Society for History Education

The Political Theory of the American Revolution: Changing Interpretations

Author(s): Roy N. Lokken
Source: The History Teacher, Vol. 8, No. 1 (Nov., 1974), pp. 81-95
Published by: Society for History Education
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The Political Theory

of the American Revolution:
Changing Interpretations
ROY N. LOKKEN
East Carolina University

IN

A BOOK of interpretiveessays, The Genius of AmericanPolitics,

Daniel J. Boorstin wrote in 1953that the AmericanRevolution "did not
produce in America a single important treatise on political theory. Men

like Franklin and Jefferson, universal in their interests, active and

spectacularly successful in developing institutions, were not fertile as
political philosophers."' Revolutionary Americans were nonideological,

because a revolutionary ideology seemed unnecessary. Indeed the

Revolution, accordingto Boorstin, was not a real revolution at all, but
only an act of separation from the old British Empire, and Americans
Mr. Lokken is Professor of History at East Carolina University, in Greenville, North
Carolina. He holds a B.A. from the University of Puget Sound and a Ph.D. from the
University of Washington. He has worked previously as an archivist at the State
Historical Society of Wisconsin, a research associate for the Wisconsin Legislative
Council, and a history professor at the University of Texas, Arlington. Mr. Lokken was the
recipient of the Louis Pelzer Memorial Award of the Mississippi Valley Historical Society
in 1953. He is the author of David Lloyd: Colonial Lawmaker (1959) and of "The
Scientific Papers of James Logan," Transactions of the American Philosophical Society
(1972). He is currently researching a study of British policy in North America, 1762-1768,
and a biography of Cadwallader Colden as a colonial scientist and philosopher.
This article is a slightly revised version of a paper read at the East Carolina
University Symposium on History and the Social Studies, at New Bern, North Carolina,
February 16, 1973.
' Daniel J.
Boorstin, The Genius of American Politics (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1953), 66.

81

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POLITICAL THEORY OF AMERICAN REVOLUTION

justified that act of separation by legal and historical arguments, rather

than on the basis of political theory.
On the other hand Bernard Bailyn, in his study of the Pamphlets of
the American Revolution published in 1965, found a revolutionary
ideology that developed during the period between 1763 and 1776. That,
wrote Bailyn, "was the most creative period in the history of American
political thought. Everything that followed assumed and built upon its
results."''
Obviously there is some difference of opinion, and so there has been
throughout the historiography of the American Revolution. During
most of the nineteenth century the Whig conception of the American
Revolution, whose chief American exponent was George Bancroft,
prevailed. For Bancroft, a nationalist and Jacksonian Democrat, whose
10-volume History of the United States ends with the making of the
Constitution in 1787 and is therefore mostly a history of the old British
Empire, the American Revolution was the successful culmination of
American efforts to protect their liberties and democracy from British
subversion. In the decades preceding World War I Bancroft's narrow
nationalism and Anglophobia were challenged by a group of historians
who reinterpreted the American Revolution in the light of the growing
American interest in promoting friendly relations with Great Britain.
This group of historians looked at American colonial history from the
point of view of London and argued that the American Revolution
would have to be understood in terms of the empire as a whole, as well
as of the local interests of the American provinces. Herbert Levi Osgood
and George Louis Beer, leading exponents of the imperial school,
concluded from their studies that independence was the logical
consequence, not of British oppression, but of a long period of evolution
of uniquely American institutions and tendencies. In the 1920's Charles
McLean Andrews, the most influential of the imperial historians before
Lawrence Henry Gipson, spelled out in greater detail than had Osgood
and Beer the history of the colonial tendencies toward independence.
Andrews represented still another trend in the scholarship of the
American Revolution. He was one of those historians who, in the words
of Professor Jack P. Greene, "saw man as the agent of vast, impersonal
forces largely beyond his control."3 The American environment had
determined the American revolutionary state of mind; it had given
birth to "new wants, new desires, and new points of view" and had
influenced Americans to seek a "new order of society." In other words,
2 Bernard Bailyn (ed.), Pamphlets of the American Revolution (Cambridge, Mass.:
The Belknap Press of the Harvard University Press, 1965), 19.
3 Jack P. Greene, The Reappraisal of the American Revolution in Recent Historical
Literature (Washington: AHA Service Center for Teachers of History, 1967), 5.

