The Impulse to Revolution

In the American case, revolution guaranteed the new nation a significant degree of territorial sovereignty. The geographic isolation of North America from Europe fostered political isolation, which is partly why the taxation by the mother country was so onerously felt and so earnestly criticized in the Declaration of Independence. But isolation and independence had a double effect because they were successful. In the postwar period, United States economic structure could not be supported by the structure of confederation, and the country was hardly financially independent. As Becker points out, "French gold financed the war" (1915, p. 259). Thus one major challenge for the United States was to develop a self-sustaining economic system.

Political credibility was also at issue. That is because, after the revolution was over, there was a possibility that Loyalists would be targeted for violence by Patriots. There seems to have been relatively little of that. Writing in 1785, two years after the war was over, Jefferson (1943) says that English reports about anarchy in America are lies but are widely believe

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er "extracting money from the great mass of the people, especially farmers" (Miller, 1960, p. 72). "Should a bad government be instituted for us in future," wrote Jefferson, "it had been as well to have accepted at first the bad one offered to us from beyond the water without the risk and expense of contest" (Miller, 1960, p. 2). But the whole point was to change things. The compromise of this fundamental debate was reached in the US Constitution, which fundamentally limited government intervention and gave specific guarantees of individual freedom in the Bill of Rights that had been called for by the Declaration. Debates over the proper economic structure for the US continued after ratification, but civil war was avoided for some 70 years. And when it finally did come, it was fought over the single issue that the founding documents tolerated and that blotched the revolutionary vision of individual liberty: slavery. The Russian Revolution in many ways was more effective than its American counterpart because it mobilized and transformed a society that involved millions more people and that affected the infrastructure not only of Russia per se but of the global geopolitical system as well. As in the American case, the Russian Revo
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Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 1225
Approximate Pages = 5 (250 words per page)