The American Revolution: A History (19 page)

By asserting that all sovereignty rested with the people, the Federalists were not saying, as theorists had for ages, that all governmental power was merely derived from the people. Instead, they were saying that sovereignty remained always with the people and that government was only a temporary and limited agency of the people—out to the various government officials, so to speak, on a short-term, always recallable loan. No longer could any parts of the state and federal governments, even the popular houses of representatives, ever fully represent the people; instead, all elected parts of the governments—senators and governors and presidents—were now regarded in one way or another as simply partial representatives of the people. This new thinking made nonsense of the age-old theory of mixed or balanced government in which monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy were set against one another. Even though the American governments, at both the state and federal level, contained monarchlike executives and aristocratic senates, they now began to be called unmixed democracies or representative democracies. Since the process of election had become the sole criterion of representation, all elected governmental officials, including senators and executives, were considered equal agents of the people. If judges themselves were likewise considered agents of the people, which is the way many Federalists now described them, then by rights they ought to be elected by the people—which, of course, is precisely what many of the states began to do. Today a majority of states have popularly elected judiciaries.

This new understanding of the relation of the society to government now enabled the Federalists to explain the expansion of a single republican state over a large continent of diverse groups and interests. The Federalists—especially Madison—seized on Scottish philosopher David Hume’s radical suggestion that a republican government might operate better in a large territory than in a small one, and ingeniously turned on its head the older assumption that a republic must be small and homogeneous in its interests. The Federalists argued that American experience since 1776 had demonstrated that no republic could be made small enough to avoid the clashing of rival parties and interests. (Tiny Rhode Island was the most faction-ridden of all.) The extended territory of the new national republic was actually its greatest source of strength, wrote Madison in
The Federalist,
No. 10, the most famous of the eighty-five essays that he, Alexander Hamilton, and John Jay wrote in defense of the Constitution in New York. By extending the political arena over the whole nation, Madison concluded, the number of interests and factions in the society would increase to the point where they would check one another and make it less likely that a factious and tyrannical majority could combine in government to oppress the rights of minorities and individuals.

As an added benefit, Madison predicted that the elevated and expanded sphere of national politics would act as a filter, refining the kind of men who would become national leaders. Representatives to the national Congress would have to be elected from relatively large districts—a fact that Madison hoped would inhibit demagogic electioneering. If the people of a particular state—New York, for example—had to elect only ten men to the federal Congress in contrast to the sixty-six they elected to their state legislature, they would be far more likely to ignore the illiberal, narrow-minded men with “factious tempers” and “local prejudices” who had dominated the state legislatures in the 1780s—the Yateses and the Findleys—and instead elect to the new federal government only those educated gentlemen with “the most attractive merit and the most . . . established characters.” In this way the new federal government would avoid the problems that had plagued the states in the 1780s.

Although the Federalists in creating the Constitution may have intended to curb the populist forces the Revolution had released, the language and principles they used to defend the Constitution were decidedly popular. Indeed, most Federalists felt they had little choice in using democratic rhetoric. The proponents of the Constitution did not need John Dickinson to warn them in Philadelphia that “when this plan goes forth, it will be attacked by the popular leaders. Aristocracy will be the watchword; the Shibboleth among its adversaries.” Precisely because the Anti-Federalists, as Hamilton observed in the New York ratifying convention, did talk “so often of an aristocracy,” the Federalists were continually compelled in the ratifying debates to minimize, even disguise, the elitist elements of the Constitution. And in fact the Federalists of 1787–88 were not rejecting democratic electoral politics; nor were they trying to reverse the direction of the republican Revolution. They saw themselves rather as saving the Revolution from its excesses, in Madison’s words, creating “a republican remedy for the diseases most incident to republican government.” They shared a common American agreement that all American governments had to be “strictly republican” and derived “from the only source of just authority—the People.”

The Anti-Federalists provided little match for the arguments and the array of talents that the Federalists gathered in support of the Constitution in the ratifying conventions that were held in the states throughout the fall, winter, and spring of 1787–88. Apart from a few distinguished leaders like George Mason and Richard Henry Lee of Virginia, most Anti-Federalists were ordinary state-centered men with only local interests and loyalties. They tended to lack the influence and education of the Federalists, and often they had neither social nor intellectual confidence. They had difficulty making themselves heard both because their speakers, as one Anti-Federalist in Connecticut complained, “were browbeaten by many of those Cicero’es as they think themselves and others of Superior rank,” and because much of the press was closed to them. Out of a hundred or more newspapers printed in the late 1780s, only a dozen supported the Anti-Federalists.

