The Radicalism of the American Revolution

Article V Blog ^ | 1991 | Gordon S. Wood

[Jacquerie]

We Americans like to think of our revolution as not being radical; indeed, most of the time we consider it downright conservative. It certainly does not appear to resemble the revolutions of other nations in which people were killed, property was destroyed, and everything was turned upside down. We can think of Robespierre, Lenin, and Mao Zedong as revolutionaries, but not George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and John Adams. We cannot quite conceive of revolutionaries in powdered hair and knee breeches.

They made speeches, not bombs; they wrote learned pamphlets, not manifestos. They were not abstract theorists and they were not social levelers. They did not kill one another; they did not devour themselves. The American Revolution does not seem to have the same kinds of causes – the social wrongs, the class conflict, the impoverishment, the grossly inequitable distributions of wealth – that presumably lie behind other revolutions. There were no peasant uprisings, no burning of chateaux, no storming of prisons.

The social conditions that generically are supposed to lie behind all revolutions – poverty, and economic deprivation – were not present in colonial America. American colonists were not oppressed and had no crushing imperial chains to throw off. In fact, the colonists knew they were freer, more equal, more prosperous, and less burdened with cumbersome feudal and monarchical restraints than any other part of mankind in the 18th century.

Precisely because the impulses to revolution in America bear little or no resemblance to the impulses that presumably account for modern social protests and revolutions, we have tended to think of the American Revolution as having no social character, as having virtually nothing to do with the society, as having no social causes and no social consequences.

We tend to admit only a political, not a social radicalism. We have generally described the Revolution as an unusually conservative affair, concerned almost exclusively with politics and constitutional rights, and in comparison with the social radicalism of the other great revolutions of history, hardly a revolution at all.

If we measure the radicalism of revolutions by the degree of social misery or economic deprivation suffered, or by the number of people killed or manor houses burned, then this conventional emphasis on the conservatism of the American Revolutions becomes true enough. But if we measure the radicalism by the amount of social change that actually took place – by transformations in the relationships that bound people to each other – then the American Revolution was not conservative at all; on the contrary, it was as radical and as revolutionary as any in history.

The social distinctions and economic deprivations that we today think of as the consequence of class divisions, business exploitation, or various isms – capitalism, racism, etc. – were in the 18th century usually thought to be caused by the abuses of government. Social honors, social distinctions, perquisites of office, business contracts, privileges and monopolies, even excessive property and wealth of various sorts - all social evils and social deprivations – in fact seemed to flow from connections to government, in the end from connections to monarchical authority. So that when Anglo-American radicals talked in what seems to be only political terms – purifying a corrupt constitution, eliminating courtiers, fighting off crown power, and, most important, becoming republicans – they nevertheless had a decidedly social message.

In our eyes the American revolutionaries appear to be absorbed in changing only their governments, not their society. But in destroying monarchy and establishing republics they were changing their society as well as their governments, and they knew it. Only they did not know – they could scarcely have imagined – how much of their society they would change.

By the time the Revolution had run its course in the early 19th century, American society had been transformed. One class did not overthrow another; the poor did not supplant the rich. But social relationships – the way people were connected one to another – were changed, and decisively so. It was in fact a new society unlike any that had ever existed anywhere in the world.

In 1760 America was only a collection of disparate colonies huddled along a narrow strip of the Atlantic coast – economically underdeveloped outposts existing on the very edges of the civilized world. The less than two million monarchical subjects who lived in these colonies still took for granted that society was and ought to be a hierarchy of ranks and degrees of dependency and that most people were bound together by personal ties of one sort or another. Yet scarcely fifty years later these insignificant borderland provinces had become a giant, almost continent-wide republic of nearly ten million egalitarian-minded bustling citizens who not only had thrust themselves into the vanguard of history but had fundamentally altered their society and their social relationships. Far from remaining monarchical, hierarchy-ridden subjects on the margin of civilization, Americans had become almost overnight, the most liberal, the most democratic, the most commercially minded, and the most modern people in the world.

And this astonishing transformation took place without industrialization, without urbanization, without railroads, without the aid of any of the great forces we usually invoke to explain “modernization.” It was the Revolution, more than any other single event, that made America into the most liberal, democratic, and modern nation in the world.

