Fifty years ago–in November 1925–the historian J. Franklin Jameson delivered a now classic series of lectures at Princeton University entitled The American Revolution Considered as a Social Movement. The heart of Jameson’s argument was contained in a single sentence: “The stream of revolution, once started, could not be confined within narrow banks, but spread abroad upon the land.”
Not just political independence, he said, nor simply a new concept of sovereignty, resulted from the events of 1776. Profound social changes were also set in motion: the suffrage was extended; feudal vestiges, such as primogeniture and entail, were abolished; the Anglican Church was disestablished; Loyalist landholdings were confiscated and distributed among American citizens; slavery and the slave trade met their end in many states; enterprise was broadened; and American intellectual life was quickened. In short, suggested Jameson, a more democratic political and social system unanticipated by most colonists before the Revolution, began to make its appearance at the close of war- and constitution-making. Since those lectures, Jameson’s findings have been qualified in important respects. We have come to see more clearly how few barriers stood before the forces of our Revolution, in comparison, say, with those of France or Russia. As Louis Hartz and others have convincingly argued, the American Revolution, unlike many others, did not have to destroy the structure of feudal society in order to achieve its ends. Indeed it did not aim to revolutionize the patterns of landholding, status, and privilege in large part because it did not have to. Therefore, some of what Jameson thought to be important achievements of the Revolution we now tend to see as rather minor gains.
For example, neither primogeniture nor entail was deeply rooted in the colonies, even in the eighteenth-century South, given the vast tracts of land available for settlement. The Anglican Church was never strong where it was legally established–in the South and in the southern counties of New York–and was thus rather easy to dislodge. On the other hand, where the established religion was deeply rooted in the general culture, as in Congregational New England, disestablishment did not take place for decades–in Massachusetts not officially until 1833. Also, the suffrage had usually been broader in fact than in law, so that its legal extension after the Revolution to a larger proportion of white males merely brought the law into line with practice.
Finally, a point we are bound to emphasize today, the abolition of the “peculiar institution” of slavery where it was inextricably woven into the fabric of society was not greatly promoted by the Revolution. To be sure, as William Freehling has recently argued, the Revolutionary generation did pave the way for the eventual eradication of bond servitude by giving birth to an ultimately irresistible ideology of liberty, by confining slavery to the southern states, and by cutting off the supply of slaves from abroad. But it took the greatest tragedy in our collective history, the bloodiest war the world had seen to date, finally to accomplish by 1865 what the Revolution of the eighteenth century had not.
Nevertheless, once these qualifications of Jameson’s arguments are acknowledged, the general questions posed by him still serve as the basis of inquiries into the social consequences of the Revolution. What, if any, was the effect of the Revolution upon the distribution of wealth and power? How did the Revolution affect institutions? In what ways did it influence humanitarian and social thought and action?
We have, however, also begun to go beyond Jameson’s concerns to take up some matters, especially those concerning new ways of thinking and oragnizing, which he did not consider. Let me, then, try to review a few of the social, political, and cultural consequences of the Revolution–some of them originally touched on by Jameson, others not–in the era when it may be said that our Revolution “took effect,” between 1776 and the 1820s. In the interest of space, I shall by and large have to limit my remarks to questions regarding the distribution of wealth, political opportunity, the republican ideology, voluntary associations, and political parties.
As for the distribution of wealth, the few findings now available–from both city and country–point to the same development: an acceleration of the stratification of society, of the disparities between poverty and riches, from the 1770s on. During and after the Revolution, the amount of personal wealth continued, as it had in the colonial era, to gravitate toward the upper third of the white population, measured on the basis of assessed taxable wealth. Moreover, the proportion of those forced to live at the subsistence level of food and clothing appears to have increased after the Revolution. In such varied economies as the commercial center of Boston, the little farm town of Kent, Connecticut, and the fields of Chester County, Pennsylvania, the trend was the same: an increase in the proportion of impoverished people from about 25 percent to 40-45 percent of the population–although the general standard of living, even for the poor, was higher than in the mid-eighteenth century.
What might the Revolution have had to do with this? The sheer disruptions of war surely brought about a rise in the number of widowed women and orphaned children: those who were dependent, paid no taxes, and lived off charity and the poor rates. Quite simply, the war injured and increased the ranks of the poor. But war and independence also created opportunities to increase old or to create new wealth through privateering, leading to the governments, and securing lucrative government contracts for food, clothing, and munitions. Furthermore, Loyalist estates were not extensively redistributed, so that the average citizen did not have whatever opportunity might have presented itself to increase his land holdings. Relatedly, and perhaps most important, as Kenneth Lockridge has suggested, the Revolution released the tides of egalitarianism and participatory action, removed many of the remaining cultural inhibitions against an individual’s desire to pursue his own interests at the expense of others.
