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November 6 - December 26, 2023
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.1
the white American colonists were not an oppressed people; they had no crushing imperial chains to throw off.
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.
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.
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.
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
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In its starkest theoretical form, therefore, monarchy, as Americans later came to describe it, implied a society of dependent beings, weak and inferior, without autonomy or independence, easily cowed by the pageantry and trappings of a patriarchal king.
Liberty: Englishmen everywhere of every social rank and of every political persuasion could not celebrate it enough. Every cause, even repression itself, was wrapped in the language of English liberty.
In the eighteenth century, as in the time of John Winthrop, it was nearly impossible to imagine a civilized society being anything but a hierarchy of some kind, in which, in the words of the famous Calvinist preacher Jonathan Edwards, all have “their appointed office, place and station, according to their several capacities and talents, and everyone keeps his place, and continues in his proper business.”
No wonder some aristocrats believed that such ignorant, superstitious, small-souled ordinary folk were made for monarchy. The “unthinking mob,” the “ignorant vulgar,” were easily taken in by their senses, especially by their sight, and were often overawed by elaborate displays of color and ermine. Even at the end of his long life and a decade’s experience with republican government, Benjamin Franklin could still conclude that “there is a natural inclination in mankind to Kingly Government.”6
Compared with what young Alexander Hamilton called “the unthinking populace,” the members of the aristocracy were very different. They were those “whose Minds seem to be of a greater Make than the Minds of others and who are replenished with Heroic Virtues and a Majesty of Soul above the ordinary Part of our Species.”
And so it had always been through the ages and was still for many in the eighteenth century: only the ambitions and actions of the great, of the high-ranking, of kings and generals, of aristocrats and gentlemen, counted in the direction and movement of events.
Most gentlemen in that age, like some people even in our own time, believed that the intentions and concerns of ordinary men and women did not matter much in history. Even Thomas Jefferson thought that the ordinary people most often seen by travelers—“tavern keepers, Valets de place, and postilions”—were “the hackneyed rascals of every country” who “must never be considered when we calculate the national character.”7
We will never comprehend the distinctiveness of that premodern world until we appreciate the extent to which many ordinary people still accepted their own lowliness. Only then can we begin to understand the radical changes in this consciousness of humility, among other things, that the American Revolution brought about.
It was in the great towns, all travelers agreed, where one found the “more civilized” inhabitants, those who were distinguished from the common herd by their refinement and learning.12
The gentry’s distinctiveness came from being independent in a world of dependencies, learned in a world only partially literate and leisured in a world of laborers.
“To be born for no other Purpose than to consume the Fruits of the Earth,” wrote Henry Fielding in 1751, “is the Privilege (if it may be really called a Privilege) of a very few. The greater Part of Mankind must sweat hard to produce them, or Society will no longer answer the Purposes for which it was ordained.”
Since most relationships in this hierarchical society were still very personal, they were also necessarily paternalistic. It was only natural for the family—that oldest and most intimate of institutions—to be the model for describing most political and social relationships, not only those between king and subjects but also those between all superiors and subordinates.
Paternalism was meaningful to the colonists because much of their society was organized in families or in those stark dependencies that resembled the relationship between parents and children. For the colonists, the family, or what modern scholars call the household, was still the basic institution in the society and the center of all rights and obligations.
The household and hence patriarchy may even have been stronger in America than in England precisely because of the weakness in the colonies of other institutions, such as guilds.
The Minutemen of the towns were held together less by chains of command than by familial loyalties. The 3,047 Massachusetts soldiers who served in the Seven Years’ War had only 1,443 family names. Over one-quarter of the Lexington militiamen mustered by Captain John Parker on April 19, 1775, were related to him by blood or marriage.5
Probably few ordinary farmers ever owned much more than what was handed down to them by their families. When they did accumulate wealth, they generally used it to buy more land in order to provide for their heirs.7
at any one moment as much as one-half of colonial society was legally unfree.18
The subjugation of colonial servitude was thus much more cruel and conspicuous than it was in England, where the degrees of dependence were more calibrated and more gradual. Consequently, the colonists were much more acutely conscious of legal dependence—and perhaps of the value of independence—than Englishmen across the Atlantic.
Under such circumstances it was often difficult for the colonists to perceive the distinctive peculiarity of black slavery. Slavery often seemed to be just another degree of servitude, another degree of labor, more severe and more abject, to be sure, but not in the eyes of most colonists all that different from white servitude and white labor.
Many colonists, therefore, not only black slaves but white servants and young men and a variety of tenants and of course all women, knew firsthand what dependence meant. Dependence, said James Wilson in 1774, was “very little else, but an obligation to conform to the will … of that superior person … upon which the inferior depends.”
As common and as manifest as these legal forms of dependency were, however, they were not experienced by large portions of white male society, or if they were, not for full lives.
