Strangely enough, people in Canada, Australia, and the UK, and in many other places also seem to believe that all people are created equal, that they are endowed with certain inalienable rights, and that among those are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. People in all modern democracies believe such things...and many of those democracies evolved within the British system, not outside of it.

It's not an exclusively American idea. It's not an idea embraced only in the USA. It's quite a common set of ideas, and such freedoms are found in many places where the USA has never attained any political dominion.

I've read some books about the American Revolution. My impression is that the key matter which triggered the war was the "taxation without representation" issue. It was a war triggered by the financial concerns of Yankee traders who were upset about British taxes on imports into North America. Those Yankee traders were mostly located in New England, specially around Boston, and it was around that region of the 13 states that the revolution began.

Once it did begin, it started a bitter war. As soon as a war is under way things get a lot worse, people get killed, property gets destroyed, and both sides become ever more embittered and ever more determined to wipe out the other.

The Declaration of Independence was written some time after the war started, about a year after, I believe, and many of the complaints in it have to do with matters that arose after the opening of hostilities...after serious battles had occurred. The language in the Declaration reflects the hardened attitudes created by that war...and many of the complaints expressed about the British have to do with things that occurred in wartime. The British had a long list of similar complaints about things the colonists had done, needless to say.

The whole thing could have been avoided, had not hardliners and very stubborn and arrogant people on BOTH sides driven it to the point of open warfare in 1775. The blame for that, in my opinion, falls about equally on the British crown and on a group of revolutionary fanatics like Sam Adams, who was a man absolutely bent on civil strife and revolution, no matter what the consequences. He was uninterested in productive negotiations with England, he wanted a war...and he got one.