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THE HISTORY TEACHER

83

American revolutionary political thought was little more than a

response to environmental stimuli; the entire history of colonial
tendencies toward independence had been environmentally
determined. Many historians in Andrews' time sought in history the
impersonal forces that motivated human conduct and thought. If those
forces were not the physical environment, then they were socioeconomic forces. Progressive historians, such as Arthur Meier
Schlesinger and Charles Beard, looked for the economic factors that
explained historical events in revolutionaryAmerica. In Schlesinger's
work the American Revolution is explained as a clash of economic
interests, and in Beard the Constitution of the United States is the
product of a Thermidoreanreaction and the cash nexus. The economic
interpretationthat loomed large in Progressivehistoriographystressed
conflict between economic classes, between Dives and Lazarus, with
Dives, the wicked fellow, winning out in the long run. The Progressive
historians researchedand wrote history during a period when the major
political issues were economic, when economic evils were blamed on
"robber barons," and the Progressive emphasis was on the need for
socio-economic reforms.
After World War I some American historians, specializing in
American Revolution scholarship, were concerned about problems of
international organization; they studied American revolutionary
political thought in search of historicalprecedentsthat might be useful.
One of them was Randolph G. Adams whose Political Ideas of the
American Revolution: Britannic-American Contributions to the
Problem of Imperial Organization1765 to 1775 was first published in
1922. This was the first book devoted solely to the subject of the
political thought of the American Revolution. For Adams, the
controversy over Parliamentary taxation between 1765 and 1775 was
subordinateto the real problem:the constitution of the British Empire,
relations between the colonies and the English homeland, and the locus
of powerin the empire. Americansdid not arriveat a theory of imperial
organization all at once, but by stages. In the first stage the colonies
admitted the right of Parliament to levy customs duties (external
taxes), but denied its right to levy excise taxes (internal taxes) upon
them. In the second stage the colonists concededthe right of Parliament
to regulate imperial trade, but denied its right to levy either internal or
external taxes upon the colonies. In the third stage the colonies
admitted that Parliament had the right to superintend the empire, but
denied that it had any legislative authority over the colonies. Adams
wrote that "throughout the controversy, the colonists were attempting
to work out philosophically and politically some formula by which they
could become free nations and yet at the same time continue their

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POLITICALTHEORY OF AMERICANREVOLUTION

participation in the Britannic league of nations."4 Adams' use of the

term "Britannic league of nations" to indicate the old British Empire
shows that his real concern was with the League of Nations following
1919, and that he was thinking in terms of divided sovereignty and a
loosely knit commonwealth of nations.
Related to the question of imperial organization were the questions
of interpretation of the British Constitution, the locus of sovereignty in
the Empire, and the role of Parliament in the imperial government.
According to Adams, by 1763 the individual British colonies in North
America had become well developed nations, and with the expulsion of
the French from the North American continent it had become necessary
to solve the problem of imperial organization. During the era of salutary
neglect before the French and Indian War the problem had not existed,
but in the new situation that followed the Peace of Paris the question
was how to unite the colonies (or nations) in some sort of federal system
in the empire. The consensus in England was that colonies were
dependencies of Great Britain and therefore subject to Parliamentary
control. Between 1763 and 1775 American patriots developed the idea
that the colonies were co-equal in sovereignty to Great Britain in an
empire defined as a league of nations. An agreed-upon solution to the
problem of sovereignty was essential to a viable solution to the problem
of imperial organization. If, as Blackstone contended and most
Englishmen agreed, Parliament was absolutely sovereign and
sovereignty was indivisible, then colonial arguments for a decentralized
empire in which each colonial legislature was sovereign in its own
province could not be seriously considered in London. The concept of
divided sovereignty in an empire defined as a league or commonwealth
of nations was too novel to be understood in eighteenth-century
England.
The problems of sovereignty and imperial organization were closely
related, in the colonial mind, to the constitutional question. American
political theorists developed the idea that a constitution was
fundamental law limiting the statute-making powers of a legislature,
and that the British Constitution could not be altered by an Act of
Parliament. Moreover, they postulated a law of nature as part of the
British Constitution-a law of nature that transcended man-made law
and included natural rights that were beyond reach of legislative
enactment. Such ideas were at variance with the conviction in England
that the Parliament was absolutely sovereign and that acts of
Parliament were additions to the British Constitution.
Carl Lotus Becker, in The Declaration of Independence: A Study in
4 Randolph G. Adams, Political Ideas of the American Revolution: BritannicAmerican Contributions to the Problem of Imperial Organization 1765-1775 (New York:

Barnes & Noble, Inc., 1958), 91.

