The United States of America, as a political organization, was created by a revolution which founds its expression in the Declaration of Independence of 1776. The experience of revolution is therefore one which Americans share with others. It is important to try to see the American Revolution in a comparative light, assessing both resemblances and differences between it and other revolutions, and the effects it may have had on revolutionary developments in other parts of the world, down to the present.
The task is not easy. Nor is it new, for Americans have been concerned with their special relationship to the rest of the world from the time of the revolution itself, and indeed since the first settlement of the country. Europeans and others, also, have found much in the American experience to illuminate their own. But though old, the question has its relevancy today, when some see the United States as the great conservative power opposed to twentieth-century revolutions, while others, like Senator Kennedy of New York, believe that the American revolutionary example should be carried to Latin America and elsewhere. It may be added that what is called the “Negro Revolution” in the United States–that is, the struggle for equality for American citizens of whatever race–may be seen as a manifestation of principles deriving from the American Revolution.
There are many possible views. Some have thought that there was really no revolution in America at all, in any modern sense of the word, but only a successful war of independence, which removed British control but left the country internally much the same. Closely related is the idea that the American revolt was really a conservative movement, to protect old liberties against novel demands by Great Britain, somewhat like the revolt of the Belgian estates in 1789 against the attempted reforms of Emperor Joseph II.
The idea, which later found favor in conservative circles in the United States, appeared in Europe as early as the 1790’s, when Friedrich Gentz, for example, praised the conservatism of the American Revolution in order to attack the French. Other European conservatives of the time, however, for example the Abbé Barruel, insisted that the French Revolution had been anticipated in America. It was in America, said Barruel, that a “sect” of secret revolutionaries had first announced “its code of equality, liberty, and sovereignty of the people.” Though no one now agrees with Barruel’s conspiratorial theory of the revolution, he nevertheless shared in a third view, indeed the classic view, common to persons of both conservative and liberal inclination, that the American Revolution was the first episode in a long revolutionary period extending from about 1770 through the European revolutions of 1848, and principally marked by the great French Revolution of 1789.
Within this view many nuances exist, depending on how much one wishes to stress similarities or national differences. Georges Lefebvre, the eminent French historian, thought that the American Revolution had more in common with the English revolution of the seventeenth century than with the French; that the Anglo-Saxon revolutions, as he called them, were primarily concerned with liberty, while the French Revolution aimed most especially at equality. While the idea of equality took on a far wider range of meanings in the French Revolution, it seems certain that Lefebvre greatly underestimated its importance in America. For Alexis de Tocqueville, writing his Democracy in America in the 1830’s, the United States offered the world’s leading example of “equality,” though it is true that Tocqueville did not relate his observation to the American Revolution.
The various revolutions up to 1848, including the American, and that of England in the seventeenth century, have sometimes been put together as the “bourgeois revolution,” a view congenial to Marxists but not limited to them, and one in which everything depends on what is meant by the “bourgeoisie.” Since, in brief, the English revolution was an affair of fairly aristocratic landowners, and the American was one of small farmers, planters and country lawyers, and the French was one of a large composite urban middle class reinforced by peasants and workers, with occasional nobles and priests, the conception of a bourgeoisie must for this purpose become excessively generalized, and signify hardly more than persons who possessed or aspired to possess private property, in land or in goods, in amounts either very large or very small.
Indeed, if any revolution is regarded as a “bourgeois revolution,” that would seem to imply a future stage of development in which the bourgeoisie is to be succeeded by a new dominant group, with private property in income-producing goods abolished. Such came to be the message of revolutionary or MArxist socialism in Europe after the mid-nineteenth century. In the rise of this movement, the American Revolution was of little significance. There is little affinity between the American Revolution and the Russian Revolution as it developed after 1917, or between it and the Chinese Revolution as it developed after the Second World War.
There is another category of revolutions, those aiming at national independence, in which the American Revolution is seen as a precedent, since, whatever else it may also have been, it was clearly a struggle for independence against Great Britain. In general, such revolutionary movements ran their course in Latin America through the nineteenth century, and in Europe through the close of the First World War, producing such newly independent states as Czechoslovakia or Ireland. Such revolutions have been in progress more recently in Africa and Asia, in the form of resistance to the European colonial rule. The leaders of these movements of national independence have often looked to the American Revolution as an example to follow, and have characteristically been befriended by the government of the United States.
