What The American Patriots Feared Most

And how we failed our Founders.

Image created with In Adobe Photoshop with source image from Getty Images / Culture Club / Contributor

Table of Contents

• Intro

• The Empire Within The Empire

• The World’s First Corporate Bailout

• Tea, Corruption, And Monopoly

• Lessons For 2026

Intro

As Americans, we are told a familiar story in school about our country’s founding, albeit one that never ceases to capture our imaginations long after we have learned it.

Sick and tired of the British Empire’s taxes, and angry that the British Parliament, across the ocean in London, could levy them without proper representation of the colonies — “no taxation without representation” — the scrappy Americans rose against the “tyrannical” King George, fought a war for independence, and established the greatest Constitutional Republic the world had ever seen. That is the crux of it. That is what we remember most.

But obviously there is so much more to this story than what we learn throughout grammar school, high school, and perhaps even college. This piece hopes to shed some light on one such nugget of overlooked history.

The American Patriots of the late 18th century weren’t simply rebelling against the King. In fact, King George III wasn’t even that powerful, compared to the monster that Britain had unleashed upon the globe nearly 200 years earlier. It was a beast that had no real parallel in the history of the world up until that point – and has had no such parallel since. It was an “empire within an empire,” and the Patriots were right to fear it as much as they feared the monarch.