WEBVTT NOTE 80. Was the American Revolution Radical? 1 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:06.000 Volume 4, Chapter 80. Was the American Revolution radical? 2 00:00:06.000 --> 00:00:16.000 Especially since the early 1950s, America has been concerned with opposing revolutions throughout the world. 3 00:00:16.000 --> 00:00:23.000 In the process, it has generated a historiography that denies its own revolutionary past. 4 00:00:23.000 --> 00:00:46.000 This neoconservative view of the American Revolution, echoing the reactionary writer in the pay of the Austrian and English governments of the early 19th century, Friedrich von Gens, tries to isolate the American Revolution from all the revolutions in the Western world that preceded it and followed it. 5 00:00:46.000 --> 00:01:05.000 The American Revolution, this view holds, was unique. It alone, of all modern revolutions, was not really revolutionary. Instead, it was moderate, conservative, dedicated only to preserving existing institutions from British aggrandizement. 6 00:01:05.000 --> 00:01:12.720 Furthermore, like all else in America, it was marvelously harmonious and consensual. 7 00:01:12.720 --> 00:01:18.400 Unlike the wicked French and other revolutions in Europe, the American Revolution then did 8 00:01:18.400 --> 00:01:21.760 not upset or change anything. 9 00:01:21.760 --> 00:01:25.640 It was therefore not really a revolution at all. 10 00:01:25.640 --> 00:01:28.840 Certainly it was not radical. 11 00:01:28.840 --> 00:01:36.320 Now this view in the first place displays an extreme naivete on the nature of revolution. 12 00:01:36.320 --> 00:01:42.720 No revolution has ever sprung forth fully blown and fully armed like Athena from the 13 00:01:42.720 --> 00:01:45.480 brow of existing society. 14 00:01:45.480 --> 00:01:49.240 No revolution has ever emerged from a vacuum. 15 00:01:49.240 --> 00:01:56.440 No revolution has ever been born out of ideas alone, but only from a long chain of abuses 16 00:01:56.440 --> 00:02:03.840 and a long history of preparation, ideological and institutional. 17 00:02:03.840 --> 00:02:09.780 And no revolution, even the most radical, from the English Revolution of the seventeenth 18 00:02:09.780 --> 00:02:16.480 century to the many third world revolutions of the twentieth, has ever come into being 19 00:02:16.480 --> 00:02:24.680 except in reaction to increased oppression by the existing state apparatus. 20 00:02:24.680 --> 00:02:31.680 Our revolution is in that sense a reaction against worsening oppression, and in that sense 21 00:02:31.680 --> 00:02:35.980 all revolutions may be called conservative. 22 00:02:35.980 --> 00:02:40.840 But that would make hash out of the meaning of ideological concepts. 23 00:02:40.840 --> 00:02:45.960 If the French and Russian revolutions may be called conservative, then so might the 24 00:02:45.960 --> 00:02:47.600 American. 25 00:02:47.600 --> 00:02:53.040 This same process was at work in Bacon's Rebellion of the late 17th century and the 26 00:02:53.040 --> 00:02:59.240 The American Revolution of the Late Eighteenth. As the Declaration of Independence, a good 27 00:02:59.240 --> 00:03:06.720 source for understanding the revolution, rightly emphasized, prudence indeed will dictate that 28 00:03:06.720 --> 00:03:12.840 governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes, and 29 00:03:12.840 --> 00:03:19.980 accordingly, all experience hath shown that mankind are more disposed to suffer while 30 00:03:19.980 --> 00:03:46.780 Evels are sufferable than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed, but when a long train of abuses and usurpations evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty to throw off such government. 31 00:03:46.780 --> 00:03:52.940 It takes such a long train of abuses to persuade the mass of people to throw off their habitual 32 00:03:52.940 --> 00:04:00.440 customs and loyalties and to make revolution, hence the absurdity of singling out the American 33 00:04:00.440 --> 00:04:03.820 Revolution as conservative in that sense. 34 00:04:03.820 --> 00:04:11.100 Indeed, this very breakthrough against existing habits, the very act of revolution, is therefore 35 00:04:11.100 --> 00:04:16.360 ipso facto an extraordinarily radical act. 36 00:04:16.360 --> 00:04:23.360 All mass revolutions, indeed all revolutions as distinguished from their coup d'etats, 37 00:04:23.360 --> 00:04:31.400 by bringing the masses into violent action are therefore, per se, highly radical events. 