Could I ask what book are you reading that claims the British were going to outlaw slavery almost 60 years before they actually did?

Let's start off by analyzing your question. What do you hope to gain by declaring someone a good guy or a bad guy in history? If it's simply to declare our modern moral superiority - or inferiority - to the people of the past, there's really no point. They had their failings, as do we. If you want to analyze how the memory of the past is used in modern society - like, say, uncritical praise of the "Founding Fathers" by bad political commentators looking to make a stupid point - then we're closer to being on the right track. I'll address your question from the latter perspective.

Of course, real life, sadly, is not Star Wars or The Lord of the Rings. There rarely are people who openly ally with evil, or give such clear hints to their crapulence that opposing them is reflexive and easy. In this specific example, both the American revolutionaries and the British had valid, diametircally opposed, legal and philosophical underpinnings to their positions. Both the American and British militaries had people that conducted themselves with restraint and adhered to the rules of the sharply limited warfare of the day. Both also had people that committed acts of unrestricted violence that would likely had landed them in front of a war crimes tribunal today.

To address some of your points:

• The British empire had taken some steps to limit slavery before the war. The Mansfield Decision (1772) declared that slavery did not exist in England itself, and created the precedent that the Crown could legally ban the practice of slavery. This upset a great many people, including slaveowners in British colonies like Virginia, South Carolina, and Jamaica. For some, this was a major reason for supporting independence. The British made further offers of emancipation-for-service during the war, but these were purely military expedients. In at least some cases, British officers re-enslaved black soldiers and sold them for a tidy profit to Jamaica planters at the end of the war.

While the British did abolish slavery across the empire decades before the United States, many historians (stemming from Eric Williams, Capitalism and Slavery) are quick to point out that slavery had stopped being as massively profitable by the 1820s. While we are not here to argue counterfactuals and alternate histories - that's against the sub's rules - I think we can safely say that the introduction of cotton cultivation in the American South would have been a complicating factor.

• In 1763, the British government formally announced that American colonists should only settle on the seaboard side of the Appalachian Mountains. This was a major point of contention for many colonists, who found themselves trapped in coastal communities where all the land was already owned by established families. Capping frontier expansion kept the peace with native tribes in the interior, but killed the dream of upward mobility through land ownership that had attracted tens of thousands to the colonies in the first place. It's impossible to say if the British and their colonists would have honored the 1763 proclamation for long, but every bit of evidence from Anglo-American colonization efforts indicates that they would not. Again, counterfactuals, but relevant if you're trying to make a bigger point about long-term American bad guys.

• The Americans were not pissed off about a burdensome tax on tea, or stamped paper goods, or any of the other taxes Parliament passed between the end of the Seven Years' War and Revolution. In fact, taxed tea was actually cheaper than the smuggled stuff. The reason most political-minded Americans opposed taxation at one point or another was the constitutional principle behind the taxes. Literate, Englightened, political-minded people in the 18th century Anglosphere viewed much of English history as the rise of Parliament, and assumed that this rise was just, right, and natural. Parliament, at its simplest, stood for governing with the consent of the governed, particularly in matters of taxation and property. The English Whigs - the liberal party that many Americans identified with - prided themselves on the limits placed upon their monarch and their government; the English monarch, for all the might of his armies and fleets, could not seize the poorest man or his meager property without some degree of due process. The principle of no taxation without representation was central, almost sacred, to Whig thought. American Whigs were horrified by the fact that Parliament had decided to tax the internal economies of the colonies, despite the fact that the colonies had no representation within Parliament. British Whigs claimed that Parliament, whose districts had fallen wildly out of alignment with where people actually lived in Britain, offered direct representation to no one, and that all Britons the world over were virtually represented by a Parliament made of the best and brightest subjects of the empire.

Did American concerns about British governmental overreach justify a minority of them taking up arms, attacking royal soldiers and facilities, and breaking the colonies away from the empire? Maybe. Did the revolutionaries create a society that normalized and celebrated white supremacy in a way more intense than the British empire it did at the same time? Arguably (remember, these same British went on conquer India, and governed there with great brutality for another century). Were there losers of the American Revolution outside of those killed in battle and in the halls of Parliament and Westminster? Absolutely. Rather than trying to pass a black-and-white historical judgement, you'd be better served trying to understand the motivation and actions of those on both sides of the war.

Sources and Further Reading

Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution

Jack P. Greene, The Constitutional Origins of the American Revolution

Maya Jasanoff, Liberty's Exiles

Edmund S. Morgan, Inventing the People: The Rise of Popular Sovereignty in England and America

Simon Schama, Rough Crossings: Britain, the Slaves, and the American Revolution

Alan Taylor, The Internal Enemy

A follow on question, hopefully it doesn't require it's own thread - but I've heard that the British people in general supported the revolutionaries, are refused to fight against them, hence why the British required German mercenaries. Is that true?

As a side question... Was the British military 'good'? How common were war crimes in the War for Independence and were the British more or less likely to commit atrocities than the Americans?

Oh boy, a question I feel qualified enough to answer! I've lurked here a while but today's my lucky day as you've asked a question that ties-in with my dissertation subject; namely the motivations behind Loyalism in the American Revolution.

