Was the American Founding Revolutionary?

This essay serves as the first in what will be an ongoing series of essays attempting to reinterpret American history.

The American Founding was a revolution. At first blush, this framing might seem to be an oxymoron. To “found” suggests a state of stability if not permanence—it conveys an idea that something is to be cast in stone and put above or outside the change of time. By contrast, a “revolution” suggests radical change, the kind of change and movement that disrupts, convulses, and is very much in time.

How do we square this circle?

To answer this question, we must ask several others. What did the American Founding qua founding do? Did it conserve something old, or did it create something new? Is it not true that the American Founding incorporated many of the political forms and formalities if not some of the moral manners and mores of the colonial period? Can there be a founding without revolutionary change and violence? Is it an exaggeration to suggest that the American Founding literally began de novo and with a tabula rasa? Put differently, how revolutionary was the American Founding?

These are difficult questions that speak to the nature and meaning of the American Founding.

The general thesis of this essay and several to follow is to suggest that the American Founding was a revolution, but it was a revolution of a peculiar kind. It was not, for instance, like the French Revolution. The French had a revolution, but they did not have a founding. The American Founding did not, by contrast, destroy America’s colonial past with force and guillotines. It did not invent a new calendar that began with Year One. Nor was the American Founding totalizing in the changes it wrought. It forgot or left behind what it did not like, and it carried forward those manners and more from the past that it found salutary. The American Founding may be characterized as having institutionalized a gentle or moderate revolution.

And how do we measure and judge what is revolutionary in a revolution? Should it be measured and judged by what it destroys from the past or by what it creates for the future? We also want to know whether society can be revolutionized, or at least changed in significant ways, without a revolution?

This much we know with certainty: the American Founding changed the nature of American society in complex ways. For instance, it conserved some of the best elements of colonial life (e.g., many of the forms and formalities of the colonial governments), but it also rejected many of the worst elements of colonial life (e.g., the Scripture-encoded criminal law of the Puritans) or those elements that were in contradiction with America’s post-revolutionary founding principles (e.g., religious establishments). It is also true that moral, cultural, social, political, and economic changes typically occur slowly over decades if not centuries. Change is a process, and all social processes occur in time and over time. The American Founding reoriented the way that Americans thought about the nature of their society and the kind of society they hoped to become, and then it took many decades for this newly envisioned society to come into existence. Understanding the complex ways in which the American Founding was revolutionary and therefore transformative is the task before us.

The general question of change and continuity is complicated. Consider three historical touch points: 1630, 1730, and 1830. The American colonies of 1730 retained many of the cultural folkways of 1630, but they also rejected many of their forefathers’ manners and mores and developed new ones that would have been unrecognizable or unacceptable to the first generation of Puritans. The same can also be said of 1830. There were still trace elements in the day-to-day lives of Americans in 1830 that mirrored or imitated those of 1730 and even 1630, but it is also undoubtedly true that life in 1830s America was dramatically different than it had been during the previous two centuries. Something fundamental had changed about American society by 1830. The differences between the colonies in 1630 and 1730 were differences of degree; the differences between the colonies in 1730 and the United States in 1830 were differences of kind.

All of this is to suggest that there can be revolutions without a founding and foundings without a revolution. Even more: revolutionary change is possible without either a revolution or a founding, and there can be cultural continuity that survives a revolution or a founding. In other words, certainly in the American context, there were other forces at work in addition to the Revolution and the Founding which were already in the process of transforming American society. To complicate matters, even the most revolutionary revolutions or the most revolutionary foundings take decades and sometimes even centuries to work out the full breadth and depth of their principles, institutions, and policies. Determining the rank order of an event’s causes and consequences and distinguishing between substantive, superficial, and subterranean changes in a society is difficult and is the proper work of historians and political philosophers.   

How Revolutionary Was the American Founding?

With these preliminary considerations in place, let us return to our opening thesis suggesting that the American Founding was a revolution. To that end, I do not plan in this essay to examine the nature of the American Founding as much as its meaning. I am also less concerned here with the causes of the American Founding (see America’s Revolutionary Mind: A Moral History of the American Revolution and the Declaration that Defined It) and the structural institutions it created (see “The Laissez-Faire Constitution”) than I am with the long-term intentions and consequences of the Founding. In other words, I am concerned in this essay and those to follow with trying to understand the kind of society that America’s Founding Fathers envisioned for the future when they founded the United States.

