The Radicalism of the American Revolution

by Gordon S. Wood

Authority and liberty flowed not as today from the political organization of the society but from the structure of its personal relationships. In important respects this premodern or early modern society still bore traces of the medieval world of personal fealties and loyalties out of which it arose.

Colonial Massachusetts had a society of 300,000 people, yet it spent less than £25,000 a year on its government,

Some of the planters saw with mounting fear the accumulated gains of their lives being dissipated by the reckless gambling and drinking of their heirs, who, as Landon Carter moaned, “play away and play it all away.” “In a commercial nation,”

drink away

“The first father,” said Boucher, “was the first king: and … it was thus that all government originated; and monarchy is its most ancient form.” Since kings, magistrates, masters, and all superiors received their authority not from below but from God, the duty of all subjects and subordinates was simple: “to be quiet and to sit still.”

divine right

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

revolution