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Except they didn't. As David Friedman and many other Libertarian Scholars are fond of pointing out, the end-result of the American Revolution was not a transfer of power from the King of England to the Continental Congress, but rather a rectification of De Jure (on paper) authority with the reality on the ground.
A "rectification" settled by shooting the British army until they fled back to England.
The point is that a Venn diagram of the most wealthy and influential men in the colonies pre Boston Massacre in 1770 and post Constitutional Convention in 1787 is practically a circle, thier power didn't come from "shooting the British army until they fled back to England" they already had it.
"(We) Live Free or (You Will) Die" works great, I don't think anybody doubts that. The problem is that it's mythologised until people believe that standing up and declaring your willingness to die for freedom makes you free, rather than being able to back up that declaration with overwhelming and coordinated force.
This is why conservatives are constantly trying to do what the Left does (protests, pointing out hypocrisy, public mourning of horrible murders) and are baffled when they don't get the results the Left gets.
EDIT: Whatever power those men might have thought they had was on sufferance from the British until they were able to fight off the British, if you prefer to put it that way. If the British had put down the American Mutiny (as it might have been dubbed) then things would have been very different, and we would now agree post hoc that those wealthy and influential men in the colonies had been standing on unstable ground.
And this is where Friedman and his disciples would point out that "the myth" is true. There is a very real sense in wich being willing to die does in fact make make you free. Someone can put a gun to your head but they can't make you do anything if you are sincerely prepared to eat that bullet.
Nor would i say the right is "baffled" so much as we have different reasons and motives.
And I think that's very beautifully polished bullshit. "Free to die" is a very different kind of freedom from "Free to live a happy and prosperous life doing all the stuff you (plural) think I shouldn't do" and people are overwhelmingly interested in the latter. Presenting the former using the same word as the latter is somewhere between a category error and slippery rhetoric, depending on the speaker's motive.
If you are prepared to eat a bullet rather than obey, all you're doing is saving your killer time and potential future complications while they take your stuff, pour the ashes of your fathers in the river, and deface the temples of your Gods. As we see from the statue of Robert E Lee.
Personally I want to die fat and happy, surrounded by friends, disciples and twelve loving grandchildren who will further my beliefs and family story.
The latter is built on the former. Without the former, the latter disintigrates.
Because the former makes you fight well in war (a la Iran), or because the former by itself will grant you the latter?
Capacity to accept extreme sacrifices helps whether you are fighting or not fighting. I agree with you, I think, that such a capacity does not in and of itself guarantee victory, peace or prosperity, but the good life runs on sacrifice, and if individuals or collectives are not willing to make those sacrifices personally, they will sooner or later run out of other peoples' sacrifices, in a similar way to how socialists inevitably run out of other peoples' money.
Horatius accepts dying well with a spear in hand, facing the foe. Christian martyrs die well, refusing to fight on principle. Either of these are, I think, valid expressions of accepting sacrifice, of the sort durable peace and prosperity are built on. But what you seem to be pointing to in this thread is that there is a sort of illusory sacrifice, where mere indolence masquerades as principle: "not organizing and not compromising is my principle. How about a fruitless gesture instead?" I would point out that there's also a similar illusory sacrifice pursuing violence-for-its-own-sake; CatgirlKulak and the Israel-Palestine conflicts seem like good examples of this failure mode.
Sacrifice is necessary, but waste is not sacrifice, and an inability to distinguish the two leads to disaster. Are we not fighting because it is not time to fight, or are we not fighting because fighting would be scary? Are we not fighting because fighting is wrong, or are we not fighting because we are too comfortable?
I have a chronic argument running with @CapitalRoom and @The_Nybbler on this subject for some years now. They argue that the time to fight has passed us by, and seem to want either fighting now, or an admission that fighting will never happen. My position is that while the current position is miserable and undignified, we are in fact moving in the correct direction, and endurance continues to be the correct choice.
In your opinion, what does organizing look like? What does compromising principle look like?
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