So I was having a little debate earlier with an American friend about whether or not the American war of independence was primarily just a separatist movement or whether it also included strong elements of fundamental systematic class struggle.
From what I've seen it strikes me that things like the tea tax would have primarily affected the wealthier American colonials. The Stamp tax also seeming to be likely to primarily effect more middle and upper class type markets and businesses, most obviously things like newspapers thus motivating newspapers. Thus drumming up a lot of bad feeling among those likely to be reading such newspapers that would inevitably be predisposed to producing articles criticizing a tax that effected their business.
I understand that the number of people working as tenant farmers was much lower in the 13 colonies at the time but at the same the number of agricultural slaves in the south was much higher than in Great Britain itself and this doesn’t seem to have been an issue of actual contention.
So if I were to be a little cynical I’d suggest that much the American War of Independence was basically driven by American and British elites vying for control and their own interests. Is there anything to my argument or am I just pulling this out of my ass.
There was, first of all, a lot of participation across class lines by the Colonists. There were wealthy merchants like Robert Morris, southern planters like Patrick Henry, bourgeois and haute-bourgeois businessmen like Paul Revere. But there were also farmers and sons of farmers, like Joseph Plumb Martin in Pennsylvania and Henry Bedinger and the volunteers for the Beeline March from Virginia. While some of the wealthy were definitely affected by the Townshend Act taxes, the growing British response to colonial resistance to paying the taxes and the Boston Tea Party resulted in the "Intolerable" acts, which had not only new taxes but new impositions: the charter of Massachusetts and most of the government was dumped and a royal governor put in charge, trial of government officials could be done in English courts, ( instead of trial in Massachusetts ), the port of Boston was closed until the colonists paid for the Boston Tea Party tea, and British troops could be quartered anywhere the governor saw fit. The governor appointed was also Thomas Gage, a military man. This effect of this was beyond simple taxation and economic interest: it took away local government and replaced it with an official responsible only to the Crown, and that created resentment among all classes in the state. When the governor took the state gunpowder out of the armory ( which he had a perfect right to do) there was an immediate massive mob response, the Powder Alarm. Like the Great Fear in the early stage of the French Revolution, the Powder Alarm shows the population was already close to being up in arms and ready to fight. When that was met by military action, the other colonies became alarmed at what they saw could easily become their own fates, of being run by royal governors.
There were also grievances beyond Boston Bay . The end of the war with the French , in 1763, was followed by Pontiac's War- that promised further expensive campaigns in North America. The Proclamation of 1763 , that barred new settlement beyond the Alleghenies, was intended to pacify the Native nations, and did so. But it had been assumed by most of he colonists that, after the War, lands to the west would be opened. When they were not, there was great resentment- and that resentment was not only shared by wealthy planters but by anyone looking for land- and , in the 18th c. colonies, which were mostly dominated by farms, land was the basis of the economy and so the equivalent of money. This resentment went far deeper than wealthy merchants.
If there were very mixed classes fighting the Revolutionary War, though, it's very true that the revolution went no deeper than removal of British authority when it was over. The same elites who ran the colonies before continued to run them. And those elites were aware of the possibility of democracy taking root. Shay's Rebellion in Massachusetts was seen by people like Washington as a warning sign. If ex-soldiers in the Army could march to take control of the local courthouse in Springfield, MA in revolt against Boston elite rule, how many other disgruntled veterans might want to take up arms as well? Those fears were part of the motivation for the 1787 Constitutional Convention, where a stronger central government could be created to keep mob rule in its place.
Because the power did not devolve to the common people, really, many have said the Revolutionary War should be called something else than Revolutionary. They have a point- there was no Terror, no blood running in the streets. Slaves were slaves before, and were slaves after. But still, the actual revolt was not limited to elites, and not only powered by their interests. Nor , it might be added, could it be said that the British elites had an enormous desire to hang on to their property in the 13 Colonies. The big money in the British colonies was in the Caribbean, in the giant sugar plantations in places like Jamaica. Those never had a chance of revolting.
A good recent book for your question is War and Society in the American Revolution: Mobilization and Home Fronts, edited by John Resch & Walter Sargent Dekalb:Northern Illinois University Press, 2007.