Many of the small states—Delaware, New Jersey, Connecticut, and Georgia—commercially dependent on their neighbors or militarily exposed, ratified immediately. The critical struggles took place in the large states of Massachusetts, Virginia, and New York, and acceptance of the Constitution in these states was achieved only by narrow margins and by the promise of future amendments. (Under the leadership of Madison, the first federal Congress attempted to fulfill this promise and proposed twelve amendments to the Constitution. In 1791 ten of them were ratified by the states, and these became the Bill of Rights.) North Carolina and Rhode Island rejected the Constitution, but after New York’s ratification in July 1788 the country was ready to go ahead and organize the new government without them.

Despite the difficulties and the close votes in some states, the country’s eventual acceptance of the Constitution was almost inevitable. Since the Confederation Congress had virtually ceased to exist, the alternative was governmental chaos. Yet in the face of the great number of wealthy and influential people who supported the Constitution, what in the end remains extraordinary is not the political weakness and disunity of Anti-Federalism but its strength. That large numbers of Americans could actually reject a plan of government that was backed by George Washington and nearly the whole of the “natural aristocracy” of the country said more about the changing character of American politics and society than did the Constitution’s acceptance. It was indeed a portent of the democratic world that was coming.

The Anti-Federalists may have lost the contest over the Constitution, but by 1800 they and their Jeffersonian-Republican successors eventually won the larger struggle over what kind of society and culture America was to have, at least for a good part of the nineteenth century. Not only as president in 1801 did Jefferson reduce the power of the national government, but those who had been Anti-Federalists—narrow-minded middling men with interests to promote—soon came to dominate American politics, especially in the North, to a degree that Federalist gentry had never imagined possible.

In the 1780s the arch–Anti-Federalist William Findley had pointed the way. In a debate in the Pennsylvania assembly over the role of interest in public affairs, Findley set forth a rationale for modern democratic interest-group politics that has scarcely been bettered. Unlike his patrician opponents, who continued to hold out a vision of disinterested leadership, Findley argued that since everyone had interests to promote, self-made middling men like himself, who had no lineage, possessed no great wealth, and had never been to college, had as much right to political office as wealthy gentry who had gone to Harvard or Princeton. This was what American equality meant, he said. Furthermore, since everyone did have interests to promote, it was now quite legitimate for candidates for public office to campaign for election on behalf of the interests of their constituents. This was a radical departure from customary practice, for none of the Founders ever thought it was proper for a political leader to campaign for office. In this debate Findley anticipated all of the popular political developments of the next generation—the increased electioneering and competitive politics; the open promotion of interests in legislation, including the proliferation of chartered banks and other private corporations; the emergence of political parties; the extension of the actual and direct representation in government of particular groups, including ethnic and religious groups; and the eventual weakening, if not the repudiation, of the classical republican ideal that legislators were supposed to be disinterested umpires standing above the play of interests. This was democracy as Americans came to know it.

As the Federalists of the 1790s eventually discovered to their dismay, this democracy was no longer a technical term of political science describing the people’s representation in the lower houses of representation. And it was no longer a simple form of government that could be skeptically challenged and contested as it had been since the ancient Greeks. Instead, it became the civic faith of the United States to which all Americans must unquestionably adhere. The emergence of this rambunctious middling democracy was the most significant consequence of the American Revolution.

Bibliographic Note

A reader ought to begin with R. R. Palmer’s monumental work
The Age of the Democratic Revolution: A Political History of Europe and America, 1760–1800
(2 vols., 1959, 1964), which places the American Revolution in a comparative Atlantic world perspective. Robert Middlekauff,
The Glorious Cause: The American Revolution, 1763–1789
(1982), is a good single-volume account of the Revolution that stresses the military conflict. There are a number of valuable collections of original essays on various aspects of the Revolution, including Stephen G. Kurtz and James H. Hutson, eds.,
Essays on the American Revolution
(1973); Alfred F. Young, ed.,
The American Revolution
(1976); Young, ed.,
Beyond the American Revolution
(1993); the five volumes from the Library of Congress Symposia on the American Revolution (1972–76); and the many volumes on various aspects of the Revolutionary era edited by Ronald Hoffman et al. for the United States Capitol Historical Society.

Among the many attempts to treat the coming of the Revolution from an imperial viewpoint, Lawrence H. Gipson,
The British Empire Before the American Revolution
(15 vols., 1936–70), is the most detailed. Gipson has summarized his massive work in
The Coming of the Revolution, 1763–1775
(1954). For a critical account of British policy, see Robert W. Tucker and David C. Hendrickson,
The Fall of the First British Empire
(1982). Jack P. Greene,
The Quest for Power: The Lower Houses of Assembly in the Southern Royal Colonies, 1689–1776
(1963), stresses the desire of the colonial legislatures for control of their societies. An ingenious but sound study that combines the views of a British and an American historian on the causes of the Revolution is Ian R. Christie and Benjamin W. Labaree,
Empire or Independence, 1760–1776
(1976). Theodore Draper,
A Struggle for Power: The American Revolution
(1996), plays down the importance of ideas in bringing on the Revolution.

