Chapter Five: The American Revolution

Where Historians Disagree - The American Revolution

The longstanding debate over the origins of the American Revolution has tended to reflect two broad schools of interpretation. One sees the Revolution largely as a political and intellectual event, the other as a social and economic phenomenon.

The Revolutionary generation itself portrayed the conflict as a struggle over ideals, and this interpretation prevailed through most of the nineteenth century. But in the early twentieth century, historians influenced by the reform currents of the progressive era began to identify social and economic forces that they believed had contributed to the rebellion. Carl Becker, for example, wrote in a 1909 study of New York that two questions had shaped the Revolution: "The first was the question of home rule; the second was the question…of who should rule at home." The colonists were not only fighting the British; they were also engaged in a kind of civil war, a contest between radicals and conservatives.

Other "progressive" historians elaborated on Becker's thesis. J. Franklin Jameson, writing in 1926, argued, "Many economic desires, many social aspirations, were set free by the political struggle, many aspects of society profoundly altered by the forces thus let loose." Arthur M. Schlesinger maintained in a 1917 book that colonial merchants, motivated by their own interest in escaping the restrictive policies of British mercantilism, aroused American resistance in the 1760s and 1770s.

Beginning in the 1950s, a new generation of scholars began to reemphasize the role of ideology and de-emphasize the role of economic interests. Robert E. Brown (in 1955) and Edmund S. Morgan (in 1956) both argued that most eighteenth-century Americans shared common political principles and that the social and economic conflicts the progressives had identified were not severe. The rhetoric of the Revolution, they suggested, was not propaganda but a real reflection of the ideas of the colonists. Bernard Bailyn, in The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (1967), demonstrated the complex roots of the ideas behind the Revolution and argued that this carefully constructed political stance was not a disguise for economic interests but a genuine ideology, rooted in deeply held convictions about rights and power. The Revolution, he exclaimed, "was above all an ideological, constitutional, political struggle and not primarily a controversy between social groups undertaken to force changes in the organization of the society or the economy."

By the late 1960s, a new generation of historians--many influenced by the New Left--were reviving economic interpretations of the Revolution by exploring the social and economic tensions that they claimed shaped the Revolutionary struggle. Historians cited the actions of mobs in colonial cities, the economic pressures on colonial merchants, the growing climate of economic distress in colonial cities, and other changes in the character of American culture and society as critical prerequisites for the growth of the Revolutionary movement. Gary Nash, attempting to reconcile the emphasis on economic interests with the role of ideology, argued that the two things were not incompatible. "Everyone has economic interests," he claimed, "and everyone . . . has an ideology." Exploring the relationship between the two, he argues, is critical to historians' ability to understand either. Also, as Linda Kerber and others have argued, the newer social interpretations have raised increasing interest in the experience of workers, slaves, women, Native Americans, and other groups previously considered marginal to public life as part of the explanation of the Revolutionary struggle.

Finally, Gordon Wood, in The Radicalism of the American Revolution (1992) revived an idea once popular and recently unfashionable: that the Revolution was a genuinely radical event that led to the breakdown of such longstanding characteristics of society as deference, patriarchy, and traditional gender relations. Class conflict may not have cause the Revolution, he argues, but the Revolution had a profound, even radical, effect on society nevertheless.

http://revolution.h-net.msu.edu/essays/contro.html - The American Revolution as a Constitutional Controversy

http://revolution.h-net.msu.edu/essays/hall.html - The American Revolution and the Religious Public Sphere

1			Read the two essays above ("Constitutional Controversy," "Religious Public Sphere") What are the writers' arguments concerning the origins of the American Revolution? Are they mutually exclusive? Which one do you find the more palatable?

http://odur.let.rug.nl/~usa/E/progr_histo/histoxx.htm - Progressive Historiography of the War of Independence

http://edweb.tusd.k12.az.us/uhs/APUSH/1st%20Sem/Articles%20Semester%201/Artiles%20Semester%201/Wood.htm - Gordon Wood, The War for Independence was a Social Revolution

http://edweb.tusd.k12.az.us/uhs/APUSH/1st%20Sem/Articles%20Semester%201/Artiles%20Semester%201/Zinn%20Rev.htm - Howard Zinn, The War for Independence was not a Social Revolution

2			Read the essays above. Do you believe the Revolution was in fact a revolution? What did the Progressive historians think? What claims do Gordon Wood and Howard Zinn use to buttress their theses? Which interpretation of the American Revolution do you find most plausible or scintillating?

http://www.wm.edu/oieahc/wmq/Oct00/steeleoct00.pdf - William & Mary Quarterly Review of The Crucible of War

http://h-net.msu.edu/cgi-bin/logbrowse.pl?trx=vx&list=h-law&month=0109&week=a&msg=CnX3ENwkv/jjFAOukKamww&user=&pw - Another review of The Crucible of War

3			One of the more striking recent interpretations of the origins of the American Revolution was made in Fred Anderson's The Crucible of War. After reading the two book reviews above, summarize Anderson's argument. Which of the historians listed above, if any, would find sympathy with Anderson's thesis?