The War for Independence
by
Was a Social Revolution
Gordon S. Wood
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. The American
revolutionary leaders do not fit our conventional image of
revolutionaries-angry~ passionate, reckless, maybe even bloodthirsty for the
sake of a cause. We can think of Robespierre, Lenin, and Mao Zedong as
revolutionaries, but not George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and John Adams.
They seem too stuffy, too solemn, too cautious, too much the gentlemen. We
cannot quite conceive of revolutionaries in powdered hair and knee breeches. The
American revolutionaries seem to belong in drawing rooms or legislative halls,
not in cellars or in the streets. 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. There was no reign of terror in the American Revolution and no
resultant dictator-no Cromwell, no Bonaparte. 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 jacqueries, no
burning of chateaux, no storming of prisons.
Of course, there have been many historians-Progressive or neo-Progressive
historians, as they have been called-who have sought, as Harmah Arendt put it,
"to interpret the American Revolution in the light of the French
Revolution," and to look for the same kinds of internal violence, class
conflict, and social deprivation that presumably lay behind the French
Revolution and other modern revolutions. Since the beginning of the twentieth
century these Progressive historians have formulated various social
interpretations of the American Revolution essentially designed to show that the
Revolution, in Carl Becker's famous words, was not only about "home
rule" but also about---who was to rule at home." They have tried to
describe the Revolution essentially as a social struggle by deprived and
underprivileged groups against entrenched elites. But, it has been correctly
pointed out [by Bernard Bailyn, despite an extraordinary amount of research and
writing during a good part of this century, the purposes of these Progressive
and neo-Progressive historians-"to portray the origins and goals of the
Revolution as in some significant measure expressions of a peculiar economic
malaise or of the social protests and aspirations of an impoverished or
threatened mass population-have not been fulfilled." They have not been
fulfilled because the social conditions that generically are supposed to lie
behind all revolutions-poverty and economic deprivation-were not present in
colonial America. There should no longer be any doubt about it: the white
American colonists were not an oppressed people; they 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 eighteenth century. Such a
situation, however, does not mean that colonial society was not susceptible to
revolution.
Precisely because the impulses to revolution in eighteenth-century 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. It has
therefore often been considered to be essentially an intellectual event, a
constitutional defense of American rights against British encroachments
("no taxation without representation"), undertaken not to change the
existing structure of society but to preserve it. For some historians the
Revolution seems to be little more than a colonial rebellion or a war for
independence. Even when we have recognized the radicalism of the Revolution, we
admit only a political, not a social radicalism. The revolutionary leaders, it
is said [by Bailyn, were peculiar "eighteenth-century radicals concerned,
like the eighteenth-century British radicals, not with the need to recast the
social order nor with the problems of the economic inequality and the injustices
of stratified societies but with the need to purify a corrupt constitution and
fight off the apparent growth of prerogative power." Consequently, 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.
A Radical Revolution
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 Revolution 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. Of course, the American Revolution was very different from
other revolutions. But it was no less radical and no less social for being
different. In fact, it was one of the greatest revolutions the world has known,
a momentous upheaval that not only fundamentally altered the character of
American society but decisively affected the course of subsequent history.
It was as radical and social as any revolution in history, but it was radical
and social in a very special eighteenth-century sense. No doubt many of the
concerns and much of the language of that premodern, pre-Marxian eighteenth
century were almost entirely political. That was because most people in that
very different distant world could not as yet conceive of society apart from
government. 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 eighteenth 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. J.
Franklin Jameson, who more than two generations ago described the Revolution as
a social movement only to be roundly criticized by a succeeding generation of
historians, was at least right about one thing: "the stream of revolution,
once started, could not be confined within narrow banks, but spread abroad upon
the land."
By the time the Revolution had run its course in the early nineteenth century,
American society had been radically and thoroughly 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. By the early years of the nineteenth century the Revolution had
created a society fundamentally different from the colonial society of the
eighteenth century. It was in fact a new society unlike any that had ever
existed anywhere in the world....
That revolution did more than legally create the United States; it transformed
American society. Because the story of America has turned out the way it has,
because the United States in the twentieth century has become the great power
that it is, it is difficult, if not impossible, to appreciate and recover fully
the insignificant and puny origins of the country. 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 that was crucial to this transformation. It was the Revolution, more
than any other single event, that made America into the most liberal,
democratic, and modern nation in the world....