I think that, before tackling the issue of just who the 'bad guys' were in the whole thing, it's best to adjust one's perceptions of the conflict: I'd argue that the Revolution is better characterised as a civil war between British citizens. It most certainly was not, initially, fought as a means to win independence for the United States; the very notion of independence was a contentious one within the Continental Congress. There were multiple attempts at conciliation by colonial representatives, such as Joseph Galloway's (rejected) a 'Plan for Union' in 1774, which intended to incorporate the Colonies as self-ruling entities remaining in the British Empire.

The population itself was highly divided, with John Adams himself estimating (perhaps with undue generosity toward the Loyalists) that colonists' convictions were split evenly in thirds between Patriots/Whigs, Loyalists and the unaligned/neutral.

The war itself testifies to this; popular American historical narratives downplay the role of Loyalists in the conflict; it doesn’t seem to be common knowledge that 20,000 colonists, at the war’s end, opted to forfeit all their land and property by fleeing overseas with the British. The British Southern Strategy was based on utilising Southern Loyalists, which were perceived as numerous, in their war effort. Much of the fighting in the South was done by militias on both sides, with the Battle of Kings Mountain being famous for not having had a single regular present on either side. Loyalist leaders like David Fanning (highly recommend reading his book; https://archive.org/details/narrativeofcolon00fann) became infamous for waging a brutal guerilla war against the Patriots (which saw both sides killing the family members of opposing participants).

Finally we can't talk about the divided nature of the colonies without addressing the whites of religious/ethnic minorities, African American slaves and Native Americans, who all, largely, favoured the British. I feel that I do need to be careful in not portraying British intentions regarding these groups as benevolent rather than pragmatic, so please do bear in mind that where British policies seem to be somewhat progressive, it's seldom because of humanitarian concerns.

Let's start with religious/ethnic minorities. Perhaps the one group that gave the Patriots the biggest bloody nose were the Quebecois or French-Canadians. At the conclusion of the Seven Years War, the British had committed to respect the Canadians' language, religion and legal system (meaning Quebec remained under French legal code, and conducted trials without juries). This was a source of tension between the authorities and British subjects in the Thirteen Colonies, who had hoped for a more forceful annexation of the French possessions and to 'anglicise' them.

In spite of these divisions, the Patriots were still optimistic enough to launch their first major offensive of the war against Quebec, with the expectation that the French there would join them in fighting to overthrow the British. Oddly enough, the French Catholics remained loyal to the Protestant Crown; figuring that the devolution of power to English colonists, or their being ascendant within an independent nation, would likely lead to an erosion of their rights protected by the British. The Patriot forces were repelled at the Battle of Quebec.

The roots of Native American affiliation with the British again stem from the end of the Seven Years War. At the conclusion of the conflict, the British government implemented a 'Royal Proclamation Line of 1763,' demarcating the Thirteen Colonies, along the Appalachians, from the Ohio Territories and forbidding any settlement beyond it. The purpose of the line was to prevent infringement on Native American territories and prevent future (potentially expensive) conflicts. Given that the whole appeal of the Americas to colonists was the prospect of cheap virgin land for colonisation, this move was obviously deeply unpopular with British colonials.

When war broke out between the rebels and the Crown, Native Americans were perplexed by the struggle. The Patriots officially urged the Indians to stay out of the matter (I’m searching somewhat fruitlessly for the quote). The British weren’t so reluctant to make use of potential allies and the bulk of Native American tribes chose to side with the British when push came to shove; eager for protection from colonial settlement and to regain lost lands. It bears mentioning, however, that some tribes did align with the patriots and the Iroquois Confederacy split on the matter. Unfortunately for those natives that did side with the Crown, Patriot reprisals were brutal and both sides found their settlements raised and civilians murdered in harsh frontier warfare. The Americans’ final victory left the natives as the one group that perhaps suffered most from the Revolution.

Finally we have the slaves. The colonial governor of Virginia, one Lord Dunmore, was quick to identify slaves as a critical weakness within the American war effort in the southern colonies. Dunmore concluded that, if the British could attract slaves to come over in sufficient numbers, the rebels would be placed under tremendous economic strain. He enacted a proclamation stating that any slave who found his way to British lines would be freed if they were “able and willing to bear arms.” Ultimately, however, the majority of the approximately 20,000 Africans who made their way over to the British were used for labour rather than in a combat role; whether this was because of prejudice or a fear of arming blacks, I can’t really say. An American response wasn’t forthcoming, with the rebel leadership, many of whom were slave owners themselves, being reluctant to enact emancipating policies. Nevertheless, the success of the British policy mandated some kind of response, which ultimately forced Washington to issue a similar proclamation of his own.

The final and often unconsidered groups I’d like to deal with are the various religious/ethnic minorities present among free whites in the colonies. The following groups were more likely than not to align with the British; recently arrived immigrants, foreign minorities such as Dutch inhabitants of New York (which was a Loyalist stronghold), Anglicans and Quakers; the latter of which suffered significant repression from Patriot Committees of Public Safety; which punished them with tarring and feathering and property confiscations.

(Cont. in reply)

Follow-on question: I've seen people compare the tea tax to a wifi tax for today's equivalence, which seems odd to me. Is there a fair equivalence to compare the tea tax to something today?

Related/follow-up question: I've heard the claim that the 'real' reason for the American Revolution was the realization among the founding fathers that America simply didn't need Britain to be great power in its own right. So it wasn't so much that Britain was "oppressive", rather that "we're better off being independent". Is there any documentation to that effect?