American Rev. 1775-1783 PDF

## C ## American Revolution [1775-1783] ### Causes of American Revolution - Political - Social - Economic (taxation) - Religious ### Do you agree with the view that the American Revolution was the 'the most complete, unexpected and revolutionary of any in the history of the nation'? Discuss with...

## C ## American Revolution [1775-1783] ### Causes of American Revolution - Political - Social - Economic (taxation) - Religious ### Do you agree with the view that the American Revolution was the 'the most complete, unexpected and revolutionary of any in the history of the nation'? Discuss with reference to the nature of the Revolution. The American Revolution was a political revolution that separated England's North American colonies from Great Britain and led to the formation of the United States of America. Between the years 1763 and 1783, the American colonies declared their independence from Great Britain, waged a war of liberation, transformed colonies into states and created a new nation. However, historians have been largely divided over the nature of the American Revolution (1775-1783) and with that, even the term "revolution" is put into question. In one interpretive camp are those who assert that the Revolution was "the most radical and most far-reaching event in American history," while their opponents claim that it was "culturally, politically, socially, and economically a conservative movement." In the following paragraphs, we will attempt to examine the nature of the revolution by taking a look at its causes and consequences. In course of that, we will also elucidate upon various historiographical interpretations and perspectives on the same. However, before we go on to discuss the nature of the revolution and through that attempt to answer the question as stated, we must firstly take a brief look at the events preceding and during the revolution. ### Important events preceding and during the Revolution Throughout the 18th century, the maturing British North American colonies inevitably forged a distinct identity. They grew vastly in economic strength and cultural attainment; virtually all had long years of self-government behind them. However, in the aftermath of the French and Indian War, London saw a need for a new imperial design that would involve more centralized control, spread the costs of empire more equitably, and speak to the interests of both French Canadians and North American Indians. The colonies, on the other hand, long accustomed to a large measure of independence, expected more, not less, freedom. And, with the French menace eliminated, they felt far less need for a strong British presence. A scarcely comprehending Crown and Parliament on the other side of the Atlantic found itself contending with colonists trained in self-government and impatient with interference. The British government needed more money to support its growing empire and faced growing taxpayer discontent at home. The replacement of the Molasses Act of 1733, which placed a prohibitive duty, or tax, on the import of rum and molasses from non-English areas, with the Sugar Act of 1764 outlawed the importation of foreign rum. It also put a modest duty on molasses from all sources and levied taxes on wines, silks, coffee, and a number of other luxury items. Both the duty imposed by the Sugar Act and the measures to enforce it caused consternation among New England merchants. They contended that payment of even the small duty imposed would be ruinous to their businesses. Merchants, legislatures, and town meetings protested the law. Colonial lawyers protested "taxation without representation," a slogan that was to persuade many Americans they were being oppressed by the mother country. #### Taxes Imposed on America 1. Navigation Acts - Only British ships to be used 2. Hat Act of 1732 - Acid have would be wed by Americans. 3. Iron Acts - 1750 - Production, Export 4. Stamp Act - 1765 - Paper Production - Americans were required to pay taxes - Americans were required to only purchase British paper Later in 1764, Parliament enacted a Currency Act "to prevent paper bills of credit hereafter issued in any of His Majesty's colonies from being made legal tender." Since the colonies were a deficit trade area and were constantly short of hard currency, this measure added a serious burden to the colonial economy. Equally objectionable from the colonial viewpoint was the Quartering Act, passed in 1765, which required colonies to provide royal troops with provisions and barracks. A general tax measure sparked the greatest organized resistance. Known as the "Stamp Act," it required all newspapers, broadsides, pamphlets, licenses, leases, and other legal documents to bear revenue stamps. Bearing equally on people who did any kind of business, the Stamp Act aroused the hostility of the most powerful and articulate groups in the American population: journalists, lawyers, clergymen, merchants and businessmen, North and South, East and West. The issue thus drawn centred on the question of representation. The colonists believed they could not be represented in Parliament unless they actually elected members to the House of Commons. The American leaders argued