Transcript Lecture 4: Legacies, Character, Consequences, and Significance of the American Revolution

Lecture 4: Legacies, Character,
Consequences, and Significance of
the American Revolution
Teaching American History
Wenatchee, WA
Significance of the American
Revolution (overview)
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Continued for Eight Years. Longest American conflict prior to Vietnam. No one, incidentally, went
into the war believing that it would last so long. The British thought that they would be greeted as
liberators and that they would have significant loyalist support.
About 25,000 Americans were killed or 1% of the population. As a percentage of the total
population more Americans were killed in the American Revolution than in any other war but the
Civil War.
Battles were eventually fought across entire United States. Americans from different states
encountered each other for the first time. They often held intense regional prejudices. By no
means did the Revolution eradicate these loyalties, but it was essential to the formation of an
American Identity, a sense of national unity or continental consciousness that had not previously
existed. In Congress during the Revolution, a group of “nationalists” formed who saw the
difficulties that regional loyalties and the absence of a true central government – with the power to
raise revenue and regulate commerce – created for the troops and the war effort. These
nationalists later almost uniformly supported the Constitution of 1787. 1776 is thus inseparably
linked to 1787.
The American Revolution became part of the Battle for Global Supremacy between Britain and
France. The American Revolution was initially a civil war, then a war between two nations, but
once France entered on the side of the Americans, the American Revolution became an important
part of the battle between France and Great Britain for global supremacy that lasted some two
centuries.
Civilian Control of the Military
• Washington took orders from Congress
and obeyed their instructions. E.g. defend
New York and do not burn New York.
• Washington refused to use the threat of
military power to get benefits for himself
and his troops.
The Newburgh Conspiracy
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Story of the Newburgh conspiracy. After Yorktown, discontent grew among
the American troops who feared that they would not receive payments that
they had been promised from Congress for service in the war. Several of
Washington’s generals and commanders communicated with members of
Congress (Hamilton, Robert Morris, Horatio Gates, and Timothy Pickering)
about the possibility of threatening or even using force to secure these
payments. Several nationalistic Congressmen saw the military discontent
and the threat of mutiny as a means of gaining a stronger central
government with the power to raise taxes. When Washington heard of this
plan, he first sent correspondence to Hamilton warning him that the Army is
“a dangerous instrument to play with.” He also suggested that such a ploy
might create divisions in the military and undermine efforts to empower
Congress. He then assembled and addressed his officers, urging them to
see that rejecting the call to mutiny was an unusual opportunity for them to
display public virtue. Most famously, he shamed his troops with a bit of
theater in which he tried to read a dispatch from Congress and had to put
on his spectacles. He then announced, “Gentlemen, you must pardon me. I
have grown grey in your service and now find myself growing blind.”
Thoroughly shamed, his officers used the occasion to sign an affirmation of
their loyalty rather that to signal support for mutiny.
Washington’s Resignation
• When he assumed power Washington had said,
“I shall constantly bear in mind that as the sword
was the last resort for the preservation of our
liberties, so it ought to be the first to be laid
aside when those liberties are firmly established”
Now he followed through with that promise by
immediately relinquishing power. Quoted in
Garry Wills, Cincinnatus: George Washington
and the Enlightenment (Garden City, NY:
Doubleday & Co., 984), 226-227.
Washington’s Resignation
John Trumbull’s Resignation of
Washington
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“The greatest of Trubull's four paintings, however, is General George Washington
Resigning His commission to Congress as Commander in Chief of the Army at
Annapolis, Maryland, December 23rd, 1783. Painted in 1824, the formal unities of the
congregation reach their height. Trumbull conjures a return to the civil obeisance
which marked the Declaration. The Founding Father defers to the United States, the
individual submits to the deliberative, and the executive power yields before
Congress. The impetus for Washington's noble decision is present in the visitor's
gallery, in his wife, Martha, and grandchildren, symbols of the family and private
sphere. The gallery sits atop an Ionic capitol, signifying the classical origins of
republicanism and the rational order on which democracy rests. Washington's
willingness to resign, to give up his power to others in order that he might return
home to a domestic life, speaks of his confidence in the capacity of the young nation
to continue its democratic experiment.”
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Washington’s Resignation
(Houdon’s Richmond Statute)
Jean-Antonine Houdon’s
Richmond Statute
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This is a remarkable sculpture of Washington. It is the only sculpture made posed for
by Washington. It may be the representation of Washington that is most like him.
