Page:Bertram David Wolfe, Jay Lovestone, William Francis Dunne - Our Heritage from 1776 (1926).pdf/8

 6 speculators." He points out, and rightly, that Washington, Hamilton and Morris were interested in land speculation and that "Washington had good reasons for being a rebel, as he surveyed lands outside of the royal grant and in exceeding the powers of his commission was liable to prosecution as a law breaker." But he does not point out at the same time that the poor frontiersmen, the pioneers who occupied small farms on the Western frontier and who made up the bulk of the army of the revolution, were also interested in fighting these laws. And as "squatters" who had occupied land in defiance of the laws, they were also "land thieves." These land thieves and speculators were also fighting the battle of progress against laws that put fetters upon the development of the productive forces of the colonies.

A third cause of the revolution was the paper money question. During the French and Indian wars British merchants had sent over large quantities of goods on credit and rich planters, importers and merchants in America were all debtors to British merchants. These classes had been fighting against the issue of cheap paper money as a means of settling on easy terms the debts of the colonial poor but now that they were debtors they united to issue large quantities of paper currency. The British merchants succeeded in passing a law limiting and prohibiting this practice. This cause, generally ignored by orthodox historians because it shows the revolutionary fathers trying to escape paying their debts, was one of the prime causes of the American revolution and, like the land issue, united rich and poor alike in a common cause.

A fourth cause of the revolution was objection to British taxation. "Taxation without representation" was undoubtedly a fraudulent slogan. It was not the intention of those who raised it to give representation to everybody who paid taxes. What they objected to was the size of the taxes, the articles on which they were levied, the objectives of the taxes in placing restrictions on trade in "niggers," rum, molasses, indentured servants (stamp tax) and other commodities, and the purpose of the taxes—to make the royal governors independent of the colonial legislatures by paying their salaries out of royal taxes in place of legislative grants. In one case, they even objected to the lowering of a tax—the tax on