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Library of Congress Cataloging‐in‐Publication Data
Names: Chet, Guy, author.
Title: The Colonists’ American Revolution : Preserving English Liberty, 1607–1783 / Guy Chet, University of North Texas, Denton.
Description: First edition. | Hoboken : Wiley, 2019. | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2019033177 (print) | LCCN 2019033178 (ebook) | ISBN 9781119591863 (paperback) | ISBN 9781119591931 (adobe pdf) | ISBN 9781119591986 (epub)
Subjects: LCSH: United States–Politics and government–To 1775–Juvenile literature. | Great Britain–Politics and government–1760–1789–Juvenile literature. | Revolutionaries–United States–History–18th century–Juvenile literature. | Revolutionaries–Great Britain–History–18th century–Juvenile literature. | United States–History–Revolution, 1775–1783–Causes–Juvenile literature.
Classification: LCC E210 .C49 2019 (print) | LCC E210 (ebook) | DDC 973.3–dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019033177LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019033178
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Cover Image: © Marcus Baker/Alamy Stock Photo
Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations […] evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.
American Declaration of Independence, 1776.
As an immigrant to the United States, I know firsthand that American values are simultaneously familiar and exotic to foreigners. On the one hand, America seems recognizable to outsiders because they are often well acquainted with American culture and institutions, and even American history. They might even see American culture, beliefs, and values as similar to their own. On the other hand, immigrants and foreign observers are often perplexed by various American peculiarities – from the natives' attachment to cars, firearms, and work, to their religiosity, their fear of governmental power, and their veneration of a Constitution written over two hundred years ago. This sense of bewilderment or frustration revolves most persistently around issues relating to liberty versus security. Whereas most Americans assume that the tension between the two is visible and visceral to all, many newcomers truly do not understand why Americans see tension between the two. My intent is to clarify to those – foreign and domestic – who are mystified by the origins and nature of Americans' conception of liberty.
Americans who revere the United States Constitution, admire the Founders, and share their ideological belief system easily identify the differences between the country they live in today and the United States of the late‐eighteenth century. Those who disapprove of the Revolution and the Constitution similarly recognize these differences. Specifically, Americans of all stripes are struck by how the country, its culture, and its Constitution have been fundamentally transformed since the late‐nineteenth century. The United States in the twenty‐first century is a managerial nation‐state. Moreover, it has been so for more than a century; longer than it had been the decentralized federal republic as which it was founded. What explain this shift are changes that occurred long ago in the circumstances, demography, economy, and culture of the country. American Constitutional law has reflected these changes in the culture, as a century of court rulings has gradually transformed Madison's Constitution from a tool to constrain the national government and insulate local governments from it, to a tool that empowers the national government to supervise, guide, correct, punish, and restrict local governments. Successive generations of Americans have thus been born into a managerial state, and into a culture that understands liberty and equality differently than did Americans of the founding era. This transformation is dismaying for some and comforting for others, but it should allow American readers, students, and scholars to approach eighteenth‐century America with detachment, as a distant and bygone historical civilization, albeit one that is still culturally relevant, meaningful, and instructive to them, such as ancient Rome or Biblical Judea.
What I propose in this book is that the American Revolution is best understood as a British event, one designed to safeguard traditional English liberties and preserve the existing status quo. I examine the Revolution through a British lens because I follow the lead of the colonists themselves, as the book's title indicates. On this method there is genuine disagreement among historians. Some historians believe their mission is to identify the hidden forces that moved people and events in the past; forces of which contemporaries were not aware, but were shaping their ideas and actions nonetheless. Other historians try instead to look at events through the eyes of people in the past, and to understand events as they themselves did; to record how contemporaries understood what they were doing, and why they were doing it. To my way of thinking, when we try to understand people and events in the past, we benefit more from channeling their understanding of their actions and beliefs, rather than identifying motivating forces that were hidden from them at the time, but which we can see (or think we see) from our own modern vantage point. These two competing approaches lead some historians to see the American Revolution as a story of change, and others (like myself) to see it as a story of continuity, in which the Revolutionists saw themselves as preserving the status quo, not challenging it.
