In the 1780’s, looking back on the Revolution, Thomas Jefferson mused that the new American Republic was a completely new model of governing. Old theories, Jefferson thought, would have to be thrown out because the American example was proving so many of the accepted political assumptions wrong. America’s revolution was much like the new Republic–of a different sort than those that preceded it, or, for that matter, those that came after it. John Adams famously said that the American Revolution had already taken place by the time the guns started going off, that the true revolution was accomplished in the minds of men in the years leading up to the actual fighting. British sympathizers, Tories, were perplexed about the revolution as well. Never had so much resistance been made to so little tyranny in their opinion. Indeed, twentieth century historians would wonder at the violence of colonists’ claims of tyranny and assume that they hid ulterior economic motives because the British Empire was, in fact, so loose in its application of power.
Historians of the Revolution are of two minds when it comes to the forces that produced the colonial revolt. Put simply, there are those who argue for the power of ideas to shape action and politics, and those who argue that social and, above all, economic concerns are the base motivators of men’s actions. One school or another has held sway at various times over the last hundred years, and currently a refined version of the idea interpretation holds the upper hand.
In 1913, Charles Beard published his book, An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution, in which he argued that the Constitution could be read as the work of a class with vested economic interest in a strong central authority. Writing against the work of nineteenth-century historians who took the founding generation at their word and placed the ideals of liberty and self-governance at the center of the revolution, Beard essentially charged that various interest groups formed the Constitution to safeguard their precarious place in society. Landholders, among other groups, worried that the democratic tendencies of popular elections would eventually result in levelling and property confiscation, wanted a power higher than the states that could defend their interests. Beard wrote his book in an atmosphere heavy with the ideas of Carl Marx, who dismissed the concept that ideas had any intrinsic power and always sought to find the base causes, usually economic interest, which shaped ideology.
Historians of Beard’s generation moved away from the intellectual explanation of the Revolution in part because they could not take seriously the outrageous charges that the colonists levelled against Parliament and the King; thus they took these charges as a smokescreen for other, more devious, motivations. Indeed, the charges of monstrous corruption, tyranny, and subversion fall hard on our ears today, sounding like so much propoganda, and the skeptical mind easily detects a disingenuous note in the colonists’ arguments.
Beginning in the 1950’s, a new generation of historians began to reevaluate these protests. This new school found its most cogent statement in Bernard Bailyn’s Ideological Origins of the American Revolution. Bailyn, reading through published Revolutionary pamphlets, began to wonder if the colonists really meant what they said, if they really feared the tyranny of England as much as they said they did. Bailyn concluded that they did, and that the source of their deeply held beliefs about liberty and power came from the small “Country” or Opposition Party in English politics, which utilized a highly dramatized political language developed during the 17th century during England’s Civil War to charge their opponents with corruption and conspiracy. The Colonists absorbed the talk of corruption, power, and conspiracy from a distance, and saw in English actions the beginnings of a threat to their independence. Fundamental to their understanding of the world, and to how they would structure their own country, was a belief in the deeply antagonistic relationship between liberty and power. Bailyn and other historians like Edmund Morgan put ideas back at the center of their interpretations of the Revolution, essentially arguing with John Adams that the Revolution was one of hearts and minds.
That’s it for now, folks, these little blurbs help me place some of the things I read everyday. I’m going to work on the format next time. There’s too much information, I need to focus on smaller parts.
