Humanities Homework Help

You need to explain to your whether you agree more with the
Howard Zinn or Gordon Wood article in this week’s reading, and why.

Though it occurred nearly two hundred and fifty years ago,
the American Revolution’s impact reaches to the present day. “To
understand America at any time,” writes historian Gordon S. Wood, “has
… required coming to terms with the meaning of the Revolution.”
Historian George Athan Billias adds:

The Revolution remains the
single most important event in all of American history. Within the short
span of two decades—1763-1783—Americans rejected the British monarchial
system, waged a war of independence, created states out of colonies,
and set up a central government based on the principles of popular rule,
republicanism, and nationalism.

Billias goes on to describe one of the central questions historians face when examining the Revolution:

These changes occurred with remarkable rapidity, but was the transformation itself sweeping enough to justify the term revolutionary?
Did the new nation differ that much from the former colonies? Did the
laws, institutions, and customs of the United States constitute a sharp
break with the British heritage? Was American society radically reshaped
and restructured as a result of independence? Was there a dramatic
shift in the ideas, attitudes, and behavior of most Americans in the
relationship between individuals and their government, the society, and
with one another? Within the context of our nation’s history, such
issues may be reduced to a single question: How revolutionary was our
Revolution?

Over the past two hundred years historians have answered that question differently. Daniel J. Boorstin,
for example, argues that the American Revolution was essentially a
conservative movement that sought to preserve the colonial status quo.
He and other historians argue that a great deal of social change had
already occurred in the century before the Revolution and that a
great majority of (white, male) Americans already had political,
economic, and religious freedoms and opportunities. The Revolution was
fought to preserve these freedoms rather than to create new ones,
Boorstin and others say. The classes of Americans that did not share in
these freedoms—black slaves, women, and the very poor—were not, in this
historical interpretation, much affected by the Revolution.

Other historians, however, have argued that the American
insurrection was truly revolutionary. Some, such as Bernard Bailyn, have
argued that the true revolution took place within the minds of
Americans, affecting the way they looked at themselves and their relation to the British Empire. What had once seemed American deficiencies, such as a lack of an aristocracy, a cosmopolitan culture, and
a nationally established church, were transformed into American
virtues, Bailyn argues, enabling Americans to envision themselves as an
independent republic.

Other historians have examined specific changes and reforms that the Revolution spurred in American society. The Revolution did create new constitutional governments. It popularized the ideas of liberty and equality. It did
not abolish slavery, but it did inspire the growth of an antislavery
movement (one that was partly led by free blacks demanding that America
live up to its ideals as expressed in the Declaration of Independence). Many historians agree with Richard L. Bushman in arguing that the American Revolution brought more changes in American principles than in fact—but that such principles ultimately contributed to further revolutionary results. Bushman writes:

Social and cultural change
growing out of the Revolution was … halting and incomplete. It was for
the most part a time of planting rather than
harvest. Despite considerable agitation, slavery continued to the Civil
War. Women, in another instance of blatant inequality, were not allowed
to vote until 1920…. The great changes
came later when the implications of revolutionary principles were more
fully recognized…. The power of the idea of equality lay more in its
enduring strength than in its immediate effect.

The following viewpoints examine both the motives of the
leaders of the American Revolution and the Revolution’s ultimate impact
on American life.

VIEWPOINT 1: The War for Independence Was Not a Social Revolution

Howard Zinn, “The War for Independence Was Not a Social Revolution”

Howard Zinn was professor emeritus of political science at
Boston University. He was also a civil rights activist and opponent of
the Vietnam War. Zinn’s books include Disobedience & Democracy and Declarations of Independence: Cross-Examining American Ideology. His 1980 book A People’s History of the United States was
nominated for an American Book Award. The tome surveys American history
from colonial times to America’s bicentennial from the point of view of
Blacks, Native Americans, women, and other minorities and disadvantaged
classes. Among the events Zinn examines from this perspective is the
American Revolution.

Zinn argues that the American Revolution had little
positive impact on the everyday lives of most Americans. He writes that
most of the leaders of the Revolution were members of the colonial elite
who wished to preserve their wealth and power. They used the war for
independence from Britain as a way “to create a consensus of popular
support” for their continued rule and to prevent large-scale internal
changes in America’s society. In this sense, Zinn concludes, the
American Revolution was really a successful effort to preserve America’s
status quo.