In short, the Revolution did not in and of itself effect a deep revolution in the ownership of wealth. If anything, it sustained trends in the distribution of property evident throughout the eighteenth century. Yet its implications were egalitarian. And among the factors which have worked for two centuries to dampen society-wide revolutionary fervor in the United States, surely the belief in the existence of opportunity for all–a belief born of the Revolution–is among the foremost.
We should bear in mind, moreover, some important corollaries. Little or no sense of class consciousness or class solidarity accompanied the growing disparity of wealth. This can be explained in part by the rather complete permeation of American thought by currents of republican thinking, which emphasized community harmony and mutual social obligations. Moreover, conditions approaching real social and economic equality continued to exist during the first generation or two of settlement in the new farmlands of the interior North and Northwest. And finally–if we exclude the real American proletariat of the time: roughly 15-20 percent of the whites, almost all free blacks, and the slaves–the opportunity to own property and enjoy a gain in social status probably continued to exist for the bulk of the white population through the 1830s.
Opportunity is a notion we normally associate with American social reality. It is also, of course, an ingredient of our political culture. Here, the Revolution seems to have had a direct and distinctly positive effect. At first, it was to be seen at the lower levels of political leadership; later it would extend throughout all ranges of authority. As Jackson Turner Main has been able to show, the Revolution absorbed the political talents of many more Americans than the colonial era had, especially in the state legislatures whose social bases broadened significantly after 1776. Apparently–given the dislodging of British officaldom, the absence of many of the old elite at war, and the new demands upon government–more men on the one hand, and newer and less established men on the other, were drawn into political activity. Power became more widely distributed. More people gained experience in public life. What resulted, in part, was the blossoming of new forms of governments and the emergence of institutional inventiveness for which this society is so well known.
By far the most striking and encompassing–if also the least well recognized–result of the Revolution was the rapid emergence of a new world view. This set of mind we now generally refer to as the “republican ideology.” Jefferson called it “the holy republican gospel.” It was an ideology as momentous, subversive, and pervasive as any other (such as the French revolutionary ideology in its time, or Marxism in ours). It affected everything: politics, reform, enterprise, expansion, religion, war. Until the 1820s, it governed the thinking of Americans.
By ideology one means a set of ideas, principles, and aims which claims to explain social and political reality and which provokes to action and reform. In this case, the ideology was composed of a century-old body of British opposition and dissenting thought, including the vital currents of Scottish moral philosophy so important in the early history of Princeton; it was given relevance to the lives of Ameicans by the conditions of colonial political and social existence; and it was given coherence, timeliness, and unity of expression by the events of 1776.
Republican thought deeply re-ordered perceptions. It required the eradication of old ways of thought and brought about a recognition of problems earlier ignored (just as black women’s liberation ideologies have done for us today). Above all, republicanism was utopian, giving rise to visions of a better society, one in which distinctions in rank would be moderated, corruptions of the spirit and of the body politic would be eradicated, and happiness (a central eighteenth-century goal) would prevail.
The concept of republicanism should bring to our minds some concrete images. It means the absence of hereditary monarchy. It means government based directly upon the will of the people. In a more institutional sense, it means representative government–government by delegates rather than direct government by the mass of the people.
But to contemporaries it meant more than this. Republican thought had at its core some specific assumptions about the quality and tone of society. That is what made it an ideology, not just a political theory.
For the sake of clarity, four social tenets of republicanism may be singled out.
The first was public and private virtue. Without virtue, it was believed, republics would not survive. “It has ever been an acknowledged maxim in the science of politics,” wrote a representative commentator, “that virtue is the only permanent basis of a republic.”
The second was harmony. Without internal unity, a balance of social forces, equilibrium among the branches of government, a spirit of mutual concession, harmony between classes and sections–without these qualities, contemporaries believed, this republic was doomed.
The third was a fear of power. If moral rectitude and social equilibrium sustained a republic, then power–especially its abuse–imperiled it. Contemporaries repeated endlessly that power is “of an encroaching nature.” It must be checked, subdued, reduced. Among all threats to the republic–which the revolutionary generation thought to be the most fragile of all political contrivances–expanded and misused power was considered the worst.
Fourth, and finally, was peace. Wars destroyed republics: peace was their shield. Republics had to defend themselves against external attack through vigilance but had to do so without incurring warfare, which destroyed virtue and harmony and which augmented power.
