You mentioned that 'PERHAPS slavery would have ended MUCH sooner'.    There is no doubt slavery would have been abolished in 1832 when England outlawed the practice throughout the British Empire, by Act of Parliment not by any civil war.  That may have prompted a short lived rebellion in the southern colonies,  with no sympathy from northern or western colonys.

                      With the African slave trade ending in the 1830's we might be without some promient African Americans today, because their ancesters never left Africa, on the other hand what would society be like today if the massive casualties of the civil war had desendents. With about 600,000 killed during the war we might be looking at 30 to 40 million influencing American society over the last 155 years,  who were simply never born.

Just to respond to a few more things in the OP in more directly and in detail.

I really think you need to reevaluate the altruistic motivations you are giving GB for protecting the Indians. At that time GB and France had an uneasy truce that could break into open warfare at any time. In the French Indian war between GB and France the Indians were on the French side and made it very difficult and costly for GB to win. The Royal Proclamation of 1763 did NOT outlaw colonizing Indian land, it simply required its sale to be to Crown officials who would then sell it to whomever they wanted. It was a naked attempt by King George III to minimize rebellion among the Indians while at the same time providing the Crown with more direct control over the American Colonies and the speed of their growth (and who would become major land owners). 

He was neither "right" nor right in the head, and he eventually rested control of the empire to eldest son Prince of Wales George IV in a final relapse of his disease. (thought to be prophyria)

Even when he wasn't having psychosis, he was something of an arrogant prick* -he didn't listen very well to Britain's best strategic mind, Charles Cornwalis. If he had, he may not have lost the war. Even more ironic was the fact that losing made him more popular, for reasons I don't understand very well.

*(all royal family members tend to be, to some limited extent)

As we all learned in history class 1/3 of the colonists wanted to stay under the Crown, 1/3  wanted independence, and 1/3 didn't care.  I think at least in a few ways we could be better off under Britain but in MOST areas I prefer independence.

I don't mean to digress but the gun violence in America is WAY out of control.  You have 30,000 gun deaths a year in America while there's less than 200 a year in  the U.K.!! Even if you adjust for population that's less than a thousand a year in the U.K. compared to 30,000 a year here! NO ONE can argue that the U.K. isn't a safer place!  When there was a mass school shooting in the U.K. killing 16 they banned handguns! Where there is mass school shooting here they almost want to hand more guns out! That's INSANE!!

As far as the historical context goes the U.S. would've eventually gotten independence anyway since America far to big to be controlled from 1000s of miles away.  The British Empire is all but dead since  the age of imperialism is dead.  You can't go around taking countries over any more.

You wanna know what would've REALLY changed history? What if the people who didn't want slavery AT ALL in the 17th century got their way? Then no black slaves would have come here and it would have only been white indentured servants.  Then every famous black in America would've never existed here but been an African that we would've (most likely) never heard of.

The Native Americans just lived a too primitive life and they would've eventually had to modernize at least to some extent.  Did you guys hear what Tecumseh tried to do? He wanted to created a Native AMerican Nation where parts of Indiana and Ohio are now.  It was a confederation of different Indian nations.  He almost did it but the British bailed on him at the last minute.  Obviously they would've needed help from a European nation to do it and that COULD have been done because some European nations HATED the U.S. and they would've helped but it just never worked out.

<div>Being a Canadian, my perspective on this might help. Yes, the British made invading Native land illegal. I generally think this was a tongue in cheek, wink, wink, nudge ,nudge policy simply to keep the powerful (at the time)Iroquois nation on their side against the French. Yes they did side with the British in the revolutionary war and the war of 1812. Well, of course the British lost the revolutionary war yet the war of 1812 was essentially a stalemate. There are many disputes as to who won the war of 1812 but the simple fact is if we (Canadians and British) lost there would be no Canada. The truth is there are no independent native American states in Canada either.

This can also be disputed. Close to my hometown of Kingston Ontario is the Akwasasne reserve which straddles the New York Ontario border. In a sense this an autonomous territory but certainly not what the Mohawks or Iroquois were told or envisioned. England had no intention and did not respect native American rights.

That said, I don't think the outcome would have been that much different. The likelihood is that North America would have become a Parliamentary Democracy much like Canada and GB are now. Things in GB were certainly moving in that direction long before 1776.

It's funny, we Canadians pride ourselves on our Loyalty to the crown. The area I live in was inundated with Loyalists during the revolution. People who are descendants of these refugees are called United Empire Loyalists, proudly.