To focus, as we are today apt to do, on what the Revolution did not accomplish – highlighting and lamenting its failure to abolish slavery and change fundamentally the lot of women – is to miss the great significance of what it did accomplish; indeed, the Revolution made possible the anti-slavery and women’s rights movements of the 19th century and in fact all our current egalitarian thinking.

The Revolution not only radically changed the personal and social relationships of people, including the position of women, but also destroyed aristocracy as it had been understood in the Western world for several millennia. The Revolution brought respectability and even dominance to ordinary people long held in contempt and gave dignity to their menial labor in a manner unprecedented in history and to a degree not equaled elsewhere in the world. The Revolution did not just eliminate monarchy and create republics; it actually reconstituted what Americans meant by public or state power and brought about an entirely new kind of popular politics and a new kind of democratic officeholder.

The Revolution not only changed the culture of Americans, but even altered their understanding of history, knowledge and truth. Most important, it made the interests and prosperity of ordinary people – their pursuits of happiness – the goal of society and government. The Revolution did not merely create a political and legal environment conducive to economic expansion; it also released powerful popular entrepreneurial and commercial energies that few realized existed and transformed the economic landscape of the country.

In short, the Revolution was the most radical and most far-reaching event in American history.

End.

Obama, Hillary, the Left and their useful idiots work to reverse the American Revolution, and with it, the end of western civilization. Elections alone cannot stop them.

We are the many; our oppressors are the few. Be proactive. Be a Re-Founder. Join Convention of States.

Sign the COS Petition.

Excerpted from the Introduction to The Radicalism of the American Revolution, by Gordon S. Wood, 1991.

[Tunehead54]

4 am .. :-)

[sauropod]

Thanks for posting this. It shines a light on the 2nd revolution we have undergone (not done yet) that is completely changing the country and it’s culture again.

And not for the better.

[TalBlack]

Here’s the thing, believe as, say, George Washington believed and YOU will be called a radical by most people today. Period.

[sauropod]

After reading through it, i saw this paragraph:

The social conditions that generically are supposed to lie behind all revolutions – poverty, and economic deprivation – were not present in colonial America. American colonists were not oppressed and had no crushing imperial chains to throw off. In fact, the colonists knew they were freer, more equal, more prosperous, and less burdened with cumbersome feudal and monarchical restraints than any other part of mankind in the 18th century.

This is completely inaccurate. Bostonians certainly felt oppression, as did those in other cities.

The gist of the article is basically correct, however. 'Pod.

[Tennessee Nana]

It certainly does not appear to resemble the revolutions of other nations in which people were killed, property was destroyed, and everything was turned upside down.
___________________________________________

Is this guy for real ???

I had Loyalist ancestors who were killed and their property destroyed or stolen... “confiscated” it was called...they lost everything...cabins deliberately burnt down, lands taken..

grandmothers and little children were imprisoned..the women and children had to flee for their lives..with just the clothes on their backs..

Happened in Wyoming County, Pennsylvania, and it happened in near Albany, New York ...

why is this guy white washing a terrible time in our history ???

it was a WAR...people die and things get broken...

it was no party...

[Vendome]

Levin never sleeps...

[sauropod]

You’re not kidding.

Quite a few Loyalists fled to Canada because things got too hot here.

[nathanbedford]

I believe that the great contribution of the founders was to reverse entirely the source of governing authority.

Prior to July 4, 1776, political legitimacy flowed from heaven to the sovereign through the nobility and was applied to the people. The great revolutionary concept of the Declaration of Independence was to reverse that order and ground legitimacy in the individual who lends it to the sovereign.

Under the new regime, the idea of divine right of kings, for example, becomes unsupportable and the authority of George III becomes wholly arbitrary.

I once got into a real wrangle on these threads because I argued that the Declaration of Independence would have been impossible without Martin Luther because he began the unraveling of the medieval structure described above and made possible the idea that the ordinary citizen was the source of legitimacy because he made possible the idea that the ordinary citizen could come to ultimate truth without the monopolistic intervention of higher authorities. Until that philosophical revolution radicalized thinking, it was unthinkable to question a hierarchical political structure fashioned by God himself.

[nathanbedford]

I think the article is very important because it undermines the currently fashionable Marxist approach to history and restores the generally accepted explanation believed by those who actually waged the revolution and held by succeeding generations. This is revisionist thinking in the eyes of Marxists but there are certain undeniable facts which support the idea that there was more to the American Revolution the mere class upheaval.