The republican ideology, so quickly absorbed by Americans after the Revolution, played an important role in some major developments of the post-war years. It enshrined the rule of law. It helped gie rise to new humanitarian currents by encouraging men and women to reform and perfect both their institutions (such as prisons and the penal laws) and their own moral conduct (with regard, for example, to drink) in the interests of social order and republican virtue. It helped spur a re-awakening of pietistic religion, as the clergy and laity together became fearful that a republic which backslid from Christian faith and worship could not long avoid a decline into corruption and despotism.
The republican ideology also encouraged Americans to seek expanded national boundaries in the interest of keeping at a distance all enemies of the fledgling republic in a revolutionary and anti-republican world. It helped give rise to a politics characterized by extraordinary venom and mistrust, as contemporaries mistook for corruption and power-hunger the best-intentioned conflicts over pressing public issues. And, perhaps most important, the republican ideology provided the major impetus to the flowering of that characteristic American institution: the voluntary association.
As early as the 1830s, the great French social analyst, Alexis de Tocqueville, recognized the epicentral position of voluntary associations in American life.
Americans of all ages, all conditions, and all dispositions [he wrote] constantly form associations. They have not only commercial and manufacturing companies, in which all take part, but associations of a thousand other kinds, religious, moral, serious, futile, general or restricted, enormous or diminutive. The Americans make associations to give entertainments, to found seminaries, to build ins, to construct churches, to diffuse books, to send missionaries to the antipodes; in this manner, they found hospitals, prisons, and schools. If it is proposed to inculcate some truth or to foster some feeling by the encouragement of a great example, they form a society. Whenever at the head of some new undertaking you see the government in France, or a man of rank in England, in the United States you will be sure to find an association.
What had the Revolution to do with the emergency of voluntary associations? The established fetters on power–especially public power–were critical. What was remarkable about the state and federal governments at the time, in comparison with others elsewhere, was their relative impotence (although great power was latent). Governments were purposely given limited social welfare functions and little power, compared to other nations, to carry on enterprises in the state’s name. If governments were incompetent, however, citizens associating together were not so. That is, the fear of governmental power was complemented by a confidence and hope in citizen and private action.
Furthermore, the fact that the rights of speech, assembly, petition, and the press were protected against encroachment, especially by the national government in the First Amendment, gave an essential encouragement to all associations. The radical individualism and egalitarianism let loose by the Revolution also allowed, indeed encouraged, people to do things on their own (i.e., together as citizens) rather than under state auspices. Finally, and by no means least important, was the experience, repeated over and over again, of improvisation, of institution-building, of crisis action required by the revolutionary events themselves. Militia companies had to be formed, state governments created, committees of correspondence administered, communities run in the midst of war and rebellion.
It is therefore not surprising that, when the experience of voluntary collective action merged with the utopianism of republicanism, the United States became the principal scene, as Tocquesville later saw, of the voluntary association created to aid the poor, reform the prisons, abolish slavery, promote manufacturing, and elect public officials (parties, after all, being voluntary associations, and perhaps the most important of them all).
Indeed, political parties were themselves one dimension of what may well have been, especially for comparative purposes, the most significant consequence of the American Revolution–that is, constitutional and political inventiveness: the creation of the fundamental laws of legitimacy and government on the one hand, and the institutions needed to exercise responsibility and authority on the other.
As Robert Palmer has so cogently argued, the theory and example of the people acting as constituent power was truly revolutionary. Never before had it been tried in practice. It took place first in Massachusetts. There, after the people had rejected in 1778 a constitution drawn up by the legislature of that state, a second constitution was submitted to all adult white males convened in town meetings for ratification. This principle of ratification by the people sitting as sovereigns was, of course, later adopted by the men who met in Philadelphia in 1787 and subsequently by the French and other revolutions. Modern law and politics are inconceivable without the principle that the people “do ordain and establish” the fundamental law of the land. And this was among the great bequests of the American Revolution to Western political science, along with the formation of the first modern political parties in the world.
Now, the founding fathers brought parties into being shamefacedly. Jefferson, as the late Richard Hofstadter recently reminded us, wished to be remembered on his tombstone for his authorship of the Declaration of Independence and of the Virginia Statute of Religious Freedom and for founding the University of Virginia, but not for bringing into being the first of all modern political parties. Parties–or “factions,” as contemporaries called them–reeked of English corruption, of disharmony, of power lust, of impulses contrary to the public interest. And yet it is now clear that without parties the political potentialities of the American Revolution and of the Constitution could probably not have been realized.
To be sure, James Madison, probably the greatest political theorist in our history, saw the Constitution as the ultimate defense against party. The Constitution, he wrote in his celebrated 10th Federalist, was designed to “brak and control the violence of faction.” And yet, ironically, the Constitution created the need for the very institutions it sought to prevent. First, it created a national forum for debate on national issues. Second, by institutionalizing federalism, it all the more stimulated the creation of parties as coalitions capable of winning majorities and of governing among polities. And, finally, by separating the branches of government, it necessitated parties to reconcile the legislative and executive branches of government.
