Ideas Behind the American Revolution
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The five sources consulted for this study present both conflicting and complementary interpretations of the dominant ideas behind the American Revolution. These ideas include the political, the economic, the conspiratorial, and the social, and combinations thereof. This study will argue that the five writers are like five blind men investigating an elephant, each man focusing on the part before him, the part which he suspects is the most important, and the part which he describes at length and concludes is, indeed, the most important. Each combs through roughly the same available evidence and selects the material which supports his assumptions, ignoring, downplaying, or refuting the evidence which contradicts his assumptions and conclusions. To some degree, they are all correct: the American Revolution was a massive event which was produced by a conglomeration of impulses--the political, the economic, the social, and the conspiratorial. No revolution of scope and import would ever succeed unless it drew energy from all of the major sources of complaint--the political, the social, and the economic. The American Revolution was indeed a revolution of scope and import, and it was indeed inspired by the colonists' demands for economic and political freedom, while the leaders behind the revolution were generally of the upper social class in terms of the property they owned. Bernard Bailyn, in The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, argues that the Revolution was roote
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bout taxes, or a rough demand for independence, or a desire to make as much money as they could out of the shadow of British restrictions.
Accordingly, Bailyn writes,
Americans had come to think of themselves as in special category, uniquely placed by history to capitalize on, to complete and fulfill, the promise of man's existence [to reach] . . . a higher plane of political and social life than had ever been reached before. "The liberties of mankind and the glory of human nature is in their keeping," John Adams wrote.
. . . America was designed by Providence for the theatre on which man was to make his true figure, on which science, virtue, liberty, happiness, and glory were to exist in peace" (Bailyn 20).
These ideals, probably part genuine and part propaganda, were nevertheless supported by far more down-to-earth considerations. The Revolutionaries wanted economic and political freedom from the British so that they--the rich, white, male property-owners who were the fathers of the revolution--could create a country which would protect their own interests.
Morey Rothberg, in "John Franklin Jameson and the Creation of The American Revolution Considered as a Social Movement," focuses on the social, or sociohistorical asp
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Approximate Word count = 1806
Approximate Pages = 7 (250 words per page)
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