but may well have remained an independent country. Can you imagine needing a visa to watch the Dallas Cowboys play, and Lyndon Johnson could not have been president of the United States.
As the British Empire abolished slavery in its territories, the Civil War would not have been fought and much of our racial history would have been radically altered.
The US would have entered World War I in 1914 and World War II in 1939. The infusion of US material and manpower at those early stages could have shortened those wars considerably. My father may well have served in the 104th Royal Timberwolf Division.
My grandmother would have been born a native instead of Canadian, as her ancestors evacuated to Nova Scotia with the British troops following the siege of Boston.
But, although I can imagine the Patriots playing the Redskins in a rugby match, I cannot for the life of me picture the beloved Red Sox as a cricket team.

Uncle Archie

My maternal grandfather was always proud that his family had been in this country almost since the Pilgrims. In fact, they came over from England and settled in the Salem, MA area about 10 years after the landing at Plymouth Rock. A framed certificate hung on his wall proclaiming his membership in the Sons of the American Revolution, through his descent from one Peter Dolliver. He regaled us with stories of life on the frontier during the early Indian wars when one of his forefathers, caught outside in a raid, was brought down on is doorstep when a tomahawk cleaved his skull. The stories often sounded like he was actually there. The stories of this era would always end by him telling us that we were also descended from the last man hanged for horse thievery in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.
Other stories included an uncle, a Wells Fargo man, who was killed during a train robbery. His widow and child, my grandfather’s cousin, had come back east after the tragic event, but later had returned to Colorado.
His own grandfather, one William Augustus Wright, owned a trading company which probably acted as middlemen, bringing goods from not only the US but the Carribbean to England where he had a partner in one Sir Francis Vernon, whence came my grandfather’s middle name, or so the story goes. My grandfather, Frank Vernon, graduated from the University of Connecticut in 1912, and after refusing a lieutenancy in the Philippine Constabulary, took a job as a civil engineer in Jamaica with the United Fruit Company.
In those days, there were no docking facilities in Kingston, and passengers were brought to shore in rowboats, propelled by native water men. As he and his trunk were safely aboard, the old man, about his father’s age, rowing the boat remarked about my grandfather’s name on his luggage. “That’s my name too,” he said.
“And what would your name be, then?” he asked to be polite.
“William Augustus Wright.”
Strangely, my grandfather’s stories, although he was fascinated with the Civil War, never included any relatives of his own. The family was wealthy enough for any male at the time to avoid service, and perhaps that’s what they did.
These stories left me, at the time, almost resentful that my father’s side of the family seemingly had no one, who participated in the great events of our nation’s history, as his father had arrived here in 1902, and having two children at the time, was exempt from service in World War I.
But then, as he grew older, and I had traveled back to Ireland to meet his family, Grand father Millar told me of his Uncle Archie. Uncle Archie arrived in the US at the time of the Civil War and was either drafted, enlisted or paid as a substitute to enlist in the Union Army, and as my grandfather told it, a cavalry regiment, as he was a superior horseman. Frustratingly, he knew little, if anything about his service, save that at the end of the war, he was suffering severely from rheumatism and being heartily sick of the United States, returned home. All he could remember was peeking into a trunk, when his uncle was an old man, and seeing a sword and a “peaked blue cap.”
Sadly only one of his sisters in Ireland had any first hand recollection of him, the others being too young to remember him when he died. They did remember a long lost sword and produced a picture of a handsome, self assured looking gentleman, and told me that local lore said that he was an avid bird hunter as well as horseman, and that, rather than hunt on foot, using a dog to flush his prey, he would gallop across the fields with the barrel of a shotgun resting between the ears of the horse. The poor animal must have suffered chronic headaches after a day of killing grouse. How much of this is true, I don’t know. What has fascinated me over the years, was that here was a man who returned to his native home after finding that the land of promise was not what he expected or even wanted to be a part of. It has never been part of what we were taught in school.