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THE HISTORY TEACHER

85

the History of Political Ideas, also published in 1922, interpreted

Americanrevolutionarypolitical thought as a rationalizationof colonial
opposition to Parliamentarytaxes. Colonists, accordingto Becker, had
never given much thought to the nature of the British Empire and the
status of the colonies in their relation to the English homeland until
after the passage of the Sugar Act of 1764. The Stamp Act of 1765 and
the overt colonial violations of that act of Parliament seemed to require
a positive colonial definition of colonial rights within the empire so as to
justify the action the colonists were taking. A colonial theory of the
British Empire therefore emerged, but it was not until after 1768 that
the idea grew in the minds of Americans that the colonial legislatures
shared with Parliament sovereignty in a decentralized empire, united
only under the Crown.The powersof both Parliament and the colonial
legislatures were limited by fundamental law, i.e., the British
Constitution and the natural rights ordained by God. In rationalizing
the colonial position, American political theorists drew from John
Locke's social contract theory and Sir Isaac Newton's cosmology, as
explained by popularizers. Locke's political thought provided
revolutionary Americans with a justification for rebelling against a
King who, as Americans believed, had violated his contract with his
subjects in America. The popularizersof Newton's cosmologyinspired
Americans with the vision of a harmonious, orderly Nature to which
human society and government should correspond.
The imperial and progressiveinterpretationsdominated American
Revolution scholarshipuntil the late 1940's.After the end of the Second
World War historians, influenced by the ideological conflicts that
characterizedthe war and the Cold War that followed it, subjected the
basic assumptions of the progressive and imperial interpretations to
rigorous examination and revision. Armed with more sophisticated
research methods and a greater abundance of available source
materials than earlier historians had possessed, scholars after 1945
worked out a fresh interpretation of the American Revolution, its
causes, its nature, and its political theory. The neo-Whighistorians-a
label assigned to them by Professor Jack P. Greene-were as much
influenced by their twentieth-centuryframe of referenceas the imperial
and progressivehistorians had been. Motivated by patriotic spirit and
the desire to see Americans form a united front against ideological
enemies abroad, they read into the history of the AmericanRevolution
their twentieth-century predilections and biases. For them, consensus
rather than division characterized revolutionary Americans, and the
colonial position on the rights of the Americancolonies and the powers
of the Parliament in the old British Empire was fully formed by 1765
and did not significantly change after that year. That colonial position
may or may not have been in the form of an ideology. If it was an

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POLITICALTHEORY OF AMERICANREVOLUTION

ideology, it was well developed by 1765; if not, Americans being a

virtuous people defending their ancient liberties had no need for
ideology. Neo-Whigs interpreted the American Revolution as
conservative, because Americanssought only to defend their long-held
liberty from the efforts of the Parliament and the King's ministers to
subvert it; the AmericanRevolution was not a social upheaval but only
an act of separation. Professor Greene's label for this school of
interpretation is an apt one; the neo-Whig interpretation is to some
extent a revival of the nineteenth-century Whig interpretation,
exemplified by George Bancroft, but the neo-Whig historians are far
more sophisticated and possess better research techniques than did
Bancroft and his contemporaries.Most of the neo-Whighistorianshave
discussed substantive issues and institutional arrangements rather
than political theory, but some of their conclusions have a bearing on
what earlier historians had said about the political thought of the
American Revolution.
Edmund S. Morgan,in a series of journalarticles and an important
book which his wife co-authored, The Stamp Act Crisis; Prologue to

Revolution (1953), challenged the older theory that the American

position on the role of the Parliament in the old British Empire changed
from time to time between 1765 and 1775 (Randolph G. Adams' threestage theory, for example). Instead, according to Morgan, Americans
made their position clear in 1765 and did not waver from it during the
next decade: Americanpolitical leaders and pamphleteerscategorically
rejected Parliament's authority to levy any taxes on the colonies for
revenue purposes; almost all of them (Daniel Dulaney was a relatively
unimportant exception) made no distinction between internal and
external taxes. It followed, therefore, that the colonial theory of
imperial organizationwas already well developed in 1765, and was not
the product of several shifts in political thought between 1765and 1775
as Randolph G. Adams, Carl Becker, and other earlier historians had
believed.
Robert E. Brown, in his Middle-Class Democracy and the
Revolution in Massachusetts, 1691-1780, published in 1955, concluded

on the basis of statistical research in archival sources that during the

eighteenth century most Massachusetts colonists were property-holders
and legally qualified to vote. It thereforefollowed that Massachusetts
was a well developed middle-class democracy well before the
Revolution. In a subsequent study of Virginia 1705-1786: Democracy or