that their only legal relations were with the Crown. They asserted that the English Parliament had no more right to pass laws for the colonies than any colonial legislature had the right to pass laws for England. The British Parliament rejected the colonial contentions, yielding only in 1766. The year 1767 brought another series of measures that stirred anew all the elements of discord. Charles Townshend, British Chancellor of the Exchequer, attempted a new fiscal program in the face of continued discontent over high taxes at home. The "Townshend Acts" were based on the premise that taxes imposed on goods imported by the colonies were legal while internal taxes (like the Stamp Act) were not. The agitation following enactment of the Townshend duties was less violent than that stirred by the Stamp Act, but it was nevertheless strong, particularly in the cities of the Eastern seaboard. On March 5, 1770, antagonism between citizens and British soldiers again flared into violence. Dubbed the "Boston Massacre," the incident was dramatically pictured as proof of British heartlessness and tyranny. Faced with such opposition, Parliament in 1770 opted for a strategic retreat and repealed all the Townshend duties except that on tea. The "Boston Tea Party" occurred on the night of December 16, 1773, when a band of men disguised as Mohawk Indians and led by Samuel Adams of Massachusetts boarded three British ships lying at anchor and dumped their tea cargo into Boston harbour also became a turning point. Doubting their countrymen's commitment to principle, they feared that if the tea were landed, colonists would actually purchase the tea and pay the tax. A crisis now confronted Britain. If the destruction of the tea went unpunished, Parliament would admit to the world that it had no control over the colonies. Thus, it responded with new laws that the colonists called the "Coercive" or "Intolerable Acts". From then on, the spirit of the revolution brewed stronger and became increasingly violent. The early stages of war, in 1775, can be best described as British military victories and American moral triumphs. In June 1775, the colonists failed to prevail at Bunker Hill, but inflicted heavy casualties on a vastly superior military force. A year later, in 1776, while the British occupied New York, Washington led his army to two surprise victories at Trenton and Princeton that uplifted the morale of the patriots. Regardless, by 1777 the British occupied Philadelphia, the seat of the Continental Congress, and sent that body into hiding. The British also controlled New York City and pretty much had their way in the waters along the Eastern Seaboard. I The Battle of Saratoga, in northern New York, served as a critical turning point. The British attempt to capture the Hudson River Valley ended with their surrender to General Horatio Gates in October Washington, having lost Philadelphia, led his troops to Valley Forge to spend the winter. In early 1778, the French agreed to recognize American independence and formed a permanent alliance with the new nation. In October 1781, the war virtually came to an end when General Cornwallis was surrounded and forced to surrender the British position at Yorktown, Virginia. Two years later, the Treaty of Paris made it official: America was independent. ### Nature of the American Revolution - a historiographical overview The American Revolution had a significance far beyond the North American continent. It attracted the attention of a political intelligentsia throughout the European continent. We can especially note this in the context of a worldwide bourgeoning of ideas of liberty and citizens' rights. But the world and especially, Europe had not yet moved to a stage wherein monarchies were completely overthrown. Even the English Revolution had left England with a Constitutional monarchy along with the Parliament. In the first century of the event, historians did not probe much into the revolutionary nature of the Revolution. Some historians even argue that the Revolution was solely a colonial rebellion aimed at achieving only the limited goal of independence from Britain. The general assumption was that the main theme of the American Revolution was the "quest for liberty". Here, we may take note of the nationalist school of historiography led by George Barcroft to whom the Revolution represented the phase of a master plan by God. To him, America synthesised the forces of liberty and progress vis-à-vis Britain's tyranny and reaction. The revolution is seen in terms of hastening the advance of mankind towards a millennium of "everlasting peace". Не went on to add that the Revolution was achieved within the colonies in "benign tranquillity" as all the colonies were united in their spirit and determination. Barcroft's interpretation of the American Revolution remained the most dominant in the nineteenth century as it embodied the need of the time. Many of the years between 1830s and 1870s, the nation was split by the bitter political battles of the Jacksonian era and the brutal military conflict of the Civil War. Barcroft's nationalistic representation of a united struggle for liberty, no north or south- satisfied the intense desire of the American