Colliding with the Past

Early in the twentieth century, Carl Becker published a History of Political Parties in the Province of New York, 1760–1776 (1909), in which he formulated the thesis that the American Revolution had in actuality been two revolutions: one to obtain home rule, or independence, and the other to determine who should rule at home, or democracy. The second of these, as Becker depicted it, was essentially a struggle between haves and have-nots. A few years after Becker, Charles A. Beard wrote An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States (1913) and An Economic Interpretation of Jeffersonian Democracy (1915), in which, with some twists, he extended Becker’s thesis to comprehend the rest of the Revolutionary epoch. To Beard, the establishment of the Constitution was something of a counter-revolution, engineered by affluent but suffering holders of personal as opposed to real property, mainly in the form of depreciated certificates of the Revolutionary War debts. Its design was to reverse the radical democratic tendencies the Revolution had unleashed; it was opposed by small farmers and debtors. After a dozen years of Federalist rule, the latter groups, led by plantation slaveowners, succeeded in overthrowing the Hamiltonian capitalists and establishing democracy. The Becker-Beard interpretation was buttressed by a number of other works, most notably Arthur Schlesinger’s The Colonial Merchants and the American Revolution (1918), and was broadened by J. Franklin Jameson’s The American Revolution Considered as a Social Movement (1926), which postulated that the Revolution ushered in an age of democratization, especially by the confiscation of great semifeudal landholdings of Loyalists and their redistribution in small parcels to ordinary farmers.

The views of this “Progressive school” of American historians met with a mixed reception. Among politicians and pious patriots, they were roundly denounced as heretical attacks on sacred American icons. Among scholars, by contrast, acceptance of the new interpretation was rapid and almost total, and it found its way into virtually every college history text and classroom. That the reception was so favorable in academe bears out Beard’s and Becker’s pronouncement in their presidential addresses before the American Historical Association, namely that historians inevitably read into the past the concerns and values of the present, the present during their time being acutely sensitive to the emergence of a working-class consciousness in response to the massively disruptive rise of Big Business.

For quite some years the Progressive school went unchallenged. To be sure, a hardy soul rose now and again to chip away at one aspect or another of the thesis. Thus, for example, Harry Yoshpe, in The Disposition of Loyalist Estates in the Southern District of New York (1939), demolished much of Jameson’s argument by showing that the confiscated estates in the lower Hudson Valley were sold not to farmers but to large-scale speculators. More common, however, were studies such as E. Wilder Spaulding’s published dissertation, New York in the Critical Period, 1783–1789 (1939), which uncritically repeated Beard’s interpretation even when Spaulding’s own data contradicted it.

Then, in the 1940s and 1950s, came an onslaught of fresh investigations led by Charles A. Barker, Philip Crowl, Richard P. McCormick, William Pool, Robert Thomas, John Munroe, Robert E. and B. Kathryn Brown, and the present reviewer. When that was done, the Becker-Beard thesis appeared to have been demolished, its factual basis utterly destroyed.

But the destruction left an interpretive vacuum—one eminent historian complained to me, what are we going to teach our students about the founding now?—and historians abhor vacuums quite as ardently as nature does. Into it, from two distinctly different directions, rushed new students of the period. One was the ideological school, the most influential practitioners of which were Bernard Bailyn, J. G. A. Pocock, and Gordon Wood. These scholars rediscovered an ancient republican tradition that had found its way to colonial Americans through Machiavelli, seventeenth-century English commonwealthmen, and eighteenth-century British Oppositionists. That tradition was both conservative and radical, and...