Aristocracy? (1964) Brown, with his wife as co-author, found that the
franchise in the Old Dominion was sufficiently broad to give that colony
a democratic character. He extrapolated from his Massachusetts and
Virginia researches the general conclusion that all of the colonies had

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THE HISTORY TEACHER

87

democratic governments before 1763. The purpose of British policy

after 1763 was to suppress democracy in America. Revolutionary
Americans fought to save their democracy from British power; hence
the American Revolution was conservative.
Brown was more interested in the franchise and Americanpolitical
institutions than he was in political thought. Daniel J. Boorstin, who
shared with Brown his conservative interpretation of the Revolution,
had more to say about political theory; he doubted that there was any.
In The Genius of AmericanPolitics, Boorstin denied the existence of an
American revolutionary ideology. Revolutionary leaders, including
Thomas Jefferson, took little interest in political theory, because they
needed none. The Revolution was a conservative colonial rebellion,
hardly a revolution at all; the American purpose was only to conserve
political institutions already existing. Although the American
Revolution, he wrote, took place in a century "which throughout
Europe was laden with philosophic reflection and important treatises,
our Revolution was neither particularlyrich nor particularlyoriginalin
its intellectual apparatus."' The American mind was not cluttered up
with the philosophical baggage of Europe. Boorstin postulated a
metaphysical "given-ness"--a belief in the inevitability of indigenous
American institutions-that has determined American thought both
during the Revolution and since. For Boorstin that metaphysical
the absence of any significant
concept-"given-ness"-explains
political theory American in origin.
Boorstin's anti-European bias and admiration for American
institutions and traditions show in all his work. Clinton Rossiter also
admired American political institutions as they took form during the
colonial period and concurred with Brown, Boorstin, and other neoWhig historians that the American Revolution was conservative in
character. Rossiter devoted the entire Part 3 of his Seedtime of the
Republic: The Origin of the American Tradition of Political Liberty,
published in 1953, to the political theory of the AmericanRevolution.,
Accordingto Rossiter, "the political principles of the Revolution were
so unsophisticated in expression and inclusive in appeal as to seem a
declaration of faith rather than a body of theory."'7They were
expounded, mostly orally, by men who represented nearly every class
and occupation in American society, but the chief spokesmen, whose
expressed ideas were immortalized in print, were mostly lawyers from
the upper or upper-middle class. The Revolution "producedneither a
5

Boorstin, The Genius of American Politics, 75.

Part 3 has since been enlargedand publishedseparatelyas ThePolitical Thoughtof

the American Revolution (New York: Harcourt,Brace & World, 1963).
Clinton P. Rossiter, Seedtime of the Republic: The Origin of the American
7
Tradition of Political Liberty (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1953), 326.

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POLITICALTHEORY OF AMERICANREVOLUTION