To say all of this–to point to the legacies of political theory and practice on the one hand and of political parties on the other–is not, however, to make a general argument that the political system which emerged from the American Revolution was modern. In fact, taken comparatively, there is much to the argument, forcefully offered by Samuel P. Huntington, that our Revolution, being backward-looking in spirit, enshrined pre-modern, if not medieval, ways of politics. It might be well, therefore, to conclude an assessment of the consequences of the Revolution with a short review of our not altogether advanced political system–which, after all, came into being at the time.
When we talk of political modernization, we usually have in mind three factors: First, the rationalization of authority; that is, the replacement of traditional religious, familial, ethnic, tribal, and political authorities by a single, unitary, secular national authority. Second, the differentiation of political functions and structures; that is, the separation of legal, military, and administrative functions from the political arm of the state. And third, the eventual development of mass participation in the political process of the electorate through parties and interest associations.
Instead, what do we find embodied in law and practice in the few years after 1776? Rather than the notion of a secular state, we find the powerful idea of the organic harmony of society and government. We find claims that the government is subordinate to the “higher law.” We find created a balance of power between the executive and legislative branches of government. The Founders retain the vitality of local government authority (whose consequences are never plainer than when we try to abolish slavery). They continue to rely on local forces, such as the militia.
Let me offer a few comparisons by way of illustration. In England, by the nineteenth century, MPs had become representatives of the community as a whole, and one House of Parliament had become supreme. In the United States, in contrast, we retained our president as the general representative of the people. Our representatives were taken, as they still generally are, to speak primarily for their communities, not for the nation as a whole. Neither house of Congress became supreme.
Elsewhere, the functions of government became fused into a single center of power, either the king or the legislature or something like the Supreme Soviet. In the United States, our Constitution places similar functions in different branches. As for separated powers, there is little separation, except in theory. Treaties, the prerogative of the executive, must also be ratified by the Senate. Laws made by the legislature can be thrown out by the courts. Indeed, as we now recognize, the courts help make the law.
Elsewhere, the executive was carved up, sometimes into three people: the chief of state, the head of government, the captain of party. In the United States, the president is all three at once.
To say all of this is really to say, in the theorists’ terms, that, although it was a real revolution, ours was a pre-modern revolution–at least when its consequences alone are considered. It was antistatist, reducing the power of governments and throwing authority much more into the hands of the people and of local voluntary and official association. It surely did not tear down economic obstacles (in large part because it did not have to) but instead preserved and expanded the rule of the small capitalist. It was libertarian, in that it tried to protect civil liberties, in that it freed–in intellectual, religious, and political realms–the individual to go his or her own way without overweening intervention from the state. And all of this was so because the Revolution occurred in a relatively advanced society which was literate and relatively prosperous.
Of course, the Revolution fell short of its utopian goals and, as I have suggested, encouraged some anti-egalitarian and retrograde developments in social and political life. Yet, all things taken together, it ushered in a new era. It heightened national self-consciousness. It contributed directly to the shift from older conservative and holistic values to the liberal, individualistic, democratic spirit. If it failed appreciably to alter the class structure, it put the gentry permanently on the defensive by requiring them thenceforth to justify their authority by hard work and accommodations to equality. And it encouraged these developments precisely because it left the larger society relatively intact, without the kinds of deep social division which were created by the contemporaneous French Revolution.
In short, the American Revolution brought into being a new people with a new set-of-mind in a new republic. This was its most enduring result.
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James M. Banner Jr.--B.A. Yale, Ph.D. Columbia–is Associate Professor of History at Princeton and newly named Director of Continuing Education. He is the author of To the Hartford Convention (1970) and a co-author of Blacks in America: Biographical Essays (1971), a publication of Princeton’s Program in American Studies, of which he has been Chairman. He is on the National Governing Board of Common Cause and has been a consultant to the House Committee on the Judiciary. This article is based on a lecture last June at the West Coast Alumni College, sponsored by the Alumni Council.
Drawings with this article are by the best known early American illustrator, Felix O. C. Darley (1822-1888), from Benson J. Losing’s Our Country: A Household History…, 1877-78. Losing (prolific artist himself of “Pictorial Field Book” series) says in his Preface: “Darley has in every drawing consulted the best authorities for portraiture and costume….His spirited sketches are stamped with the insignia of truth.”
This book, with many proofs of the wood engravings, is one of over 150 Darley items in the Sinclair Hamilton Collection of American Illustrated Books, Princeton University Library–the earliest dated 1843, when the self-taught artist was 21.
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