These changes were radical, and they were extensive. 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 nineteenth
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 at least two 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-making over their art, architecture,
and iconography-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...
Conditions for Revolution
By the late 1760s and early 1770s a potentially revolutionary situation existed
in many of the colonies. There was little evidence of those social conditions we
often associate with revolution (and some historians have desperately sought to
find): no mass poverty, no seething social discontent, no grinding oppression.
For most white Americans there was greater prosperity than anywhere else in the
world; in fact, the experience of that growing prosperity contributed to the
unprecedented eighteenth-century sense that people here and now were capable of
ordering their own reality. Consequently, there was a great deal of jealousy and
touchiness everywhere, for what could be made could be unmade; the people were
acutely nervous about their prosperity and the liberty that seemed to make it
possible. With the erosion of much of what remained of traditional social
relationships, more and more individuals had broken away from their families,
communities, and patrons and were experiencing the anxiety of freedom and
independence. Social changes, particularly since the 1740s, multiplied rapidly,
and many Americans struggled to make sense of what was happening. These social
changes were complicated, and they are easily misinterpreted. Luxury and
conspicuous consumption by very ordinary people were increasing. So, too, was
religious dissent of all sorts. The rich became richer, and aristocratic gentry
everywhere became more conspicuous and self-conscious; and the numbers of poor
in some cities and the numbers of landless in some areas increased. But social
classes based on occupation or wealth did not set themselves against one
another, for no classes in this modern sense yet existed. The society was
becoming more unequal, but its inequalities were not the source of the
instability and anxiety. Indeed, it was the pervasive equality of American
society that was causing the problems....
This extraordinary touchiness, this tendency of the colonists in their political
disputes to argue "with such vehemence as if all had been at Stake,"
flowed from the precariousness of American society, from its incomplete and
relatively flattened character, and from the often "rapid ascendancy"
of its aristocracy, particularly in the Deep South, where families "in less
than ten years have risen from the lowest rank, have acquired upward of £100,000
and have, moreover, gained this wealth in a simple and easy manner." Men
who had quickly risen to the top were confident and aggressive but also
vulnerable to challenge, especially sensitive over their liberty and
independence, and unwilling to brook any interference with their status or their
prospects.
For other, more ordinary colonists the promises and uncertainties of American
life were equally strong. Take, for example, the lifelong struggle of farmer and
sawmill owner Moses Cooper of Glocester, Rhode Island, to rise from virtual
insignificance to become the richest man in the town. In 1767-68, at the age of
sixty, Cooper was finally able to hire sufficient slaves and workers to do all
his manual labor; he became a gentleman and justice of the peace and appended
"Esq." to his name. Certainly by this date he could respond to the
rhetoric of his fellow Rhode Islanders talking about their colony as "the
promised land ... a land of milk and honey and wherein we eat bread to the full
... a land whose stones are iron ... and ... other choice mines and minerals;
and a land whose rivers and adjacent seas are stored with the best of
fish." And Cooper might well have added, "whose forests were rich with
timber," for he had made his money from lumber. Yet at the same time Cooper
knew only too well the precariousness of his wealth and position and naturally
feared what Britain's mercantile restrictions might mean for his lumber sales to
the West Indies. What had risen so high could as readily fall: not surprisingly,
he became an enthusiastic patriot leader of his tiny town of Glocester. Multiply
Cooper's experience of uneasy prosperity many thousandfold and we have the stuff
of a popular revolutionary movement....
Patriots vs. Courtiers
The great social antagonists of the American Revolution were not poor vs. rich,
workers vs. employers, or even democrats vs. aristocrats. They were patriots vs.
courtiers-categories appropriate to the monarchical world in which the colonists
had been reared. Courtiers were persons whose position or rank came artificially
from above-from hereditary or personal connections that ultimately flowed from
the crown or court. Courtiers, said John Adams, were those who applied
themselves "to the Passions and Prejudices, the Follies and Vices of Great
Men in order to obtain their Smiles, Esteem, and Patronage and consequently
their favors and Preferments." Patriots, on the other hand, were those who
not only loved their country but were free of dependent connections and
influence; their position or rank came naturally from their talent and from
below, from recognition by the people. "A real patriot," declared one
American in 1776, was "the most illustrious character in human life. Is not
the interest and happiness of his fellow creatures his care?". . .