The conundrum we face in determining the precise meaning of the American Founding as revolutionary might best be captured by the term stasis, which has two competing if not opposite definitions. On the one hand, stasis means a state of stability and equilibrium; on the other hand, it means a public disturbance or civil strife. The word stasis captures rather nicely the two-fold and seemingly oxymoronic description of the American Founding as revolutionary. The American Founding created a permanent constitutional foundation and structure for the United States, but it also changed everything in its wake. The society that emerged out of the post-1788 founding was vastly different than the society that went into the pre-1776 War for Independence. The Founding of the U.S. had both intended and unintended moral, social, cultural, political, constitutional, and economic consequences.

Let us jump start our reflections with a bold claim that will launch us on our historical and philosophical investigation: not since the decline and fall of the Roman empire had the world changed as much as it did in the aftermath of the American Founding. The American Founding was a revolutionary event. It changed everything in its wake, not just for the United States but for the world. What existed before the revolutionary-founding period was a relatively traditional society that looked to the past and to the East (i.e., Europe) for guidance; what came after was a liberal society that looked to the future and to the trans-Appalachian West for guidance.

The Americans thus launched a new era in human history. They rejected the artificial barriers and conventional Old-World institutions of church, aristocracy, monarchy, army, and the State. These institutions, which had long been viewed by Europeans and colonial Anglo-Americans as necessary for the stability and order of society, were changed or abandoned in post-Founding America. The Americans literally created a novus ordo seclorum (or at least that’s how they understood it), but that does not mean they simply forgot or eradicated their past. They brought some of their past (particularly the uniquely American parts that were sympatico with their revolutionary principles) into the future.

For instance, America’s founding revolutionaries carried forward from the late colonial period what they called the “spirit of liberty” that launched, according to Edmund Burke, the imperial crisis in the 1760s and then the War of Independence. In his 1775 speech on conciliation with the colonies, Burke was moved to explain that the single most important factor in understanding the Americans’ resistance to British legislation was their “Temper and Character.” By studying the moral character of the colonists, Burke thought he had located the deepest source of their behavior over the course of the previous decade. In the American temperament and moral character, he wrote,

a love of Freedom is the predominating feature which marks and distinguishes the whole: and as an ardent is always a jealous affection, your Colonies become suspicious, restive, and untractable, whenever they see the least attempt to wrest from them by force, or shuffle from them by chicane, what they think the only advantage worth living for. This fierce spirit of Liberty is stronger in the English Colonies probably than in any other people of the earth.

The Americans’ love of freedom, according to Burke, provided the primary causal explanation of why they reacted to the Stamp, Declaratory, Townshend, Tea, and Coercive Acts in such a determined and principled way. It rendered the colonists “acute, inquisitive, dexterous, prompt in attack, ready in defense, full of resources.” By contrast, the people of other countries, he noted, “judge of an ill principle in government only by an actual grievance.” These American provincials did not succumb to the same kind of moral lethargy so common to most people throughout history. Instead, they anticipated the “evil,” and they judged “of the pressure of the grievance by the badness of the principle.” They saw and augured “misgovernment at a distance; and snuff the approach of tyranny in every tainted breeze.” In many ways, the Founding was an attempt to institutionalize the Americans’ “spirit of liberty.”

The Americans of the founding era retained the best of their past but they also created a new kind of political society, one that was so radical that it literally birthed a new order of man—a new social type—the likes of which had never been seen before. They did this by reengineering the basic motives and energies of ordinary people. (This reengineering was done in exactly the opposite way attempted by Jean-Jacques Rousseau or the Soviet geneticist Trofim Lysenko. It was done by setting people free rather than by bending the wills of men through the coercive force of the State.) The promise of freedom, independence, wealth, and happiness unleashed first hundreds of thousands and then millions of Americans and recent immigrants in search of their dreams. The American people were willing to risk their future on a new experiment—an experiment to replace (as we shall see in this and future essays) debts, taxes, regulations, armies, and government interference, and the moral philosophy of altruism with freedom and a laissez-faire government that liberated a new understanding of self-interest as the driving moral force of human activity.

The Two Americas

How should we understand the nature and meaning of this radical change? What were its causes and consequences? What role did the American Founding play in these changes?

