Rethinking the American Revolution

Part 1

In the next few weeks, I will publish via Loco-Foco Press the first volume of a two-volume set of primary source documents titled Political Thought of the American Revolution: A Reader. The first volume, subtitled “The Imperial Crisis and Independence,” assembles some of the most important tracts in the conflict between Great Britain and her American colonies in the years between 1761 and 1776. The second volume, subtitled “Revolutionary Constitution-Making and Social Reform,” presents dozens of original documents concerned with the attempts by American revolutionaries to construct new constitutions and governments after 1776 and to reform the laws of their societies.

The purpose of Political Thought of the American Revolution: A Reader is to introduce teachers and students of the American Revolution to the thought of the best and most influential thinkers and statesmen in America in the years between 1761 and 1780. The tracts of both volumes allow readers to study the colonists’ grievances against Great Britain, their various rhetorical strategies in furthering the American cause, and the development of their moral and political thought that led to the Declaration of Independence and the revolutionary state constitutions and governments. Hopefully, the selections included in both volumes will allow students of the American Revolution to get inside the minds of the leading revolutionaries to better understand why they thought and acted as they did.

Over the course of the next few weeks, I will be publishing in three parts the Introduction to the first volume of Political Thought of the American Revolution: A Reader.

There was a War for Independence and there was an American Revolution. These two events overlap and are related, but they are not the same thing. The American Revolutionary War had a precise beginning and end. The War for Independence began unofficially on April 19, 1775, with the battles at Lexington and Concord, and it began officially on July 4^th, 1776, when the Second Continental Congress formally declared independence from the mother country on behalf of the American people. The war between Great Britain and her American colonies ended unofficially with the Battle of Yorktown on October 19, 1781, and it ended officially on September 3, 1783, with the signing of the Treaty of Paris.

The American Revolution was, by contrast, much broader in scope, scale, duration, influence, and meaning than the Revolutionary War. Dating the beginning of the Revolution is difficult. Most scholars of the American Revolution typically date its beginning to 1765 with the British Parliament’s passage of the Stamp Act and the Americans’ reaction to it. Interestingly, though, John Adams, who played a pivotal role in the American Revolution from start to finish, dated its beginning to several years before the generally accepted start of the imperial crisis in 1765. In an extraordinary letter written to Thomas Jefferson in 1815, Adams claimed that the true American Revolution began fifteen years before shots were fired at Lexington and Concord. This means that he dated the beginning of the American Revolution to 1760! What could Adams have meant by this extraordinary claim? What occurred in 1760 to trigger a revolution that would end in American independence and later change the world?

In his letter to Jefferson, Adams also drew a sharp distinction between the Revolution and the war. The latter was, he wrote to his friend in Virginia, an “Effect and consequence” of the former. The war, he continued, “was no part of the Revolution.” According to Adams, the actual American Revolution “was in the Minds of the People.” What an extraordinary statement! What could Adams have possibly meant when he suggested that American Revolution was an intellectual revolution that somehow changed the way the American people thought and acted? A few years after his arresting letter to Jefferson, Adams told Hezekiah Niles that there had been a “radical Change in the Principles, Opinions Sentiments and Affection of the People” in the decade and a half before the war and that this “radical Change” constituted what he called the “real American Revolution.” Such changes, though, do not typically happen all at once.

Whereas John Adams looked to the deepest causes of the Revolution, his old friend, Benjamin Rush, a Philadelphia physician, looked to the long-term consequences of the American Revolution. In 1787, Rush noted, “There is nothing more common than to confound the terms of American Revolution with those of the late American war.” He did not, though, like Adams, think the Revolution and the war were the same thing. Rush went on to observe, “It remains yet to establish and perfect our new forms of government, and to prepare the principles, morals, and manners of our citizens, for those forms of government after they are established and brought to perfection.” The effects of the American Revolution would take decades if not centuries to percolate down and through American culture.

By Adams’s account, the true American Revolution was an intellectual, moral, social, religious, constitutional, political, and economic revolution—indeed, a radical revolution—that dramatically altered the American way of life. Years later, Jefferson described the meaning and consequences of the Declaration of Independence, which he thought to be synonymous with the American Revolution, in these terms: “May it be to the world, what I believe it will be, (to some parts sooner, to others later, but finally to all,) the signal of arousing men to burst the chains under which monkish ignorance and superstition had persuaded them to bind themselves, and to assume the blessings and security of self-government. . . . All eyes are opened, or opening, to the rights of man. The general spread of the light of science has already laid open to every view the palpable truth, that the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately, by the grace of God.” Indeed, one could plausibly argue that twenty-first century Americans are still working out the consequences of the Revolution’s ideals.

In a speech delivered in 1857 on the Dred Scott decision, Abraham Lincoln captured the meaning that Adams, Rush, and Jefferson attributed to the Revolution. He saw, in exactly the same terms as Adams, Rush and Jefferson, the long-term consequences of the principles of the Declaration of Independence as they worked themselves out in American culture and politics. Reflecting on the Declaration’s meaning, Lincoln noted that Jefferson and the other Founders “meant to set up a standard maxim for free society, which should be familiar to all, and revered by all; constantly looked to, constantly labored for, and even though never perfectly attained, constantly approximated, and thereby constantly spreading and deepening its influence, and augmenting the happiness and value of life to all people of all colors everywhere.” The Revolution formed all the fundamental principles and institutions of the American way of life—principles and institutions that are still being perfected to this day.

How, then, should we understand this extraordinary event? What precisely was this revolution in the minds of the American people? What were its deepest causes?

