The Revolution was prosecuted by imperfect individuals who had a mixture of motives, including the purely economic motives of businessmen who did not want to pay taxes and the political conflicts among the competing social classes in the colonies themselves. Yet self-rule was at the heart of it all. Self-rule had been the basis for the flourishing of these colonies; self-rule was the basis for their revolution; self-rule continued to be a central element in the American experiment in all the years to come.