38 00:04:31.400 --> 00:04:35.880 All revolutions are therefore radical. 39 00:04:35.880 --> 00:04:42.040 But the deep-seated radicalism of the American Revolution goes far beyond this. 40 00:04:42.040 --> 00:04:49.400 It was inextricably linked both to the radical revolutions that went before and to the ones, 41 00:04:49.400 --> 00:04:53.240 particularly the French, that succeeded it. 42 00:04:53.240 --> 00:04:59.560 From the researches of Caroline Robbins and Bernard Balin, we have come to see the indispensable 43 00:04:59.560 --> 00:05:06.920 linkage of radical ideology in a straight line from the English Republican revolutionaries 44 00:05:06.920 --> 00:05:14.240 of the 17th Century through the Commonwealth Men of the late 17th and 18th Century to the 45 00:05:14.240 --> 00:05:18.340 French and to the American revolutionaries. 46 00:05:18.340 --> 00:05:28.000 And this ideology of natural rights and individual liberty was to its very morrow revolutionary. 47 00:05:28.000 --> 00:05:34.900 As Lord Acton stressed of radical liberalism in setting up what ought to be as a rigorous 48 00:05:34.900 --> 00:05:43.400 This guide posed for judging what is. It virtually raised, thereby, a standard of revolution. 49 00:05:43.400 --> 00:05:49.900 The Americans had always been intractable, rebellious, impatient of oppression, as witnessed 50 00:05:49.900 --> 00:05:56.060 the numerous rebellions of the late seventeenth century. They also had their own individualist 51 00:05:56.060 --> 00:06:03.820 and libertarian heritage. Their Ann Hutchinsons and Rhode Island quasi-anarchists, some directly 52 00:06:03.820 --> 00:06:07.820 are closely linked with the left wing of the English Revolution. 53 00:06:07.820 --> 00:06:14.820 Now strengthened and guided by the developed libertarian natural rights ideology of the 18th century 54 00:06:14.820 --> 00:06:23.820 and reacting to aggrandizement of the British imperial state in the economic, constitutional and religious spheres, 55 00:06:23.820 --> 00:06:29.820 the Americans in escalated and radicalized confrontations with Great Britain 56 00:06:29.820 --> 00:06:37.820 of Britain had made and won their revolution. By doing so, this revolution, based on the 57 00:06:37.820 --> 00:06:45.280 growing libertarian idea, pervading enlightened opinion in Europe, itself gave immeasurable 58 00:06:45.280 --> 00:06:51.620 impetus to the liberal revolutionary movement throughout the old world. For here was a living 59 00:06:51.620 --> 00:06:59.540 example of a liberal revolution that had taken its daring chance against all odds and against 60 00:06:59.540 --> 00:07:13.540 The American Revolution was radical in many other ways as well. 61 00:07:13.540 --> 00:07:20.420 It was the first successful war of national liberation against Western imperialism. 62 00:07:20.420 --> 00:07:27.060 A people's war, waged by the majority of Americans having the courage and the zeal 63 00:07:27.060 --> 00:07:34.700 to rise up against constituted legitimate government actually threw off their sovereign. 64 00:07:34.700 --> 00:07:41.820 A revolutionary war led by fanatics and zealots rejected the siren calls of compromise and 65 00:07:41.820 --> 00:07:45.220 easy adjustment to the existing system. 66 00:07:45.220 --> 00:07:51.060 As a people's war, it was victorious to the extent that guerrilla strategy and tactics 67 00:07:51.060 --> 00:07:57.980 were employed against the far more heavily armed and better trained British Army, a strategy 68 00:07:57.980 --> 00:08:04.560 in tactics of protracted conflict resting precisely on mass support. 69 00:08:04.560 --> 00:08:11.280 The tactics of harassment, mobility, surprise, and the wearing down and cutting off of supplies 70 00:08:11.280 --> 00:08:15.980 finally resulted in the encirclement of the enemy. 71 00:08:15.980 --> 00:08:21.620 Considering that the theory of guerrilla revolution had not yet been developed, it was remarkable 72 00:08:21.620 --> 00:08:26.140 that the Americans had the courage and initiative to employ it. 73 00:08:26.140 --> 00:08:31.700 As it was, all their victories were based on guerrilla-type concepts of revolutionary 74 00:08:31.700 --> 00:08:38.700 war, while all the American defeats came from stubborn insistence by such men as Washington 75 00:08:38.700 --> 00:08:44.140 on a conventional European type of open military confrontation. 