universal thinker nor a definitive book."' The political theory of the

American Revolution "was a popular creed" at the heart of which was a
philosophy of "ethical, ordered liberty," the product of a long period of
development on American soil. British imperial policies after 1763,
starting with the abandonment of salutary neglect, created "a highly
charged political atmosphere" in which Revolutionary political theory
was expressed as a consensus of American protest in defense of liberties
long enjoyed. Revolutionary political theory was more than protest, of
course. The end-result of a long period of development in colonial
conditions, it affirmed the responsibility of government to protect the
fundamental natural rights of man and the interests of the individual as
long as those interests were compatible with the needs of the
community. Good government is the product of a virtuous people, and
that government is good which is republican, representative, balanced,
limited in its powers, constitutional, and virtuous.
Like Rossiter, Max Savelle regarded the political theory of the
American Revolution as the end-result of a long period of evolution in
colonial conditions.' In Seeds of Liberty: The Genesis of the American
Mind, first published in 1948, Savelle offered the thesis that by the
middle of the eighteenth century the colonists had developed common
attitudes, values, and traditions in all areas of thought, and had
become one people culturally with a dormant spirit of nationalism that
would be stimulated by the imperial crises between 1765 and 1776. The
debate with Great Britain after 1763 was not the origin of American
national sentiment, but a powerful "impetus to a moving political force
underway."'" Liberty in revolutionary political thought meant selfgovernment, and the colonial insistence on assembly-dominated
autonomous provincial governments led to the theory of the British
Empire as a federation of autonomous provinces-a theory expressed by
the Continental Congress in 1774, but actually "the culmination of the
evolution of a theory of the Empire that had been developing ever since
the settlement of the first English Colonies.""
The most comprehensive recent treatment of the political theory of
the American Revolution appeared in 1965 in Bernard Bailyn's
"General Introduction" to his edition of Pamphlets of the American
Revolution. Bailyn subsequently developed the "General Introduction"
into a book, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution,
8 Ibid., 440.
9 Savelle, however, is not easily classified. His views are more nearly those of the
imperial school; at the same time he embraces the environmentalism usually attributed
to the progressive school.
0 Quoted in Greene, Reappraisal of the American Revolution, 26.
'" Max Savelle, Seeds of Liberty: The Genesis of the American Mind (New York:
Alfred A. Knopf, 1948), 342.

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THE HISTORY TEACHER

89

published in 1967. According to Bailyn, the political theory of the

American Revolution was expressed in numerous pamphlets that
appeared after 1763. The pamphlets expressed the American effort to
protect liberty from the threat of arbitrary power; the purpose of the
Revolution was not to overthrow or change the existing social order, but
to conserve liberties long possessed. Revolutionary political theorists
thought of power as the dominion of some men over others. Power was
necessary and legitimate, but only when it rested on the contractual
obligations between the governors and the governed, in the sense of
John Locke's social contract. But power is always a danger to liberty,
and liberty is the interest only of the governed. Power has a corrupting
influence on men. A man may be virtuous in private life, but when he
gains public office he is likely to be corrupted by power and become a
tyrant.
Because liberty is passive and power active, the pamphleteers
believed that liberty could be preserved only by a balance of forces; in
England that meant keeping King, Lords, and Commons in balance.
When political imbalance appeared, liberty seemed to be threatened.
After 1763 colonists, influenced by such radical English pamphleteers
as Trenchard and Gordon, Benjamin Hoadly, and Robert Viscount
Molesworth, and the Jacobite political theorist, Henry St. John,
Viscount Bolingbroke, were disturbed by the extent of moral and
political corruption in England. That corruption seemed to have
created a political environment that was hostile to liberty. During the
crises provoked by the Stamp Act and Townshend Acts colonists
became convinced that there was a conspiracy of power against liberty
in both England and America. It was this conviction, Bailyn believes,
that drove the colonists to revolution. Belief that there was an active
ministerial conspiracy to subvert liberty was shared by radicals and
other critics of the government in both England and America. The
conspiratorial theory of the Revolution, however, was not monopolized
by opponents of the King's ministers. Supporters of the British
government expressed belief that there was an active conspiracy on the
part of a small faction in America to destroy authority and separate the
colonies from the English homeland. Bailyn pointed out that the
conspiratorial theory persisted in the post-Revolution historical
literature representing both the American and British sides of the story.
In fact, such conspiratorial theories persisted into twentieth-century
historiography. According to Bailyn, the progressive historians
"adopted unknowingly the Tory interpretation."'2 The theory of
ministerial conspiracy, on the other hand, was stated in stronger terms
in Oliver Dickerson's Navigation Acts and the American Revolution,
12 Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge:
The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1967), 157-58.

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POLITICALTHEORY OF AMERICANREVOLUTION

