e. This was not the nature of the American war, for no foreign power of different ethnicity held sway in the colonies; certainly no Germans rose up in Pennsylvania in order to establish a German-style state out of the old British colony. Indeed, Germans tended toward loyalist sensibilities. Jameson argued that the war had the effect of creating more colleges and of diffusing religious faith. This certainly is a description of cultural contact with Europe more than it is a description of a result of a war. These very things took place in Europe before and after the American war; sometimes these phenomena were accompanied by violence and armed struggle, and sometimes not. The Americas were already religiously diverse, and it probably comes as no surprise that the conclusion to this paper is that the growth of colleges was accompanied by, and was a result of, a substantial growth in the population. This rather leaves the war out of the picture; for wars seldom create things, but instead tend to destroy or impede them. It should be pointed out that Jameson makes no political arguments outside of suffrage. (One generally thinks of dramatic political changes as being a result of a “revolution.”) He discusses political institutions not at all. He is only concerned with who had the vote. However, even before the war, the colonies had wider suffrage than the European countries from which the people and their forebears came; how is this a revolutionary outcome? Were these people not fighting to preserve that which they already had against the growing influence of the House of Commons, which threatened to take their self-determination away? Slavery was already receding in the colonies; it was evolving away--in Vermont in 1777, Pennsylvania in 1780, Rhode Island and Connecticut in 1784; if the revolution was the cause, why then did abolition, albeit gradual, continue its march in New York in 1799 and New Jersey in 1804? The American var...
