Page:Bertram David Wolfe, Jay Lovestone, William Francis Dunne - Our Heritage from 1776 (1926).pdf/10

 8 Dr. Ramsay, a contemporary of the revolution, writing of North Carolina, says: "There was an ardor and an enthusiasm in the friends of Congress that was generally wanting in the advocates of royal government." A rising social class whose victory means social progress always has "an ardor and enthusiasm" generally lacking in the counter-revolutionists.

This in part explains the victory of the rebels.

If the American colonists were divided, the inhabitants of the mother country were also. The Whigs (party of the new merchant-manufacturer class) in England were fighting against King George and his system of government. Pitt and Burke and Fox and a host of other major statesmen opposed the colonial policy and supported the revolutionists. Lord Howe, who commanded the British troops in America during the first critical years of the revolution, was an avowed Whig and when it was too late was recalled and tried for treason because he abandoned Boston to George Washington, made no effort to come in time to the relief of Bourgoyne at Saratoga, and did not try to crush Washington's miserable, ill-equipped little army after repeatedly defeating it in New York and New Jersey, "Thruout the revolution the favorite toast at banquets of American officers was 'General Howe'."

During the latter years of the revolution, France, Spain and Holland came to the aid of the American forces, the revolutionists having managed to utilize not only differences in the British ruling classes but also conflicts of interest between England and other countries as well in the strategy of the revolting colonials. There is a little "Leninist" lesson in winning alliances for a revolution. {{dhr}]

Finally, the revolution succeeded above all because it was truly "revolutionary" in its methods. "The people who write histories," says S. G. Fisher in his "True History of the American Revolution," "are usually of the class who take the side of the government in a revolution; and as Americans, they are anxious to believe that our revolution was different from others, more decorous, and altogether free from the atrocities, mistakes, and absurdities which characterize even the patriot party in a revolution. They have accordingly tried to describe a revolution in which all scholarly,