76 00:08:44.140 --> 00:08:53.140 Also, as in any people's war, the American Revolution did inevitably rend society in two. 77 00:08:53.140 --> 00:08:59.140 The Revolution was not a peaceful emanation of an American consensus. 78 00:08:59.140 --> 00:09:10.140 On the contrary, as we have seen, it was a civil war resulting in permanent expulsion of 100,000 Tories from the United States. 79 00:09:10.140 --> 00:09:19.140 Tories were hunted, persecuted, their property confiscated, and themselves sometimes killed. What could be more radical than that? 80 00:09:19.140 --> 00:09:25.140 Thus the French Revolution was, as in so many other things, foreshadowed by the American. 81 00:09:25.140 --> 00:09:38.140 The inner contradiction of the goal of liberty and the struggle against the Tories during the Revolution showed that revolutions will be tempted to betray their own principles in the heat of battle. 82 00:09:38.140 --> 00:09:53.140 The American Revolution also prefigured the misguided use of paper money inflation and of severe price and wage controls which proved equally unworkable in America and in France. 83 00:09:53.140 --> 00:10:06.140 And as constituted government was either ignored or overthrown, Americans found recourse in new quasi-anarchistic forms of government, spontaneous local committees. 84 00:10:06.140 --> 00:10:12.960 Indeed, the new state and eventual federal governments often emerged out of federations 85 00:10:12.960 --> 00:10:16.380 and alliances of local and county committees. 86 00:10:16.380 --> 00:10:22.760 Here again, committees of inspection, committees of public safety, and so forth, prefigured 87 00:10:22.760 --> 00:10:26.160 the French and other revolutionary paths. 88 00:10:26.160 --> 00:10:33.060 What this meant, as was most clearly illustrated in Pennsylvania, was the revolutionary innovation 89 00:10:33.060 --> 00:10:44.060 of parallel institutions, of dual power, that challenged and eventually simply replaced old and established governmental forms. 90 00:10:44.060 --> 00:10:52.060 Nothing in all of this picture of the American Revolution could have been more radical, more truly revolutionary. 91 00:10:52.060 --> 00:10:58.060 But it may be claimed this was, after all, only an external revolution. 92 00:10:58.060 --> 00:11:04.760 Even if the American Revolution was radical, it was only a radicalism directed against Great Britain. 93 00:11:04.760 --> 00:11:09.760 There was no radical upheaval at home, no internal revolution. 94 00:11:09.760 --> 00:11:18.060 Again, this view betrays a highly naive concept of revolution and of wars of national liberation. 95 00:11:18.060 --> 00:11:22.560 While the focus of the upheaval was, of course, Great Britain, 96 00:11:22.560 --> 00:11:29.560 The inevitable indirect consequence was radical change within the United States. 97 00:11:29.760 --> 00:11:36.360 In the first and most obvious place, the success of the revolution meant, inevitably, the overturn 98 00:11:36.360 --> 00:11:43.360 and displacement of the Tory elites, particularly of those internal oligarchs and members of 99 00:11:43.800 --> 00:11:49.800 governors' councils who had been created and propped up by the British government. 100 00:11:49.800 --> 00:11:56.320 The freeing of trade and manufacture from British imperial shackles again meant a displacement 101 00:11:56.320 --> 00:12:00.880 of Tory favorites from positions of economic privilege. 102 00:12:00.880 --> 00:12:07.320 The confiscation of Tory estates, especially in feudalism-ridden New York State, had a 103 00:12:07.320 --> 00:12:14.760 sharply democratizing and liberalizing effect on the structure of land tenure in the United 104 00:12:14.760 --> 00:12:16.480 States. 105 00:12:16.480 --> 00:12:23.220 This process was also greatly advanced by the inevitable dispossession of the vast British 106 00:12:23.220 --> 00:12:31.500 proprietary landed estates in Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia and North Carolina. 