[OPINION] The American Rebellion - Rudyard Kipling

What is interesting about Kipling’s “The American Rebellion” is that it is really two poems jammed together by sheer brute force. The first half is Kipling the imperial lawyer making the strongest possible British case against the American Revolution: you let us fight France, you let us spend the money, you let us secure the continent, and then, once the danger was gone and the bill arrived, you suddenly discovered liberty. And that argument has _some_ merit because it is not completely Kipling just being a jingo-ist. Britain really had protected the colonies. Britain really had bad debts largely (but not wholey) caused by protecting the American collonies. The Revolution really did come after the French threat had been removed. But Kipling takes that real point and stretches it until it breaks IMO.

He treats the American argument as if it were just pure hypocrisy and that is just not how they thought. He barely admits the constitutional issue: that the colonists thought Parliament was claiming a new kind of power over them, and that they were defending old English liberties, not inventing freedom out of nowhere because "taxes are soooooooooooo annoying!" That is the big problem in the first half which is sharp, memorable, and historically crooked. Even the title, “The American Rebellion,” is Kipling being . . . well Kipling.

To Rudyard America is misbehaving naughty son. But then the poem changes. Once he gets to Valley Forge, the Delaware, the snow, the British dead, and the American dead lying in the same ground, the sneer drains out of him! The second half is a much better poem because it stops trying to win the argument he is having with people long since dead. It's Kipling the human poet writer who could really get into the emotional weight of history