The first half of the 1770s saw a meteoric shift in public opinion on both sides of the Atlantic, from an unquestioned confidence in the status of Britain’s American colonies to a widespread acceptance that it was time for the United States to become an independent nation. What was politically unimaginable in 1770 had become politically inevitable by 1776.

Mackinac Center Director of Research Michael Van Beek joins the Overton Window Podcast to discuss how American independence became an acceptable idea even in England.

“The colonists wanted what they viewed as their rights as British citizens, as British subjects,” Van Beek says. “Being a colonist, in their view, meant that they should have all the same rights that a Londoner had at the time. What the colonists wanted was a restoration of the rights that they thought they were owed and had naturally as British citizens. And so in a way it was a conservative kind of movement. They wanted to go back to the way that things had been, and they felt the acts of the British — especially after the Seven Years War or French and Indian War — were evidence that things were changing, that their rights as British citizens were under threat.”

The causes of the American Revolution go far beyond the Taxation Without Representation slogan that “we teach to schoolchildren,” Van Beek notes, but the slogan also points to critical questions about westward expansion, property rights, and even war.

“The idea that the colonists could be taxed and be forced to pay the British government without having any impact or input on that, without having someone representing their interest in the Parliament that was making these decisions, was an affront to the colonists. And it wasn’t just about taxation either. There were other policies by the British that the colonists believed they should be involved in because of their rights as British citizens.

“So for instance, the British sent armies into the colonies and had standing armies there. That wasn't completely unheard of or illegal. But in the colonists’ minds, they thought that they should have a say in whether or not these armies are permitted in their colonies and whether or not they need to supply and support those armies as well,” says Van Beek.

“They were in a sense operating as dual citizens,” he says. “They definitely viewed themselves primarily as as British subjects. They inherited by natural right all of the privileges and the rights that any British citizen had. And they did have other duties to their local colony and to their charter. They managed their internal affairs that way. But I think ultimately they would say that their fundamental political rights were rooted in being British subjects.”

Britain’s need to recoup some of the expenses it had run up to expel France from the New World upset a longstanding balance between the prosperity of the colonies and the financial needs of the king. This conflict between central and distributed authority would persist in America long after the king was gone.

“In a lot of ways the Civil War was the culmination of a debate about the dynamic between states’ rights and the federal government’s authority,” says Van Beek. “And the colonists face this same kind of dynamic, the same debate about how we organize the colonies, how we coordinate their efforts in a way that is beneficial for all of the individual colonies but also does not usurp their sovereignty and take away their self-governing features. That's one of the reasons why we had a failed attempt initially with the Articles of Confederation.”

Ideas on government spread widely during the period of independence, thanks to the explosion of print media and strong spiritual expressions from the pulpit.

“Newspapers, magazines and journals often would print sermons from famous preachers who could gain notoriety throughout the colonies by the impact of sermons that got passed around,” Van Beek says. “It was fertile ground for new ideas, for political debate; and the colonists at the time were debating these kinds of issues. What are their natural rights? What kinds of rights should they have under British rule? What balance of power should exist between the local colonial charter and the British Empire?”

Van Beek sees these questions still informing policy debates in 2026.

“It is related to our work at the Mackinac Center as a state-based think tank,” he says. “At this moment, after 250 years, the republican nature of our government is that it balances power between the states’ authority and the federal government’s. There is so much confusion about which authority is responsible for what policy or which issue — partly because the federal government’s authority and scope has grown so dramatically, and that has come at the expense of the states. But the states still play a really important role in American governance, and they play a really important role in the general welfare of the public, of people's day-to-day lives. State government impacts people in a very real way, I think more so than what the federal government does. So I would like people to be more aware of the republicanism of the American governance system and take more interest in what their state governments are doing, because they are really important government entities.”

Listen to the full conversation on the Overton Window Podcast.

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