# The American Revolution Reconsidered **URL:** **By** Murray Rothbard **Published:** July 1, 1974 --- “The coming Bicentennial is a useful time to reassess the historiography of the American Revolution and to point out the remarkable transformation over the last decade in the way in which historians have looked at this crucial and dramatic event.” The coming Bicentennial is a useful time to reassess the historiography of the American Revolution and to point out the remarkable transformation over the last decade in the way in which historians have looked at this crucial and dramatic event. History as a profession begins in the late nineteenth century, and the first historians—at and after the turn of this century—regarded the Revolution favorably as a stately constitutional debate over whether or not Great Britain, in its incursions on the rights of American colonists, had violated the rather vaguely defined “British constitution.” Often these “constitutionalist” historians (C. McIlwain, A. McLoughlin, R. Adams, C. Andrews, et al.) also pointed to the influence on the American revolutionaries of John Locke’s formulation of natural rights and the right of revolution. Soon, however, two contrasting schools of thought arose to challenge the constitutionalist view. One was the well-named “imperialist” school, begun by S. H. Beer and culminating in the multivolume work of L. H. Gipson. This view berated the American revolutionaries as hot-headed agitators and ingrates who tragically disrupted the glorious and harmonious British Empire. More important was the “progressive” school. Launched by Carl Becker in the early years of this century, it became dominant by the 1920s and 1930s and included A. Schlesinger, Sr., J. C. Miller, C. P. Nettels, P. Davidson, and many others. The progressives employed classstruggle analysis to debunk the American Revolution as a mere defense of the economic interests of the ruling class of colonial- American merchants and financiers. But if the Revolution was purely a war waged on behalf of rulingclass interests in the colonies, why did the bulk of Americans support the war? The progressives—in addition to down-playing the extent of popular support—answered with the theory of “propaganda” popular during the 1920s. The masses were seduced by demagogic rhetoric beamed at them by the Revolutionary leaders (e.g., Sam Adams and Patrick Henry), who did not believe their talk about liberty and natural rights: it was only a mask for their class economic interests. Curiously enough, the leftish progressives thereby ended up in a working alliance with the rightist imperialists, each camp denigrating the Revolution as unprincipled and unnecessary, whipped up by clever agitators for their own sinister ends. The progressives contributed a useful discussion of economic interests, which were at least as much on the minds of the colonists as abstract matters of constitutionality. But there are several grave problems with their approach. One is the fact that ideologists usually believe their own rhetoric; all evidence, in letters and private papers as well as public speeches and pamphlets, is that the Revolutionary leaders passionately believed in their own statements. Secondly, the progressives never understood the crucial difference between two types of social change: movements against government, and movements on behalf of stronger government over the populace. The latter, as Charles Beard and other progressives showed in their studies of later periods of American history, are usually at bottom a drive to foist off a ruling economic class on the bemused and propagandized public. So far so good. But movements against government are a far different matter altogether. For while defense of economic rights against government depredation is indeed involved, economic interests are too diffuse to be primary—in contrast to the concentration of economic interests involved in a drive for statism. Hence, in movements against government the primary motivation is always ideological, an ideology passionately held by the leaders and by the public. Nothing less can effect this sort of “revolution.” If, finally, the progressives had taken the Revolutionary ideology seriously, they would have seen that defense against economic invasions by the British—taxes, tariffs, restrictions on trade and production—was perfectly consistent with the libertarian and natural-rights ideology held and advanced by the Revolutionaries. It was all part of a consistent libertarian system that included the philosophic, the constitutional, and the economic. It is no accident that the progressive approach flourished in the interwar years that saw a pervasive spread of Marxian thinking among American intellectuals. Similarly, it was inevitable that the post-World War II replacement of Marxism by the “American celebration” among the intellectuals would also have a profound effect on historians of the American past. The result was the “consensus” school, which dominated the scene from the end of World War II until the 1960s. At its best, such as in Edmund and Helen Morgan’s definitive history, _The Stamp Act Crisis_ (1963), the new school restored a highly favorable view of the American Revolution, pointed out the broad multi-class support for the Revolution, and attacked the depredations of Great Britain on our political and economic rights. However, at the hands of its leaders—Clinton Rossiter and Daniel Boorstin—the consensus school provided the most distorted and fallacious interpretation of the American Revolution yet written— one that neatly fitted the ideological preconceptions of the “New Conservatism.” Almost grotesquely, the consensus school claimed that the American Revolution was unique among all other revolutions in not being really revolutionary—in being a mere conservative defense of the status quo against the post-1763 incursions of the British government. In this way, the New Conservatives were able to embrance the American Revolutionary heritage while still feeling able to denounce all other revolutions as being radical, ideological, and socially disruptive. Furthermore, as despisers of ideological principle as well as revolution, the adherents of the consensus school claimed that the motivations