An example of how one's historical method shapes one's understanding of the Revolution is the concept of class. A running theme in this book is “aristocratic resistance,” a concept that describes the efforts of local governments – noble families in Europe, and elite‐dominated colonial assemblies in America – to resist the concentration of power in central governments. In this framework, the American Revolution was an elite‐led movement to resist change and preserve the decentralized structure of the British Empire. This characterization is a loaded one for modern readers, given how thoroughly we have internalized Marxian (or Marxist) assumptions regarding class and class conflict. Karl Marx's influence on the study of history, sociology, and economics has led most Westerners to conceive of elites and “common people” as groups with different and opposing circumstances, interests, sentiments, and allegiances. This is why modern observers routinely label elite‐led conflicts like the American Revolution or the U.S. Civil War as “a rich man's war, but a poor man's fight.” Even if this adversarial analysis of historical societies is accurate, it is important to remember that the concepts of class and class conflict are modern; they were foreign, as a general rule, to the minds of premodern people. Certainly colonial Americans did not view their society in such adversarial terms. Elite families in early‐modern England and America enjoyed support, deference, allegiance, and trust from below. Common folk in local communities saw the elite status of their social superiors as legitimate, and these elite families for the most part reflected the interests, fears, concerns, and values of their localities. This is why historians who use the modern concept of class to analyze colonial America clarify to their readers that contemporaries were unaware of the class dynamics that were shaping their ideas and actions; these dynamics are visible to the scholar in hindsight, but were hidden from contemporaries. By contrast, studying colonial America with premodern sensibilities regarding class allows one to understand this elite‐led event as contemporaries themselves understood it – a communal resistance movement, rather than an elitist one.
This book reflects knowledge and sensibilities absorbed from other scholars over three decades of studying early‐American history. I am grateful to the historians who had taught me, to those for whom I had worked as a teaching assistant, and to the many others on whose work I relied when conducting research and constructing my courses, lesson plans, and lectures. The material presented here reflects the findings, analysis, and insights of numerous teachers and scholars whose work has shaped my understanding of American history. At this point, I can no longer cite the sources of my convictions regarding colonial culture and society; I have absorbed so much from so many for so long, that I cannot tell where their thoughts and beliefs end, and where mine begin. I have listed their publications in the bibliography as a form of attribution, with apologies for failing to acknowledge specifically the ideas, findings, and interpretations which they will likely identify as their own in these pages.1
I thank my editors at Wiley Blackwell – Jennifer Manias, Niranjana Vallavan, Aneetta Antony, and Ajith Kumar – for their wise counsel on bringing this book to press, Katherine Carr for her sharp copy‐editing, and Erica Charters, Tal Chet, Travis Bagley, Sophie Burton, Mike Campbell, Ralph Mitchell, David Smith, and Stuart Zenner for reading early drafts of the manuscript, in parts or in whole, and offering scholarly and editorial advice. I also thank my undergraduate students, who read the manuscript and provided insights and suggestions from a student's perspective; their critique was helpful in shaping the final product. Last, I am indebted to Chris Morris and Ben Wright for their sensible advice to drop academic jargon as much as possible (specifically with regard to Americanization and Anglicization).
I am thankful to Yale University for admitting me into its graduate program many years ago and thus making possible my life in America and career in academia; I owe a special debt of gratitude to Associate Dean Ingrid Walsoe Engel, who went beyond the call of duty there on my behalf. Mostly, I am grateful to and for this country, which has welcomed me and has done so much for me.
This book is accompanied by a companion website:
www.wiley.com/go/Chet/ColonistsAmericanRevolution
The website includes the following supplementary material for instructors:
The historian's understanding of past situations benefits greatly from the fact that he, unlike any contemporary observer, knows a good deal about the subsequent development. It is only in retrospect […] that germinal forces, unnoticed or underestimated at the time, can be seen in their true significance. However, hindsight also has its dangers. Reading history backwards we are easily misled into postulating specific “antecedents” and “early phases” of phenomena which seem to require a long period of gestation; and we are almost inclined to distrust our records if they fail to confirm our expectations.1
—Karl Helleiner
Perhaps the most prominent theme in scholarship on early‐American history is the formation of American identity – how (and therefore when) did American society become distinctively American, featuring uniquely American manners, sociology, sports, literature, religiosity, philosophical sensibilities, and politics. Most historians hold that life in colonial America gradually reshaped English settlers' habits, mores, values, and beliefs. What produced this cultural transformation, according to this view, were realities of life that were unique to America – slavery, racial diversity, ethnic diversity, the absence of a formal aristocracy, small governmental bureaucracies, and frontier conditions, such as cheap land, high wages, robust demographic growth, and class mobility. That is, the physical and social environment in America gradually reshaped the settlers' cultural traits, and the colonies thus drifted steadily away from their English cultural roots. Eventually, this process of Americanization produced the American Revolution.
