rding the welfare of the states. Also, even the best terms of which the colonies could have expected to obtain would be uncompromising and unsettled. Emigrants would not have chosen to come to country whose form of government was constantly on the brink of destruction. Those inhabitants loyal to America might have fled the land, giving up on the colonial government and searching for independence elsewhere. But the most powerful of all arguments is that nothing but independence could preserve the peace of the Continent. If reconciliation with Britain would have incurred, civil revolt might have erupted, the consequences of which would be far more fatal than any confrontation with Britain.The war for independence was a social revolution, and it forever changed American society (Dudley, 246). This astonishing transformation took place without industrialization or any other great forces we usually conjure up to explain “modernization.” It was the Revolution that was pivotal in this transformation. “It was the Revolution, more than any other single event, that made America into the most liberal, democratic, and modern nation in the world”(Dudley, 256). If we measure the radicalism by the amount of social change that actually took place then the American Revolution was not conservative at all. In fact, it not only altered the character of American society but affected the course of subsequent history. In 1760, America was a collection of disparate colonies concentrated on the Atlantic coast, economically underdeveloped and still taking for granted that society ought to be hierarchical. Roughly fifty years later, these territories had become a nearly continent-wide, world power that had fundamentally altered its society and its social relationships. The Revolution not only radically changed the personal and social relationships of people, but also destroyed aristocracy (Dudley, 258). Ordinary people were ...