of the revolutionaries were neither ideological nor class-economic, but simply pragmatic and ad hoc responses to circumstance. The flaws of the consensus approach were legion. Once again, in another kind of unholy left-right alliance with the progressives, the consensus school denied the importance of libertarian or natural rights ideology; furthermore, it chose to overlook the transforming effect of the Revolution in carrying out such internal libertarian reform as the advance of religious freedom, separation of church and state, bills of rights, and the breakup of Tory-held feudal estates. In this stifling “consensus” atmosphere the only corrective note was provided in the first volume of the brilliant and monumental two-volume work of Robert R. Palmer, _The Age of the Democratic Revolution_ (1959). In a trans-Atlantic tapestry, Palmer showed the inspirational effect of the American Revolution on the later (and therefore not really more “radical”) French and other European revolutions. He also pointed out that proportionately more Tories were driven out of America than aristocrats out of France. But Palmer, as a "European" historian, was not read by the American historical guild. Out of this miasma came a historian who was able, single-handed, to transform our entire knowledge of the founding of the American Republic. This was Bernard Bailyn. In the course of editing a multivolume series of Revolutionary pamphlets, Bailyn discovered the vital importance of passionately-held ideology; furthermore, he found that this ideology was not merely the abstract syllogisms of John Locke, but a far more militant and applied creed which can only be called libertarianism, and which Bailyn came to call "the transforming libertarian radicalism" of the American Revolution. Breaking through the usual hermetic separation of historians into "American" and "European," Bailyn found the source and the transmission of this libertarianism in a dedicated group of English writers who had been resurrected a few years before in Caroline Robbins' great work _The Eighteenth Century Commonwealthman_ (1959). (Is it only a coincidence that Robbins is the sister of that distinguished economist and student of Mises, Lionel Robbins?) Robbins traced a forgotten group of writers, who carried forth the libertarian radicalism of such seventeenth century English republicans as Algernon Sidney, through John Locke and down through the "Real Whigs" of the eighteenth century. Bailyn found the most important shaper of this libertarian viewpoint to be "Cato's Letters," a series of powerful and hard-hitting newspaper articles of the early 1720s authored by journalists John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon. "Cato's Letters" were promptly and widely reprinted throughout the American colonies, and they exerted a powerful influence on the American mind down through the Revolution. Briefly, these militant "Lockeans" expounded on the great polar opposites of liberty and power; from liberty, and from the natural rights of the individual, flow and have always flowed the blessings of peace, prosperity, and human happiness. But power—government coercion—has always stood ready to aggress against liberty, to cripple and destroy it, and thereby to bring to the world conflict, war, misery, and impoverishment. While "Cato" and his American followers were not anarchists, they wanted government power to be kept as small and as tightly confined as possible; moreover, their spirit of deep hostility to government power was definitely anarchistic: Power, they held, must always be watched with eternal hostility and vigilance, for power is always conspiring to invade and destroy the liberty and the rights of the individual. As Englishmen, Trenchard and Gordon warned of the systematic power structure and "corruption" (sale of place and privilege) by which the king and his cronies were able to manage and control the British Parliament, and their American readers needed no prompting to apply these lessons. Bailyn's findings were first presented in his pathbreaking "General Introduction" to Volume I—the only volume so far published—of _Pamphlets of the American Revolution_ (1965). His fuller presentation was published in two relatively brief but notable books: _The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution_ (1967), an expansion of his "General Introduction," and _The Origins of American Politics_ (1967), which not only traced the "Cato's Letters" connection, but also offered a brilliant explanation of the structural reasons for the king being dominant in Great Britain (despite his supposed lack of power), while the royal governors were virtually powerless in the American colonies (despite their theoretically overriding power). Both of these works are not only magnificent testimony to what one courageous historian can do; they are also lucidly written. Under the inspiration of the Bailyn thesis, furthermore, Bobbs-Merrill's American Heritage series brought us an excellently edited anthology of "Cato's Letters," so we can now read and enjoy their hard-hitting and beautifully executed libertarian writings for ourselves (_The English Libertarian Heritage_ \[1965\], David L. Jacobson, editor). I was fortunate enough to attend the American Historical Association meeting at which Bernard Bailyn first presented his thesis to a packed and stunned audience. Symbolically enough, Bailyn was attacked from both the right and the left: by Clinton Rossiter, who reiterated his view that the American revolutionaries were ad hoc pragmatists uninterested in ideology; and by Merrill Jensen, leader of the present-day progressives, who insisted that economic class was determining and the ideology of the Revolutionaries mere "propaganda." It was a desperate coalition of left and right in an attempt to deny the importance of libertarian ideology in the American Revolution. The coalition, happily, was not destined to succeed, as the Bailyn interpretation, grounded as it was in sound historical research, quickly swept the field. While Bailyn has triumphantly demonstrated the overriding Revolutionary importance of libertarian ideology, we still do not have a comprehensive political history of the origins of the American Revolution that