Around 1776, certain important people in the English colonies
made a discovery that would prove enormously useful for the next two
hundred years. They found that by creating a nation, a symbol, a legal
unity called the United States, they could take over land, profits, and
political power from favorites of the British Empire. In the process,
they could hold back a number of potential rebellions and create a
consensus of popular support for the rule of a new, privileged
leadership.

When we look at the American Revolution this way, it was a work
of genius, and the Founding Fathers deserve the awed tribute they have
received over the centuries. They created the most effective system of
national control devised in modern times, and showed future generations
of leaders the advantages of combining paternalism with command.

Many Rebellions

Starting with Bacon’s Rebellion in Virginia, by 1760, there had
been eighteen uprisings aimed at overthrowing colonial governments.
There had also been six black rebellions, from South Carolina to New
York, and forty riots of various origins.

By this time also, there emerged, according to Jack Greene,
“stable, coherent, effective and acknowledged local political and social
elites.” And by the 1760s, this local leadership saw the possibility of
directing much of the rebellious energy against England and her local
officials. It was not a conscious conspiracy, but an accumulation of tactical responses.

After 1763, with England victorious over France in the Seven
Years’ War (known in America as the French and Indian War), expelling
them from North America, ambitious colonial leaders were no longer
threatened by the French. They now had only two rivals left: the English
and the Indians. The British, wooing the Indians, had declared Indian
lands beyond the Appalachians out of bounds to whites (the Proclamation
of 1763). Perhaps once the British were out of the way, the Indians
could be dealt with….

With the French defeated, the British government could turn its attention to tightening control over the colonies. It needed
revenues to pay for the war, and looked to the colonies for that. Also,
the colonial trade had become more and more important to the British
economy, and more profitable….

So, the American leadership was less in need of English rule,
the English more in need of the colonists’ wealth. The elements were
there for conflict.

The war had brought glory for the generals, death to the
privates, wealth for the merchants, unemployment for the poor. There
were 25,000 people living in New York (there had been 7,000 in 1720)
when the French and Indian War ended. A newspaper editor wrote about the
growing “Number of Beggers and wandering Poor” in the streets of the
city. Letters in the papers questioned the distribution of wealth: “How
often have our Streets been covered with Thousands of Barrels of Flour
for trade, while our near Neighbors can hardly procure enough to make a
Dumplin to satisfy hunger?”

Gary Nash’s study of city tax lists shows that by the early
1770s, the top 5 percent of Boston’s taxpayers controlled 49 percent of
the city’s taxable assets. In Philadelphia and New York too, wealth was
more and more concentrated….

In Boston, the lower classes began to use the town meeting to
vent their grievances. The governor of Massachusetts had written that in
these town meetings “the meanest Inhabitants… by their constant
Attendance there generally are the majority and outvote the Gentlemen,
Merchants, Substantial Traders and all the better part of the
Inhabitants.”

What seems to have happened in Boston is that certain lawyers,
editors, and merchants of the upper classes, but excluded from the
ruling circles close to England—men like James Otis and Samuel
Adams—organized a “Boston Caucus” and through their oratory and their
writing “molded laboring-class opinion, called the ‘mob’ into action,
and shaped its behaviour.” This is Gary Nash’s description of Otis, who,
he says, “keenly aware of the declining fortunes and the resentment of
ordinary townspeople, was mirroring as well as molding popular opinion.”

Using the Lower Classes

We have here a forecast of the long history of American
politics, the mobilization of lower-class energy by upper-class
politicians, for their own purposes. This was not purely deception; it
involved, in part, a genuine recognition of lower-class grievances,
which helps to account for its effectiveness as a tactic over the
centuries….

This accumulated sense of grievance against the rich in Boston
may account for the explosiveness of mob action after the Stamp Act of
1765. Through this Act, the British were taxing the colonial population
to pay for the French war, in which colonists had suffered to expand the
British Empire. That summer, a shoemaker named Ebenezer
MacIntosh led a mob in destroying the house of a rich Boston merchant
named Andrew Oliver. Two weeks later, the crowd turned to the home of
Thomas Hutchinson, symbol of the rich elite who ruled the colonies in
the name of England. They smashed up his house with axes, drank the wine
in his wine cellar, and looted the house of its furniture and other
objects. A report by colony officials to England said that this was part
of a larger scheme in which the houses of fifteen rich people were to
be destroyed, as part of “a War of Plunder, of general levelling and
taking away the Distinction of rich and poor.”