It is in this context that we can best understand the revolutionaries' appeal to
independence, not just the independence of the country from Great Britain, but,
more important, the independence of individuals from personal influence and
"warm and private friendship." The purpose of the Virginia
constitution of 1776, one Virginian recalled, was "to prevent the undue and
overwhelming influence of great landholders in elections." This was to be
done by disfranchising the landless "tenants and retainers" who
depended "on the breath and varying will" of these great men and by
ensuring that only men who owned their own land could vote.
A republic presumed, as the Virginia declaration of rights put it, that men in
the new republic would be "equally free and independent," and property
would make them so. Property in a republic was still conceived of
traditionally-in proprietary terms-not as a means of personal profit or
aggrandizement but rather as a source of personal authority or independence. It
was regarded not merely as a material possession but also as an attribute of a
man's personality that defined him and protected him from outside pressure. A
carpenter's skill, for example, was his property. Jefferson feared the rabble of
the cities precisely because they were without property and were thus
dependent....
In a monarchical world of numerous patron-client relations and multiple degrees
of dependency, nothing could be more radical than this attempt to make every man
independent. What was an ideal in the English-speaking world now became for
Americans an ideological imperative. Suddenly, in the eyes of the
revolutionaries, all the fine calibrations of rank and degrees of unfreedom of
the traditional monarchical society became absurd and degrading. The Revolution
became a full-scale assault on dependency.
Dependency and Slavery
At the beginning of the eighteenth century the English radical whig and deist
John Toland had divided all society into those who were free and those who were
dependent. "By Freeman," wrote Toland, "I understand men of
property, or persons that are able to live of themselves; and those who cannot
subsist in this independence, I call Servants." In such a simple division
everyone who was not free was presumed to be a servant. Anyone tied to someone
else, who was someone's client or dependent, was servile. The American
revolutionary movement now brought to the surface this latent logic in
eighteenth-century radical whig thinking.
Dependency was now equated with slavery, and slavery in the American world had a
conspicuous significance. "What is a slave," asked a New Jersey writer
in 1765, "but one who depends upon the will of another for the enjoyment of
his life and property?" "Liberty," said Stephen Hopkins of Rhode
Island, quoting Algernon Sidney, "solely consists in an independency upon
the will of another; and by the name of slave we understand a man who can
neither dispose of his person or goods, but enjoys all at the will of his
master." It was left to John Adams in 1775 to draw the ultimate conclusion
and to destroy in a single sentence the entire conception of society as a
hierarchy of graded ranks and degrees. "There are," said Adams simply,
"but two sorts of men in the world, freemen and slaves." Such a stark
dichotomy collapsed all the delicate distinctions and dependencies of a
monarchical society and created radical and momentous implications for
Americans.
Independence, declared David Ramsay in a memorable Fourth of July oration in
1778, would free Americans from that monarchical world where "favor is the
source of preferment," and where "he that can best please his
superiors, by the low arts of fawning and adulation, is most likely to obtain
favor." The revolutionaries wanted to create a new republican world in
which "all offices lie open to men of merit, of whatever rank or
condition." They believed that the reins of state may be held by the son of
the poorest men, if possessed of abilities equal to the important station."
They were "no more to look up for the blessings of government to hungry
courtiers, or the needy dependents of British nobility"; but they had now
to educate their "own children for these exalted purposes." Like
Stephen Burroughs, the author of an extraordinary memoir of these years, the
revolutionaries believed they were "so far ... republican" that they
considered "a man's merit to rest entirely with himself, without any regard
to family, blood, or connection." We can never fully appreciate the
emotional meaning these commonplace statements had for the revolutionaries until
we take seriously their passionate antagonism to the prevalence of patronage and
family influence in the ancient regime.