The situation becomes confused when movements of national independence take on a strong social character, and are directed against foreign capitalism, foreign economic control, or foreign ideas, influence or privileges, as in the Mexican Revolution after 1910, the Cuban Revolution since 1959, and indeed in the Russian and Chinese revolutions also. The extreme of aggressive xenophobia, with doctrinaire rejection of Western Civilization, individual liberty, representative government and even of reason itself, as in the National Socialist movement in Germany, has nothing in common with the American or any other eighteenth-century revolution.
Let us consider at greater length only two matters suggested by the preceding survey: first, the relationship of the American Revolution to the French and European revolutions of almost two hundred years ago; and second, the relationship of the American Revolution, whether in resemblance or by contrast, to the current anti-colonialist revolutionary disturbances in the Asian-African-Latin American world in recent times. As for the first, my view is a form of what has already been called the “classical” interpretation. There was one great revolutionary period from about 1770 to 1848; this was the European Revolution or Revolution of Western Civilization. The American Revolution was part of this process; was indeed the opening movement of this general European or “Atlantic” phenomenon. On the other hand, the American Revolution was directed against Europe–Euroope as a whole, and not merely Great Britain. Hence, it has a positive significance for anti-colonialist revolutionaries today, who are fundamentally anti-European, and can with some justice see the American Revolution as the opening movement of their revolution also.
But in both cases we run into difficulties and paradoxes. The American Revolution of 1776 was different from the French Revolution of 1789, if only because Americans were not Europeans. But it is different also from later anti-colonial and anti-European movements because the Americans are, after all, a species of Europeans–the “colony of all Europe,” as Thomas Paine said in 1776; the “daughter of Europe,” as General Charles de Gaulle remarked in 1965.
Similarities between the American revolution and those in Europe in the eighteenth century are impossible to deny. It is idle to pretend that the uprising in America was not truly revolutionary, or to see it as primarily a conservative protest. The Americans rebelled against the legal authority of the British crown and parliament, they passed from more moderate to more radical stages, reaching the point of armed conflict and a secession from the British empire which many Americans were unwilling to accept, so that the war of independence was at the same time a civil or revolutionary struggle between native Americans. In the course of the struggle, as a few years later in France, there was a good deal of intimidation if not actual “terror,” emigration of tens of thousands who remained loyal to Britain, and confiscation of the property of these political émigrés.
Victorious after a long struggle, and thanks to the intervention of France, the revolutionary Americans set up new governments according to new principles, and to a large extent, operated by new men, of a kind who could not have achieved prominence had the colonies remained British. This is true not only of such notables as George Washington or John Adams. A study has recently been made of men who sat in legislatures of the colonies just before independence, and of the corresponding states just after, according to the classifications of “wealthy,” “well-to-do” and “moderate.” In New York, New Jersey and New Hampshire, between 1770 and 1784, the proportion called “moderate,” i.e. in wealth not opinion, rose from 17 to 62 per cent, with corresponding loss of the “wealthy” and “well-to-do.” Even in the South the “wealthy lost their predominance in the legislatures. When classified by occupation, the proportion of merchants and lawyers greatly declined, while the proportion of farmers doubled. In short, the revolt in America meets the external criteria of a true revolution, and of a revolution in a democratic direction, since it was a former upper or “aristocratic” class that was displaced.
It is in principles, purposes and ideas, or what may be called “ideology,” that the resemblance between the American and the French or European revolutions is most evident. On the plane of actual politics, the modern doctrines of liberty and equality, or natural rights and the sovereignty of the people, were first proclaimed by the American Revolution. The Declaration of Independence announced that “all men are created equal,” with an equal right to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”
There has been much discussion of what Jefferson meant by inserting “happiness” into this document; the Americans had not really been “unhappy” under British rule, and “happiness” makes a vague political program; but all students of the eighteenth century will recognize that “happiness,” le bonheur, la félicité publique, was a common idea of the European Enlightenment. It was the revolutionary belief that men may take action to improve their conditions of life, even against the established authorities of law, state, church or society. As Saint-Just remarked a few years later, at the height of the French Revolution, “happiness is a new idea in Europe.”
The Declaration of Independence went on to assert that governments exist only to protect the rights thus affirmed, and that when government failed in this function, the people “may alter or abolish it.” They might then “institute new government” as they chose. This is a pure formula of revolution.
