The Radicalism of the American Revolution

by Gordon S. Wood

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...

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 m...

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 Revolu...

“If there were only one religion in England,” wrote Voltaire in his Philosophical Letters, “we should have to fear despotism; if there were two, they would cut each other’s throats; but there are thirty, and they live in peace and happiness.”6

Use this connection between property and liberty 2 explain the relationship between voting rights and being a free holder. Connect further with the Republican theory of liberty

Ordinary people versus gentry and aristocracy: the radical meaning of all men are created equal.

Arthur young: the guy who said that people must be kept poor or they will not work

Pre-revolutionary times leading up to the revolution: the family is the model for the political system: the relationship between parent and child is the model for the relationship between state or sovereign and people. Regard: Addison

Even the model of the family was slightly different: a family consisted of a single head, and all those who were dependent upon that head, nuclear or extended family. The common theme of dependence between family members and the people of the state ties together the two with the metaphor of politics as paternalism

In the absence of all the elaborate institutions of modern society—from hospitals and nursing homes to prisons and asylums—the family remained the primary institution for teaching the young, disciplining the wayward, and caring for the poor and insane. No wonder that the colonists believed that society was little more than a collection of family households, to which all isolated and helpless individuals necessarily had to be attached. Everywhere families reached out and blended almost imperceptibly into the larger community.

Living within a family meant a state of dependence for everyone but the patriarch.

With their husbands alive women were considered legally to be like children: they could not sue or be sued, draft wills, make contracts, or deal in property.

These paternalistic dependencies involved not only those linked by blood or marriage. Paternal authority reached beyond the household to bind large numbers of Americans in various degrees of legal dependency. Indeed, at any one moment as much as one-half of colonial society was legally unfree.

The relationship of slave to master also conceived of in paternalistic, parental kind of ways

Legal unfreedom, however, was not confined to blacks. Tens of thousands of whites, usually young men and women, were indentured as servants or apprentices and bound to masters for periods ranging from a few years to decades.

Yet being bound out in service or apprenticeship for a number of years was not always an unrespectable status, and it was by no means confined to the lowest ranks of the society.

Servitude was common on both sides of the Atlantic; indeed, nothing sets off that distant eighteenth-century world from our own more than the ubiquitous presence of servants.

By colonial standards rural servitude was remarkably mild and loose in England. Although English servants were still members of their masters’ households, these households were usually in localities close to their homes, and the servants saw themselves essentially as hired labor. Their contracts with their masters were usually oral and bound them for only a year at a time. Servants moved easily and often from master to master, and many of them received wages and acquired property. This was not the servitude that most colonists either experienced or witnessed.

In the colonies servitude was a much harsher, more brutal, and more humiliating status than it was in England, and this difference had important implications for the colonists’ consciousness of dependency.

There was nothing in England resembling the passes required in all the colonies for traveling servants.

Colonial servants often belonged to their masters in ways that English servants did not.

The much harsher and greater degree of subjection and degradation of American servants, and other laborers like apprentices and such, led to the more acute perception of subjection on the part of Americans than their counterparts in Britain. It also may have tended to obscure the racial distinctions on matters of subjection: the great correlation between race and degradation, that is, slaves occupied the most degraded position, but degradation and subjection or not unique to them; they were only the most abject version of it

Consequently, the colonists were much more acutely conscious of legal dependence—and perhaps of the value of independence—than Englishmen across the Atlantic.

This notion of the dependence of laborers correlates strongly with the independence that was desired at the time both politically and socially, thus building a connection between the relationship between dependence and independence in the revolutionary time, and the present day

By the middle of the eighteenth century black slavery had existed in the colonies for several generations or more without substantial questioning or criticism. The few conscience-stricken Quakers who issued isolated outcries against the institution hardly represented general colonial opinion.

Closest to the legally unfree in dependence were those who did not own their own land. Although most colonial farmers, unlike most English tenant farmers, were freeholders, in some areas of America in the middle of the eighteenth century tenantry was rapidly growing.

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.”

Dependents were all those who had no wills of their own; thus like children they could have no political personalities and could rightfully be excluded from participation in public life. It was this reasoning that underlay the denial of the vote to women, servants, apprentices, short-term tenants, minors, and sons over twenty-one still living at home with their parents.

white servitude and apprenticeship were usually temporary statuses, largely confined to the young.