people for a national history that would bind them together. However, by the end of the nineteenth century, a reaction against Barcroft's ultra-nationalist historiography came up. Between the 1890s and 1940s, the scholars that revised Barcroft's interpretations fell under two major schools: the Imperial School and the Progressives. The Imperialists saw the revolution in terms of the political and constitutional issues that surrounded it, while the Progressives held that the primary causes were social and economic in nature. The imperial school was led by Geroge L. Beer, Charles M. Andrews and Lawrence H. Gipson who believed that the American Revolution could not be viewed only from the narrow lens of national history. To them, the dispute between the mother country and the colonies lay in the constitutional issues between them as the colonies kept moving steadily in the direction of greater self-government and the mother country moving more in the direction of control over her empire. The Progressives took a different approach attempted to view the Revolution through the lenses of class conflict and economic interests. They also denied the notion that ideas had any real causal power and that the rhetoric of the revolutionaries was largely a cover for their own interests. In 1909, Carl Becker proffered his "dual revolution thesis," writing, "The first was the question of home rule; the second was the question... of who should rule at home." That is to say, Becker took the position that the American Revolution should be considered not as one revolution but two. The first was an external revolution-the colonial rebellion against Britain- caused by a clash of economic interests between the colonies and mother country. The second was an internal revolution-a conflict between America's social classes to determine whether the upper or lower classes would rule once the British departed. A few years later, Charles Beard published an extended essay-more ruminative than researched-in which he argued that individual economic and class interests shaped the decisions made by delegates to the Constitutional Convention and the subsequent ratification process. More than any other single work written in the Populist-Progressive era, Beard's book caused Progressive historians to view the period between the 1760s and the 1780s as one of continuous conflict between social classes in America over economic matters. J. Franklin Jameson was another historian who contributed greatly to the school as his basic premise was that the war was a social revolution. He argued that the most salient feature of the American Revolution had not been the war for independence from Great Britain; it was, rather, the struggle between aristocratic values and those of the common people who tended toward a levelling democracy. American revolutionaries sought to change their government, not their society, but in destroying monarchy and establishing republics, they in fact changed their society profoundly. Jameson wrote, "The stream of revolution, once started, could not be conned within narrow banks, but spread abroad upon the land? Jameson's book was among the first to bring social analysis to the fore of American history. Examining the effects the American Revolution had on business, intellectual and religious life, slavery, land ownership, and interactions between members of different social classes, Jameson showed the extent of the social reforms won at home during the war. By looking beyond the political and probing the social aspects of this seminal event, Jameson forced a re-examination of revolution as a social phenomenon and, as one reviewer put it, injected a "liberal spirit" into the study of American history. The interpretation reached its apex in the work of Merrill Jensen, a second-generation Progressive, who argued that the American Revolution was "an internal revolution carried on by the masses of the people against the local aristocracy." Progressives believed that the Revolution of 1776 was a radical, populist uprising and that the Constitutional Convention represented the elites' attempt at counterrevolution. Interesting to note, regarding the imperialists and the progressives was that while the two groups had varied interpretations of the causes and nature of the Revolution, they were often in agreement with the conclusion that the movement was indeed a revolutionary one. In the 1940s and 1950s, in reaction to the Progressives' focus on conflict (and the rise of the Cold War), historians began looking for commonalities or consensus in the past. Louis Hartz found a broad scale consensus among colonists in the political philosophy of John Locke. Other consensus historians, like Daniel Boorstin, stressed the conservative nature of the American Revolution. Meanwhile, a few historians took on Progressive arguments directly including Forrest McDonald, who refuted Beard's argument regarding economic interest and the Constitution, while Robert Brown tried to dispel the Progressives' class conflict dynamic by arguing that a "middle-class democracy" had already existed before the Revolution. In 1953, Edmund S. Morgan argued that colonists' arguments about constitutionality were not only genuine