"That is the man, himself," Lafayette said, "I can almost realize he is going to move.“
It is also remarkable in its depiction of his resignation, of the soldier becoming citizen.
Garry Wills calls this statute Washington’s “metamorphosis to citizen” with
Washington caught in “midtransformation.” Washington is still clad in his military
uniform, but he hangs up his military sword (on the right) to take up a walking staff as
a private citizen. The ploughshare and the Roman symbol of the fasces are to
Washington’s right. We think of fascism through the lens of Nazi Germany and fascist
Italy. But before WWII, the fasces was the symbol of the revived Roman republic. It
is, Wills observes, all over Washington in early monuments, sculptures, and
paintings. In Houdon’s sculpture. The sword is draped across the fasces, “putting it,”
Wills notes, “at the disposal of the republic as he returns to the plow.” “The sword is
for service, and must wait upon the call.”
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For these quotes and Wills’ analysis see Garry Wills, Cincinnatus: George
Washington and the Enlightenment (Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Co., 984), 225230.
Inspired the
French
Revolution
Influence of Americans and Their
Revolutionary Documents in the
French Revolution
• American Revolutionaries and American
documents are influential in the French
Revolution
• Jefferson and Thomas Paine
• Virginia Declaration of Rights and the
Declaration of Independence
American Revolution as an Indirect
Cause of the French Revolution
French support of the American Revolution
contributed to the declining economic
situation in France which, in turn,
undermined the Monarchy.
The American Revolution and the
Development of Democracy
• The American Revolution released an
egalitarian impulse in American history
and established the proposition that “all
men are created equal” as our core
political truth. But was the American
Revolution truly radical?
Character of the American Revolution
A “Conservative” Revolution?
• The American Revolution is often considered “conservative” in
comparison with the French Revolution.
• Was not fought to create new liberties but rather to preserve old
ones.
• The American Revolution is often characterized as an intellectual
event, in that it was spurred and justified on the basis of ideas, not
class conflict or gross inequalities in the distribution of wealth.
• The leaders of the American Revolution were uniquely sober men,
not revolutionaries in the classic sense. They were immune to the
“enthusiasms” and utopian visions of revolutionaries such as Lenin,
Robespierre, or Mao Zedong.
• The American Revolution did not lead to chaos, a “reign of terror,” or
the imposition of a dictator (a Bonaparte). The American
Revolutionaries did not devour their own. They also did not
redistribute property and, arguably, never abandoned the rule of law/
But was it Conservative in Its
Effects?
• Many historians argue, however, that a
profound social revolution was both cause
and consequence of the American
Revolution.
Consequences of the
American Revolution (continued)
• The Revolution branded slavery as at least a
suspect institution. If “all men were created
equal,” then how was slavery justified?
• It is estimated that 100,000 blacks escaped
during the American Revolution. More slaves
escaped during the American Revolution than in
any other time before the Civil War. Some went
to Canada, others to Britain, others to live with
the Indians or on Indian lands, others formed
“maroon communities” in Georgia and South
Carolina, and still others were shipped to Africa
by the British.
Consequences of the American Revolution
(continued): The First Great Emancipation
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The American Revolution culminated in the “First Great Emancipation.”
In 1776, there were approximately 400,000 to 500, 000 slaves in the United States or between
17% to 2)% of the population. One of every five persons was a slave. Although concentrated in
the South, northern states had numerous slaves. Fourteen percent of New York’s population was
enslaved; New Jersey and Rhode Island had slave populations of 8 and 6 percent respectively.
The North was also deeply implicated in the slave trade.
“By 1804, all of the states north of Virginia, Maryland, and Delaware had either ended slavery
outright or had passed legislation to gradually abolish the institution. “ (Finkelman, Defending
Slavery, 2) After 1804, slavery was a southern institution.
“Massachusetts implicitly ended slavery in its 1780 constitution, and in the Quock Walker Cases
(1781-1783), the state’s highest court affirmed this result; New Hamsphire adopted virtually
identical language in its constitution o f1783, and by 1790, there were no slaves in that state.
Vermont, which would become the fourteenth state, banned slavery in its constitution of 1777, and
this clause remained when Vermont joined the Union in 1791. In 1780, Pennsylvania took steps to
end slavery through the passage of a gradual emancipation act. Under this law, no new slaves
could be brought into the state, and the children of all existing slaves would be free at birth.
