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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Neonchameleon" data-source="post: 8998751" data-attributes="member: 87792">There are two people who were primarily responsible on the British/American side that ordered the actions that lead to that war. The first was the Governor was explicitly acting without the knowledge of the government (which casts its own light on the reasonableness of George III). The second was a young officer who then found an opportunity to ambush French troops and then got his force captured.While I accept the governor might have been acting against British interests it's legitimate to see him as British responsibility I find it much harder to say the same about the young and ambitious officer who actively used his own initiative and ordered the ambush that started the war and then got captured for it. He was, after all, George Washington.And I find it a bad case of double standards to blame Britain for a governor that ordered the actions that lead to the war and refuse to accept responsibility for the person who made the decisions and ordered the actions that actively started the war - or to refuse to accept that George Washington himself should primarily be considered a colonist.Further, as you were talking about the reasonableness of George III I don't find it an unreasonable position either that taxes for defence are legitimate or that when a war was started by a colonist and a governor acting against instructions for the crown to consider that it was dragged into the war.There is a lot to be said here, of course, about how people shouldn't be governors and have strong financial interests; Dinwiddie was acting not as a colonial governor so much as he was an agent of the Ohio Company founded by two of George Washington's half brothers and Robert E Lee's grandfather. This is very much corruption - and the Ohio Company was very much a colonist enterprise. So even though I fully accept Dinwiddie as being not a colonist the reason he acted the way he did was that he had been corrupted by influential and wealthy colonists and was acting in their interests.Blaming the Americans for starting the war when of the two people who gave the orders one was George Washington himself and the other was following the interests of the colonists over that of the British crown is not something I consider remotely unreasonable.And while on the subject given that the war was started in significant part by a governor in the pay of wealthy colonists trying to ensure that being a governor was a paid position is a relatively reasonable way to try to prevent that happening again. And yet it's something you pick out as objectionable.</blockquote>

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