integrates the Bailyn findings. From _Resistance to Revolution_ (1972), by Bailyn's student Pauline Maier, deals largely with intellectual and ideological themes, and it is disappointing in that it conservatizes the Bailyn thesis to stress the "responsible" and allegedly "moderate" nature of the revolutionaries' goals. John C. Miller's _Origins of the American Revolution_ (1943) is a crude and historically unreliable version of the class struggle thesis, and Merrill Jensen's _The Founding of a Nation_ (1938) is a diluted, last gasp of the progressive position. By far the best political history of the origins of the conflict is Bernhard Knollberg's superbly researched _Origin of the American Revolution, 1759-1766_ (1960). Written completely apart from the Bailyn thesis, Knollenberg complements Bailyn by his prorevolutionary viewpoint and by his demonstration that British officials were doing the conspiring against American liberties which the revolutionaries, in their supposed "paranoia," had used their libertarian hostility to government to intuit and to impute to Great Britain. The political actions documented by Knollenberg thus form an impressive counterpoint to the libertarian ideology spelled out by Bailyn. While the Morgans' work, _The Stamp Act Crisis_, brings the story nicely down to 1766, there is still no adequate political history of the decade preceding the outbreak of the Revolution at Lexington and Concord in 1775. Recently, an important historical breakthrough has been opened on the hitherto stale military history of the Revolutionary War itself. The American war in Vietnam, and other guerrilla and counter-guerrilla struggles around the globe, have sharpened the insight of historians and alerted them to the military as well as the political implications of the fact that the American Revolution was the first war of "national liberation" against Western imperialism. Recent historians have therefore begun to reevaluate the much despised local militias and their guerrilla strategy and tactics. We now see, for example, that every military victory by the Americans was in battle fought along guerrilla and "people's war" lines, with the farmers battling for their own land and homes, cutting off the supply lines of the British, and stressing mobility, flexibility, the element of surprise, and sniping with long-range rifles. On the other hand, when the Americans fought along orthodox Prussian-style, State-army lines, marching out into the open field to meet the superior British firepower with fixed musket volleys, they were smashed. The best insight into this guerrilla vs. Prussian-State strategy is in the work of John Shy, especially in his resurrection of the great radical-libertarian English revolutionary and guerrilla theorist, Charles Lee, Washington's second-in-command in the early years of the war. (See in particular, "Charles Lee: The Soldier as Radical," _George Washington's Generals_ \[1964\], George A. Billias, editor.) Also important is the only (and fairly sympathetic) biography of the misunderstood Lee, _General Charles Lee, Traitor or Patriot?_ (1951), by John Alden. Another essay in the Billias book is an important reevaluation of the role of guerrilla warfare in the Revolution by Don Higginbotham, "Daniel Morgan: Guerrilla Fighter," on the greatest of guerrilla tacticians during the Revolution. Higginbotham's earlier biography, _Daniel Morgan, Revolutionary Rifleman_ (1961), should also be read, but it lacks the insights on guerrilla warfare of his Billias article. A recent symposium of historians of the American Revolution provides both a convenient introduction to the above literature and new insights of its own. This is _Essays on the American Revolution_ (1973), edited by S. Kurtz and J. Hutson. Symposia are always a mixed bag, but this collection provides excellent essays by Bailyn, summarizing his contribution; by Shy, "The Military Conflict Considered as a Revolutionary War," which brilliantly interprets British military strategy during the war as proceeding from a "police action" against Boston, to orthodox inter-State and interarmy conflicts over territory, to a counter-guerrilla strategy of "pacification" in the South; and by Jack Greene, who pushes the Knollenberg tracing of British depredations from 1759 back to the incursions of the Earl of Halifax beginning in 1748. On the internal or "domestic" history of the Revolutionary period, two older works remain by far the best in their fields: Merrill Jensen's _The Articles of Confederation_ (1940), on the forces at work in the history of the Articles during the Revolution; and Allan Nevins' _The American States During and After the Revolution_ (1924), a comprehensive, state-by-state political history of the period. And in a superb little pamphlet, _The Social Impact of the_ _Revolution_ (1974), the conservative historical sociologist Robert A. Nisbet insists on the truly revolutionary nature of the Revolution: its revolutionary and libertarian social consequences in dismantling feudal land tenure and established churches, and in leading to religious liberty and the seeds of the movement for the abolition of slavery. In the politico-economic realm, E. James Ferguson, _The Power of_ _the Purse_ (1961) is a truly distinguished, neo-Beardian work that pinpoints the sinister role of Robert Morris and his nationalist friends in driving toward a strong central government during the war, with the benefits of a heavy public debt and government contracts flowing in their direction. The later battle over the Constitution is anticipated by the Morris-Hamilton attempted takeover, and here—in the realm of the motivation of statist movements—the progressive "economic interpretation" begins to come into its own. Finally, on the diplomatic front, for those of us who have always disliked the shifty opportunism of the much-revered Benjamin Franklin—in contrast to the sturdy libertarian radicalism of his enemy and fellow diplomat Arthur Lee—there is now a delightful work which provides strong evidence that Franklin, while a diplomat in France, served as a British agent—"Number 72" in British intelligence archives: _Code Number 72: Ben Franklin—Patriot or_ _Spy?_ (1972), by Cecil B. Currey. _Reviewed by Murray N. Rothbard_