As a matter of fact, it was not the Declaration of Independence which first attracted attention in Europe, or which best illustrates the resemblance in ideas between America and Europe at the time. A complaint by disaffected provincials against the King of England, rehearsing his real and alleged misdoings, however adorned with familiar eighteenth-century generalizations, could have little universal appeal. The connection between the American and European revolutions is more apparent in the constructive part of the American program, the way in which they “instituted new government.” They instituted it, or “constituted” it, first of all in each of the 13 states, each of which received a new written constitution (except that in Connecticut and Rhode Island the colonial charters were retained, which were virtually republican anyway), and then by establishing the federal union with the constitution written in Philadelphia in 1787, which, as amended, remains the constitution of the United States today.
To produce their state and federal constitutions the Americans devised the mechanism of a special convention or constituent assembly, which was held to exercise the sovereign power of the people, and which characteristically did two things. First, it issued a declaration of rights, listing the “rights of man” in a series of numbered articles, and setting limits beyond which the powers of government could not go. Second, it produced a written constitution, one short single document, by which the people were supposed to create a government for themselves, all public power was held to be merely a revocable and delegated authority (as in the Social Contract of Rousseau), various political bodies and officers were defined, and the executive, legislative and judicial powers were separated and balanced, so that abuse of government, despotism or dictatorship might be prevented.
The American constitutions and declarations of rights gave a practical embodiment to ideas of political liberty and legal equality, to the principle of representation by numbers rather than by classes or corporate groups, the rejection of hereditary office and privileged status, the opening of career to merit rather than birth, and the separation of state and church, or at least of citizenship from religious affiliation.
This machinery and these ideas soon became common to the great European or “Atlantic” revolution, from the French Constituent Assembly of 1789 and the French Convention of 1792, through the new regimes in Holland, Switzerland and Italy, that is the Batavian, Helvetic, Cisalpine and other republics that arose during the wars of the 1790’s, to the French Constituent Assembly of 1848, the German Frankfurt Parliament and other European developments of that same year.
Yet the American Revolution was very different from the European, and especially the French Revolution, for the good reason that America in the eighteenth century was a very different kind of country from Europe, more different than it is today. The astonishing thing is that any parallel in political behavior or ideology could exist at all. In the Thirteen Colonies, at the time of their revolution, there was no feudalism, no seigneurial or manorial system, and no peasantry–for the mobile and property-owning American farmers were hardly peasants. There were no lords or nobility, no magnificent and privileged church, and one might almost say no monarchy, though the distant king and his agents were long respected.
Before the troubles with England the Americans lived virtually without problems of taxation, civil service, armed forces or foreign policy. There were no craft guilds or other medieval economic survivals. The Americans had no developed capitalism, as in Europe; no banks, no corporations or trading companies, no great wealth and no extreme poverty, always excepting the Negro slaves, who were numerous in the South but played no political role (except to give importance to their owners), and whose very existence accentuated the difference between the two continents.
There were no large cities, and no significant network of roads. There was a handful of small colleges but no universities, and although many Americans, like Franklin, Adams and Jefferson, were well-read and well-informed, there was in truth no intellectual class. Almost no books were written in America; the book trade was part of the import trade from England. There was as yet hardly any distinctive national culture or political unity. How could such a country give lessons to Europe, or even share in European ideas?
The answer, of course, is that for many revolutionary developments in Europe America did not offer a parallel. It is obvious that the French Revolution was a more vast and profound social upheaval, involving more violent conflict between classes; more radical reorganization of government and society; more far-reaching redefinition of marriage, property and civil law as well as of organs and public authority; more redistribution of wealth and income; more fears on the part of the rich and more demands from the poor; more sensational repercussions in other countries; more crises of counter-revolution, war and invasion; and more drastic or emergency measures, as in the Reign of Terror. Very early in the French Revolution, the American Revolution came to seem very moderate.
Thomas Jefferson, who was then in France, feared even before the fall of the Bastille that the French were going to dangerous extremes. For the advanced democratic leaders of France and Europe, from 1789 or 1793 down through the nineteenth century, the Americans seemed “Girondist” or “federalist,” since they failed to see the need of a powerful, enterprising, centralized, unitary, democratic state as a means not only of carrying on war but of reducing inequalities against strong opposition. Only in our own time, as the federal government intervenes locally, to protect the rights of Negroes, or to assure more equality in such matters as schools and highways, are Americans learning what has long been known to Europeans.