It was one of those moments in which fury against
the rich went further than leaders like Otis wanted. Could class hatred
be focused against the pro-British elite, and deflected from the
nationalist elite? In New York, that same year of the Boston house
attacks, someone wrote to the New York Gazette, “Is
it equitable that 99, rather 999, should suffer for the Extravagance or
Grandeur of one, especially when it is considered that men frequently
owe their Wealth to the impoverishment of their Neighbors?” The leaders
of the Revolution would worry about keeping such sentiments within
limits….

In the countryside, where most people lived, there was a
similar conflict of poor against rich, one which political leaders would
use to mobilize the population against England, granting some benefits
for the rebellious poor, and many more for themselves in the process….

In North Carolina, a powerful movement of white farmers was
organized against wealthy and corrupt officials in the period from 1766
to 1771, exactly those years when, in the cities of the Northeast,
agitation was growing against the British, crowding out class issues.
The movement in North Carolina was called the Regulator movement, and it
consisted, says Marvin L. Michael Kay, a
specialist in the history of that movement, of “class-conscious white
farmers in the west who attempted to democratize local government in
their respective counties.” The Regulators referred to themselves as
“poor Industrious peasants,” as “labourers,” “the wretched poor,”
“oppressed” by “rich and powerful…designing Monsters.”…

A contemporary account of the Regulator movement in Orange County [N.C.] describes the situation:

Thus were the people of Orange
insulted by the sheriff, robbed and plundered… neglected and condemned
by the Representatives and abused by the Magistracy; obliged to pay Fees
regulated only by the Avarice of the officer; obliged to pay a Tax
which they believed went to inrich and agrandise a few, who lorded it
over them continually; and from all these Evils they saw no way to
escape; for the Men in Power, and Legislation, were the Men whose interest it was to oppress, and make gain of the Labourer.

In that county in the 1760s, the Regulators organized to
prevent the collection of taxes, or the confiscation of the property of
tax delinquents. Officials said “an absolute Insurrection of a dangerous
tendency has broke out in Orange County,” and made military plans to
suppress it. At one point seven hundred armed farmers forced the release
of two arrested Regulator leaders. The Regulators petitioned the
government on their grievances in 1768, citing “the unequal chances the
poor and the weak have in contentions with the rich and powerful.”…

The result of all this was that the assembly passed some mild
reform legislation, but also an act “to prevent riots and tumults,” and
the governor prepared to crush them militarily. In May of 1771 there was
a decisive battle in which several thousand Regulators were defeated by
a disciplined army using cannon. Six Regulators were hanged. Kay says
that in the three western counties of Orange, Anson, and Rowan, where
the Regulator movement was concentrated, it had the support of six
thousand to seven thousand men out of a total white taxable population
of about eight thousand.

One consequence of this bitter conflict is that only a minority
of the people in the Regulator counties seem to have participated as
patriots in the Revolutionary War. Most of them probably remained
neutral.

Fortunately for the Revolutionary movement, the key battles
were being fought in the North, and here in the cities, the colonial
leaders had a divided white population; they could win over the
mechanics, who were a kind of middle class, who had a stake in the fight
against England, who faced competition from English manufacturers. The
biggest problem was to keep the propertyless people, who were unemployed
and hungry in the crisis following the French war, under control….

In Virginia, it seemed clear to the educated gentry that
something needed to be done to persuade the lower orders to join the
revolutionary cause, to deflect their anger against England. One
Virginian wrote in his diary in the spring of 1774: “The lower Class of
People here are in tumult on account of Reports from Boston, many of
them expect to be press’d & compell’d to
go and fight the Britains!” Around the time of the Stamp Act, a Virginia
orator addressed the poor: “Are not the gentlemen made of the same
materials as the lowest and poorest among you?… Listen to no doctrines
which may tend to divide us, but let us go hand in hand, as
brothers…. “

It was a problem for which the rhetorical talents
of Patrick Henry were superbly fitted. He was, as Rhys Isaac puts it,
“firmly attached to the world of the gentry,” but he spoke in words that
the poorer whites of Virginia could understand….

Patrick Henry’s oratory in Virginia pointed a way to relieve
class tension between upper and lower classes and form a bond against
the British. This was to find language inspiring to all classes,
specific enough in its listing of grievances to charge people with anger
against the British, vague enough to avoid class conflict among the
rebels, and stirring enough to build patriotic feeling for the
resistance movement.