None of these facts take away from the spirit of what the American revolution meant for people who desired to live free around the world.

Fact: did you know that 33,000 to 55,000 Canadians (at the time they were known as British) took part in the American civil war (99% north) and 15 000 draft dodgers were treated as refugees and not forcibly returned.

The intertwined history of Canada and the United States is covered extensively in our public and secondary schools in Canada. We have differences but those differences are fewer than the similarities.

I'm not so sure Zeeboe about the living breathing constitution.&nbsp; I thought that's what the amendments were for. The U.S. seems to have the ability to change the constitution at will with good arguments(correct me if I'm wrong). We had to pry our constitution out the grasping hands of the British monarchy in 1981 (look at that year again 1981 not 1918). Needless to say we can change it when the need arises.

The main thing is to thank your lucky stars ( 50 for you) or maple leaves that we live in the countries we do. Thomas Paine is my hero.

 Anyway, if things had been different, then they would be different.

One can debate points of history which are and may always go unresolved yet nothing will change about the world in which we live.

Really though, as an alternate history buff, I would like to point out that George Washington's fondest desire was to be moved from the colonial army to the regular army. Had that happened, he might have served with honor and distinction in India or somewhere else or not but whatever.

Any other change would similarly change the outcome of history in some way.

Past that, I think that it is in order to consider the economic picture in greater detail.

The colonies were not simply a thing where people were sent over to sink or swim. Rather, each colony was established as a (hopefully) profitable business. As in the Massachusetts Bay Company. Or the East India Trading Company.

Basically, they were intended as a way to create a perpetual income for the investors who started them and the families who came after them. Past the initial investment and whatever return would have been appropriate, they were expected to continue producing capital for the nation of England pretty much forever. All the better to continue expanding the empire.

Sure, England ran into a bunch of wars in the decades leading up to the revolution. They wanted to pay for those wars not with the real wealth of England but with the perpetual source of capital that the colonies were intended to be.

OK, the colonists played a role in the French Indian War. But not automatically all other wars. Why should the colonists pay for a war in, say, India? That is right, we should not have been expected to pay a pension for the widows of the Black Hole of Calcutta. It was not our problem.

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

Now, about the whole taxation without representation thing, this too goes to the idea that we existed for no other purpose than to be sucked dry of the fruits of our labors.

OK, everyone has heard of the Boston Tea Party but how many people know the whole story?

For comparison, let me posit that the East India company had been buying tea at $0.90/kg and selling it in the colonies at $1.00/kg.

Well, mercenaries for the East India Company had beat the tar out of some local warlord and basically taken his tea crop. All that they had to pay was the cost of transport. So they reasoned that they could sell it at half price in Boston and reap unusual profits.

So we are looking at them getting tea to Boston for $0.03/kg and telling the colonists that since they had a huge windfall, they were going to pass the savings along and tea would now cost $0.50/kg.

However, even back then, news traveled fast enough that that did not play well with the colonists. If the powers that be had been willing to charge $0.05/kg, then things would probably have not gone down as they did.

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

Another example would be the fact that the British government had done as much as possible to outlaw the idea of a metals industry in the colonies.

Well, back then, iron ore was something that was found in swamps and the facilities to turn it into solid iron took up less than an acre of land and lots of wood to burn (which we were not hurting for access to). Also, it was impractical to ban black smithing.

Even so, the British passed a bunch of laws on the production of metals.

You could not own a metal shovel unless it was made in England. So the colonists made shovels from wood. As lame as a wooden shovel is, it was cheaper to buy a new wooden shovel every week than to have a metal shovel imported from England at a lordly price.

How about the tax on windows? Many people who had had windows in their houses before that went into effect simply bricked up the windows and did without because it was nothing more than a way to bleed us of the products of our labor.

I don't think anyone would disagree that the Native Americans got screwed BIG TIME in more ways than one. Not only did they never get the Native American nation that Tecumseh tried to created but around 90% of their population was wiped from the 1600s to the present!

In that same time period the colonists(whites) population went up several THOUSAND percent!

So if powerful aliens came to earth (like in Independence Day) and wiped us all out then they would be RIGHT?

 This sounds a lot like a job for Cpt. Hindsight 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coon_2:_Hindsight

Of course, humans use our superior technology to exterminate species every day. Who is to say we are wrong? Extermination only becomes immoral when the damage affects the exterminators.

The dead are not able to argue for what is moral.

You raise several issues but lets get a few things straight regarding Indians and slavery which have to be taken into account in any discussion.