Yet the parallels between the American and European revolutions, as already indicated, remain. Apart from the fact of rebellion itself against an older authority, the parallels have mostly to do with constitutional principles, and with the essentially ethical goals summed up in the ideas of liberty and equality. At this level there was undeniably a transatlantic ideology common to the revolutionary era of Western Civilization. The American leaders thought like Europeans because they were transplanted Europeans. Their only culture was an English and European culture, modified and diluted by the experience of living in a new and simpler environment. They drew their ideas from the same sources as Europeans; from their own experience in affairs; from their own churches in part; and from Greek and Latin classics read in school, from Cicero and Plutarch, from Livy and Tacitus; and from the modern philosophers of natural law, such as Grotius, Pufendorf and John Locke.
Social conditions, social structures, problems and grievances were very different on the two sides of the Atlantic. But a political philosophy is not merely the product of specific social conditions, or an instrument devised to meet immediate practical needs. There are many kinds of restraints from which a desire for liberty may arise, and many kinds of inequalities or injustices from which a desire for equality may come. Different though the circumstances were, the American Revolution could announce a revolutionary program for Europe.
By the same token, the American Revolution has its relevancy to the contemporary anti-colonialist movements, despite immense differences in circumstances, not only between the United States today and the ex-colonial countries, but between the Thirteen Colonies of 1776 and the British, French, Dutch and Portuguese “colonies” in Asia and Africa of some twenty-odd years ago. These differences are very great, and involve first of all a difference of meaning in the word “colony” itself.
“Colony” in recent usage has meant no more than a “possession.” The colonies which became the United States were colonies in the classical and Latin sense: new communities established by the migration and settlement of persons from a mother country, with which they shared the same language, culture, inheritance and race. In this respect, the parallel of the American Revolution might seem to be to the Europeans in Algeria before its independence, or to the white population in Rhodesia today. The white Rhodesians, in fact, in their unilateral assertion of independence of 1965, adopted some of the language of the American Declaration of Independence, with careful avoidance of any reference to human equality. There is actually no significant parallel here.
In the American colonies of the eighteenth century the whites were not newcomers among a much larger indigenous population. The native Indian population of eastern North America had always been sparse. The attitude of the white population to these Indians may be called ruthless, but the two million whites in the Thirteen Colonies in 1776 probably outnumbered the aborigines by ten or twenty to one. There were also the Negroes, some half million in number, almost all slaves. Like the whites, they were immigrants or the descendants of immigrants. Deprived of their African culture by the slave trade and by the daily experience of enslavement, and not yet sharing significantly in the European culture of the whites, they formed a large passive element in the population.
Neither slavery nor racial questions were ever at issue between Britain and America at the time of the revolution, as they might have been if the white Americans had rebelled a half-century later. While many white Americans were already uneasy about the enslavement of Africans, they suppressed the question in order to maintain unity among themselves. It was not the Americans, but the French, at the height of their own Revolution in 1794, who were the first to abolish slavery. In this respect, as in others, the French Revolution went further than the American in equalitarian and humanitarian principles, though it was easier for the French to abolish slavery, which existed only in their colonies, than it would have been for the Americans to do so in their own country.
The point is that for practical purposes, at the time of the American Revolution “the Americans” meant the white Americans of European and mainly English descent, and these ex-Europeans, unlike those of Rhodesia, South Africa, or Algeria, were far from being a minority in their own country. But of course by the anti-colonial revolution today we mean the movements of the black Africans of Africa, the Arabs of North Africa, the peoples of Asia and the former Dutch East Indies and the technically independent republics of Latin America, especially those in which the aboriginal or non-European element is very large. How does this modern “anti-colonialism” compare with the American Revolution?
Certainly the differences are obvious and considerable. For one thing, it is not clear how many such anti-colonial revolutions, in a strict sense, there have ever been. Algeria is a special case, Mexico has had a real revolution, and Cuba entertains a revolutionary ideology. On the whole, however, and with exceptions as in Viet Nam, the British, French, and Dutch liquidated their empires without waiting for revolution, and not many Africans or Asians have actually had the American experience of rebellion and war to obtain their political independence.
In any case, the problems are different. In the Afro-Asian-Latin American world the problems are poverty, overpopulation, economic under-development, and exploitation by foreign capital or the forces of a world market. There are difficulties of language and communication, and a lack of trained personnel for positions in government and economy. There is the cultural problem posed by Western Civilization–is this foreign culture to be rejected, resisted, made use of, or imitated? And there is the racial problem, inflamed by the humiliation of having been condescended to, segregated or ostracized by a white ruling class.
