The Radicalism of the American Revolution

by Gordon S. Wood

On the difference between subjects and citizens.

America is the best country in the world for poor(?) people at the time

But the prosperity of some parts of the society contrast especially well with white servitude and black slavery, calling them both into severe question

Main division in the American revolution was not rich versus poor, or employers versus employees, but patriots versus courtiers. Suitable to a monarchical world

Courtiers for people whose position or rank came “artificially from above”

Patriots were not only those who love their country, but were also free of dependence and influence, as we have seen mentioned before

“The revolution became a full scale assault on dependency.”

Collapsing of social ranks into freeman and slaves destroyed all of the finally tuned social distinctions and complicated gradations that existed in a hierarchical society: such was the effect the American revolution had upon a rigidly hierarchical society. collapsing all of those fine distinctions into two, but hopefully in practice one, category

The diminution of patriarchal control of men over their wives. Example of changing distribution of power during the revolutionary.: Extending beyond the political, and into the social and even private spheres

Refer here for the revolutionary errors affect on indentured servant dude, and the combination of its rhetoric and pushes to free all those who suffered from dependence, which increasingly appeared anachronistic and undesirable

Some northerners believed that even keeping servants, as distinct from slaves were indentured servants, was anti-republican

Note: revolution ended the cultural climate that allowed black slavery, and other kinds of subjection servitude. Refer back here for note on that point

Philadelphia in 1775: the first anti-slavery society in North America. Born of Revolutionary ideology

The great dilemma: contrast between the embodiment of the People’s power in elected representatives, versus the power of the people at large: it seems that Wood here is referring to the contrast between the power of representatives and the power of people, perhaps as embodied in the constitution, or perhaps in the amorphous quality of the people at large

Some evidence that John Lockes theory of tabula rasa, has a theory for human cultivation in the future in a Republican society, was not uncommonIn this era. See John Adams in this part of the text

The extent to which the theory of tabula rasa was widespread was the extent to which the revolutionary generation believed that the universe of possibility extend it before them: a society could be properly hold to be virtually utopian in a Republican sense.

See this point, and both before and after, for summaries of Washington’s character and characteristics

Contrast Washington with William of orange, Marlborough, and Cromwell on the tendency to seek rewards commensurate with political and military achievements. Washington’s surrendering of a sore to Congress was monumental for its time, because he thought no such rewards, nor did he could become the dominant political power of the nation given his military achievements.

Could Washington have become a dictator? Whatever the case may be, he wanted no such thing. He seems to have been sincere in his desire for himself and his soldiers to return to normal and honorable private lives

The new conception of virtue as getting along with others rather than a more masculine form of heroic self-sacrifice. The new conception was equally practicable by women, according to Sam, better practice by women Senpai mean

Additional note: classical virtue as martial And that’s masculine.

Republican ideology, in some places, reach to kind of utopianism which republicanism would affect and cultivate individuals in generations to come in such Waze as would lead to permanent peace between individuals and nations.

Americans as remarkably cosmopolitan: transcending parochial concerns, and even national prejudices

history. The revolutionaries aimed at nothing less than a reconstitution of American society. They hoped to destroy the bonds holding together the older monarchical society—kinship, patriarchy, and patronage—and to put in their place new social bonds of love, respect, and consent. They sought to construct a society and governments based on virtue and disinterested public leadership and to set in motion a moral movement that would eventually be felt around the globe.

By the early nineteenth century, America had already emerged as the most egalitarian, most materialistic, most individualistic—and most evangelical Christian—society in Western history.

Thus was begun the myth that has continued into our own time—the myth that the American Revolution was sober and conservative while the French Revolution was chaotic and radical. But only if we measure radicalism by violence and bloodshed can the myth be sustained; by any other measure the American Revolution was radical—and most of the Federalists knew it.

Democracy actually represented a new social order with new kinds of linkages holding people together.

Yet there is no doubt that the new Republic saw the development and celebration of democratic social bonds and attachments different from those of either monarchy or republicanism and the emergence of democratic political leaders different from any that had ever existed anywhere in the history of the world.

By every measure there was a sudden bursting forth, an explosion—not only of geographical movement but of entrepreneurial energy, of religious passion, and of pecuniary desires.

The Revolution resembled the breaking of a dam, releasing thousands upon thousands of pent-up pressures. There had been seepage and flows before the Revolution, but suddenly it was as if the whole traditional structure, enfeebled and brittle to begin with, broke apart, and people and their energies were set loose in an unprecedented outburst.

Nothing contributed more to this explosion of energy than did the idea of equality. Equality was in fact the most radical and most powerful ideological force let loose in the Revolution. Its appeal was far more potent than any of the revolutionaries realized. Once invoked, the idea of equality could not be stopped, and it tore through American society and culture with awesome power.

Within decades following the Declaration of Independence, the United States became the most egalitarian nation in the history of the world, and it remains so today, regardless of its great disparities of wealth.

They knew that any society, however republican and however devoted to the principles of equality, would still have to have “some Distinctions and Gradations of Rank arising from education and other accidental Circumstances,” though none of these distinctions and gradations would be as great as those of a monarchical society.

Equality mainly as equality of opportunity: careers open to talents, replacing patronage and kinship as the sources of opportunity in attachment, has had been the case for centuries prior in European societies, and probably most of the places

Assumption was that advantage and privilege would not have the opportunity to coalesce across generations. This would ensure a roughly quality of conditions, or at least any qualities that were justified by talent and industry. Of course, it didn’t work out this way. But the principle of the revolution is incongruent with what we observe today

Such a rough equality of condition was in fact essential for republicanism.

Note: the suggestion that some government agency have the power to re-distribute property if the distribution of property were to become too lopsided. Americans to not believe in strict equality of property, but some kind of rough approximation, it seems

Although most Americans in 1776 did not believe that everyone in a republic had to have the same amount of property, a few radicals did call for agrarian laws with “the power of lessening property when it became excessive in individuals.”

“Men were equal in that no one should be dependent upon the wheel of another”

Equality was related to independence;

“Almost every man is a freeholder” of course this didn’t include slaves. It seems doubtful as to whether this included other members of dependent classes, though they were disappearing as classes. Seems a slight exaggeration, at least

Men were equal in that no one of them should be dependent on the will of another, and property made this independence possible.

Indeed, if equality had meant only equality of opportunity or a rough equality of property-holding, it could never have become, as it has, the single most powerful and radical ideological force in all of American history. Equality became so potent for Americans because it came to mean that everyone was really the same as everyone else, not just at birth, not in talent or property or wealth, and not just in some transcendental religious sense of the equality of all souls.

Equality: no one is better than anyone else. Seems a little amorphous in its definition; claims that no other nation has quite ever had equality this way. Seems doubtful asked whether we have had an exactly that way, either, but so be it.

Ordinary Americans came to believe that no one in a basic down-to-earth and day-in-and-day-out manner was really better than anyone else. That was equality as no other nation has ever quite had it.

Republican America would end the deceit and dissembling so characteristic of courtiers and monarchies. “Let those flatter who fear,” said Jefferson in 1774; “it is not an American art.”

Lockes theory of human nature and behavior, that all people are the same by nature, and differences arise between them because of circumstances, helped to influence the revolutionary rejection of aristocracy, and the growing conception of equality