Other scholars – mostly specialists on colonial America – see the settlers as conventional Englishmen. These historians are generally skeptical regarding Americanization and the alleged cultural divide between colonists and Britons. They challenge the narrative of the colonies' centrifugal trajectory away from England's sphere of influence by tracing forces of Anglicization in America. Indeed, these scholars present the Revolution as a product of the colonists' English culture, and argue that the formation of a uniquely American identity took place not in the colonial era, but mostly after independence, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. To them, the American Revolution took place because of a sudden change in British imperial policy, not gradual changes in the identity and culture of American settlers.
U.S. History textbooks invariably deploy the first narrative – the narrative of Americanization – to explain the formation of American identity and the coming of the Revolution. Because they tell the story of the United States of America up to the present day, they trace the story of Americans' collective identity backward, to identify its earliest formation in the colonial era. With the benefit of hindsight, this framework identifies for students colonial antecedents of the Revolution – Mayflower Compact, Puritanism, Bacon's Rebellion, frontier culture, the Dominion of New England, Navigation Acts, rise of the assemblies, Zenger trial, Great Awakening, Albany Plan, Braddock's Defeat, Revenue Acts, and so on. By looking back to the Revolution from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, these textbooks produce a storyline of English settlers becoming more Americanized by their physical and social environment; a story of growing distance and differentiation between settlers and mother country.2
What is obscured in this conventional account – and what is presented in this book – is the colonists' own understanding of the origins, causes, and ends of their Revolution.
Colonial history is an awkward field of study because its focal point is not the colonial period itself, but the end point of that period – the Revolution. The Revolution is the black hole toward which all colonial‐era developments gravitate. One of the first to formulate such a historical narrative for colonial America was Thomas Paine, the radical pamphleteer who worked tirelessly to win American hearts, minds, and military volunteers for the Revolution in its earliest stages. Paine's Common Sense (1776) told American readers the history of colonial America in order to explain to them why it was both warranted and natural for the colonies to become independent. Offering natural‐law justifications for rebellion and independence, as well as economic justifications, Paine conceptualized the relationship between Britain and its colonies as a mother–child relationship. Since the natural and desired end of such a relationship is maturity and independence, Paine contended that colonial status has a shelf life beyond which it becomes unnatural, abusive, and parasitic.
Following Paine's lead, historians (and U.S. History textbooks) have habitually presented the Revolution as a natural culmination of the colonial period. The idea conveyed in this narrative of colonial and Revolutionary history is that colonial rule was increasingly onerous and frustrating to settlers, and that this structural problem was resolved by independence. Students and readers thus absorb the understanding that by planting colonies across the ocean in 1607, the English government had set in motion the forces that inexorably led to independence nearly two centuries later; and that the impulse to separate was already there in embryonic form in 1607, consistently growing during the colonial era, as Americans pursued their own interests and formed their own identity. In the 1770s, that separatist impulse finally reached fruition when Americans' political self‐determination and economic self‐interest (a desire to lower tax and regulatory burdens, to print paper money, and to invigorate international trade and domestic manufacturing) brought this inherent tension between colonies and mother country to a point of rupture.
American separatism and rebellion seem like natural outcomes of colonialism in retrospect, but they surprised and perplexed contemporaries at the time. Even today, the fact that the stream of publications aiming to make sense of this rebellion increases from decade to decade suggests that the accepted narrative of the Revolution – the one first proposed by Thomas Paine over two centuries ago – fails to explain certain aspects of the Revolution. American settlers had perhaps the most comfortable living standards and lowest taxation rates in the Western world at the time; their trade was protected by the strongest navy in world history; their borders likewise were protected by the Empire; through London, they had access to the largest marketplace in the history of humanity; and the vastness of territory and limited reach of colonial governments combined to offer settlers an unprecedented degree of freedom of religious worship. For these British subjects to risk all these benefits by challenging the greatest military power in the world seemed to many – then and now – as an irrational, self‐defeating, and ill‐conceived undertaking.
