Whose American Revolution Was It?: Historians Interpret the Founding

Introduction

1 Introduction Gregory H. Nobles and Alfred F. Young Whose American Revolution Was It? speaks to the different ways Americans at the time of the Revolution might have answered this question and to the different ways historians in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries have interpreted the Revolution for our own time. On one level, the answer to the question in either era might seem quite obvious: Whose American Revolution was it? It was the Americans’, of course, a successful War for Independence from Great Britain. Americans made—and won —their revolution. But no sooner has one said the word “Americans” than other questions immediately come up: Which Americans? Who were the Americans who made the political Revolution of 1776? Who fought to win the War for Independence? And who within America benefited from the results of the Revolution? The meaning of the American Revolution as both a political and a popular movement has always been a measure of the ways the United States has progressed as a society, particularly in fulfilling its promise in the Declaration of Independence of liberty and equality. Asking “Whose American Revolution was it?” forces us to think about the Revolution in ways that do not offer simple answers but that make for a much more vital and engaging line of inquiry. The question remains contested, and the stakes are still high. Every generation has to come to terms with the Revolution in the context of its own time, looking back to the founding era as a historical touchstone that tells us where we have come from, how far we have come, and perhaps where we still ought to be going. The more we invoke the symbols of the Revolution today, or glorify its famous leaders, the more we need to know it well in its own time, embracing a broad view that encompasses all its inherent contradictions and sometimes unclear outcomes. 2 Gregory H. Nobles and Alfred F. Young Asking “Whose American Revolution was it?” makes some present-day Americans uncomfortable, however. It implies that the Revolution may not have been everybody’s Revolution, that there may have been an underside to it that could undermine, or certainly complicate, the standard narrative that puts the “Founding Fathers” at the head of an all-embracing, consensual movement. Yet that supposed “underside” has hardly been invisible to anyone who reflected on the Revolution. However uncertain average Americans may be about the specific events of the Revolutionary era, they still have a general sense of who was there and of the very significant differences among the people of the era. They know that slavery existed and that some of the most prominent political leaders of the Revolution, such as George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, were slave owners. They might not grasp the full extent of slavery, that in a population of 2.5 million there were five hundred thousand enslaved African Americans and that tens of thousands fought with the British and several thousand others on the side of the Americans. They also have a sense, perhaps from the iconic image of the statue of the “Minute Man” at Concord—one hand on the plough, the other holding his rifle—that at a time when most of the country was agricultural , most of the white soldiers on the patriot side, some two hundred thousand men, came from farm families and that their way of life was far different from that of the leaders who lived at Mount Vernon or Monticello . So too it is not hard to imagine that John Hancock, whose signature was first and largest on the Declaration of Independence—and who was also the wealthiest merchant in New England—lived a life in Boston that was very different from the craftsmen who built his ships and the sailors who manned them. They also can intuit that women, no matter what their class or race, were not accepted as full citizens after the Revolution and did not even get the vote until the twentieth century. Finally, it is common knowledge that that there were Native Americans within the colonies and new nation—actually no less than one hundred thousand Native Americans in the area east of the Mississippi River—who would be displaced and decimated by the expanding nation. Thus, even with a basic knowledge of such differences among Americans at the time, it should not be hard for Americans today to imagine that not everyone experienced the Revolution in the same way. It seems...