Antiques - American Revolution and today's antiques - Brief Article

Magazine Antiques, Feb, 2002

Our clock strikes when there is a change from hour to hour; but no hammer in the Horologe of Time peals through the universe, when there is a change from Era to Era.

Thomas Carlyle, "Thoughts on History," Fraser's Magazine, November 1830

The transformation of Britain's mainland colonies between 1680 and 1770 was the real American Revolution. The great social, economic, political, and cultural changes created the first modern society, just as the war in 1776 can rightly be called the first modern revolution.

Between 1680 and 1770 the people of America became the diverse society that has distinguished the country ever since. The economy grew at a rate unprecedented by the standards of both the new and old worlds, drawing on the productivity of European immigrants, enslaved Africans, and American Indians. It brought American goods to expanding international markets and a wide array of the world's goods to affluent American consumers.

Despite the rising importance of merchants and the skilled trades, the ubiquity of farming in America meant that most European immigrants shared one common characteristic: they were people of the land. Much colonial farming raised crops for household consumption, but commercial fanning for other markets became increasingly important during that century of change. By the 1760s farmers were quite commercially oriented, selling crops to factors, who then sold them to other, mainly European markets. These crops varied widely and included grains, tobacco, rice, indigo, and timber.

During the fruitful century in question American colonists participated in the consumer revolution that swept Britain, France, and the Netherlands, where material goods were produced at lower prices than ever before. What were treated as luxuries in the seventeenth century became more widely available and affordable. The American colonists imported great quantities of European goods while simultaneously patronizing colonial artisans, who challenged and often surpassed their British provincial counterparts in the objects they made. In general, the Americans who sought English furniture wanted fine but not necessarily ornate examples. Peter Manigault of Charleston, for example, ordering "plate and furniture" for his new house in 1771, specified "the plainer the better so that they are fashionable."

In 1818 the aging John Adams rhetorically asked, "But what do we mean by the American Revolution? Do we mean the American war?" Then he famously answered: "The Revolution was effected before the war commenced. The Revolution was in the minds and hearts of the people; a change in their religious sentiments of their duties and obligations."

By 1770 Americans had moved into another era not only in time but also in thought, in the way they perceived themselves and the world. They bad experienced a social and cultural transformation as great as any in American history. Yet the transformation was so complicate, so involuntary, and involved such a medley of responses to fast moving events, that colonial Americans scarcely knew how they got from one era to another.

Wendell Garrett