I mean, it is funny that so much of our national identity is wrapped up in the American Revolution yet we are rarely ever taught what it was actually about. Forget all that nonsense about freedom from tyranny, in practice the government of the early United States was indistinguishable from the colonial administration, and indeed perhaps the greatest contribution of the revolution made to advancing the cause of liberty was to inspire the French to revolt with a far more radical stance which has had much farther ranging effects on politics the world over. The real reason the colonists revolted was because they were hungry for native land, after all most of them had only moved here in the first place because of the promise of vast tracts of open space just waiting to be settled, and with the British victory in the Seven Years' War and subsequent seizure of all French territory in North America, they believed that the gateway west was now wide open. However, the British insistence on maintaining the treaties the native tribes had signed with the French left the colonists bottled up near the coast, an intolerable situation as the vast majority of that land had already been claimed by a handful of wealthy plantation owners, and there were innumerable young men yearning to strike out into the frontier and stake their own claim, never mind all the people already living there. Admittedly, it is unlikely that the British could have maintained the borders as they were for long anyway, and there were certainly plenty of British investors who saw opportunities out west that they wanted to claim for themselves rather than allowing the colonists to get there first. But fundamentally, that's what the Revolutionary War was about, two groups of white men fighting over who had the right to take over native lands.