The character of a nation is defined by its consciously chosen values, principles, and virtues and the actions and habits of life they inspire. In Europe, the manners and mores of the various peoples remained largely unchanged over the course of 800 years or so. The way of life for a peasant in 1300 Europe was little different from that of his descendants 500 years later. In America, by contrast, a revolution in the national character began to take place starting with that momentous fifteen-year period between the signing of the Declaration of Independence in 1776 and the ratification of the Bill of Rights in 1791. The fifty years on either side of 1776 represented two different ways of living and associating. Life in the America of 1826 was radically different than life in any of the American colonies in 1726.

To tease out these differences, let us redirect our initial questions and ask these two basic questions: How was society and the American character different during the colonial period versus life in nineteenth-century antebellum America? How are we to understand these changes and their causes?

The differences can be seen or measured in different ways. Let’s begin with a general description of seventeenth-century American society and nineteenth- century American society.

Each one of the early seventeenth-century British-American colonies, particularly those of New England, brought with them from the Old World two different but compatible ways of living and organizing their societies: the first concerned their inherited English folkways—folkways that had developed over the course of hundreds of years, and the second concerned their unique religious beliefs and practices. The Pilgrims of Plymouth, the Puritans of Massachusetts Bay and Connecticut, the followers of Roger Williams in Rhode Island, and the Quakers of Pennsylvania, for instance, set up their colonies and laws in accord with English political and legal traditions, and they proclaimed and followed a radically conservative theological vision and a moral purpose for their societies that shaped their institutions. In certain ways, the way of life in Boston, Massachusetts, in 1640 was not, for instance, that much different than life in Boston, Lincolnshire. These seventeenth-century Christian societies took the community as the moral-political standard of value, and they created communities that were a static, hierarchically structured, patriarchal, organic whole. Their cultural, social, political, and economic institutions conformed to their theological vision and purpose.

The society created by the American Founding was, by contrast, guided by no similar purposes or structures. America’s Founding Fathers derived their ideas of society, politics, law, and economy not from John Calvin but from John Locke. America’s revolutionary Founders viewed the individual as the moral-political standard of value, and they created a free and dynamic society based on individual rights, limited government, and the pursuit of individual self-interest and happiness. Unlike the static, corporatist societies created by their seventeenth-century forbearers, America’s post-Founding pioneers were on the move, cutting through forests, tilling and sowing the land along the way, and they were motivated by no moral vision similar to that of their ancestors.

We can glimpse the difference between life in Britain’s seventeenth-century American colonies with that of the nineteenth-century United States by pondering how these two different worlds were described by two of America’s greatest antebellum novelists, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Washington Irving. In The Scarlett Letter (1850), Hawthorne’s narrator describes with remarkable accuracy the cultural forms and formalities of seventeenth-century Boston and then contrasts them with life in nineteenth-century America:

It was an age when what we call talent had far less consideration than now, but the massive materials which produce stability and dignity of character a great deal more. The people possessed by hereditary right the quality of reverence, which, in their descendants, if it survive at all, exists in smaller proportion, and with a vastly diminished force in the selection and estimate of public men. The change may be for good or ill, and is partly, perhaps, for both. In that old day the English settler on these rude shores—having left king, nobles, and all degrees of awful rank behind, while still the faculty and necessity of reverence was strong in him—bestowed it on the white hair and venerable brow of age—on long-tried integrity—on solid wisdom and sad-coloured experience—on endowments of that grave and weighty order which gave the idea of permanence, and comes under the general definition of respectability.

In the highly popular Rip Van Winkle published in 1819, Washington Irving captured without fully understanding that something profound had changed in America in the years after the Founding. Rip Van Winkle tells the story of a ne’er-do-well, Dutch-American living in provincial New York in the years just before 1776. Long story short, Van Winkle gets drunk, passes out, falls into a long sleep, and when he awakens 20-years later, post-Founding American society was a dramatically different place from pre-Founding American society. According to Irving, “The very character of the people seemed changed.” He noted that there “was a busy, bustling, disputatious tone about” the new America, “instead of the accustomed phlegm and drowsy tranquility.” Something had changed in America, but what it was Mr. Van Winkle did not know.

The shift that took place in American society between Hawthorne’s description of seventeenth-century colonial American society and Irving’s description of nineteenth-century American society represents as profound a cultural revolution in how people lived as any that had taken place in universal history. These two portraits provide us with a jumping off point in our attempt to understand the nature and meaning of the American Founding as a revolutionary event.

