Antiques

Magazine Antiques, August, 2003 by Wendell Garrett

National spirit is the natural result of national existence; and although some of the present generation may feel colonial oppositions of opinion, that generation will die away, and give place to a race of Americans.

Gouverneur Morris to John Jay, January 10, 1784

In 1815 John Adams asked Thomas Jefferson: "Who shall write the history of the American revolution? Who can write it? Who will ever be able to write it?" Jefferson replied: "Nobody; except merely it's external facts. All it's councils, designs and discussions, having been conducted by Congress with closed doors, and no member, as far as I know, having even made notes of them, these, which are the life and soul of history must for ever be unknown."

Nonetheless, the American Revolution has attracted generations of historical interpretation. At the outset it was seen as a heroic moral struggle for liberty against British tyranny, with the participants either heroes or villains. Then, through much of the nineteenth century, the Revolution lost its personal character and became the ordained fulfillment of the American people's democratic destiny This view was largely the work of George Bancroft, who pictured the Revolution as a great democratic movement by a united people. When Abraham Lincoln, in the middle of the Civil War, tried to define the significance of the United States, he saw that the Revolution had convinced Americans that they were a special people with the destiny to lead the world toward liberty. The Revolution, in short, gave birth to the country's sense of nationhood.

Only with the twentieth century and the advent of professional historians did the Revolution become something more than a colonial rebellion or an intellectual event. As Carl Becker put it, the Revolution was not only about home rule but also about "who should rule at home." Arthur M. Schlesinger Sr., turning to the study of the colonial merchants, found that they sought the support of the lower orders to defeat British policies but not to gain independence. However, the lower orders turned against the merchant class and demanded political and social changes that were in fact, if not in name, democratic. The merchants, alarmed, banded together to create a government that would protect their economic interests, which was a potent factor that led to the writing of the Constitution. This emphasis on class conflict dominated history writing during the first half of the twentieth century. In the middle of that century, historians reasserted the constitutional and conservative nature of the Revolution. Bernard Bail yn has argued that ideas were of overwhelming importance in the Revolution and that the men involved were controlled by the "transforming radicalism" of ideas they only half understood.

The story of the Revolution and its aftermath is a dramatic one. In less than three decades thirteen British colonies along the East Coast, three thousand miles from the centers of Western civilization, evolved into a sprawling republic of nearly four million evangelical, money hungry citizens bent on expansion. Neither the causes nor the consequences of the War of Independence lend themselves to simple answers. Indeed the participants themselves understood its complexities. This is why men like Adams and Jefferson doubted that the history of the Revolution could ever be written. As Adams summed it up: "The principles of the American Revolution may be said to have been as various as the thirteen states that went through it, and in some sense almost as diversified as the individuals who acted in it. In some few principles, or perhaps in one simple principle, they all united."