Common Sense

Tom Paine’s Common Sense, which appeared in early 1776 and became the most popular pamphlet in the American colonies, did this. It made
the first bold argument for independence, in words that any fairly
literate person could understand: “Society in every state is a blessing,
but Government even in its best state is but a necessary evil…. “

Common Sense went through twenty-five editions in 1776 and sold hundreds of thousands of copies. It is probable that almost every literate colonist either read it or knew about its contents….

Paine’s pamphlet appealed to a wide range of colonial opinion
angered by England. But it caused some tremors in aristocrats like John
Adams, who were with the patriot cause but wanted to make sure it didn’t
go too far in the direction of democracy. Paine had denounced the
so-called balanced government of Lords and Commons as a deception, and
called for single-chamber representative bodies where the people could
be represented. Adams denounced Paine’s plan
as “so democratical, without any restraint or even an attempt at any
equilibrium or counter-poise, that it must produce confusion and every
evil work.” Popular assemblies needed to be checked, Adams thought,
because they were “productive of hasty results and absurd judgements.”

Paine himself came out of “the lower orders” of England—a
staymaker, tax official, teacher, poor emigrant to America. He arrived
in Philadelphia in 1774, when agitation against England was already
strong in the colonies. The artisan mechanics of Philadelphia, along
with journeymen, apprentices, and ordinary laborers, were forming into a
politically conscious militia, “in general damn’d riff-raff-dirty,
mutinous, and disaffected,” as local aristocrats described them. By
speaking plainly and strongly, he could represent those politically
conscious lower-class people (he opposed property qualifications for
voting in Pennsylvania). But his great concern seems to have been to
speak for a middle group. “There is an extent of riches, as well as an
extreme of poverty, which, by narrowing the circles of a man’s
acquaintance, lessens his opportunities of general knowledge.”

Once the Revolution was under way, Paine more and more made it
clear that he was not for the crowd action of lower-class people—like
those militia who in 1779 attacked the house of James Wilson.
Wilson was a Revolutionary leader who opposed price controls and wanted
a more conservative government than was given by the Pennsylvania
Constitution of 1776. Paine became an associate of one of the wealthiest
men in Pennsylvania, Robert Morris, and a supporter of Morris’s
creation, the Bank of North America.

Later, during the controversy over adopting the Constitution,
Paine would once again represent urban artisans, who favored a strong
central government. He seemed to believe that such a government could
represent some great common interest. In this sense, he lent himself
perfectly to the myth of the Revolution—that it was on behalf of a
united people.

The Declaration of Independence

The Declaration of Independence brought that myth to its peak
of eloquence. Each harsher measure of British control—the Proclamation
of 1763 not allowing colonists to settle beyond the Appalachians, the
Stamp Tax, the Townshend taxes, including the one on tea, the stationing
of troops and the Boston Massacre, the closing of the port of Boston
and the dissolution of the Massachusetts legislature—escalated colonial
rebellion to the point of revolution. The colonists had responded with
the Stamp Act Congress, the Sons of Liberty, the Committees of
Correspondence, the Boston Tea Party, and finally, in 1774, the setting
up of a Continental Congress—an illegal body, forerunner of a future
independent government. It was after the
military clash at Lexington and Concord in April 1775, between colonial
Minutemen and British troops, that the Continental Congress decided on
separation. They organized a small committee to draw up the Declaration
of Independence, which Thomas Jefferson wrote. It was adopted by the Congress on July 2, and officially proclaimed July 4, 1776.

By this time there was already a powerful sentiment for
independence. Resolutions adopted in North Carolina in May of 1776, and
sent to the Continental Congress, declared independence of England,
asserted that all British law was null and void, and urged military
preparations. About the same time, the town of Malden, Massachusetts,
responding to a request from the Massachusetts House of Representatives
that all towns in the state declare their views on independence, had met
in town meeting and unanimously called for independence:“…we therefore renounce with disdain our connexion with a kingdom of slaves; we bid a final adieu to Britain.”

“When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for
one people to dissolve the political bands…they should declare the
causes…. ” This was the opening of the Declaration of Independence.
Then, in its second paragraph, came the powerful philosophical
statement:

We hold these truths to be
self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by
their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are
Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights,
Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from
the consent of the governed, that whenever any Form of Government
becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to
alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government….

