On Grand Strategy

by John Lewis Gaddis

Whatever their contradictions, Americans were consistent, before and after their first revolution, in deeply distrusting government. Having been left on their own for so long, the colonists saw as sinister any British action affecting them: “[T]he most minor incidents,” the historian Gordon Wood has shown, “erupted into major constitutional questions involving the basic liberties of the people.”49 Allergies that extreme don’t easily disappear, and this one lasted long after Great Britain accepted the independence of the United States in 1783. The Americans simply turned it upon themselves. Perhaps victory made forbearance less necessary. Perhaps it exposed an issue they’d so far evaded: had the revolution secured equality of opportunity—the right to rise to inequality—or of condition—the obligation not to? Perhaps corruptions in British society had now, like smallpox, infected its American counterpart. Perhaps legislation, if unchecked, always produced tyranny, whether in parliaments or confederations. Perhaps the people themselves weren’t to be trusted. Perhaps the British had been right, some Americans thought but couldn’t say, in having tried to replace neglect with a heavier hand.