The importance of slander in colonial and maybe revolutionary times

Social outcomes and political outcomes for presumed to be the result of deliberate will and express intentions and decisions on part of those in power. Notion of describing outcomes and behaviors to impersonal processes and institutions and not get arisen. Yet, some of the tradition of describing all events to those in power, whether intended or not, survived this day, especially on the right

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 networks of patronage and influence extending from the crown, to the colonial governors, to all areas of colonial life. As well as in Britain itself. Patronage and gendered a tendency to look up for rewards for obedience, and to depend upon the graciousness of one’s superiors for social advancement. Another aspect of colonial culture which would be overthrown in the revolutionary Era

The experience of living in a monarchy, said Hume, tended “to beget in everyone an inclination to please his superiors.”

All in all, concluded Douglass, this power to appoint local officials “gives the Governors vast Influence.”

Eighteenth-century monarchical government still rested largely on inherited medieval notions that are lost to us today. The modern distinctions between state and society, public and private, were just emerging and were as yet only dimly appreciated.

The revolutionary character of republicanism: republicanism as a way of life not just a form of government; republicanism as revolutionary as Marxism in the 19th century

Republicanism became an ideology and philosophy that extended beyond politics, as we presently understand it, and into private life, because monarchy, with its networks of dependence and hierarchy and superiority, and also extend it to all aspects of life. Republicanism, from his challenged monarchy, permeated to all aspects of life, because the ideology that I talked to replace had done the same

The dichotomy of human personality and political ideology, the monarchists and the Republicans; the lovers of order and peace, and the lovers of liberty and independence

Because of his circumstances so distant from the mother country, do United States, or rather than American colonies, naturally lacked the same kind of rigid and traditional hierarchies that existed in Britain. This contributed to the aversion to hierarchy, that is, the lack of experience with traditional and long-standing hierarchies made Americans less likely to except them, and more likely to be antagonistic to attempt to impose them

Note here of the poverty of the American colonists relative to Britain: even the landed freeholders like Washington were, at best, wealthy yeomen by English and British standards

Important note, in such cases as military companies and clergy for churchgoers, their superiors or commanders, or Ministers were elected by the group, chosen by the people who comprised the organization to be covered, not imposed upon them from without

Two-thirds of the white colonial population owned land, compared with only one-fifth of the English population. There were propertyless in America (maybe in some places as many as 30 percent of the adult males), but they tended to be either recent immigrants or young men awaiting their inheritance or an opportunity to move and acquire land. In no case was the overall situation of property-owning in America comparable to that of England, where more than 60 percent of the population owned no property of any kind. Freehold tenure in America was especially widespread, and freehold tenure, said William Knox bluntly, “excluded all ideas of subordination and dependence.”

Quote: freehold tenure eliminates all idea of dependence or subordination. Refer back to here for full quote

Two-thirds of the white colonial population owned land, compared with only one-fifth of the English population. There were propertyless in America (maybe in some places as many as 30 percent of the adult males), but they tended to be either recent immigrants or young men awaiting their inheritance or an opportunity to move and acquire land. In no case was the overall situation of property-owning in America comparable to that of England, where more than 60 percent of the population owned no property of any kind. Freehold tenure in America was especially widespread, and freehold tenure, said William Knox bluntly, “excluded all ideas of subordination and dependence.”

Egalitarian character of colonial society: refer back to here for more

America, it seemed, was primed for republicanism. It had no oppressive established church, no titled nobility, no great distinctions of wealth, and no generality of people sunk in indolence and poverty. A society that boasted that “almost every man is a freeholder” was presumably a society ideally suited for republicanism.

Referred to here for Adam Smith on labor: the principal driver of productivity and, perhaps, value

American attempts to liberalize divorce, and other legal institutions regarding the rights of women

The shift in thought over the relationship between rulers and rule extended to parents and children as well: parents now had to work for the esteem of their children rather than command it through authority. That’s changed as well the relationship between Rulers and ruled: if the people rebelled or rioted, the burden was on the government to act in such ways as could command there esteem, not on the people for being insufficiently submissive.