Bringing (the) Revolution Back In

In an 1818 letter to Hezekiah Niles, John Adams famously asked, "But what do we mean by the American Revolution? Do we mean the American war?" Obviously not. For the War only fixed what had already happened: a transformation "in the minds and hearts of the people; a change in their religious sentiments of their duties and obligations." Whatever it was that explains a peoples' affection for their rulers—the ineffable movements of the heart, self-interest, or some combination of the two—the Americans had experienced a revolution in that affection well before the first shots were fired at Lexington and Concord. The foundation of political allegiance had shifted, and now the Americans directed their religious-like adherence to authority not to the English monarch, but to the Continental Congress and those transmuted vestiges of colonial governance, "all the thirteen state congresses, etc."

By any modern standard, this is a sorry excuse for revolution, indeed. There is no underlying pursuit of social justice, no quest to end poverty or expand the franchise. There is no self-conscious sense that the forces of history are about to be transformed and that out of that transformation will come an entirely new world order. Freedom itself, the engine of modern revolution, is nowhwere to be seen. (As the Marquis de Condorcet put it, "the word 'revolutionary' can be applied only to revolutions whose aim is freedom."¹) For Adams, the American Revolution was like the Reformation: it involved not the end of faith but its redirection. But of course, by the time Adams was writing, he well knew that something other than simply a sentimental or emotional redirection had happened in the new United States. For the love formerly shown the monarch could not be mistaken for the sentiment most commonly directed toward its putative replacement, the various representatives of the people. There one found not allegiance and adoration but crude, base, and perhaps even unhinged anger. Whatever it was that effected the change in the peoples' political attachments had obviously so overwhelmed their emotional faculties—once so ideally suited to upholding a classic raison d'etat—as to render them nearly unrecognizable. What to do about this change was not clear to Adams or anybody else of his generation, unable as they were to fathom a politics where means and ends are indistinct. But its origins were entirely clear. As Adams explained in this same 1818 letter,

The people of America had been educated in an habitual affection for England, as their mother country; and while they thought her a kind and tender parent, (erroneously enough, however, for she never was such a mother,) no affection could be more sincere. But when they found her a cruel beldam, willing like Lady Macbeth, to "dash their brains out," it is no wonder if their filial affections ceased, and were changed into indignation and horror.

"This radical change in the principles, opinions, sentiments, and affections of the people," Adams continued, "was the real revolution." That revolution may not have been a rupture in favor of liberty or justice, but it was no less definitive and final. Sincerity and kind affection hang by the slightest of threads above the pit of fury and terror. And when the likes of Lady Macbeth step from her domestic world of maternal affection and emotional reassurance to the public world of power and politics, something truly gothic is bound to happen. Whatever emotional fulcrum it was that held the people together, that preserved those filial ties to king and country, that afforded nothing so simple as sanity, is gone forever; and in its place we have a nation of Macbeths, paranoid and frantic as they desperately navigate a world with no emotional or moral center.

Alas, it is one of the more remarkable facts of American historiography that it has taken so long for scholars to recognize in Adams's characterization true insight.² After...