Was the American Revolution Revolutionary?
One of the big questions about the American revolution was whether or not it was actually a revolution. The short answer is yes, it was a revolution, but what kind of revolution it was, and how much it changed for the people living in what became the United States, is a difficult one to answer, and historians have given very different answers.
Let's start with the big one: in his masterpiece, The Age of Revolution: Europe 1789-1848, Eric Hobsbawm says that the big revolution that kicked off the age was the French revolution. At least, that's the big political and social revolution; Hobsbawm argued that the industrial revolution, which happened in Britain, was the big economic revolution. By contrast, the American revolution was not particularly revolutionary. As Hobsbawm writes:
The French Revolution may not have been an isolated phenomenon, but it was far more fundamental than any of the other contemporary ones and its consequences were therefore far more profound...It was, alone of all the revolutions which preceded and followed it, a mass social revolution, and immeasurably more radical than any comparable upheaval. It is no accident that the American revolutionaries, and the British 'Jacobins' who migrated to France because of their political sympathies, found themselves moderates in France. Tom Paine was an extremist in Britain and America; but in Paris he was among the most moderate of the Girondins. The results of the American revolutions were, broadly speaking, countries carrying on much as before, only minus the political control of the British, Spaniards and Portuguese.
This view is pretty standard, I think, especially among radical historians. The American revolution was a political revolution; it removed the political control of the British. But it wasn't a social or economic revolution; besides the fact that there was now a President and a Speaker of the House, instead of a King and a Prime Minister, not much changed.
I don't think that's right, though. The first and obvious objection I have to Hobsbawm's claim is that the British didn't really exercise political control over the colonies for most of the 18th century. It was only after the Seven Years' War (1756-1763), in which the British defeated the French in the first world-wide conflict, that the British started trying to tax the American colonies more substantially, to the pay for the debt accumulated during the war and also to pay for the soldiers, forts, and navies who would protect the colonies in the future. The colonists (churlishly, in the view of the British) objected to paying for the war that had just been won on their behalf or, more sympathetically, were unwilling to let Britain impose taxes and assert authority after a century of non-rule.
Of course, this isn't making the case that the American revolution was truly revolutionary. Quite the opposite: here I'm suggesting that the American revolution confirmed the 18th century status quo: the colonies were effectively independent before the war.
The status quo, however, was fairly revolutionary already. The American colonies had already experienced a democratic or petty bourgeoisie revolution. They had experienced the fastest economic growth in history, and they had done it because any free family could find land to start a small farm or business on. In Europe, a dense population and feudal arrangements prevented people from simply working for themselves and growing wealth. North America, with its indigenous people devastated by disease and war, offered plenty of land for anyone who wanted to make a living. While the big bourgeoisie in the South pursued slave-based agriculture, and the big bourgeoisie in the North practiced banking and commerce, everyday colonists were constantly pushing westward and developing a small-property holder society. Roughly speaking, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Paine, and Thomas Jefferson were the big advocates for this smallholding class among the founding fathers; Thomas Jefferson famously called them "yeoman farmers," to suggest continuity with the same class in England.
But in the wake of the Seven Years' War, in 1763, King George III drew a line on the map of North America, known as the Proclamation Line, to the west of the current colonies, and forbade any further westward expansion. For the big bourgeoisie, this wouldn't be a problem: bankers and plantation owners could make more money if banking and plantation slavery expanded west, but they could make plenty of money without westward expansion. But if you were the child of a yeoman farmer or tradesperson, you weren't expecting to inherit the farm or the shop. You were expecting to found a new farm or shop in the new territories. The engine of growth for the petty bourgeoisie was westward expansion. Indian societies, after centuries of exposure to European diseases and European land practices, had stabilized and organized themselves politically and militarily to protect the land west of the Appalachians, and their new polities were going to be protected by the king.
If you focus on this trend, then it's clear that the American revolution was very, very revolutionary indeed. The small owners needed more land if their children were also going to be small owners, and for that reason they pretty much just ignored the Proclamation Line. For the colonies to continue on their course, the king and his line had to go. You probably remember "no taxation without representation," the Intolerable Acts, the Boston Tea Party, and all the rest of the ways that the British tried to reassert their political control over the colonists. I think most of these can be understood, again, as assaults on the petty bourgeoisie. But they are also ultimately less important than the Proclamation Line. Without the ability to move west and create new farms and towns out of land taken from the Indians, the smallholders would become proletarians, a surplus population dependent on wages from the wealthy for their livelihood.