On these matters, parallels to the American Revolution are shadowy or non-existent. The Thirteen Colonies did not suffer from poverty. The average American probably enjoyed better food, lodging and conditions of work than the average European. There was no overpopulation; quite the reverse. Though the British colonial system was operated for British commercial and strategic advantage, and though Americans had begun to chafe at certain restrictions, the Thirteen Colonies had not been exploited. The Americans had always enjoyed a large measure of genuine self-government, and could draw on their own political experience after independence.
The Thirteen Colonies were economically undeveloped, though in some ways they rivalled England itself, as in fisheries or shipbuilding. But in any case they had the means of rapid development in their human and natural resources and in their institutional setting, a development aided in the generations following the Revolution by the continuing investment of British capital and influx of European immigration, which brought skilled labor and professional talents to the new country. This influx was made possible by the racial and cultural affinity between white Americans and Europeans. For Americans, Europe with its older and richer civilization, and more elaborate social classes, might pose a psychological problem. Americans might at times suffer from an “inferiority complex” towards Europe, or complain of European condescension. But there was hardly the same social distance as for Asians or Africans. America was the daughter of Europe, never its slave-girl or its captive.
Given such differences, what can be the parallels? What relevancy can the American Revolution have for non-Europeans and the anti-colonial movements of the twentieth century? Perhaps it might be wise to give up the very idea of any such parallels or resemblances. Americans today might have a more realistic view of the world, and more real sympathy, understanding and tolerance for other peoples, if they expected no resemblance whatsoever to the American pattern. Perhaps, for some peoples in Africa, the revolution of the 1790’s in Haiti offers a more significant precedent than the revolution which produced the United States. At that time, the black of the French colony of San Domingo, in conjunction with the French Revolution, established the second oldest independent republic in the Americas. But the subsequent history of Haiti was very troubled, and the precedent would be a discouraging one, except for the fact that the Africans of today are more advanced than the slaves of eighteenth-century San Domingo, and enjoy far more support from the white man’s world than the blacks of Haiti ever obtained.
Yet something can be said for resemblances between the American Revolution and the twentieth-century anti-colonial revolutionary upheavals. The independence of the United States did signify, after all, the first case of break-up of a European empire. It set a precedent for the act of rebellion; it showed men fighting, living dangerously, and dying for their rights. The Americans, after their independence was recognized, were the first “new nation” in a certain modern sense of the world, and they faced the problems of a new nation. Emerging from the old British empire, they soon embarked on a successful economic development. They also had to establish their national unity and identity, and they did so with difficulty, for in the early years of the federal constitution it seemed that the country might fall apart into separate fragments, and all compromises broke down in the great Civil War of 1861. If formal unity was thereafter restored, it was at the expense of the Negroes; but the Amerians today, in attempting to create an interracial society, are still at work on a problem of national unity of a kind, in general, which other “new nations” also face.
But it is at the highest level, that of abstract ideas, that the American Revolution has something to say to the anti-colonialists of the twentieth century, as to European revolutionaries at the time of the great revolution in France. The Americans justified their independence by the grandeur and universality of a revolutionary message. The idea that peoples should choose their own government, and determine the forms and powers of this government by constituent assemblies, is not yet exhausted. The old eighteenth-century “rights of man,” though much criticized by philosophers from that day to this, and now known more tamely as “human rights,” are still very much alive. As a matter of fact, a more lucid and balanced statement of these rights was given in the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen of 1789. Some of the first American state constitutions likewise expressed the idea in more definite form.
But, for the belief that all men are “created equal,” and have an equal right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, whose protection is the function of good government, we still turn, with good reason, to the American Declaration of Independence.
_____________________________________________________________________________________
Robert R. Palmer–A.B. University of Chicago, Ph.D. Cornell–joined the Princeton faculty in 1936, left in 1963 to become Washington University’s first Dean of the Faculty of Arts & Sciences, returned this year as Professor of History and Dean of the Faculty on J. Douglas Brown’s retirement. An authority on the intellectual and political movements of the 18th century, he is the author of History of the Modern World (rev. ed. 1956), Twelve Who Ruled (1951), and The Age of Democratic Revolution (1960), a Princeton University Press book which won the Bancroft Prize and a $10,000 award from the American Council of Learned Societies. This article, prepared for a USIA radio series, will appear in The Comparative Approach to American History, ed. By C. Vann Woodward, to be published in January by Basic Books, Inc. © 1967 by R.R. Palmer.
The Latest
See all
Related News
Virginia Maloney ’10 Is Pushing Affordability in Campaign for New York City Council
‘New York is at a critical juncture where we need strong leaders,’ Maloney says
0 Responses