published in 1951, than in any of the eighteenth-century American

patriot literature.
In the Bailyn interpretation the political theory of the American
Revolution involved only in part the defense of liberty from arbitrary
power and ministerial conspiracy. It was also characterized as a
transforming radicalism. At this point, Bailyn, as have a few other
scholars during the 1960's and early 1970's, diverged from the neo-Whig
and earlier schools of interpretation. He stressed the transforming effect
of the revolutionary movement on traditional political concepts. There
was a shift in the American understanding of constitutionalism.
Boorstin, in The Genius of American Politics, had defined the
Revolution as "a victory of constitutionalism"; he had asserted that
American institutions had "required no basic change."'3 Bailyn,
however, showed that in revolutionary political thought the
Constitution became something more than the general system of laws,
customs, and institutions, or frame of government, as it has
traditionally been described. It became a set of fixed principles from
which statute law and the exercise of power must not deviate, fixed
principles which limit the powers of government in order to protect the
rights, indeed to guarantee the natural rights, of the governed.
Moreover, the traditional attitude of respect for social superiors
and constituted authority was transformed by the Revolution. Bailyn
cautioned that the American Revolution was not a social revolution in
that no political theorist or other revolutionary leader endeavored or
even proposed to change fundamentally the structure of American
society. Nevertheless, the traditional belief that disobedience to
authority was disobedience to God was eroded by the revolutionary
experience. Conservative writers during the imperial crisis expressed
fear that distrust and open defiance of authority would be destructive of
a stable social order. The growing revolutionary belief, however, that
the rulers should be servants of the people rather than their masters
presaged the eventual emergence of a new social order in which men in
positions of authority would be chosen on the basis of merit rather than
of wealth, prestige, and social status, and would cater to the will of the
people rather than demand unquestioning obedience. This meant the
breakdown of traditional habits of deference (J. R. Pole's word, not
Bailyn's), but it did not mean acceptance of what eighteenth-century
Anglo-Americans understood democracy to be. It was commonly
understood that democracy meant "the lowest order of society as well as
the form of government in which the commons ruled."" The supposed
danger of "democratic despotism" caused political theorists, especially
'3 Boorstin, The Genius of American Politics, 68, 98.
'4 Bailyn, Ideological Origins, 282.

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91

John Adams, and revolutionarypolitical leaders to develop the checks

and balance system and specifically the Senate as the balance-weight
between the executive and the House of Representatives; that, they
believed, would be the securest arrangement in a republican
government.Then it was that the traditional concept of democracywas
transformed, and the American doctrine of the separation of
functioning powers was created.
Also transformed by the Revolutionaryexperience was what had
become, in England, the traditional conception of sovereignty. By the
eighteenth century the idea had fully developed in England that
sovereignty, unlimited and undivided, was vested entirely in the
Parliament. Before the Seven Years War the exercise of power by
Parliament (King, Lords, and Commons) had "touched only the outer
fringes of colonial life."'"For the most part colonials in America had
been governed by their own local governments rather than by the
sovereign Parliament or by the Crown.Hence, authority in the empire
had in fact been decentralized.After 1763the colonists were confronted
by "Parliament'sclaims to the right to exercise sovereign power in
America."" Their response was to draw a distinction between things
"internal" and things "external." American theorists believed that
Parliament's power in America was limited to external matters;
internal matters were the exclusive business of the colonial assemblies.
John Dickinson's position, adopted officially by the Continental
Congress in 1774, was that the colonial assemblies had the exclusive
right to internal legislation, including taxing, and that the power of
Parliament in the empire was limited to the regulationof the commerce
and foreign affairs of the colonies. By 1775 the Dickinson position,
which had been radical in the 1760's,became the conservativeposition,
as the more radical patriots argued for the total exclusion of
Parliamentarysovereigntyin America,recognizingonly the sovereignty
of the Crown, and advanced the idea of imperial federalism. What
American revolutionary theorists had done was to challenge "the
traditional eighteenth-century notion of sovereignty.""In the process
they had arrived at an as yet incompletely developed conception of
federalism which involves the idea of divided sovereignty.
Bailyn's theory of transformingradicalism was intended to show
how the political theory of the Revolution produced new political
institutions and attitudes. Gordon S. Wood, in The Creation of the
American Republic, 1776-1787, published in 1969, carried this idea
further, by showing in greater detail how the revolutionaryexperience
Ibid., 203.
Ibid., 204.
17Ibid., 228.