107 00:12:31.500 --> 00:12:38.200 The freakish acquisition of the territory west of the Appalachians by the Peace Treaty 108 00:12:38.200 --> 00:12:45.080 also opened vast quantities of virgin land to further liberalized the land structure, 109 00:12:45.080 --> 00:12:50.820 Provided that the speculative land companies, as it increasingly appeared, would be kept 110 00:12:50.820 --> 00:12:52.980 at bay. 111 00:12:52.980 --> 00:12:58.640 Revolution also brought an inevitable upsurge of religious liberty with the freeing of many 112 00:12:58.640 --> 00:13:05.800 of the states, especially in the South, from the British-imposed Anglican establishment. 113 00:13:05.800 --> 00:13:12.080 With these radical internal processes inevitably launched by the fact of revolution against 114 00:13:12.080 --> 00:13:17.980 Since Great Britain, it is also not surprising that this internal revolutionary course would 115 00:13:17.980 --> 00:13:19.720 go further. 116 00:13:19.720 --> 00:13:27.360 To the attack on feudalism was added a drive against the remnants of entail and promogenitor. 117 00:13:27.360 --> 00:13:33.600 From the ideology of individual liberty and from British participation in the slave trade 118 00:13:33.600 --> 00:13:40.480 came a general attack on that trade, and in the North, a successful governmental drive 119 00:13:40.480 --> 00:14:10.480 against Slavery itself. Another inevitable corollary of the revolution, and one easily overlooked, was that the very fact of revolution, aside from Connecticut and Rhode Island, where no British government had existed before, necessarily dispossessed existing internal rule. Hence the sudden smashing of that rule inevitably threw government back into a fragmented, local, 120 00:14:10.480 --> 00:14:31.480 Quasi-anarchistic form When we consider also that the revolution was consciously and radically directed against taxes and against central government power, the inevitable thrust of the revolution for radical transformation toward liberty becomes crystal clear. 121 00:14:31.480 --> 00:14:46.480 It is then not surprising that the 13 revolted colonies were separate and decentralized, and that for several years even the separate state governments could not dare to impose taxes upon the populace. 122 00:14:46.480 --> 00:14:56.480 Furthermore, since royal control in the colonies had meant executive, judicial and upper house control by royal appointees, 123 00:14:56.480 --> 00:15:10.480 The libertarian thrust of the revolution was inevitably against these instruments of oligarchy and in favor of democratic forms responsive to and easily checked by the people. 124 00:15:10.480 --> 00:15:25.480 It is not a coincidence that the states where this type of internal revolution against oligarchy proceeded the furthest were the ones where the oligarchy was most reluctant to break with Great Britain. 125 00:15:25.480 --> 00:15:42.480 Hence in Pennsylvania, the radical drive for independence meant that the reluctant oligarchy had to be pushed aside, and the process of that pushing led to the most liberal and most democratic constitution of all the states. 126 00:15:42.480 --> 00:15:48.840 A highly liberal and democratic constitution also resulted from Vermont's necessity for 127 00:15:48.840 --> 00:15:55.640 rebelling internally against New York and New Hampshire's imperialism over Vermont's 128 00:15:55.640 --> 00:15:57.240 land. 129 00:15:57.240 --> 00:16:04.240 On the other hand, Rhode Island and Connecticut, where no internal British rule existed, experienced 130 00:16:04.240 --> 00:16:08.180 no such internal cataclysm. 131 00:16:08.180 --> 00:16:15.100 The Revolution was therefore a derivative of the external, but it happened nevertheless. 132 00:16:15.100 --> 00:16:20.540 Because of these inevitable internal libertarian effects, the drive for restoration of central 133 00:16:20.540 --> 00:16:27.660 government through taxation and mercantilism had to be a conscious and determined project 134 00:16:27.660 --> 00:16:35.580 on the part of conservatives, a drive against the natural consequences of the Revolution. 135 00:16:35.580 --> 00:16:40.860 Since the revolution was a people's war, the extent of mass participation in the militia 136 00:16:40.860 --> 00:16:47.180 and committees led necessarily to a democratizing of suffrage in the new governments. 