Many colonists who were quick to scorn all forms of legal or contractual dependence, many who owned their own land and prided themselves on their independence, were nevertheless enmeshed in the diffuse and sometimes delicate webs of paternalistic obligation inherent in a hierarchical society.
Society was held together by intricate networks of personal loyalties, obligations, and quasi-dependencies. These personal loyalties were not the same as the legal bondage of the unfree; they were not like the explicit subjection of the landless; and they were not even precise reproductions of the many subserviencies of patronage-ridden England. Still, these personal relationships were forms of paternalism, dependence, and subordination—vague and subtle as they often may have been.
by the middle of the eighteenth century so repugnant was the idea of dependency among free men in the English-speaking world, and so elusive and presumably mutual were these innumerable personal attachments, that only the term “friendship” seemed universal and affective enough to describe them.3
By 1760 England had a half dozen cities with populations over 30,000; America had none of that size. By 1760 England had over twenty cities with populations over 10,000; America had three. Indeed, the colonies had only a half dozen or so urban centers larger than 5,000 people, and even its largest—Philadelphia with a population of about 20,000 in 1760—could seem to be little more than an overgrown village.5
Looking back from the urban sprawl of the early nineteenth century, one Philadelphian believed that in the colonial period he had known “every person, white and black, men, women, and children in the city of Philadelphia by name.”6
nineteen out of twenty colonists still were farmers; and the bulk of them lived in tiny rural communities in which most people knew one another.
In such a small-scale society, privacy as we know it did not exist, and our sharp modern distinction between private and public was as yet scarcely visible. Living quarters were crowded, and people who were not formally related—servants, hired laborers, nurses, and other lodgers—were often jammed together with family members in the same room or even in the same bed.
In this face-to-face society, particular individuals—specific gentlemen or great men—loomed large, and people naturally explained human events as caused by the motives and wills of those who seemed to be in charge, headed the chains of interest, and made decisions.
No one as yet could conceive of the massive and impersonal social processes—industrialization, urbanization, modernization—that we invoke so blithely to describe large-scale social developments.
The provincial governments were lilliputian by modern standards. They were not impersonal bureaucracies, but particular familiar persons whose numbers could usually be counted on one’s hands. Prominent colonists knew personally the governors, justices, customs collectors, naval officers, and other leading magistrates with whom they dealt.
Government authority in the colonies was intimate, and none of its activities was too insignificant to be dealt with by a leading official.
And so it was everywhere in this small face-to-face society: personal and official affairs could scarcely be separated.
Much of the economy was organized into webs of private relationships. Indeed, the economy in this premodern world was still often thought of in traditional terms as the management of a household. Economy was defined as the art of providing for all the wants of the family, or in the case of the royal household of the king, the nation, which was his extended family.
To this extent the colonies were not yet commercial societies like Britain, where the importance of inland or internal trade matched that of overseas or external trade. Instead, the colonies were what were called trading societies, dominated by their external commerce.
since the colonists tended to import far more than they exported, they always had an acute shortage of gold and silver specie;
In the absence of other forms of currency, this shortage of specie limited the colonists’ ability to make exchanges with one another within their borders; it limited, that is, what was commonly called their “inland trade.” Before mid-century the colonists’ inland trade remained remarkably primitive,
Without banks, without many impersonal sources of credit, without even in some cases a circulating medium, most economic exchanges in the colonies had to be personal, between people who knew one another.
Because such debts were individually small, were locally owed, and often lacked any explicitly stated promise to pay, they implied a measure of mutual trust between people.
For the very wealthy, moneylending became a common and stable source of income and influence—more stable in America certainly than that resulting from land speculation or tenantry. Indeed, money lent out on interest was a principal means by which many colonial gentlemen maintained their superiority and their leisure.
But in America, as John Witherspoon pointed out, such tenantry and rent-producing land could never be as secure a source of income as in England. In the New World, said Witherspoon, where land was more plentiful and cheaper than it was in the Old World, gentlemen seeking a steady income “would prefer lending money at interest to purchasing and holding real estate.”30
The county courts were the places where the local communities reaffirmed their hierarchical relationships and reconciled their various obligations. The courts acted as clearinghouses for the many credits and debts crisscrossing though the local community. Since the justices were always more interested in people’s relationships than in the letter of the law, they made great efforts to resolve disputes over debts informally or out of court.
Patronage was most evident in politics, and there its use was instinctive.
Such patronage politics was simply an extension into governmental affairs of the pervasive personal and kin influence that held the colonial social hierarchies together. The appointing to governmental offices, the awarding of military commissions or judgeships, the granting of land or contracts for provisions—all these were only the visible political expressions of the underlying system of personal obligations and reciprocity that ran through the whole society.