It then went on to list grievances against the
king, “a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in
direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these
States.” The list accused the king of dissolving colonial governments,
controlling judges, sending “swarms of Officers to harass our people,”
sending in armies of occupation, cutting off colonial trade with other
parts of the world, taxing the colonists without their consent, and
waging war against them, “transporting large Armies of foreign
Mercenaries to compleat the works of death, desolation and tyranny.”

All this, the language of popular control over governments, the
right of rebellion and revolution, indignation at political tyranny, economic burdens, and military attacks, was language well suited to unite large numbers of colonists, and persuade even those who had grievances against one another to turn against England.

Some Americans were clearly omitted from this circle of united interest drawn by the Declaration of Independence: Indians, black slaves, women….

To say that the Declaration of Independence, even by its own
language, was limited to life, liberty, and happiness for white males is
not to denounce the makers and signers of the Declaration for holding
the ideas expected of privileged males of the eighteenth century.
Reformers and radicals, looking discontentedly at history, are often
accused of expecting too much from a past political epoch—and sometimes
they do. But the point of noting those outside the arc of human rights
in the Declaration is not, centuries late and pointlessly, to lay
impossible moral burdens on that time. It is
to try to understand the way in which the Declaration functioned to
mobilize certain groups of Americans, ignoring others. Surely,
inspirational language to create a secure consensus is still used, in
our time, to cover up serious conflicts of interest in that consensus,
and to cover up, also, the omission of large parts of the human race….

When the Declaration of Independence was read, with all its
flaming radical language, from the town hall balcony in Boston, it was
read by Thomas Crafts, a member of the Loyal Nine group, conservatives
who had opposed militant action against the British. Four days after the
reading, the Boston Committee of Correspondence ordered the townsmen to
show up on the Common for a military draft. The rich, it turned out,
could avoid the draft by paying for substitutes; the poor had to serve.
This led to rioting, and shouting: “Tyranny is Tyranny let it come from
whom It may.'”…

Victory over Britain

The American victory over the British army was made possible by
the existence of an already-armed people. Just about every white male
had a gun, and could shoot. The Revolutionary leadership distrusted the
mobs of poor. But they knew the Revolution had no appeal to slaves and
Indians. They would have to woo the armed white population.

This was not easy. Yes, mechanics and sailors, some others,
were incensed against the British. But general enthusiasm for the war
was not strong. While much of the white male population went into
military service at one time or another during the war, only a small
fraction stayed. John Shy, in his study of the Revolutionary army (A People Numerous and Armed), says
they “grew weary of being bullied by local committees of safety, by
corrupt deputy assistant commissaries of supply, and by bands of ragged
strangers with guns in their hands calling themselves soldiers of the
Revolution.” Shy estimates that perhaps a fifth of the population was
actively treasonous. John Adams had estimated a third opposed, a third
in support, a third neutral….

The Americans lost the first battles of the war: Bunker Hill,
Brooklyn Heights, Harlem Heights, the Deep South; they won small battles
at Trenton and Princeton, and then in a turning point, a big battle at
Saratoga, New York, in 1777. Washington’s frozen army hung on at Valley
Forge, Pennsylvania, while Benjamin Franklin negotiated an alliance with
the French monarchy, which was anxious for revenge on England. The war
turned to the South, where the British won victory after victory, until
the Americans, aided by a large French army, with the French navy
blocking off the British from supplies and reinforcements, won the final
victory of the war at Yorktown, Virginia, in 1781.

Through all this, the suppressed conflicts between rich and
poor among the Americans kept reappearing. In the midst of the war, in
Philadelphia, which Eric Foner describes as “a time of immense profits
for some colonists and terrible hardships for others,” the inflation
(prices rose in one month that year by 45 percent) led to agitation and
calls for action….

In May of 1779, the First Company of Philadelphia Artillery
petitioned the Assembly about the troubles of “the midling and poor” and
threatened violence against “those who are avariciously intent upon
amassing wealth by the destruction of the more virtuous part of the
community.” That same month, there was a mass meeting, an extralegal
gathering, which called for price reductions and initiated an
investigation of Robert Morris, a rich Philadelphian who was accused of
holding food from the market. In October came the “Fort Wilson riot,” in
which a militia group marched into the city and to the house of James
Wilson, a wealthy lawyer and Revolutionary official who had opposed
price controls and the democratic constitution adopted in Pennsylvania
in 1776. The militia were driven away by a “silk stocking brigade” of
well-off Philadelphia citizens.

