How did the American Revolution go from a hissy fit by rich,bootlegging slaveown

Question:if the average person was unaffected by what the English were attempting to tax, how did it become "every man's fight for freedom"?

Best Answer - Chosen by Asker: if the average person was unaffected by what the English were attempting to tax, how did it become "every man's fight for freedom"?

A hissy fit, that's the first time I've heard it called that.

Well, it was predominantly a rich man's war, in the beginning. Boston was the center of it, and it was usually merchants, lawyers, and the occasional professional trouble maker (like Sam Adams) and smuggler (like John Hancock) who were making the initial complaints.

It became an everyman's war when people began getting hurt. And some of this has to do with the way we absorb news.

Newspapers are written with the assumption that the average person doesn't read beyond the first sentence. You have to "grab" the audience to get them to read further. If you create a poster or a handbill that has the word "Massacre" and a picture of British soldiers shooting into a crowd of civilians, you are bound to catch the attention of the reader. The fact that the soldiers were provoked and that the massacre killed exactly five people, needn't trouble the reader. So propaganda, that is the propagation of a particular idea, is an important part.

If you look at the frontier, forts like Detroit and Vincennes (in Indiana) may have commanders who are trying to incite the natives to attack and kill the people who have invaded their lands (American settlers) and separate them from their hair, in exchange for a nice bounty when the scalp is brought to the commander, this behavior is going to frighten some and anger others. A frontiersman may not give a hang about the fate of those in Boston, but threaten his kids, and there's a rifle, a knife, and a tomahawk ready to fight the redcoats.

In the farms and towns around the country, you have British soldiers and mercenaries who need to be fed. When they take the food from the farmer, there's a new soldier for the Rebellion. When a Lieutenant comes to a townsman's door and tells the owner that he has to feed and house himself and four of his men, and won't be paid for it, because it's his duty to the King, you have a new enemy of the King.

The other part of this is how fast news, particularly gossip, travels. You may have played a party game called Telephone, where everyone sits in a circle and one person whispers to the person next to them, and the message is passed along to each in turn, until the originator tells everyone how much it had changed from the time he or she said it until it got back to him or her. This is how news travels. The Boston Massacre is a good example, those five dead, coupled with the word Massacre, might have quickly multiplied that number so that it might have been 20 or 50 by the time it reached Savannah.
The same happens on the frontier. A small hunting party of 3 or 5 Shawnee, might have turned into a war party of 100 men by the time the news traveled from Louisville to Boonesborough.

In isolation, there is sometimes fertile ground for panic.

That was true before the Boston Massacre. Having people killed in that event angered the colonial population. Plus, the Intolerable Acts that were passed in response to punishment of British soldiers did affect the general population, as did the Quartering Act (did you really think the elite would let common soldiers live in their houses?), and the siezure of the Massachusetts judicial system.

I would check out writings by Howard Zinn, because he has many theories about this.