American Revolution

AMERICAN REVOLUTION. For the Left, the American Revolution has always been problematic. It opened a new phase of bourgeois republican transformation. It pulsated with upheaval and confrontation on class lines, from the Boston shoemaker Ebenezer Macintosh leading the first Stamp Act protests of 1765 to the farmers’ rebellion of 1786 named for his fellow Yankee Daniel Shays. In some sense, it was anti-colonial. But the Revolution also frustrates. Dr. Samuel Johnson of London posed part of problem with his acid quip of 1776: “How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of Negroes?”

Writing in 1814, Lord Byron caught another dimension. Byron’s bitter Ode to Bonaparte bemoaned Napoleon’s betrayal of the French Revolution and mocked the emperor’s fall. In the last verse, Byron found inspiration in “the first, the last, the best, the Cincinnatus of the West,” who “bequeathed the name of Washington—to make men blush there was one but one.” That the American Revolution did create an enduring republic, and that the Revolution’s greatest military hero did not subvert the republic should not be denigrated. Between them, these two great figures of English letters, Johnson and Byron, posed the question American radicals have faced ever since—whether to praise the Revolution’s achievements or condemn the whole American enterprise for its shortcomings and outright failures. But like most major historical events, the Revolution was not a matter of either/or. It was both/and, old problems reaching their end and finding resolution, and new questions emerging. It also was a matter of old questions that refused to die.

A tired cliché holds that this Revolution was “conservative” and its French counterpart was “radical.” It makes more sense to see both of those revolutions, plus the great revolution that created the free black republic of Haiti out of the sugar-growing slave hell that had been St. Domingue, and the national revolutions against Spain’s western hemisphere empire as a general crisis of the early modern world, including both Europe and its colonial claims. All were transforming; each generated both opportunities and problems, in intellectual, political, and social terms. All raised hopes that they did not fulfill. None brought Heaven on Earth. The North American events overthrew a monarchy, vindicated republicanism, and replaced subjection with citizenship as the basic organizing idea of public life. Those events challenged slavery and cracked it open, but did not defeat it. They raised but did not resolve both the idea of human equality and the question of “belonging” within the United States. They also created a new empire, bent on taking complete control of what lay in its path, over enormous spaces and their people. For the Republic’s self-sovereign citizenry the Revolution meant vast opportunity. For its enslaved people the Revolution offered possibility but it also brought dreams still denied. For Native people it meant dealing with the hostile new power that had arisen in the east.

Popular belief presents the revolutionaries as bewigged gentlemen in tricorn hats, frock coats or blue uniforms, and knee breeches. But Ebenezer Macintosh would not have been out of place among Parisian sans-culottes of the Year II. In his personality and outlook, Samuel Adams might have recognized Robespierre, Trotsky, Che Guevara, and Nelson Mandela as kindred spirits. The Sons of Liberty, who coordinated direct resistance during the crisis with Britain, formed a popular leadership and seem much like a modern revolutionary party. Anti-monarchical ideas that reached back to Cromwellian England came to the surface during the crisis, especially in New England. American Republican thinking inherited elements not only from the English Revolution but also from Renaissance Italy and the ancient world and amplified them all. On all these counts, participation, leadership, economics, and ideology, we see already an event that belongs among the world’s great revolutions.

Yet the right-wing interpretation that this was a revolution to conserve has its truth. The Revolution began as an ancien régime revolt among settler-colonists against unwanted change. In 1763 Britain’s empire spread from the Mississippi River to the Ganges. Britain formed the leading edge of capitalist transformation. Its rulers asserted power over the colonies “in all cases whatsoever” that a French or Spanish monarch might envy, except that it belonged to the king-in-parliament, not to the king alone. Those rulers held after 1763 that Americans were just as fully British subjects as anybody within “the realm” of England, Scotland, and Wales. White colonists agreed; the irresolvable problem was what being a British subject meant outside that realm. Indigenous, settler White, or enslaved Black, everybody east of the Mississippi lived in a world premised on human inequality and organized beneath or around the British crown. Slaves, servants, younger sons, landless men, or settler women might dislike their places in that world. Indians believed that they belonged to the Empire as associates, not subordinates. For all, however, the colonial order could make sense, if a person started with its premise that people are not equal at all.

Whoever accepted the old order’s obligation to obey also could claim a superior’s protection. Individuals, communities, and groups enjoyed “liberties,” meaning specific privileges that went with their own situations. Their liberties included the House of Burgesses’ right to rule and tax Virginians, the College of William and Mary’s right to a Burgess of its own (just as Oxford and Cambridge Universities had their own Members of Parliament), New York City’s control of its public markets, the right of property-holding individuals to bring taxed, a colonist’s “liberty” to hold a black person in slavery, or a married man’s liberty to control his wife’s whole life. These were what white colonials set out to protect against British power. They were not out of line with similar claims by Britons “at home” or by the subjects of other thrones, in Europe and America alike.

