I'll back up some and say that some Americans thought there was _a_ legitimate debt and they thought they should have full representation in Parliament to debate how much the debt was and how it should be paid.
I don't know a whole lot about the situation and most of what I think I know comes from secondary sources. I find that the attitude of American apologists and British apologists are very different and their facts seem to be rather different too. British apologists say that whatever trade restrictions the Americans had during the war, they had it worse with independence and it took them a long time to recover.
I don't know about the details, but I get the impression a lot of the argument is about moral issues. In that context I say that if the colonists were going to be part of the British Empire then they had an obligation to pay their taxes, and Britain had an obligation to give them a voice in Parliament to explain their positions and to vote. As it turned out they did not on average want to be part of the British Empire under the conditions that Britain allowed.
It wasn't simply that the American colonists didn't think that the Crown's war debt was in any way a legitimate call upon them (you've got to understand how wars were fought and funded in the 18th Century, when professional armies took to the field, supported from stocked arsenals and magazines, with little or no call upon the rest of the nation) but that H.M. government didn't undertake the kinds of military actions the colonists actually
wanted, which was principally to drive the French and the recalcitrant Indian tribes out so that the American colonists could push their own settlements further into the continent.
Parliament and the Crown had the "big picture" in mind, and that included maintaining good trading relations with the tribes along the Great Lakes and in the Ohio River basin. The colonists' acquisitive aspirations threatened this, so it's not really possible to speak of those colonists as having considered themselves under any kind of moral "
obligation" at all.
They weren't, after all, given any voice whatsoever in setting those British Empire "big picture" objectives and policies, and were being very much thwarted in their own ambitions thereby.
Beyond that, it's wrong to speak of "
whatever trade restrictions the Americans had during the war" as if these were merely wartime exigencies. They weren't. Those trade and other restrictions were applied against the American colonists under the aegis of
mercantilism and require a helluva lot more consideration here.
All Americans know about the time-honored practice of using remote rustic areas to hide whiskey distilleries, and wandering in the woods of Appalachia one can easily come across the remnants of once-flourishing stills that had been discovered decades before by the Revenooers and smashed to uselessness.
Under the Royal government of these American colonies, the manufacture of
stonewear was a crime. The colonists were supposed to purchase such stuff from manufacturers in Great Britain. Simple porous clay pottery (about what one sees in a flowerpot) could lawfully be made here, but not the hard, durable, watertight stuff preferred as common houseware in that era.
So in places that were once wilderness in the old colonies can be found today the remains of secret potteries where criminalized ceramics were thrown, glazed, and fired for the American domestic market.
A number of manufactures and imports were forbidden the American colonists, even when there was no state of war obtaining. The Americans were supposed to be a
captive market, able to purchase only from sources in Great Britain. To this end, H.M. government did much to prevent the colonists from developing trade within and between their colonies, too, so there was a deliberate policy to keep specie - coins -
out of America. It was understood that without hard currency to facilitate trade, exchange would be more readily funneled through the ports and merchants of the motherland.
Force the colonists to dicker by way of barter. So much weight of tobacco for this, so much dried cod for that, this man's note-of-hand for such, another guy's I.O.U. for something else. Keep the colonists' commerce screwed up and inefficient.
How the hell do you think the Spanish dollar came to be the
de facto (and only eventually the
de jure) unit of currency for these United States? The pillar dollar struck in the Spanish governor's mint in Havana came into the American colonies by way of wholly illegal trade to take the place of the shillings and pounds that Parliament did its best to keep out of the colonies they wanted to victimize.
To speak of any alleged "moral obligation" on the part of the American colonists is to ignore the decades during which Parliament and the Crown put the economic screws to those colonists. In the musical
1776, the authors put the following through the character of Benjamin Franklin:
"Never was such a valuable possession so stupidly and recklessly managed than this entire continent by the British crown. Our industry discouraged, our resources pillaged...."Though not drawn from Franklin's own writings. this line rings true because this attitude was indeed prevalent at that time. Read Paine's
Common Sense and other contemporary pamphlets.
The costs of remaining "
part of the British Empire under the conditions that Britain allowed" were simply too damned high for whatever minimal benefit that might accrue, and the colonists understood that.