First, it was done before the Industrial Revolution which began to cause social dislocations after 1800. Second, even though the British authorities attempted to contain the colonies east of the Alleghenies, there was still a frontier which could act as a safety valve for a economic system by providing real opportunities for advancement. My ancestors, for example, had been west of the first of the Allegheny range for 50 years by the time of the Declaration of Independence.

Finally, the colonies were extraordinarily wealthy by the standards of the time. According to David McCullough, British soldiers marveled at the wealth of the farms and orchards of Long Island as they marched through the area. Of all the places on earth to live in 1776, the American colonies were the most prosperous across the board although disparities elevated very wealthy people in England far above the average standard of living.

Yes, there were certainly economic motivations for the breach with England such as tax and tariffs and Western expansion, but the revolution was essentially an intellectual revolution which reversed the authority of sovereign over man.

[IronJack]

Bookmark

[Buttons12]

"It certainly does not appear to resemble the revolutions of other nations in which people were killed, property was destroyed, and everything was turned upside down."

___________________________________________

Is this guy for real ???

I had Loyalist ancestors who were killed and their property destroyed or stolen... “confiscated” it was called...they lost everything...cabins deliberately burnt down, lands taken..

grandmothers and little children were imprisoned..the women and children had to flee for their lives..with just the clothes on their backs..

He couches the nonsense in weasel phrases like "it certainly does not appear" and "we tend to think."

If one actually reads the history, including accounts by contemporaries, knowledge replaces the "tendency to think."

I was homeschooled, so I know. Most people my age (20's) couldn't tell you when the Revolution occurred, within a century, or the parties involved, or the causes.

[untenured]

The social distinctions and economic deprivations that we today think of as the consequence of class divisions, business exploitation, or various isms – capitalism, racism, etc. – were in the 18th century usually thought to be caused by the abuses of government. Social honors, social distinctions, perquisites of office, business contracts, privileges and monopolies, even excessive property and wealth of various sorts - all social evils and social deprivations – in fact seemed to flow from connections to government, in the end from connections to monarchical authority.

One wonders about the extent to which we are re-creating these conditions now through the growing amount of money being made off the "perquisites" of government connections, the rising tide of "privileges and monopolies" of all sorts through special tax breaks, occupational licensing, and every other anti-competitive special privilege, the fanatical efforts to obtain the "social distinctions" of elite college entrance, the growing emphasis on circumstances of one's birth as a determinant of one's legal entitlements, etc.

Throughout the 20th and 21st centuries, but especially in the last 50 years, we have become more and more a society of special privileges, at the expense of the rule of law. A growing number of Americans benefit from such privileges, and others simply want the privileges thrown their way. The voices for ending such privileges, for true legal equality, are alarmingly few.

[blueunicorn6]

There are no gods who walk among us.

Those who would be our queens and kings emerged dirty and fearful from the womb as we all did.

What they do have is some insight into humanity.

They understand that we are by nature greedy and fearful.

They take advantage of that greed and fear.

They promise us wealth and the satisfaction of our needs.

With just a small charge.

Give up some of your freedom and wealth.

Just a little of it.

And so you come to wear their chains.

“These chains are to help you.”

But they hold the ends of the chains.

Queen Hillary did not harm you personally when she sold us out. You felt no pain. Your bank account was not debited.

But she profited. She gave our enemies a secret door into destroying us. She encouraged our enemies.

Queen Hillary does not hold your chains so that she can use you to dig a ditch for her.

Queen Hillary holds your chains so she can sell you.

Half of our population willingly put her chains on for a crust of bread.

And they will try to slap Queen Hillary’s chains on the rest of us.

The wannabe queen from Skunk City, Illinois.

An old drunk.

[Jacquerie]

Gordon Wood, Forrest McDonald, Bernard Bailyn were the mid to late 20th century historians that, as far as I'm concerned, rescued American history from the likes of Charles Beard and Merrill Jensen.

[Jacquerie]

Yep, no clearer choice this November between Donald and The Beast.

FWIW, I haven't run across ANY oppo research into Trump that shows him to be less than honest in his forty years of business.

OTOH, Hillary is the sum of every character flaw we cannot allow in a president.

[Jacquerie]

Well said.