It seemed that the majority of white colonists, who had a bit
of land, or no property at all, were still better off than slaves or
indentured servants or Indians, and could be wooed into the coalition of
the Revolution. But when the sacrifices of war became more bitter, the
privileges and safety of the rich became harder to accept. About 10
percent of the white population (an estimate of Jackson Main in The Social Structure of Revolutionary America), large landholders and merchants, held 1,000 pounds or more in personal property and 1,000 pounds in land, at the least, and these men owned nearly half the wealth of the country and held as slaves one-seventh of the country’s people.

The Continental Congress, which governed the colonies through
the war, was dominated by rich men, linked together in factions and
compacts by business and family connections….

Ronald Hoffman says: “The Revolution plunged the states of
Delaware, Maryland, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, and, to a
much lesser degree, Virginia into divisive civil conflicts that
persisted during the entire period of struggle.” The southern lower
classes resisted being mobilized for the Revolution. They saw themselves
under the rule of a political elite, win or lose against the British.

Social Control

In Maryland, for instance, by the new constitution of 1776, to
run for governor one had to own 5,000 pounds of property; to run for
state senator, 1,000 pounds. Thus, 90 percent of the population were
excluded from holding office….

With black slaves 25 percent of the population (and in some
counties 50 percent), fear of slave revolts grew. George Washington had
turned down the requests of blacks, seeking freedom, to fight in the
Revolutionary army. So when the British military commander in Virginia,
Lord Dunmore, promised freedom to Virginia slaves who joined his forces,
this created consternation. A report from one Maryland county worried
about poor whites encouraging slave runaways:

The insolence of the Negroes in
this county is come to such a height, that we are under a necessity of
disarming them which we affected on Saturday last. We took about eighty
guns, some bayonets, swords, etc. The malicious and imprudent speeches
of some among the lower classes of whites have induced them to believe
that their freedom depended on the success of the King’s troops. We
cannot therefore be too vigilant nor too rigourous with those who
promote and encourage this disposition in our slaves.

Even more unsettling was white rioting in Maryland against
leading families, supporting the Revolution, who were suspected of
hoarding needed commodities. The class hatred of some of these disloyal people was expressed by one man who said “it was better for the people to lay down their arms and pay the duties and taxes laid upon them by King and Parliament than to be brought into slavery and to be commanded and ordered about as they were.” A wealthy Maryland landowner, Charles Carroll, took note of the surly mood all around him:

There is a mean low dirty envy
which creeps thro all ranks and cannot suffer a man a superiority of
fortune, of merit, or of understanding in fellow citizens-either of
these are sure to entail a general ill will and dislike upon the owners.

Despite this, Maryland authorities retained control. They made
concessions, taxing land and slaves more heavily, letting debtors pay in
paper money. It was a sacrifice by the upper class to maintain power, and it worked….

In general, throughout the states, concessions were kept to a
minimum. The new constitutions that were drawn up in all states from
1776 to 1780 were not much different from the old ones. Although
property qualifications for voting and holding office were lowered in
some instances, in Massachusetts they were increased. Only Pennsylvania
abolished them totally. The new bills of rights had modifying
provisions. North Carolina, providing for religious freedom, added “that
nothing herein contained shall be construed to exempt preachers of
treasonable or seditious discourses, from legal trial and punishment.”
Maryland, New York, Georgia, and Massachusetts took similar cautions.

The American Revolution is sometimes said to have brought about
the separation of church and state. The northern states made such
declarations, but after 1776 they adopted taxes that forced everyone to
support Christian teachings. William G. McLoughlin, quoting Supreme
Court Justice David Brewer in 1892 that “this is a Christian nation,”
says of the separation of church and state in the Revolution that it
“was neither conceived of nor carried out….Far from being left to
itself, religion was imbedded into every aspect and institution of
American life.”

One would look, in examining the Revolution’s effect on class
relations, at what happened to land confiscated from fleeing Loyalists. It was
distributed in such a way as to give a double opportunity to the
Revolutionary leaders: to enrich themselves and their friends, and to
parcel out some land to small farmers to create a broad base of support
for the new government. Indeed, this became characteristic of the new
nation: finding itself possessed of enormous wealth, it could create the
richest ruling class in history, and still have enough for the middle
classes to act as a buffer between the rich and the dispossessed ….

