Characteristics of the American Revolution
In some ways, the American Revolution was t
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In some ways, the American Revolution was the initial trigger of the "revolutionary" process which gained further momentum in the France of 1789, and which went on to sweep the world from that time up to the present day. Certainly the American revolutionary and democratizing experience had its impact on pre revolutionary Enlightment France, and revolutionists have continued to borrow from both the rhetoric of Thomas Jefferson and from the state creating work of the framers of the Constitution. In other respects, however, the American Revolution was the most exceptional of revolutions. It did not trigger the sort of social upheaval associated with revolutions since 1789. While sweeping social change did occur in the wake of the Revolution, shifting the political and social landscape swiftly from the world of the Colonial era, still very conservative, with its general (and often high) property qualifications for the franchise, towards the world of Jeffersonian republicanism and ultimately of Jacksonian democracy, this process of change itself was thoroughly evolutionary in nature (though swift paced), and did not constitute a further revolution. There was no American Thermidor period, to be followed by an American Terror, and least of all an American Napoleon. It is, perhaps, both symbolic and characteristic of the American revolution that it was in substantial a revolution of lawyers. It is not simply the superficial fact that about half the sig
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8Lawrence Friedman, History of American Law (xxxxxxx xxxxxxxxx), 35.
9Ibid.
was by modern standards minimal. The law with which the settlers were familiar was not the formal law of King's Bench and the Inns of Court, but the decisions handed down by a local Justice of the Peace in their home shire, or even those of the local squire. Such law was often quite different from the law of London; perhaps with different provisions, certainly much simpler and less formalized.
Local exigencies. The most obvious such exigency, though by no means the only one, was the presence near at hand of "wild," "untamed" Indians.10 members of a foreign society, and moreover a traditional, tribal society, to which neither the traditional provisions of the Common Law, nor the gradually developing procedures of international law could possibly be applied. In early Anglo Saxon times, the traditional law that later developed into the Common Law must have had some comparable provisions for dealing with the almost equally foreign and "untamed" Welch but any memory of such measures had vanished, probably long before the Norman Conquest. The colonists had to develop anew rules to deal with both peacable and hos
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Approximate Pages = 32 (250 words per page)
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In some ways, the American Revolution was t
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