There is no question regarding the ascendancy of the government class. I suppose it is composed of government union workers and the professional salaried administrators whose first duty is to their jobs rather than the republic.

It is the logical path for most people to economic comfort.

[Political Junkie Too]

The American Revolution does not seem to have the same kinds of causes – the social wrongs, the class conflict, the impoverishment, the grossly inequitable distributions of wealth – that presumably lie behind other revolutions. There were no peasant uprisings, no burning of chateaux, no storming of prisons.

The social conditions that generically are supposed to lie behind all revolutions – poverty, and economic deprivation – were not present in colonial America. American colonists were not oppressed and had no crushing imperial chains to throw off. In fact, the colonists knew they were freer, more equal, more prosperous, and less burdened with cumbersome feudal and monarchical restraints than any other part of mankind in the 18th century.

Precisely because the impulses to revolution in America bear little or no resemblance to the impulses that presumably account for modern social protests and revolutions, we have tended to think of the American Revolution as having no social character, as having virtually nothing to do with the society, as having no social causes and no social consequences.

---

He has refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.

He has forbidden his Governors to pass Laws of immediate and pressing importance, unless suspended in their operation till his Assent should be obtained; and when so suspended, he has utterly neglected to attend to them.

He has refused to pass other Laws for the accommodation of large districts of people, unless those people would relinquish the right of Representation in the Legislature, a right inestimable to them and formidable to tyrants only.

He has called together legislative bodies at places unusual, uncomfortable, and distant from the depository of their Public Records, for the sole purpose of fatiguing them into compliance with his measures.

He has dissolved Representative Houses repeatedly, for opposing with manly firmness his invasions on the rights of the people.

He has refused for a long time, after such dissolutions, to cause others to be elected, whereby the Legislative Powers, incapable of Annihilation, have returned to the People at large for their exercise; the State remaining in the mean time exposed to all the dangers of invasion from without, and convulsions within.

He has endeavoured to prevent the population of these States; for that purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations hither, and raising the conditions of new Appropriations of Lands.

He has obstructed the Administration of Justice by refusing his Assent to Laws for establishing Judiciary Powers.

He has made Judges dependent on his Will alone for the tenure of their offices, and the amount and payment of their salaries.

He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harass our people and eat out their substance.

He has kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies without the Consent of our legislatures.

He has affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil Power.

He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution, and unacknowledged by our laws; giving his Assent to their Acts of pretended Legislation:

For quartering large bodies of armed troops among us:

For protecting them, by a mock Trial from punishment for any Murders which they should commit on the Inhabitants of these States:

For cutting off our Trade with all parts of the world:

For imposing Taxes on us without our Consent:

For depriving us in many cases, of the benefit of Trial by Jury:

For transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences:

For abolishing the free System of English Laws in a neighbouring Province, establishing therein an Arbitrary government, and enlarging its Boundaries so as to render it at once an example and fit instrument for introducing the same absolute rule into these Colonies

For taking away our Charters, abolishing our most valuable Laws and altering fundamentally the Forms of our Governments:

For suspending our own Legislatures, and declaring themselves invested with power to legislate for us in all cases whatsoever.

He has abdicated Government here, by declaring us out of his Protection and waging War against us.

He has plundered our seas, ravaged our coasts, burnt our towns, and destroyed the lives of our people.

He is at this time transporting large Armies of foreign Mercenaries to compleat the works of death, desolation, and tyranny, already begun with circumstances of Cruelty & Perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages, and totally unworthy the Head of a civilized nation.

He has constrained our fellow Citizens taken Captive on the high Seas to bear Arms against their Country, to become the executioners of their friends and Brethren, or to fall themselves by their Hands.

He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.

---

-PJ

[sauropod]

True enough, but it was not until some time in that the Colonists thought of themselves as “Americans.”

They thought of themselves originally as “British Colonists.” They were complaining b/c they did not enjoy the same rights as did British citizens in the UK.

I am not certain if I have ancestors west of the Alleghenies before the Revolutionary War, however I have at least 5 or 6 that fought in the war and/or signed oaths of allegiance or oaths of fidelity.

At that time, that signature could have been a death warrant.

It is also instructive to review the history of the French and Indian War and the various Indian wars that occurred during the settlement of Pennsylvania and Ohio.

This stuff I was not taught in school and had to learn on my own.

FReegards, ‘Pod.