Edmund Morgan sums up the class nature of the Revolution this
way: “The fact that the lower ranks were involved in the contest should
not obscure the fact that the contest itself was generally a struggle
for office and power between members of an upper class:
the new against the established.” Looking at the situation after the
Revolution, Richard Morris comments: “Everywhere one finds inequality.”
He finds “the people” of “We the people of the United States”
(a phrase coined by the very rich Gouverneur Morris) did not mean
Indians or blacks or women or white servants. In fact, there were more
indentured servants than ever, and the Revolution “did nothing to end
and little to ameliorate white bondage.”

Carl Degler says (Out of Our Past): “No new social
class came to power through the door of the American revolution. The men
who engineered the revolt were largely members of the colonial ruling
class.” George Washington was the richest man in America. John Hancock was a prosperous Boston merchant. Benjamin Franklin was a wealthy printer. And so on.

On the other hand, town mechanics, laborers, and seamen, as
well as small farmers, were swept into “the people” by the rhetoric of
the Revolution, by the camaraderie of military service, by the
distribution of some land. Thus was created a substantial body of
support, a national consensus, something that, even with the exclusion
of ignored and oppressed people, could be called “America.”…

It seems that the rebellion against British rule allowed a certain group of the colonial elite to replace those loyal to England, give some benefits to small landholders, and leave poor white working people and tenant farmers in very much their old situation.

Linda Grant DePauw, “Only Fifteen Percent of Americans Gained Freedom”

Linda Grant DePauw teaches at George Washington University in
Washington, D.C., and has written extensively about women’s history and
the colonial era. She argues in an article originally published in a
1973 issue of Maryland Historical Magazine that the American Revolution was about freedoms for white property-owning men only—about 15 percent of the American population.

Four groups—Negroes, servants, women, and minors—together comprised
approximately 80 per cent of the two and a half million Americans in the
year 1776. The legal doctrine applied to these classes excluded them
from the category of persons who should enjoy the “inalienable rights”
of which the Declaration speaks. But perhaps the most significant mark
of their unfreedom was their usual lack of a right to vote, for the
privilege of consenting to the laws was the essential right of a free
man in Lockean theory. Indeed, the very word “enfranchise” was defined
in the eighteenth century as the equivalent of the word “emancipate;” it
meant “to make free.”…

A fifth group of colonial Americans, adult white males with little or
no property, was deprived of the vote in colonial elections and so fell
short of full liberty in the Lockean sense. But they were privileged
above the other unfree groups since they were legally entitled to
acquire property and were protected from physical abuse except such as
was administered by public authority after trial as punishment for
offenses against the state. Some of these disfranchised males were
idiots, invalids, or residents of workhouses. Others were simply too
poor to qualify under the arbitrary property requirements of the various
electoral laws. Statistically they are the least significant of the
unfree, although they have had more than their share of attention from
critics of consensus history. They made up between 5 and 10 per cent of
the total population. If they are added to the 80 per cent of the
population in the other unfree categories, which were limited not merely
in their political rights but in their rights to personal liberty and
property as well, then only 10 to 15 per cent of the American population
remain to qualify as “freemen” in the fullest sense.

VIEWPOINT 2: The War for Independence Was a Social Revolution

Gordon S. Wood, “The War for Independence Was a Social Revolution”

One of the questions facing students of American history is
whether the American Revolution can be considered a true revolution—a
fundamental change or overthrow of the rulers of America. Some
historians have answered no, stating that the war for independence from
Great Britain had little effect in changing the internal leadership and
social structure of the colonies. In comparing the American Revolution
to other revolutions, such as the French Revolution of 1789 and the
Russian Revolution of 1917, they argue that the American Revolution had
comparatively little impact on the ruling political and social
structures.

Gordon S. Wood is one of the most prominent historians who
has taken an opposing view—that the American Revolution was a
transforming event that greatly altered the lives of all Americans. A
professor of history at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island,
Wood is the author of many articles and two noteworthy books. In 1969 he
published The Creation of the American Republic, a
massive study of political ideology in America as it developed from the
time of the Declaration of Independence to the making of the U.S.
Constitution. He argued in that book that the republicanism of America’s
founders was radical for its time. His 1992 The Radicalism of the American Revolution, from
which this viewpoint is excerpted, examines how the American Revolution
changed American society. Wood argues that the changes the American Revolution brought on were profound. One of the most significant changes, he asserts, was the creating of a sense of equality for all Americans.

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 Hannah 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….

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 ascendency” 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….

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…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?”… 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 “even the reins of state
may be held by the son of the poorest men, if possessed of abilities
equal to the important station.”… 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 ancien régime.

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.”… 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…. “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.[1]
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,