Violence isn’t unknown in American political history.

 Violence isn’t unknown in American political history. 

The 19th century saw fistfights in Congress and riots at election time in major American cities. Until well into the 20th century,
 

When war with Britain broke out in 1775, American society fractured along numerous faultlines. Rather than being waged ‘by a united American people’, Taylor writes, the War of Independence quickly turned into a civil war that divided families and neighbours and unleashed local violence more extreme than military battles. ‘

A plundered farm,’ he observes, ‘was a more common experience than a glorious and victorious charge.’ ‘The whole country,’ the American general Nathaniel Greene wrote of the Southern back country, ‘is in danger of being laid waste by the Whigs and Torys, who pursue each other with as much relentless fury as beasts of prey.’
 

The American War of Independence wasn’t the only uprising for liberty in these years. In Peru, a Jesuit priest who took the name Tupac Amaru, after an Inca king, led a native rebellion to drive out the Spanish. By the time it was suppressed in 1783, 100,000 natives and 10,000 Spaniards had died. And, of course, there was the slave revolution of the 1790s that established the hemisphere’s second independent nation, Haiti (to which the US refused to grant diplomatic recognition until 1862, an early example of the distinction between good and bad revolutions).

Given the large slave majorities in their populations – 50,000 white West Indians compared to 275,000 slaves – Caribbean elites desperately needed British protection. Slavery affected British policies as well. Once France entered the war on the American side in 1778, the British government’s most pressing concern was to prevent the capture of lucrative Caribbean colonies. London despatched more reinforcements to the West Indies than to the mainland. And while the war on the mainland effectively ended with the British surrender at Yorktown in 1781, it continued in the West Indies until a year later, when a fleet commanded by Sir George Rodney defeated the French navy and saved British rule in Jamaica. Overall, Taylor writes, key West Indian sugar islands such as Jamaica and Barbados were ‘far more important’ to Britain than the rebellious American colonies.