Gordon S. Wood,
The Radicalism of the American Revolution
(1992), attempts to show that eighteenth-century monarchical society and culture were transformed by the Revolution. Jon Butler,
Becoming America: The Revolution Before 1776
(2000), argues that the fundamental changes in American society occurred before the Declaration of Independence. On the “consumer revolution,” see T. H. Breen, “ ‘Baubles of Britain’: The American and Consumer Revolutions of the Eighteenth Century,” in Cary Carson et al., eds.,
Of Consuming Interests: The Style of Life in the Eighteenth Century
(1994). Rhys Isaac,
The Transformation of Virginia, 1740–1790
(1982), uses anthropological techniques to illuminate the popular challenges to the Virginia aristocracy. Carl Bridenbaugh,
Cities in Revolt
(1955), attributes the Revolutionary impulse to the cities. Gary B. Nash,
The Urban Crucible: Social Change, Political Consciousness and the Origins of the American Revolution
(1979), stresses urban class conflict in bringing on the Revolution. Stimulating overviews of the mid-eighteenth-century Atlantic world in motion are Bernard Bailyn,
The Peopling of British North America: An Introduction
(1986), and Bailyn,
Voyagers to the West: A Passage in the Peopling of America on the Eve of the Revolution
(1986). The extent of westward migration is ably recounted in Jack M. Sosin,
Revolutionary Frontier, 1763–1783
(1967). Carl Bridenbaugh,
Mitre and Sceptre
(1962), describes the growth of Anglicanism and the effort to establish an American episcopacy in the decades leading up to the Revolution. J. C. D. Clark,
The Language of Liberty, 1660–1832
(1994), sees the Revolution as a civil war over religion.

The opening years of the reign of George III were the subject of some of the most exciting historical scholarship in the twentieth century—largely the work of Sir Lewis Namier and his students. Namier and his followers exhaustively demonstrated that George III was not seeking to destroy the British constitution, as nineteenth-century historians had argued, and that in 1760 party government with ministerial responsibility to Parliament lay very much in the future. Namier’s chief works include
The Structure of Politics at the Accession of George III
(2d ed., 1957) and
England in the Age of the American Revolution
(2d ed., 1961). For detailed studies of British politics in the Revolutionary era, see P. D. G. Thomas’s three volumes on the several phases of the imperial crisis. For additional works, see Paul Langford,
The First Rockingham Administration: 1765–1766
(1973); John Brooke,
The Chatham Administration, 1766–1768
(1956); Bernard Donoughue,
British Politics and the American Revolution: The Path to War, 1773–1775
(1964); and Eligia H. Gould,
The Persistence of Empire: British Political Culture in the Age of the American Revolution.
A good biography of George III is John Brooke,
King George III
(1972). For a study that reconciles the Whig and Namierite interpretations, see John Brewer,
Party Ideology and Popular Politics at the Accession of George III
(1976).

On the British military in America, see John Shy,
Toward Lexington: The Role of the British Army in the Coming of the American Revolution
(1965), and Ned R. Stout,
The Royal Navy in America, 1760–1776
(1973).

On American resistance, see especially Pauline Maier,
From Resistance to Revolution
(1972), which stresses the limited and controlled character of American opposition. On urban mobs, see Paul A. Gilje,
The Road to Mobocracy: Popular Disorder in New York City, 1763–1834
(1987).

On other irritants and incidents in the imperial relationship, see Joseph A. Ernst,
Money and Politics in America, 1755–1775
(1973); Carl Ubbelohde,
The Vice-Admiralty Courts and the American Revolution
(1960); M. H. Smith,
The Writs of Assistance Case
(1978); Hiller Zobel,
The Boston Massacre
(1970); Benjamin W. Labaree,
The Boston Tea Party
(1964); and David Ammerman,
In the Common Cause: American Response to the Coercive Acts of 1774
(1974).