If the king-in-parliament had recognized colonial liberties as legitimate, there would have been no revolution. Revolt in their defense morphed into revolution when Britain changed from merely asserting its power over the colonials to military suppression of their protests. That had worked against the Duke of Monmouth’s followers along the Welsh Border in 1685, at the Battle of the Boyne in Ireland in 1690, and at Culloden in Scotland in 1746. Retaining the fruits of those victories was one reason why Parliament could not back down now. But the colonies were too far away and too well organized for whatever force Britain could muster to find success.

British power collapsed between 1774 and 1776. American spokesmen, most notably the elite writer Thomas Jefferson and the plebeian Thomas Paine, shifted the terms of argument from defending British liberties to asserting human liberty. Both of them showed how little they had thought the issue through. “Male and female are the distinctions of nature,” Paine wrote in Common Sense (1776). What was natural could not be changed, which became the great excuse for denying the promise of their words. Jefferson tried to blame slavery on the hapless George III. The charge was ludicrous and ill-written, and Congress dropped it from the Declaration of Independence. But Jefferson’s fevered prose suggests how much slavery was starting to bother his epoch. Samuel Johnson’s gibe the same year about “the drivers of Negroes” stung because Jefferson and his like had laid themselves open to it.

The independence crisis took the white political Revolution into its most radical phase. Popular committees put power into the hands of artisans and small farmers, Paine’s kind of people. The astute conservative patriot Gouverneur Morris noted “with fear and trembling” in 1774 that the “poor reptiles” of “the mob” were beginning “to think and to reason.” He was correct: popular ideas about simple, directly responsive government were percolating. After independence these ideas reached institutional form in several state constitutions. But Morris only saw part of the issue.

Breaking the existing structure of power opened challenges to the whole social order. Lord Dunmore, Virginia’s final royal governor, offered freedom to slaves “pertaining to rebels.” Commander-in-chief Sir Henry Clinton expanded the offer and thousands grasped the chance. It marked the first great opening out of western hemisphere racial oppression (though there had been plenty of rebellions and escapes.) The new state of Vermont banned slavery within itself in 1777. Other northern states followed, and the Framers of the United States Constitution could not ignore the issue. But slavery died hard, not ending in Pennsylvania until 1845 or (legally) in New Hampshire until the Thirteenth Amendment in 1865. White Americans did develop bad consciences and some of them acted; enslaved people seized this chance to choose. Some who got out of slavery fled with the departing British at the war’s end; others stayed. Either way, they were choosing freedom. This was a beginning, and beginnings count. Vermont’s action in 1777 inaugurated the 111-year struggle that it took western-hemisphere slavery to end. Before it ended in blood within the United States, it thrived there for decades. Haitians were the first to complete on a national scale what North Americans, including thousands of Black People, had begun. Between 1861 and 1865, the United States joined Haiti as the only two American republics where slavery died in the midst of horrific war.

By the Revolution’s end, an American people existed where there had been none. Ideologically, that people was relocating ultimate power from a monarch above society to within itself as a sovereign citizenry. Institutionally, it had given itself institutions for exercising its will. Those same white Americans were well on their way to full capitalism, producing and trading within a large market economy where local needs counted less than the stability and predictability that business required.

But Shays’ Rebellion in Massachusetts in 1786, the more extreme forms of Antifederalism in 1787 and 1788, and the Pennsylvania Whiskey Rebellion in 1794 gave ample evidence that by no means did all white males accept the change to market capitalism protected and enhanced by a strong government. Shaysite farmers revolted when their sense of what their Revolution had won came into direct conflict with the demands of a hard money economy and long distance credit. Faced with tax demands and debts that they had to pay in scarce specie, they understood that going to court would mean a sheriff’s sale and perhaps tenancy on land that they and their ancestors had owned. They tried to protect themselves with petitions and town meetings, and when those failed they forcibly closed the courts in order stave off the sales. This was the same means they had used against the punishments that Britain imposed on Massachusetts in 1774 for destroying the East India Company’s valuable tea. Then, they had enjoyed Boston’s cooperation. Now they did not. Early in 1787 an army under revolutionary general Benjamin Lincoln easily put the rebellion down. Later that year the federal Constitution’s supremacy clause, interstate commerce clause, and denial to states of any power to interfere in obligations of contract established that Boston’s position in the dispute, not that of the Shaysites, would be national policy. Small communities defending their own ways against powerful outsiders still present a powerful theme in American public culture. But that image also has justified slavery and the Ku Klux Klan.