137 00:16:47.180 --> 00:16:53.780 Furthermore, the principle of no taxation without representation could readily be applied 138 00:16:53.780 --> 00:17:00.620 internally as could British restrictions upon the principle of one man, one vote. 139 00:17:00.620 --> 00:17:06.580 While recent researches have shown that colonial suffrage requirements were far more liberal 140 00:17:06.580 --> 00:17:12.620 than had been realized, it is still true that suffrage was significantly widened by the 141 00:17:12.620 --> 00:17:16.060 revolution in half the states. 142 00:17:16.060 --> 00:17:21.540 This widening was helped everywhere by the depreciation of the monetary unit and hence 143 00:17:21.540 --> 00:17:28.100 of existing property requirements entailed by the inflation that helped finance the war. 144 00:17:28.100 --> 00:17:36.100 Chilton Williamson, the most thorough and judicious of recent historians of American suffrage, has concluded that 145 00:17:36.100 --> 00:17:44.100 the revolution probably operated to increase the size of that majority of adult males which had, generally speaking, 146 00:17:44.100 --> 00:17:50.100 been able to meet the old property and freehold test before 1776. 147 00:17:50.100 --> 00:18:07.100 The increase in the number of voters was probably not so significant as the fact that the revolution had made explicit the basic idea that voting had little or nothing to do with real property and that this idea should be reflected accurately in the law. 148 00:18:07.100 --> 00:18:16.100 The changes in suffrage made during the revolution were the most important in the entire history of American suffrage reform. 149 00:18:16.100 --> 00:18:23.100 In retrospect, it is clear that they committed the country to a democratic suffrage. 150 00:18:23.100 --> 00:18:34.100 While many of the state constitutions, under the influence of conservative theorists, turned out to be conservative reactions against initial revolutionary conditions, 151 00:18:34.100 --> 00:18:45.100 the very act of making them was radical and revolutionary, for they meant that what the radical and enlightenment thinkers had said was really true. 152 00:18:45.100 --> 00:18:51.100 Men did not have to submit blindly to habit, to custom, to irrational prescription. 153 00:18:51.100 --> 00:19:01.100 After violently throwing off their prescribed government, they could sit down and consciously make over their polity by the use of reason. 154 00:19:01.100 --> 00:19:04.100 Here was radicalism indeed. 155 00:19:04.100 --> 00:19:22.100 Furthermore, in the Bill of Rights, the framers added a significant and consciously libertarian attempt to prevent government from invading the natural rights of the individual, rights which they had learned about from the great English libertarian tradition of the past century. 156 00:19:22.100 --> 00:19:33.100 For all these reasons, for its mass violence and for its libertarian goals, the American Revolution was ineluctably radical. 157 00:19:33.100 --> 00:19:45.100 Not the least demonstration of its radicalism was the impact of this revolution in inspiring and generating the admittedly radical revolutions in Europe, 158 00:19:45.100 --> 00:20:15.100 The American Revolution coincided with the climax of the Age of Enlightenment. It was itself, in some degree, the product of this age. There were many in Europe, as there were in America, who saw in the Enlightenment, and in the world of the Enlightenment, an international impact that has been most thoroughly studied by Robert Palmer and Jacques Godachot. Palmer has eloquently summed up the meaning that the American Revolution had for Europe. 159 00:20:15.100 --> 00:20:21.100 American Revolution, a lesson and an encouragement for mankind. 160 00:20:21.100 --> 00:20:26.900 It proved that the liberal ideas of the Enlightenment might be put into practice. 161 00:20:26.900 --> 00:20:34.720 It showed or was assumed to show that ideas of the rights of man and the social contract 162 00:20:34.720 --> 00:20:43.340 of liberty and equality, of responsible citizenship and popular sovereignty, of religious freedom, 163 00:20:43.340 --> 00:21:06.340 The freedom of thought and speech, separation of powers, and deliberately contrived written constitutions need not remain in the realm of speculation among the writers of books, but could be made the actual fabric of public life among real people in this world now.