Of course, the revolutionary leaders did not expect poor, humble men-farmers,
artisans, or tradesmen-themselves to gain high political office. Rather, they
expected that the sons of such humble or ungenteel men, if they had abilities,
would, as they had, acquire liberal and genteel republican attributes, perhaps
by attending Harvard or the College of New Jersey at Princeton, and would
thereby rise into the ranks of gentlemen and become eligible for high political
office. The sparks of genius that they hoped republicanism would fan and kindle
into flame belonged to men like themselves-men "drawn from obscurity"
by the new opportunities of republican competition and emulation into becoming
"illustrious characters, which will dazzle the world with the splendor of
their names." Honor, interest, and patriotism together called them to
qualify themselves and posterity "for the bench, the army, the navy, the
learned professions, and all the departments of civil government." They
would become what Jefferson called the "natural aristocracy"-
liberally educated, enlightened gentlemen of character. For many of the
revolutionary leaders this was the emotional significance of republicanism-a
vindication of frustrated talent at the expense of birth and blood. For too
long, they felt, merit had been denied. In a monarchical world only the arts and
sciences had recognized talent as the sole criterion of leadership. Which is why
even the eighteenth-century ancient regime called the world of the arts and
sciences "the republic of letters." Who, it was asked, remembered the
fathers or sons of Homer and Euclid? Such a question was a republican dagger
driven into the heart of the old hereditary order. "Virtue," said
Thomas Paine simply, "is not hereditary.".. .
Laws of Inheritance
In their revolutionary state constitutions and laws the revolutionaries struck
out at the power of family and hereditary privilege. In the decades following
the Revolution all the new states abolished the legal devices of primogeniture
and entail where they existed, either by statute or by writing the abolition
into their constitutions. These legal devices, as the North Carolina statute of
1784 stated, had tended "only to raise the wealth and importance of
particular families and individuals, giving them an unequal and undue influence
in a republic, and prove in manifold instances the source of great contention
and injustice. Their abolition would therefore "tend to promote that
equality of property which is of the spirit and principle of a genuine
republic.". . .
Women and children no doubt remained largely dependent on their husbands and
fathers, but the revolutionary attack on patriarchal monarchy made all other
dependencies in the society suspect. Indeed, once the revolutionaries collapsed
all the different distinctions and dependencies of a monarchical society into
either freemen or slaves, white males found it increasingly impossible to accept
any dependent status whatsoever. Servitude of any sort suddenly became anomalous
and anachronistic. In 1784 in New York, a group believing that indentured
servitude was "contrary to ... the idea of liberty this country has so
happily established" released a shipload of immigrant servants and arranged
for public subscriptions to pay for their passage. As early as 1775 in
Philadelphia the proportion of the work force that was unfree-composed of
servants and slaves-had already declined to 13 percent from the 40 to 50 percent
that it had been at midcentury. By 1800 less than 2 percent of the city's labor
force remained unfree. Before long indentured servitude virtually
disappeared....
One obvious dependency the revolutionaries did not completely abolish was that
of nearly a half million Afro-American slaves, and their failure to do so,
amidst all their high-blown talk of liberty, makes them seem inconsistent and
hypocritical in our eyes. Yet it is important to realize that the Revolution
suddenly and effectively ended the cultural climate that had allowed black
slavery, as well as other forms of bondage and unfreedom, to exist throughout
the colonial period without serious challenge. With the revolutionary movement,
black slavery became excruciatingly conspicuous in a way that it had not been in
the older monarchical society with its many calibrations and degrees of
unfreedom; and Americans in 1775-76 began attacking it with a vehemence that was
inconceivable earlier.
Slavery
For a century or more the colonists had taken slavery more or less for granted
as the most base and dependent status in a hierarchy of dependencies and a world
of laborers. Rarely had they felt the need either to criticize black slavery or
to defend it. Now, however, the republican attack on dependency compelled
Americans to see the deviant character of slavery and to confront the
institution as they never had to before. It was no accident that Americans in
Philadelphia in 1775 formed the first anti-slavery society in the world. As long
as most people had to work merely out of poverty and the need to provide for a
living, slavery and other forms of enforced labor did not seem all that
different from free labor. But the growing recognition that labor was not simply
a common necessity of the poor but was in fact a source of increased wealth and
prosperity for ordinary workers made slavery seem more and more anomalous.
Americans now recognized that slavery in a republic of workers was an
aberration, "a peculiar institution," and that if any Americans were
to retain it, as southern Americans eventually did, they would have to explain
and justify it in new racial and anthropological ways that their former
monarchical society had never needed. The Revolution in effect set in motion
ideological and social forces that doomed the institution of slavery in the
North and led inexorably to the Civil War.
With all men now considered to be equally free citizens, the way was prepared as
well for a radical change in the conception of state power. Almost at a stroke
the Revolution destroyed all the earlier talk of paternal or maternal
government, filial allegiance, and mutual contractual obligations between rulers
and ruled. The familial image of government now lost all its previous relevance,
and the state in America emerged as something very different from what it had
been.