Connecticut and Rhode Island adopted similar legislation in 1784, the year after the Revolutionary
War ended, as did New York in 1790 and New Jersey in 1804.” While no slaves were
emancipated directly under these laws, the statutes put slavery on the road to extinction, and very
quickly it ceased to be an important social or economic institution in these states, even though in
some places a few individuals were held as slaves as late as the 1840s.” (Finkelman, Defending
Slavery, 16-17)
Consequences of the American Revolution
(Creation of American Identity and Nationhood)
• The American Revolution brought many
Americans together for the first time. It began
the process of creating a nation from
states. Many Americans fought in the Revolution
as it came through their state. Congressmen
supported the war effort when it came through
their state. The nationalists of the mid -1780s
became the advocates for strong centralized
authority in the 1780s. The Revolution thus
made possible the constitutional settlement of
1787.
But other Historians Point to what
the Revolution Did Not accomplish
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“Restricting women’s politicization was one of a series of conservative
choices that Americans made in the postwar years as they avoided the full
implications of their own Revolutionary radicalism. By these decisions
Americans may well have been spared the agony of the French cycle of
revolution and counterrevolution, which spilled more blood and produced a
political system more regressive than had the American war. Nevertheless,
the impact of these choices was to leave race equality to the mercies of a
bloody civil rights movement of our own time. And the impact of these
choices was also to leave in place the system by which marriage stood
between women and civil society. For most of the history of the United
States, deep into the twentieth century, the legal traditions of marriage
would be used to deny women citizens juries drawn from a full cross-section
of the community, deny them control over their own earnings, sometimes
deny them custody of their children, even deny them their rights as citizens
should they marry a foreign man.” [1]
[1] Kerber, “The Republican Mother and the Woman Citizen,” 126.
The American Revolution as a Touchstone of
American Identity and the origins of
American Exceptionalism
• Many Americans define the significance of
the United States in terms of the
Revolution that created it. Our sense of
national purpose, our sense of nationhood,
and our belief that we are an exceptional
nation (one blessed by God with
exceptional liberty and that our values and
form of government are superior to others)
come out of the American Revolution.
Discussion of American
Exceptionalism
• Thomas Paine – “the cause of America is
in a great measure the cause of all
mankind.”
• The American Revolution was an intensely
religious war at least in the sense that
many Americans came to be that
Providence had made them different for a
reason and had great plans for them.
The American Revolution as the Beginning
to the End of Colonialism
• Finally, the American Revolution is the first
battle in what would become the most
sustained source of conflict in the 19th and
20th centuries: battles by colonial
dependencies to gain independence.
Note, however, that the colonists were not
a “colonized” people who sought to thrust
off the rule of a colonizing nation.
Battles for Colonial
Independence (continued)
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“Picture the following situation. The greatest power in the world is confronted with an
insurgency thousands of miles away, which it expects to put down quickly and easily.
It sends a large army to deal with the insurgents, but counts on many loyal supporters
to flock to its standard. Recruiting soldiers, however, is difficult, and since the great
power cannot enlist enough of its own troops to deal with the situation, it has to hire
thousands of mercenaries. It occupies the remote land, sends increasing numbers of
soldiers, spends enormous amounts of money, and suffers more and more
casualties, all of which arouses a good deal of criticism at home. The hawkish cabinet
minister in charge of the war remains confident and vainly tries to micromanage the
war an ocean away. But finally the great power is unable to put an end to the
insurgency. It carries on for many long years until its political will is sapped, and it is
forced to abandon the distant country it invaded.
This could be the United States in Vietnam in the 1960s and 1970s, or it could be
what might happen with America's intervention in Iraq. But it is neither of these.
Instead, it is the story of Great Britain's attempt in the 1770s and 1780s to put down
the rebellion of its colonists in North America.”
Gordon Wood, Review of Iron Tears: America's Battle for Freedom, Britain's
Quagmire: 1775–1783 by Stanley Weintraub Free Press in The New York Review of
Books, 52, April 28, 2005.
Federal Union
• The Revolution separates 13 colonies
from their mother country. Once
independent, they must work out their
relationship with each other. The ultimate
sovereignty of the national government is
not decided until the Civil War and we
continue to argue about the proper
relationship of the national government to
the states.