1'

16

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POLITICAL THEORY OF AMERICAN REVOLUTION

changed American political institutions and ideas. Revolutionary

American leaders, Wood tells us, began with a Whig science of politics
derived from eighteenth-centuryradical Whig thought in England, and
emerged from the Revolution with an American science of politics.
Before 1776 Americans had believed that by opposing the British
government they were defending the English Constitution, the best in
all the world. That Constitution had been corruptedby the King and
his ministers who had upset the balance of powersbetween King, Lords,
and Commons by controlling the House of Commons. The corrupted
British government,Americansbelieved, was attempting to subvertthe
liberties of the British colonists in America. Actually, the facts do not
seem to have warrantedrevolt against British rule, because Americans
were not being oppressed, but what is important is the beliefs
Americans had-beliefs upon which they based their actions. By 1776
Americansbelieved that they were actually engagedin a revolutionthat
involved more than a mere war of independence.Even after deciding on
independence,Americansremained loyal to their ideal of the English
Constitution. Concludingthat the English were too corrupted,morally
and politically, to revitalize their Constitution by checking the powers
of the King and his ministers, Americansnow addressedthemselves to
the task of revitalizing the English Constitution in an independent
American republic. In the process, however, Americans revised their
originalWhig political theories, and emergedby 1787with new political
institutions and concepts.
The Whig concept of liberty was transformedby the revolutionary
experience. Liberty in the Whig ideology of the revolutionary
Americanscomprised"the public rights of the collective people against
the supposed privileged interest of their rulers."'""The sacrifice of
individual interests to the greatergood of the whole formedthe essence
of republicanismand comprehendedfor Americansthe idealistic goal of
their Revolution.'"1This collectivistic public liberty was more important to the men of 1776 than was individual liberty. Public liberty was
institutionalized as republican government, and that "became the
essence of the Revolution."" The Whig concept of public liberty was
based on the assumption of a balance of social orders in a mixed
In the constitution
constitution.
of government as the
institutionalization of the several orders of society the legislature,
apportionedso as to be fairly representativeof population,would be the
guarantorof public liberty. By 1787, however, legislatures had become
"1 Gordon S.
Wood, The Creation of the American Republic, 1776-1787 (Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 1969), 61.
19Ibid., 53.
20 Ibid., 129.

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THE HISTORY TEACHER

93

suspect in American political thought, and balanced government had

come to mean the separation of the executive, legislative, and judicial
departments of government as a means of checking the legislative
power which, it was believed, had become subversive of liberty.
Governmentwas separated from society; it was no longer regardedas
the institutionalization of ordersof society. Liberty was emphasized as
individual civil liberties; it was therefore private and personal rather
than public and corporate.The thrust now was towardthe protectionof
the rights of individuals and minoritiesfromthe tyrannyof the majority
and from the encroachmentsof government, especially the legislature.
Public liberty, in 1787, was regarded as antagonistic to individual
liberty; the trend was away from collectivism to individualism;and the
ideal was limited government with institutionalized checks and
balances to prevent an excess of power in any department of
government. In Wood's thesis there were two bodies of revolutionary
political thought-that of 1776 and another of 1786-1787.
Accordingto Wood, the Revolution had a social as well as political
aspect. The desire for moralreformationwas a most importantstimulus
to revolution. Americanswereflattered by the Enlightenment portrayal
of them as a people more virtuous than any in Europe, but they were
conscious of the fact that they were not really free of the vices and
luxuries of Europe. Involved in revolutionarypolitical thought was a
reaction against the growing disparity between rich and poor, the
luxury that seemed to be corrupting American society and the
egalitarian ideal of what that society should be. The Calvinistic clergy
were, by 1776, working out "the concept of the Revolution as an
antidote to moral decay." "Independence thus became not only
political but moral. Revolution, republicanism, and regeneration all
blended in American thinking."2" By 1787, however, articulate
Americans were expressing disappointment that "Americans ...

were

less virtuous than it had been supposed independence would make

them.""2American social critics deplored the crass materialism and
sensuousness of Americans. Americans, they warned, had corrupted
themselves by living beyond their means, buying importedluxurygoods
with borrowed money, being selfish, and seeking personal pleasure.
Their legislatures had subverted liberty with oppressive laws, and the
people themselves were perverting republican liberty by a
licentiousness that tended dangerously toward anarchy. American
theoreticians concluded that the management of the unvirtuous
American people could be achieved only by a new arrangement of
republican
21
22

political

institutions.

Popularly

elected

Ibid., 117.
Ibid., 418-19.