Particularly mystifying are the leaders of this revolt – wealthy men from elite families, who risked not only their property, position, and lives, but also their families' status and possessions. These leaders of the rebellion understood the towering odds against them in confronting the naval, military, commercial, and financial might of the British Empire. They trembled at the prospect of war; they begged for both earthly and divine help to avert war, and then, after the war's outbreak, to avert defeat and death. Yet they felt compelled to press their resistance to Parliament and the king nevertheless. Could this expensive, demanding, and seemingly suicidal war really have been a tax revolt – one led by men who could easily afford to pay the new imperial taxes a hundred times over? Farther down the socioeconomic ladder, is it plausible that the 70 militiamen pointing their muskets at 700 heavily armed and well‐trained redcoats on the Lexington Green (April 19, 1775) were pursuing an economic self‐interest?
What explains these and other problems associated with the accepted interpretation of the Revolution is that the rebellion is widely understood as the final stage, or product, of a gradual change in American society and culture – a process by which colonists were transformed from Englishmen into Americans, from hierarchical monarchists to egalitarian republicans, and from dependent children (in Paine's formulation) to self‐sufficient adults. But this narration of early‐American history misrepresents colonial society and, therefore, also misrepresents the nature, direction, and purpose of the Revolution. American colonists were part of a culture that attempted to uphold the status quo and preserve established English customs, arrangements, and precedents. It was a culture governed by a conservative, backward‐looking impulse. What sparked the conflict with Britain, therefore, was not the gradual transformation of Englishmen in America, but the transformation of the imperial government in London. This change in London's bureaucratic culture and constitutional beliefs explains why the imperial government found itself increasingly at odds with its provincial traditionalists.
The American Revolution had less in common with the revolutions of the modern age (the French Revolution and the republican and nationalist revolutions that rocked Europe and Latin America the nineteenth century), and much more in common with premodern constitutional crises in seventeenth‐century England – the English Civil War (1642–1649) and the Glorious Revolution (1688). Rather than a tax revolt, a war of national liberation, or a revolt of the rising middle class, the upheavals of the 1760s and 1770s in British America were a revolt of an aristocracy – a conservative opposition movement, led by local elites, against constitutional reforms in the British Empire. This American resistance movement – like its seventeenth‐century English predecessors – aimed to preserve the status quo, not to change existing political and societal norms.
Moreover, this provincial opposition movement was not a product of the colonists' Americanization; it was, in fact, a recognizably English response to governmental centralization and consolidation. The English aristocracy, seated in Parliament, had resorted to armed rebellion twice in the previous century in response to the centralizing reforms of Charles I and James II, which threatened not only the liberties of Parliament, as a governing national institution, but also the liberties of local governments (that is, the liberties of the landed aristocracy that controlled the machinery of local governance). Likewise, the families that sat in and controlled colonial assemblies in America opposed the centralizing reforms of the mid‐eighteenth century, which similarly invaded the liberties and jurisdictions of the assemblies, and undercut the influence of these leading families in their local communities.
American Revolutionists were reacting to changes that the British had initiated in the imperial system in the 1750s and 1760s. This suggests that American separatism did not intensify gradually and constantly during the colonial era, but was instead sparked during the decade that immediately preceded the War of American Independence.
And rather than envisioning a novel and untried system of government, the Revolutionists simply attempted to resuscitate the old system of “salutary neglect” by which Britain had governed its empire before the French and Indian War.3 Thus, when the Revolutionists created a government for themselves (through the Articles of Confederation), they simply recreated the old salutary‐neglect governmental system under which they and their forebears had lived before the French and Indian War: a weak and receding central government, shepherding powerful and sovereign local governments.
The implications of the Americanization debate are profound – were the culture, ideas, mores, and institutions of Revolutionary America created in America (products of unique conditions in America) or were they English imports? Did America Americanize English settlers, or did the settlers Anglicize their new environment, transforming America (through conquest, agriculture, trade, and civil engineering) into a place that could sustain English patterns of social and civic organization? Did the colonies grow increasingly alien to visitors and immigrants from England in the later‐seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, or did America become more recognizably English as the frontier receded in the face of English settlement?4 Was the colonial era characterized by centrifugal forces that drew the colonies away from Britain (as Thomas Paine explained in Common Sense), or were the colonies instead increasingly drawn toward Britain's sphere of influence? Did the Revolution aim to enact change or to resist change – to establish new American customs and structures of government, or to preserve old English ones?