Which brings us back to Hobsbawm. Hobsbawm misses the economic and social revolution of American democracy because Hobsbawm is a Marxist historian, and he's looking for a proletarian revolution, which the sans-culottes of the French revolution provided. Marx includes no provision for a society of small property holders in his theory of history; he thought such a society simply couldn't exist. So when Hobsbawm claims that the French revolution's "indirect influence is universal, for it provided the pattern for all subsequent revolutionary movements, its lessons (interpreted according to taste) being incorporated into modern socialism and communism," he's doing so as a Marxist who doesn't believe that there can be such a thing as a petty bourgeoisie revolution.
But using radical thinkers such as Jefferson or Proudhon, we can see this as a true revolution, one which took power away from the king, his ministers, and various commercial oligarchs and delivered it to be ordinary people. That is, I think, something to be celebrated, and certainly something to be noticed, contra Hobsbawm who claims this wasn't a "mass social revolution."
However, we shouldn't celebrate this revolution too much. Yes, it was a democratic revolution. But it was, like the revolution that created Athenian democracy, a democratic-imperialist revolution. King George's line was in part a genuine attempt to stop the genocide of the Indians by the settlers. The two presidents who embraced these democratic forces, Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson, were both slaveholding plantation owners and imperialists who supported westward expansion via military might (although they were also class-traitors who genuinely helped the smallholders). Jackson was an Indian killer; Jefferson advised Indians to become yeoman farmers and join "civilization." The property-owning democracy vision was racist, imperialist, and patriarchal. It was truly revolutionary for "the little guy," as long as we stipulate that the little guy is a white man who works for himself.
Which brings me to the constitution, and especially the fresh reading of the constitution in Mark Peterson's new book The Making and Breaking of the American Constitution. To have a democratic empire of small farmers, this new country needed an imperial army, one which would displace, neutralize, or exterminate the new Indian polities west of the Appalachian, then a legal and political system for making the land available to white settlers. According to Peterson, that's exactly what the new constitution provided. He writes:
By turning the nation's growing wealth and power to the conquest of trans-Appalachia, the United States was indeed creating something new under the sun, a novus ordo seclorum. By promising to use its power to transform the west - "Indian Country" - into private property for purchase, the United States created a welfare state for its free white citizens under the only terms in which welfare made sense in the 1780s. The government would make rich land easily available to white settlers and gradually incorporate them within the nation with the full privileges of citizenship. The new national government would work together with colonists moving into new territories and assist them in transforming the territories into self-governing states, full members of an expanding nation. This was a promise no nation had made before. (130)
Call it a "welfare state" or "social democracy" or "mutualist anarchism" or whatever else you'd like to call it. You just can't call it feudalism or oligarchy, because it genuinely empowered and enriched the smallholders.
There were a number of potential challenges to this constitutional arrangement. The two most obvious were the Southern oligarchs, who wanted to replace smallholder democracy with slaveholding aristocracy, and the Northern oligarchs, who wanted an industrial proletariat. Both of those groups hoped eventually to use the power of the federal government, which under this new constitutional arrangement could only be deployed against external enemies, to enhance their own power. The Civil War was fought over the question of whether the Southern oligarchs were going to be able to extend their oligarchical system into the Western territories, and the slaveholders were decisively defeated by the combination of the industrial power of the Northern oligarchs and the manpower of the democratic smallholders. Those groups united under the flag of the constitution and permanently ended the power of the slaveholding oligarchy.
Which brings us to Abraham Lincoln. Lincoln, although he's best remembered now as the architect of an empowered federal government directed against slavery, campaigned as the defender of the petty bourgeoisie.
As Douglas Hofstadter wrote in his famous book The American Political Tradition and the Men Who made it:
Lincoln may have become involved in a gross inconsistency over slavery and the Negro, but this was incidental to his main concern. Never much troubled about the Negro, he had always been most deeply interested in the fate of free republicanism and its bearing upon the welfare of the common white man with whom he identified himself. On this count there was an underlying coherence in the logic of his career.
Lincoln was born and raised on the western frontier and straightforwardly represented the interests of the petty bourgeoisie. His original opposition to slavery came at least in part because slave labor propped up the interests of the Southern big bourgeoisie, who were the class enemies of the people he represented. Like Jefferson, he was skeptical that black men could join that particularly American group, but he seems to have come around during the war, particularly because of the influence of Frederick Douglass. The creation of an enormous federal war machine was thus coherent with both Lincoln's goals and the constitutional tradition identified by Peterson: the use of the US army to make westward expansion safe for the white male petty bourgeoisie. It's possible that Lincoln would have created a new constitutional arrangement favorable to this democrat-imperialist system in his second term, but after his death the Republican party was taken over by business oligarchs, who conquered the rest of the continental United States as a corporate, not democratic, project.With Lincoln's death, the Paine-Jefferson vision, which linked imperialism with a social and economic system similar to the one found in Proudhon and William Morris, lost its last major defender. So ended the American revolution, 1763-1865.