From the very start, the Republic also was an empire, which meant that some people were going to dominate others. George Washington understood that point; the Iroquois named him “Town Destroyer” because of how he showed it. Alexander Hamilton understood it too. For Thomas Jefferson there would be a unique “empire of liberty,” an exception to the normal course of human events. He had two practical ideas for bringing that about. This empire would have colonies. Calling them “territories” and crafting a ritual for them to become equal states put to rest the problem of inequality between imperial rulers and distant, inferior colonial subjects that had sundered its British predecessor. Jefferson also understood that small-farmer citizens, his “chosen people of God,” would surge west in search of land. He did believe that free citizens needed their own ground to stand on. His answer was the government-sponsored land grid that now stretches from the Appalachian Mountains to the Rockies. Jefferson’s idea found its ultimate form in the Homestead Act of 1862. In this sense, it was a classic land reform, opening the way for the landless of the Eastern states and Europe to become self-supporting independent citizens. After all, this was a new beginning, and the land was effectively empty and unorganized, waiting for civilizers to own it and put it to good use. Or so the familiar story said.

But people had long possessed and organized that land. In Jefferson’s schema, those people would lose it. There were many ways for that to happen: catching them in debt that they could pay off only with the land itself; overwhelming them with sheer numbers; rendering null their efforts to deal with what their times had given to them; breaking the Republic’s pledged troth; excluding them from its institutions of justice, and if necessary, main force. This empire of liberty, fruit of the Revolution, also would be an empire of domination. For settlers there would be land to the tiller. But as surely as the land that the French Revolution seized from the church and the aristocracy, as surely as the land where Haitians destroyed the whole plantation order, that land did not come free.

The empire of liberty also was an empire for slavery. In 1776, at just about the same time that “Beloved Man” Old Tassel was telling American negotiators seeking a Cherokee alliance that “it is our land that we are talking about,” lowland South Carolina Patriot leader William Henry Drayton was telling back country farmers that should they defeat the Cherokee they could take their land and enslave them. Old Tassel died in 1788 at a settler’s hands, after receiving an army officer’s pledge of protection. Looking westward, Drayton’s listeners had no reason to accept Jefferson’s wishful-thinking that slavery would dilute itself into non-existence among them. Land reform at the expense of Muscolge, Cherokee, Chickasaw, and Choctaw (all of whom owned slaves themselves) took tobacco and cotton slavery into the continent’s heart. Acquiring Florida, the Gulf Coast, Louisiana, and Texas opened all of that space to plantation slavery’s expanding empire, facilitated by Federal Policy over four-score years, in the name of American liberty. Here was as great a social change as any in Atlantic world and the western hemisphere. Both the Cotton Kingdom and the “fee simple empire” of northern small farmers were direct products of the American Revolution’s transforming, enormously energetic radicalism.

The Revolution solved the problem of political equality across an ocean. It created a republic that has survived. It brought white men their chance to contest for power within the Republic’s institutions as full citizens. It made possible humble “competencies” and great wealth. It brought slavery into serious question. The “American Thesis” that people could change their situation caught on as far away as Mozart’s Vienna. But all solutions beget fresh problems. Belonging to and within the American Republic led immediately to the problem of who belonged and how they belonged. Profound, challenging, and transforming though it was, the Revolution’s radicalism did not eliminate either of the two great qualities that had rendered the whole colonized western hemisphere different from what it had been prior to permanent contact. These were claims from afar to imperial dominion and enslavement for the sake of turning the land into what the discoverers, conquerors, and settlers wanted it to be. The Republic paid the price when the two issues, empire and slavery, fused, its institutions failed, and it descended into war upon itself.

Bouton, Terry. Taming Democracy: “The People,” the Founders, and the Troubled Ending of the American Revolution. New York: Oxford University Press, 2007.

Calloway, Colin G. The Indian World of George Washington: The First President, The First Americans, and the Birth of the Nation. New York: Oxford University Press, 2018.

Countryman, Edward. Enjoy the Same Liberty: Black Americans and the Revolutionary Era. Lanham. Maryland: Rowman and Littlefield, 2018.

Duval, Kathleen. Independence Lost: Lives on the Edge of the American Revolution. New York: Random House, 2016.

Gross, Robert A., ed. In Debt to Shays: The Bicentennial of an Agrarian Rebellion. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1993.

Jameson, J. Franklin. The American Revolution Considered as a Social Movement. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1926.

Jasanoff, Maya. Liberty’s Exiles: American Loyalists in the Revolutionary World. New York: Random House, 2011.

Norton, Mary Beth. Liberty’s Daughters: The Revolutionary Experience of American Women, 1760–1790. Boston: Little, Brown, 1980.

Parkinson, Robert. The Common Cause: Creating Race and Nation in the American Revolution. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, 2016.