Looking back to the Revolution from the vantage point of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries lends credence to the Americanization thesis. By contrast, examining colonial America and the Revolution from the perspective of the colonists themselves supports opposite conclusions about the origins, nature, and purpose of the Revolution: the colonies were not propelled by forces of Americanization toward separation from the mother country over generations of colonial life. In fact, the colonial period saw effective Anglicization in America – the colonies were increasingly shaped by events and developments in England, and colonists were increasingly drawn toward the orbit of English politics, commerce, and culture, including political culture. Indeed, to the degree that American colonists during the Revolutionary era saw themselves as sharing an identity, values, and interests, they did so thanks to the transmission of English culture (goods, fashions, habits, ideas) to the American periphery.
The emergence of colonial separatism, therefore, was not a product of the gradual transformation of settlers from Englishmen into Americans. Rather, separatist sentiment materialized abruptly, in the decade preceding the Revolution, due to a constitutional crisis that impelled American assemblies toward a recognizably and self‐consciously English form of resistance. This formulation casts the American Revolution as conservative and reactionary, rather than reformist or progressive. That is, those who led the colonial resistance movement did not aim to introduce novel arrangements to American society and government, but to preserve an inherited status quo against reformist innovations originating in London.
The American Revolution has long been associated with Europe's “revolt of the bourgeoisie” – republican revolts in the century following the American Revolution, led by Europe's “rising middle classes” against aristocratic privilege and in pursuit of political influence to match their growing cultural influence, wealth, and numbers. While European revolutionaries did draw encouragement from Americans' successful republican revolt, the American Revolution had more in common with revolts of the aristocracy in Europe than with these progressive and modernizing revolutions. The age of royal absolutism (the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries) saw consistent and recurring aristocratic resistance, as kings tried to expand their powers, jurisdiction, and taxation schemes at the expense of their noble families. In response to such administrative centralization and concentration of power, aristocratic families tried to protect their inherited liberties from royal encroachment. At times they resisted through litigation, at times through political pressure, and at times through open military revolt. England saw two aristocratic revolts in the seventeenth century – the English Civil War (1642–1649) and the Glorious Revolution (1688). The American Revolution was a third such revolt – a political resistance movement led by American elites in defense of their ancient liberties and jurisdictions, which broke into open revolt in 1775.5
This eighteenth‐century understanding of the Revolution calls attention to two terms of trade – “liberty” and “revolution” – that modern readers must comprehend in their premodern usage if they are to understand eighteenth‐century Americans' words, ideas, and actions. Liberty is the more difficult of the two terms, since it is as evocative and powerful in political discourse today as it was in the eighteenth century, yet its content is meaningfully different. In modern English, “liberty” and “freedom” are synonyms – one of Latin origin, the other Germanic. Terms like “free play” (in the field of mechanics), “free will” (in philosophy and religion), “free speech” (in civics), “free fall,” and “sugar‐free” indicate that “free” means “unburdened” or “unencumbered.” For modern people, therefore, “freedom” and “liberty” in the political realm convey an absence of constraints by higher authority (such as parents, employers, masters, and rulers). When this modern meaning is applied to eighteenth‐century America, the Revolutionists' complaints of their violated liberties ring as hypocritical, given the fact that the leaders of the Revolution were the rulers of their communities and imposed restrictive burdens on women, slaves, servants, Indians, the poor, religious minorities, apprentices, and various other dependent groups and individuals in their midst. A familiarity with the eighteenth‐century meaning of “liberty,” however, allows modern readers to understand why most contemporaries (on both sides of the Atlantic) did not see such rhetoric as hypocritical or inconsistent.
In Medieval Latin, libertas (from liber, or “free”) conveyed the idea of an exclusive right to one's possessions – the right to tell others, including high government officials such as kings and magistrates, “this is mine; you cannot use it or take it.” To be free, then, meant enjoying exclusive use of one's own property, possessions, office, or privileges. Politically, it meant that a ruler could not simply take what belonged to those of his subjects who enjoyed such liberty (libertas). Indeed, medieval charters like the Magna Carta listed libertates (liberties) – particular privileges or reserved rights – granted to nobles, landed gentry, burghers, religious orders, commercial entities, and other individuals or associations. Thus, the liberties of the House of Commons (England's Parliament) were specific and legally defined privileges enjoyed by members of that legislature, such as immunity from arbitrary arrest, the right to free speech, and the like. Indeed, the eighteenth‐century term was usually used in the plural (“liberties”), clarifying that liberty was understood not broadly, as it is today, but as a specific privilege explicitly articulated in law or custom. Like property, a liberty belonged to someone as a possession, meaning that the possessor had the right to defend his exclusive use of it, as a property owner has the right to exclude others from his or her property.