but that they were central to the Revolution. In a sense, Morgan's work (as well as that of Douglass Adair) signaled to early American historians that it was okay to take ideas seriously (hence the somewhat derisive label, "neo-Whig"). One of the most definitive works of this new ideological interpretation was Bernard Bailyn's The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (1967). Bailyn argued that colonists' ideology had its origins in the so-called "radical Whig" republican tradition in England, which instilled in them a strong fear of tyranny and conspiracies against their liberty. This was meant to explain why colonists reacted as they did to Britain's new imperial policies during the 1760s. To Bailyn, the Revolution represented, above all, an intellectual revolution-a radical change in the way most Americans looked upon themselves and their institutions. The true revolution, he suggested, took place inside men's minds more than out in the political or social arena. This "ideological" revolution constituted a complete transformation in the image that the colonists had of themselves. Before the Revolution the Americans saw their divergences from the norms of European society as shortcomings, they felt a sense of inferiority because they lacked a titled aristocracy, cosmopolitan culture, stratified society, and established church along national lines. After the Revolution, on the other hand, they came to look upon these differences as good, not bad; as virtues, not vices, and as advantages rather than defects. These differences, Americans; felt, would enable them to establish a republican government which would correspond with their republican society. Bailyn and others' focus on "republicanism" (which together came to be known as the "republican synthesis") was challenged by historians such as Joyce Appleby, who argued that the liberalism of John Locke was at least as, if not more, fundamental to the character of the Revolution. This "republicanism-liberalism" debate lasted for well over decade and, at times, became quite heated. Exploring themes of social change, the influence of class and society on revolution, and the ensuing generation gap in his book, The Radicalism of the American Revolution, Gordon Wood is another important figure in the historiography of the revolution. To him, the American Revolution is radical and revolutionary as it was the first anti-colonial modern revolution that replaced monarchy with a republic. In the eighteenth-century English-speaking world, monarchy created a clear social structure, linking everyone to the classes above and below them in measurements of freedom and servitude. This hereditary hierarchy assigned everyone a place from birth and reinforced it with the education of the time. People were taught that all people are not created equal; that poverty was virtuous for the common folk; and that it was important to be industrious and not think about their lot in life. However, in the American colonies, more distant from the British crown, people began thinking about these ways. They saw the aristocrats living on unearned income. They grew tired of looking upward, begging for crumbs from those above them. This growing sense of social equality sowed the seeds of republicanism in the nascent country. Increased migration in the much larger land led to social bonds breaking down, as farm families opened their ways to early industrialization. Society started to seem less ordained by God and more controlled by man. The rulers' sense of paternalism seemed more and more out of touch. As the people on the ground ignored the propaganda of the leaders, they were able to see that the dissatisfaction was actually the fault of the uncaring leadership. The concept of the country-colony relationship seemed less ordained by nature and more a choice that must be consented to by both sides. In 1763, when the British government taxed the colonists, it sent the anger over corruption in the British crown to a new level. The revolutionaries began their war against the established powers, seeking to destroy what they saw as the secret bonds of society-the use of family, blood, and personal influence to overthrow merit. They sought to substitute the right to self-determination and personal benevolence. They argued that people would find their best selves when freed of colonial trappings. In the late 1960s and 1970s, "social history," which focused on the lives of everyday persons, became predominant. At the same time, the Civil Rights movement and the feminist movement helped provide a spark for a new generation of historians to study the history of race and slavery in early America, as well as women's history. Around the same time, young historians-most notably Jesse Lemisch and Staughton Lynd-involved in New Left politics engaged in this "history from the bottom up" in an effort to recover the agency of labouring class colonists. Similarly, Mary Beth Norton and Linda Kerber both published books in 1980 about the impact of the Revolution on women.In the 1980s and 1990s, there was a resurgence of interest in class conflict and economic aspects of the Revolution. Neo-Progressive historians such as Gary Nash, Ed Countryman, and Woody