Continuity and Change

To better understand what was happening in America before and after the Founding, we should consider a few other data points that indicate how American society was already in a state of change during the years before 1776. Some of these changes were part of a long-standing process of change that was occurring throughout the longue durée of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and would have happened with or without the Founding.

Eighteenth-century America was defined by great change and much continuity. Take population growth in the colonies, for instance. The population of Great Britain’s American colonies in 1700 was 250,888 persons. A century later, the United States of America contained just over 5.3 million residents. This growth in population would seem to signal a serious change in American life, and in many ways it did. And yet, viewed from 30,000 feet, America in 1800 looked little different from what it did in 1700. The land and landscape more than 200 miles west of the seaboard was still largely untamed and uncivilized. Access to the West, even in 1800, was limited. Travel and communication in 1800 were virtually the same as they had been in 1700. In addition to the water travel through the Great Lakes to the North, there were just two roads in Pennsylvania that crossed the Alleghany Mountains; there was a rough road though the Cumberland Gap (where Virginia, Kentucky, and Tennessee meet); and there were a few passable trails into Tennessee from the Carolinas.

Though there was now more wealth in 1800 than there had been in 1700, the economic conditions of American life were little changed. The tools and machines that Americans worked with in 1800 were little different than they had been a century before. The farmer of 1800 tilled his land in the same way and with the same implements used by his great, great grandfather in 1700. All of this was about to change, however.

On closer inspection, something profound was on the verge of happening in America. In the twenty years after the signing of the Treaty of Paris ending the War of Independence, several hundred thousand pioneers set out from the heavily populated East (at least relative to earlier seventeenth- and eighteenth-century standards) to travel over or around the Alleghany and Blue Ridge Mountains to Ohio, Kentucky, and Tennessee. Thus began a century-long mass migration of millions of Americans and recently arrived European immigrants to the trans-Appalachian West. The typical pioneer purchased a wagon and horses to carry his family and their most essential possessions through mountain valleys and over mountain passes. They might then load themselves onto a flat-bottomed boat to carry them down the Ohio River. There were no inns or taverns along the way. They slept under the stars or in tents along the side of the road or trail. These rugged pioneers were entirely on their own. From the moment they left their eastern villages, towns, and cities, life on the frontier for these intrepid pioneers was radically different from that of the tidewater relatives.

Whatever connection the American people might have once had to European manners and mores was now forever broken. Life was no longer defined by folkways hundreds of years old, or by kings, aristocrats, and priests. Every day for every individual living on the frontier was a fight for survival. Nature was both friend and enemy to these dauntless settlers. They were forced to learn the hard way Francis Bacon’s maxim that nature to be commanded must be obeyed. And yet, they did it.

A Reality-Based Moral Code

These American pioneers were therefore forced to develop what we might call a reality-based moral code. Life was a day-to-day struggle both with and against nature for survival. As a result, America’s new nomads had to focus their time and attention on reality and nature’s demands. Life and death were the moral bookends that provided a dual standard of choice and action. Necessity forced them to develop ways of living and associating that were in accord with the requirements of nature.

These new American pilgrims had to design and build special wagons to transport their families and supplies across forested and rocky mountain ranges. Unlike the Red Sea, the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers did not part for the exodus of wagon trains coming from the East. These upstart pilgrims had to design and build new kinds of boats and barges that would transport them across or down rivers larger than anything they’d ever seen before. They had to study the different kinds of soil from Ohio in the north to Tennessee in the south and then determine which crops would be grow in different soils. They had to learn which native plants were good for them to eat and which would kill them. They had to adjust and adapt to dramatically different climates. They had to build their own homes, dig wells, clear the land, till the soil, plant and harvest crops, kill or trade for meat. They had to defend themselves from native-Americans. And then, on top of all that, they had to develop the institutions necessary for civilization, e.g., land-claim offices, courts, and law enforcement. Every element of their survival required a reality-based approach first to living and then to living well.

The development of this reality-based moral code is the great unwritten story of American history, and it is to this story that I shall turn in succeeding essays.

***A reminder to readers. Please know that I do not use footnotes or citations in my Substack essays. I do, however, attempt to identify the author of all quotations. All of the quotations and general references that I use are fully documented in my personal drafts, which will be made public on demand or when I publish these essays in book form.