Thus, when English rebels (in the seventeenth century) and American rebels (in the eighteenth century) complained about violated liberties, they were not demanding to be freed from their ruler, as the modern usage of “liberty” would suggest. Instead, they were complaining that their government (the king or Parliament) had violated the law by infringing on particular privileges that belonged to them by law, grant, or established custom. The American Revolution should be understood in this context because what alarmed colonial elites, seated as they were in colonial assemblies, was that Parliament was taking over legislative powers that belonged exclusively to colonial assemblies, in violation of ancient custom, British law, and the imperial constitution. This was the liberty (libertas) about which they complained. When the War of American Independence broke out, rebel rhetoric regarding republicanism and natural rights certainly encouraged Americans to question the legitimacy of slavery and other forms of dependence in their societies; indeed, Americans were the first to voluntarily abolish slavery in their midst by law.6 But Americans who viewed slavery negatively in the 1780s and 1790s saw it as a moral or religious wrong, not as a violation of legally established liberties.
The second term whose modern meaning leads modern readers to misunderstand colonial‐era Britons and Americans is “revolution.” By “revolution,” moderns mean a fundamental, abrupt, and usually violent change in political institutions and political and social values. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, however, “revolution” meant a 360° movement – a movement by which one revolves, or circles, arriving once again at the beginning point. This meaning persists still in the fields of mechanics and astronomy (“revolutions per minute,” “the revolution of the Earth around the Sun”). Thus, when contemporaries referred to the Glorious Revolution of 1688 and the American Revolution as revolutions, they understood these events to be restorations of an older status quo; a return to a point of time in the past; a reset. Whereas today revolutions represent the rejection of established custom and its replacement with something new, original, and untried, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, revolutions were understood to be conservative, designed to reestablish and preserve the old and venerated order. Indeed, the term “revolution” conferred legitimacy on the seemingly radical act of armed revolt against the government (in both 1688 and 1776) by calling attention to the fact that these movements were not radical, but traditionalist, anchored in law and ancient custom.7
Finally, just as the nature and purpose of the American Revolution can be obscured or skewed by misinterpreting eighteenth‐century terminology, so can they be by misidentifying the Revolution's chronological limits. Studies of the American Revolution habitually cover two political peaks – the War of American Independence, which launched the Revolution, and the Constitutional Convention (or the ratification of the Federal Constitution), which allegedly completed it. In this telling of the story of independence, the Revolutionary project led to and was reflected in the second American Constitution. The first constitution – the Articles of Confederation – therefore receives fleeting coverage, as a faulty wartime stopgap that was addressed and perfected soon after. This framing of 1787 as the endpoint of the Revolution attaches to the revolt a meaning and purpose that nineteenth‐ and twentieth‐century Americans identified in hindsight, but that the rebels themselves had not envisioned or endorsed. To them, the goals of the war were articulated in the 1781 Articles of Confederation and achieved in 1783, with military victory. For this reason, histories of the Revolution that wish to reflect the views and sensibilities of those who led and participated in the rebellion, ought to conclude their account in 1783, with the ratification of the first American constitution and the conclusion of the war.
The chronology of the Revolution, therefore, is itself contentious and loaded with interpretive judgment. Ending the Revolution with the ratification of a novel and modernist constitution (the second American constitution) casts the Revolution as reformist and progressive, given that the Federal Constitution created a new structure of governance over the former colonies, invented new political institutions, and reflected a new conception of American nationhood. By contrast, ending the Revolution with the ratification of the first constitution presents the Revolution as conservative and backward‐looking. The Articles of Confederation were a status quo constitution; a constitution that preserved the old salutary‐neglect structure of government in British America and perpetuated it in the newly formed United States of America.
Both researchers and general readers benefit from an awareness of how terminology and chronology create analytical biases, shaping assumptions and expectations about history. When one uses the term “revolution” without considering the difference between its premodern and modern meanings, one is more likely to conceive of the Revolution as radical and reformist. Similarly, by casually accepting either 1607 or 1763 as the origin point of the Revolution, one subconsciously and unquestioningly internalizes a specific (and contentious) interpretation of the British Empire, of colonial society, and of American political culture. The same, of course, holds for the end point of the Revolution – uncritically accepting either 1783 or 1787 as the point of conclusion limits one's ability to consider a competing interpretation of the Revolution's origins, meaning, and purpose. Given the centrality of the American Revolution and the Constitution to current debates regarding American society, culture, economics, law, and politics, such historical awareness is also important for reasons other than history.