Bernard Bailyn : Ideological Origins of the American Revolution

1. Bernard Bailyn: Ideological Origins of the American Revolution • “By 1763 the great landmarks of European life—the church and the idea of orthodoxy, the state and the idea of authority: much of the array of institutions and ideas that buttressed the society of the ancient regime—had faded in their exposure to the open, wilderness environment of America. But until the disturbances of the 1760’s these changes had not been seized upon as grounds for a reconsideration of society and politics….Then, after 1760—and especially in the decade after 1765—they were brought into open discussion as the colonists sought to apply advanced principles of society and politics to their own immediate problems. The original issue of the Anglo-American conflict was of course, the question of the extent of Parliament’s jurisdiction in the colonies….The debate involved eventually a wide range of social and political problems, and it ended by 1776 in what may be called the conceptualization of American life ….

2. Bernard Bailyn contd. • By [1776] Americans had come to think of themselves as in a special category, uniquely placed by history to capitalize on, to complete and fulfill, the promise of man’s existence. The changes that had overtaken their provincial societies, they saw, had been good: elements not of deviance and retrogression but of betterment and progress; not a lapse into primitivism, but an elevation to a higher plane of political and social life than had ever been reached before….[The intellectual] history of the years of crisis from 1763-1776 is the story of the clarification and consolidation under the pressure of events of a view of the world and of America’s place in it only partially seen before. Elements of this picture had long been present in the colonies—some dated from as far back as the settlements themselves—but they had existed in balance, as it were, with other, conflicting views. Expressed mainly on occasions of controversy, they had appeared most often as partisan arguments, without unique appeal, status, or claim to legitimacy. Then, in the intense political heat of the decade after 1763, these long popular, though hitherto inconclusive ideas about the world and America’s place in it were fused into a comprehensive view, unique in its moral and intellectual appeal. It is the development of this view to the point of overwhelming persuasiveness to the majority of American leaders and the meaning this view gave to the events of the time, and not simply an accumulation of grievances, that explains the origins of the American Revolution.”

3. Bernard Bailyn contd. • “For the primary goal of the American Revolution,…was not the overthrow or even the alteration of the existing social order but the preservation of political liberty threatened by the apparent corruption, and the establishment in principle of the existing conditions of liberty….What was essentially involved in the American Revolution was not the disruption of society, with all the fear, despair, and hatred that that entails, but the realization, the comprehension and fulfillment, of the inheritance of liberty and of what was taken to be America’s destiny in the context of world history….”

4. Quote from Charles Andrews “we sometimes hear that revolutions are not made but happen. In their immediate causes this is not true—for revolutions do not happen, they are made, in that they are the creatures of propaganda and manipulation. But in reality, revolutions are not made. They are the detonations of explosive materials, long accumulating and often long dormant. They are the resultants of a vast complex of economic, political, social, and legal forces, which taken collectively are the masters, not the servants, of statesmen and political agitators. They are never sudden in their origin, but look back to influences long in the making [i.e. ‘remoter causes,’ such as ‘the history, institutions, and mental past of the parties to the conflict.’].” Source: AHA Presidential Address at Ann Arbor Michigan (12/02/1925)

5. Charles Andrews contd. “A government, representative of a privileged social and political order that took existing conditions as a matter of course, setting nature at defiance and depending wholly on art, was bound sooner or later to come into conflict with a people, whose life in America was in closest touch with nature and characterized by growth and change and constant readjustments. In that country were groups of men, women, and children, the greater portion of whom were of English ancestry, numbering at first a few hundreds and eventually more than two millions, who were scattered over many miles of continent and island and were living under various forms of government. These people, more or less unconsciously, under the influence of new surroundings and imperative needs, were establishing a new order of society and laying the foundations of a new political system.”

6. Charles Andrews contd. “The story of how this was done—how that which was English slowly and imperceptibly merged into that which was American…. is the story of the gradual elimination of those elements, feudal and proprietary, that were foreign to the normal life of a frontier land, and of the gradual adjustment of the colonists to the restraints and restrictions that were imposed upon them by the commercial policy of the mother country. It is the story also of the growth of the colonial assemblies and of the education and experience that the colonists were receiving in the art of political self-government. It is above all—and no phase of colonial history is of greater significance—the story of the gradual transformation of these assemblies from the provincial councils that the home government intended them to be into miniature parliaments. At the end of a long struggle with the prerogative and other forms of outside interference, they emerged powerful legislative bodies, as self-conscious in their way as the House of Commons in England was becoming during the same eventful years.”