Holton have combined the issues of the Progressive interpretation with the social history's concern for non-elites. Nash is especially interesting in that he emphasises on popular behaviour and "ordinary people in bold opposition to their superiors." It is obvious that for him, economic reasons play the most important role. On the other hand, Rhys Issac analysed the different ideologies at work before and during the Revolution, in terms of the nature of authority customarily exercised by the educated elite from the leadership was drawn, and in terms of the interaction of the leaders" "higher" literary culture with the more generally diffused forms of popular culture. Here, the Methodists and Baptists of Virginia were especially examined as examples. While neo-Progressives continue to write important works, in the last twenty years there has been no dominant school or interpretation that has defined the study of the Revolution. Rather, there are many sub-fields such as imperial history, Native American history, history of the West, and religion, which are producing exciting works that are broadening our understanding of the Revolution and early America, in general. ### How revolutionary was the revolution? What is clear when one looks at the American Revolution is that it was unlike the ones that occurred in France in 1789 or in Russia in 1917 or in China in 1949 as it did not destroy the institutional foundations of the old order or transfers power from a ruling elite to new social groups. Nevertheless, the Revolution had momentous consequences. During the colonial era, the percentage of white men who voted or participated in politics was low. There were no organized political parties, and adult white men tended to defer to gentlemen. By the time the Revolution was over, ordinary people had become much more heavily involved in the political process. The revolution also profoundly altered social expectations. It led to demands that the vote be extended to a larger proportion of the population and that public offices be elected by the people. During and after the Revolution, smaller farmers, artisans, and laborers began increasingly to participate in state legislative elections, and men claiming to represent their interests began to win office and wield power. Leaders in the new state governments were less wealthy, more mobile, and less likely to be connected by marriage and kinship than those before the Revolution. For the first time, state assemblies erected galleries to allow the public to watch legislative debates. Above all, the Revolution popularized certain radical ideals--especially a commitment to liberty, equality, government of the people, and rule of law. However compromised in practice, these egalitarian ideals inspired a spirit of reform. Slavery, the subordination of women, and religious intolerance--all became problems in a way that they had never been before. The Revolution also set into motion larger changes in American life. It inspired Americans to try to reconstruct their society in line with republican principles. The Revolution inspired many Americans to question slavery and other forms of dependence, such as indentured servitude and apprenticeship. By the early 19th century, the northern states had either abolished slavery or adopted gradual emancipation plans. Meanwhile, white indentured servitude had virtually disappeared. The Revolution was accompanied by dramatic changes in the lives of women. Before the Revolution, many women were involved in campaigns to boycott British imports. During the conflict, many women made items for the war effort and ran farms and businesses in the absence of their husbands. After the Revolution, American women, for the first time, protested against male power and demanded greater respect inside and outside the home. Lucy Knox, the wife of General Knox, wrote her husband in 1777: "I hope you will not consider yourself as commander in chief of your own house--but be convinced...that there is such a thing as equal command." After the Revolution, the first feminist writers, such as Judith Sargent Murray, demanded equal rights for women. Yet despite this, it is also important to note as highlighted by Sylvia Frey that women started off as actors, only to become an audience as part of a new identity defined by men. Further, as noted by Francis Jennings, while the Americans sought to build a nation for themselves based on the principles of liberty and equality, they did so along with conquest, invasion and dispossession of Indian tribes and peoples. The romantic idea of a revolution of the people is thus tainted by its multiplicity of variously oppressed and exploited peoples. ### Conclusion Through a survey of the causes, events and interpretations of the American Revolution, it is clear to us that there is no clear answer as to whether it was indeed 'the most complete, unexpected and revolutionary of any in the history of the nation'. The multiplicity of perspectives goes to show the complexity of the revolution. With regard to its nature, it definitely embodied a revolutionary agenda. What may be noted is that the American Revolution set the stage for the creation of a powerful nation under the Constitution.