The war between Great Britain and her American colonies was preceded by a great debate between mother country and her colonies over the nature and constitution of the British Empire. Eventually, at the deepest philosophic level, the debate revolved around questions concerning the nature of freedom and rights and their source. In other words, the war of guns and canons was preceded by a battle of ideas. The American Revolution began as a search for moral, constitutional, and political principles that would help the Americans make sense of their conflict with British imperial officials. This search led them to discover new moral principles and political institutions that would revolutionize the theory and practice of government—that would launch a novus ordo seclorum.

The purpose of this volume is to introduce twenty-first century students of the American Revolution to the best known and most influential declarations, resolutions, essays, and pamphlets written by colonial Americans during the pre-Revolutionary period. Our goal is to see with our own eyes the revolution that occurred in the minds of the American people in the fifteen years before the outbreak of hostilities between Great Britain and her American colonies. Before we see how the American mind was revolutionized during the 1760s and early 1770s, though, we must first understand the ideas and actions of British imperial officials during that period to better understand why and how the Americans chose to commit their lives, fortunes, and sacred honor to the cause of revolution.

Freedom and the British Empire

In 1763, the British Empire was at the height of its reach and power, and her American colonists were perhaps the freest, most equal, and most prosperous people anywhere in the world. During the first six decades of the eighteenth century, Britain mostly left her New World cousins alone to grow and prosper in their own way. The most distinctive features of Old Europe—e.g., the canon and feudal laws and the inequalities that came with them—were mostly absent in North America’s settler communities (with the obvious exception of slavery). America’s New World pioneers knew none of the burdensome feudal restrictions and monarchical hierarchies that defined life in Old Europe, and they experienced firsthand a kind of political, economic, and religious freedom unknown to most people—then or now.

These transplanted Anglo-men governed themselves in thirteen relatively small and diverse provinces, ensuring their white inhabitants the same rights and privileges afforded to all Britons everywhere. Indeed, more Americans participated directly in the affairs of their provincial and local governments than probably any other people in history. The long arm of the British state barely touched their lives. The Americans went about their daily business unhampered by Parliamentary taxes and overly burdensome commercial regulations. For the first six decades of the eighteenth century, the British state took a laissez-faire attitude and assumed a nigh-watchman role toward her American colonies. The Anglo-Irish statesman and political philosopher, Edmund Burke, later referred to this non-policy policy as “salutary neglect.” Separated by three thousand miles of ocean, the colonists were largely outside the reach of the mother country and were thus in a state of de facto independence. The colonists experienced all or most of the virtues of the English way life but suffered few of its vices.

The Americans understood their freedom to be an extension—indeed, the fullest expression and realization—of English rights and liberties transplanted to the New World. The American system of natural liberty described in the books of European philosophers was being experienced and lived out on the edge of the western frontier of the British Empire. A new way of life was coming into view in the American wilderness in the decades before 1763, where we might say that a unique American sense of life was being forged in thought and practice. And all of this happened under the radar of British imperial officials.

Not surprisingly, the American colonists’ unique social, political, economic, and religions conditions became the object of serious philosophic investigation in Europe. Old World philosophers came to view these New World institutions and way of life as something of a laboratory to test whether certain Enlightenment ideas were true or false, workable or unworkable. The isolation and simplicity of the colonists’ world provided European philosophers with the perfect conditions by which to observe the real-life consequences of certain new ideas. Taxes and regulations were barely felt in the New World, the spirit of agrarian and commercial enterprise was unleashed, and abundant land meant that every settler could become a property-owning freeman.

Despite their near de facto independence from the mother country, colonial Americans were nonetheless proud members of the British Empire and doubly proud of their British heritage. Indeed, they reveled in their Britishness. They shared with their British cousins the same nationality, manners and mores, political ideas and institutions, laws, economy, education, language, religion, literary heritage, laws, and historic memories. They saw themselves as one people divided only by an ocean of water. The Americans’ love of mother country was second only to their love of liberty and justice.

This was the state of the American colonies when George III assumed his reign in October 1760. Not surprisingly, the colonists were also voluntary and loyal subjects of the British Crown. It seems counterintuitive to think of American society as monarchical up until July 3, 1776, but it was! Even greater than their attachment to their new king was their admiration of the British constitution, which embodied all the ideas and institutions of traditional English liberty. By their own admission, they lived under the most enlightened laws and constitution ever devised by man. And nowhere was the British constitution more studied and better appreciated than in Britain’s American colonies. Throughout much of the eighteenth century leading up to the 1760s, Americans constantly sang the praises of the British constitution. There can be little doubt that colonial Americans in the years leading up to the imperial crisis understood the British constitution to be the source of their rights, liberties, and privileges. It was their greatest inheritance and greatest source of imperial pride.

Lastly, it is important to keep in mind that the British political establishment was no less proud of the growth and accomplishments of its nascent but rapidly developing North American colonies. Never had the distant colonies of a great and mighty empire been ruled with such wisdom, benevolence, and justice. It was also true that the British people and their political leaders had invested significant sums of taxpayer money to protect their American cousins from the imperialistic designs of Spain and France. The American colonists had much to be grateful for.

Given this benevolent and mutually advantageous state of affairs, we must now consider how and why it all fell apart. Why did the British government attempt to reorganize its overseas empire? Did the Americans owe a debt to their British cousins? How and why in a remarkably short period of time did the relationship between Great Britain and her American colonies collapse and end in a civil war within the British empire?

To understand the what, why, and how of the American Revolution, we must first establish some historical context, which means that we must understand the ideas, policies, and actions of the British State in North America that led the colonists to revolt.

To be continued . . . The next installment will discuss the rise of what I call the British Deep State in years between 1760 and 1775.