If the Indians had united against the Europeans from the beginning the history of the Americas would be much different and I mean for both continents. Instead the Indians were more than happy to join with one group of Europeans against other Indians. Cortez won because of the Indians who sided with him against the Aztecs. Further north the Indians were more than happy to side with the French or the English. They jumped into European rivalries. And in doing so earned the animosity of the winners when they lost. They lost the French and Indian War where George Washington cut his teeth. You can see this all through the Indian wars in the latter half of the 19th c. where some tribes would help the US Army against other tribes.

Specific to the Indians siding with the British, maybe they did act in their own best interest but they also lost along with the Brits who then GAVE the Brit territorial claims to the colonies against the interests of the Indians.

Slavery is proof positive there are no prophets of god because none of them condemned slavery. So lets not get too excited about an institution that was old and established when recorded history began. In the long view the recent and short-lived aversion to slavery is the abberation.

In this regard it is correct that in the late 18th c. the Brits turned against slavery. Prior to that change it was the Brits who introduced slavery into the colonies. And they were not particular as to where they got their slaves as the treatment of indentured servants, transported prisoners and chattel slaves was not all that different. The difference being for the former it ended after some number of years and did not for the latter. It appears the Brits turned against slavery simply because of the industrial revolution and that is why the Northern states were against it. Forget the moral crap; it was economics. The Latin American end of slavery was more due to throwing out the Spaniards than ending slavery as any peon would have told you.

The real problem for the colonies is that they were offered representation in Parliament and could have had it. Their numbers would not have been sufficient to make their interests felt unless they traded their votes for or against the interests of the established political coalitions in Parliament. And in taking sides there was no guarantee of being on the winning side. Picking sides required taking a political interest in things of no interest whatsoever. It also put the colonies into the thick of centuries old European politics and wars over things that had no interest or bearing on them or their lives.

The short answer is, there was no way to make representation in parliament work. As such they remained colonies solely under the authority of the king who used them as part of his foreign policy which lead to the long list of grievances in the declaration of independence. Perhaps if he had invented sort of a commonwealth status a century before its time the war could have been avoided.

So for the Indians they brought it on themselves by taking sides and losing. The end of slavery was a rather odd turn around of millenia of custom and in hindsight was ended in the worst possible way. The beginning of the end of the stigma of slavery was not until the civil rights legislation a century after slavery was ended. That is longer than any place else in the world.

As for rich colonists wanting to keep slavery, they were not rich until after the invention of the cotton gin. There was only one cash crop, tobacco. Cotton was a required crop leading to canvas for the sails of British ships. Before the cotton gin there was not enough profit on cotton to make people rich so there had to be cheap labor. And that is what went into the civil war, tariff protection on northern cloth and none for southern cotton. Even if rich that kept profits low and required very cheap labor. After the end of slavery there were even cheaper sharecroppers. On one hand there is the theory of the evil of slavery. On the other hand there is the practice that life is harder for sharecroppers.

Everything I have written is not clearly thought out and certainly not well presented. It is a summary of what I have found which barely scratches the surface of several complex political and economic issues. I have never had the time or interest to dig in further. If it really interests you then you could make a career in the field. The only thing to avoid is moral absolutes as they solve nothing and in the case of slavery went from pro to anti in hardly a single generation -- that is not an absolute in anyone's book.

Its been a while since I posted, but what the hell. I'll just jump right in, shall I?

You are both right and wrong, in my opinion. I spent some time pondering this a while back, questioning the common ideas about good and evil. I also came to the conclusion that people were not made up of "good" and "evil."

However, throughout later high school and college (so far) I have been radically changing my world-view, and I think the most accurate values are as follows:

Moral status is not like skin color, where some are black and others white, and some are in-between. But good and evil do exist. They are not character traits, but adjectives which apply to actions. The more I think about it, the more I realize blanket statements without qualifiers do not work, such as: killing is evil.

Instead, unjust, intentional killing is evil. Actions can be good or evil, even if they bring about the opposite end effect. People all have both good and evil in them. A person is said to be good when most of his or her actions are good, and vice versa. People can have opinions, and what is right or wrong depend on the situation, but the fundamental principle of doing well by others is the purpose of good, and harming others, the purpose of evil. The debate about what qualifies exactly as good or evil is a lengthy and difficult one, and I will not go into it here and now. But I will say, I believe people all inherently have the same capacity to understand good and evil, and that disagreements or differences of opinion are almost always caused by some lack of understanding or missing information on one sides part.

The most important point: Actions can be good or evil, and everyone has the capacity for both good and evil in them.