Among the many local studies of American resistance are Carl Becker,
The History of Political Parties in the Province of New York, 1760–1776
(1909); Edward Countryman,
A People in Revolution: The American Revolution and Political Society in New York, 1760–1790
(1981); David S. Lovejoy,
Rhode Island Politics and the American Revolution, 1760–1776
(1958); Theodore Thayer,
Pennsylvania Politics and the Growth of Democracy, 1740–1776
(1954); Richard Ryerson,
“The Revolution Is Now Begun”: The Radical Committees of Philadelphia, 1765–1776
(1978); Patricia Bonomi,
A Factious People: Politics and Society in Colonial New York
(1971); Jere R. Daniel,
Experiment in Republicanism: New Hampshire Politics and the American Revolution, 1741–1794
(1970); Richard D. Brown,
Revolutionary Politics in Massachusetts
(1970); and Ronald Hoffman,
A Spirit of Dissension: Economics, Politics, and the Revolution in Maryland
(1973). For studies of some of the leading Revolutionaries and Founders, see John C. Miller,
Sam Adams
(1936); Richard R. Beeman,
Patrick Henry
(1974); Merrill Peterson,
Thomas Jefferson and the New Nation
(1970); Joseph Ellis,
American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson
(1997); Ellis,
Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation
(2001); Carl Van Doren,
Benjamin Franklin
(1938); Eric Foner,
Tom Paine and Revolutionary America
(1976); Richard Brookhiser,
Alexander Hamilton: American
(1999); C. Bradley Thompson,
John Adams and the Spirit of Liberty
(1998); David McCullough,
John Adams
(2001); Marcus Cunliffe,
George Washington: Man and Monument
(1958); James Thomas Flexner,
Washington: The Indispensable Man
(1974); and Garry Wills,
Cincinnatus: George Washington and the Enlightenment
(1984).

Modern interest in the ideas of the Revolution dates back to the 1920s and ’30s with the studies of constitutional law and natural rights philosophy by Carl Becker,
The Declaration of Independence
(1922), and Charles H. McIlwain,
The American Revolution: A Constitutional Interpretation
(1923), among others. While these books emphasized formal political theory, others explicitly treated the ideas as propaganda. See Philip Davidson,
Propaganda and the American Revolution, 1763–1783
(1941), and Arthur M. Schlesinger,
Prelude to Independence: The Newspaper War on Britain, 1764–1776
(1958).

In the 1950s serious attention was paid to the determinative influence of ideas in Clinton Rossiter,
Seedtime of the Republic
(1953), and especially in Edmund S. Morgan and Helen M. Morgan,
The Stamp Act Crisis
(1953), which focused on the issue of parliamentary sovereignty. Only in the 1960s, however, with Bernard Bailyn’s
Ideological Origins of the American Revolution
(1967) did historians perceive the Revolutionary ideas as ideology—that is, as a configuration of ideas giving meaning and force to events—and begin to recover the cultural distinctiveness of the late-eighteenth-century world. Bailyn’s book was based in part on the rediscovery of the radical Whig tradition by Caroline Robbins,
The Eighteenth-Century Commonwealthmen
(1959). J. R. Pole,
Political Representation in England and the Origin of the American Republic
(1966); Trevor H. Colbourn,
The Lamp of Experience: Whig History and the Beginnings of the American Revolution
(1965); and Isaac F. Kramnick,
Bolingbroke and His Circle
(1968), have further contributed to an understanding of the sources of the Revolutionary tradition. For detailed analyses of the Americans’ legal positions in the imperial debate see the many books of John Phillip Reid. Jack P. Greene,
Peripheries and Center
(1986) sets the constitutional issues of federalism in perspective.

The loyalist reaction is analyzed in William H. Nelson,
The American Tory
(1961); Robert M. Calhoon,
The Loyalists in Revolutionary America, 1760–1781
(1973); and Bernard Bailyn,
The Ordeal of Thomas Hutchinson
(1974). A vitriolic account by a loyalist of the causes of the Revolution is Peter Oliver,
Origin and Progress of the American Rebellion,
ed. Douglass Adair and John A. Schutz (1961).

On the military actions of the Revolutionary War, the best brief account is Willard M. Wallace,
Appeal to Arms
(1951). Don Higginbotham,
The War of American Independence
(1971), and John Shy,
A People Numerous and Armed: Reflections on the Military Struggle for American Independence
(1976), best appreciate the unconventional and often guerrilla character of the war. The fullest account of British strategy is Piers Mackesy,
The War for America, 1775–1783
(1964). On the British commanders in chief, see Ira Gruber,
The Howe Brothers and the American Revolution
(1972), and William Willcox,
Portrait of a General: Sir Henry Clinton in the War of Independence
(1964). Paul H. Smith,
Loyalists and Redcoats
(1964), describes British attempts to mobilize the loyalists. A particularly imaginative study is Charles Royster,
A Revolutionary People at War: The Continental Army and American Character, 1775–1783
(1979). On the Americans’ difficulties in the war, see two important works by Richard Buel, Jr.,
Dear Liberty: Connecticut’s Mobilization for the Revolutionary War
(1980) and
In Irons: Britain’s Naval Supremacy and the American Revolutionary Economy
(1998).