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houses

of

94

POLITICALTHEORY OF AMERICANREVOLUTION

representatives especially should be balanced by an increase in the

powers of senates and executives that were not subject to popular
control. The thrust in 1787 was to institutionalize a check upon
democracy so as to achieve a moral reform of American society, as well
as to protect the rights of individuals and minorities against the
tyranny of an unvirtuous majority.
The work of Bernard Bailyn, Gordon S. Wood, and other scholars
within the past decade has been based on the assumption that there
was an American revolutionary ideology expressed in one or more
bodies of political theory. Although some American historians subscribe
to Daniel J. Boorstin's dictum that the revolutionary generation was
nonideological, it appears that most do not. There is a general
agreement, however, that the American Revolution did not produce a
single master ideologist. The political theory, or theories, of the
American Revolution was expressed by a small, articulate revolutionary
elite, none of whose members are comparable to a John Locke, a Karl
Marx, or a Lenin. The political thought of the revolutionary elite
touched upon such fundamental problems as the nature of sovereignty,
the locus of power in imperial organization, the nature of liberty, the
relationship between power and liberty, and contractual relationships
between government and the governed, the effect of the moral
corruption of a people upon the integrity of their political institutions,
the justification of popular insurrection against constituted political
authority, and the institutionalization of power so as to guarantee
liberty against the excessive exercise of power. Historical studies of the
revolutionary generation's treatment of such fundamental problems of
political theory have produced a variety of changing interpretations.
A characteristic
of the historiography
of the American
all historical scholarship for that matter-has been
Revolution-of
interpretation influenced by events and concerns contemporary to the
historian. George Bancroft interpreted the American Revolution in the
light of his Anglophobia and admiration for Jacksonian democracy. The
imperial historians were motivated by their Anglophilia. The
Progressive historians looked at the American Revolution and
revolutionary political thought in terms of their desire for social reforms
in the age of the "Robber Barons." Randolph G. Adams, writing after
World War I, was primarily concerned about the problems of
international organization, and studied the political theory of the
American Revolution while thinking about the League of Nations. NeoWhig historians, thinking about twentieth-century ideological conflicts
in which the United States has been involved as the arch-opponent of
Fascist and Communist totalitarianism, have interpreted revolutionary
political thought as a consensus of patriotic American public opinion in
opposition to British tyranny. More recent historians have focused on

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THE HISTORY TEACHER

95

moral and political corruption in Hanoverian England. In part they

have been influenced by Caroline Robbins' study of The EighteenthCentury Commonwealthman and other investigations of radical
political thought in eighteenth-century England and its effect on the
revolutionaryAmerican mind. Their work has been written during the
1960'sand early 1970'swhen many scholarshave been preoccupiedwith
problems of moral and political corruptionin contemporaryAmerica
and with protecting the rights of minorities from the tyranny of the
majority. The suggestion may, therefore, be safely made that Bailyn,
Wood, and others have recently studied the political thought of the
American Revolution while thinking, at least to some extent, about
current events and problems.
Interpretationsof the political theory of the AmericanRevolution,
it appears, have been made by historians within their own
contemporary frames of reference. That would explain the changing
interpretationsreviewedin this paper, because framesof referencehave
changed from time to time since the days of George Bancroft. The
tendency of historians to interpret revolutionarypolitical thought in
terms of their contemporary concerns is obstructive of any real
understanding of what the revolutionary generation thought. An
eighteenth-centuryidea is best understood in the eighteenth-century
frame of reference.The historian'stask in studying the political theory
of the AmericanRevolution is to understandthat theory in eighteenthcentury terms. Nevertheless, the historian's concern with twentiethcentury problems has attracted attention to aspects of revolutionary
political thought that might otherwise have been ignored. Hence,
Randolph G. Adams' interest in the League of Nations attracted his
attention to the problemof imperial organizationafter 1763. As a result
we have learned more about the revolutionary idea of the federative
empire than we otherwise might have. Currentinterest in problems of
corruption and of the interrelationship between power and liberty
appears to be leading scholars toward greater knowledge than
previously possessed of the intellectual foundations of American
republican institutions as they took form after 1776. The problem for
historians, however, is to avoid the obstructiveness of tortuous
reasoning and anachronistic preconceptions in the quest for historical
truth. Interest in a current problem, such as political corruption or
parent-child relationships,"may direct the attention of the historianto
an aspect of American revolutionary ideology that has been hitherto
neglected, but overemphasison that aspect may serve to distort, rather
than to clarify, the political theory of the American Revolution.
23 See, for example, Edwin G. Burrows and Michael Wallace, "The American
Revolution: The Ideology and Psychology of National Liberation," Perspectives in

American History, VI (1972), 167-306.

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