The Radicalism of the American Revolution
The Radicalism of the American Revolution by Gordon S. Wood (Alva O. Way University Professor and Professor of History Emeritus at Brown University) won the Pulitzer Prize in History thirty-three years ago, an honor which came with a cash award of “Three thousand dollars ($3,000).” This mismatch between critical acclaim and practical under-appreciation seems emblematic of his published work, which started with 1969’s Bancroft-prize-and-$4,000-winning The Creation of the American Republic, 1776–1787.
According to a blurb on the cover of the paperback, “This book will set the agenda for discussion for some time to come.” That prediction may have turned out to be true in academia, but this was a trade book, not published by an academic press, and there are few signs of its influence on the popular culture today. Ken Burns’s recent six-part, approximately 12,000-hour documentary—despite featuring Wood, now in his nineties, as one of its on-camera interview subjects—seems hardly to have considered his ideas at all. (Maybe it did eventually; I gave up about 8,000 hours in.)
The density of the writing in The Radicalism of the American Revolution and the level of abstraction in its organization may be somewhat responsible for its muted impact. The book consists of three sections: “I. Monarchy” (with five chapters: Hierarchy; Patricians and Plebeians; Patriarchal Dependence; Patronage; and Political Authority), “II. Republicanism” (with seven chapters: The Republicanization of Monarchy; A Truncated Society; Loosening the Bands of Society; Enlightened Paternalism; Revolution; Enlightenment; and Benevolence), and “III. Democracy” (with seven chapters: Equality; Interests; The Assault on Aristocracy; Democratic Officeholding; A World Within Themselves; The Celebration of Commerce; and Middle-Class Order). A casual reader could be forgiven for struggling to follow the flow of the narrative.
Within this somewhat opaque framework, though, are spectacular insights into the context and consequences of the American Revolution—not the details of the military conflict, but the revolution in society and politics that developed before, during, and after the war. The modern world emerged from the Revolution, and its events were so transformative that their impact is hard to see clearly from the perspective of the present; just as Hamlet is full of cliches and early Beatles records are oldies, its very modernity masks its novelty. Wood is without peer in his ability to draw outlines around the norms and expectations of the people of the past that would otherwise be invisible today; without this careful framing, the Revolution could not make sense to us—as indeed it continues to be widely misunderstood two hundred and fifty years on.
Toward the end of the book, Wood sums up the challenge (p. 348):
[B]y modern standards, [Charles] Ingersoll’s [1810] judgment that America had become classless is absurd. We today see the distinctions of early-nineteenth-century society vividly, not only those between free and enslaved, white and black, male and female, but those between rich and poor, educated and barely literate. Yet if we are to understand the wonder, the astonishment, and judgments of observers like Ingersoll, we must see, as they did, this society of the early Republic in the context of what American society had once been and what societies elsewhere in the Western world still resembled. In that context America had experienced an unprecedented democratic revolution and had created a huge sprawling society that was more egalitarian, more middling, and more dominated by the interests of ordinary people than any that had ever existed before.
Even the Founders themselves, Wood tells us, did not foresee the consequences of their actions as the events were unfolding (p. 230): “By the early nineteenth century, America had already emerged as the most egalitarian, most materialistic, most individualistic—and most evangelical Christian—society in Western history. In many respects this new democratic society was the very opposite of the one the revolutionary leaders had envisaged.”
The Radicalism of the American Revolution explains how this paradox came about. I have organized what strike me as its key concepts into what I hope is a simpler structure: A) quick summaries of the Revolution’s economic and social context that led to the emerging democratization of American society; B) the important ideological background the revolutionaries had inherited—conspiratorial thinking, republicanism and gentility, and independence and dependence in society; and finally C) the political consequences of the Revolution: equality and democracy, the origins of interest-group politics, political parties, and populism, valorization of the "self-made man," the emergence of evangelical Christianity, and the democratization of public opinion. In the end, Wood’s analysis may help us to understand how the American Revolution led to the election of Donald Trump.
A. The Economic and Social Context of the American Revolution
1. Luxury and Consumerism
In the mid-1700s, the colonies experienced a “demographic explosion.” More people and more movement were coupled with equally dramatic economic changes. More imports, more exports, and higher prices created new markets, which prompted small farmers to grow surpluses and eventually allowed them to become consumers of “luxuries” or “genteel goods”: products like tea, tea sets, handkerchiefs made from silk, and mattresses made from feathers. Only poverty, it had long been believed, could motivate ordinary people to work; as it turned out, the opportunity to rise in social rank proved to be an even stronger incentive. Consumerism by ordinary people created the beginnings of a middle class and transformed a social hierarchy that was already flatter and less rigid than at home in England; the colonies had nothing like “a traditional European nobility and a sprawling mass of the destitute.”
2. A Democratic Revolution in Eighteenth-Century American Society
Americans of the 1760s and 1770s hardly seemed to be on the brink of revolution; they were not generally poor, discontented, or oppressed, and instead had become the most prosperous people in the world. This prosperity though, emerging as it did alongside a breakdown of longstanding hierarchical social relationships, led to increasing anxiety, nervousness, and jealousy in society. It was the unprecedented equality and prosperity of the colonies that created a revolutionary situation: a people newly risen from the poverty that had always characterized all but the aristocracy, and newly sensitive to any threat to the liberty and independence that had made possible the radical transformation in their social stations. This sensitivity was gradually focused to a single point by the imposition of British power in the colonies, which, apparently to everyone’s surprise, ultimately produced an imperial crisis and led to the breakup of the Empire.
B. The Ideological Context of the American Revolution
1. Conspiratorial Thinking in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World
The growing conflict with the Mother Country in the 1760s and 1770s required explanation and justification by the colonists; their history of hierarchical, monarchical society, with its chains of dependence, prepared them to see each new assertion of sovereignty by Britain as evidence of a conspiracy to take away their liberties and return them to servitude. Wood writes (pp. 60–61):
In this face-to-face society, particular individuals—specific gentlemen or great men—loomed large, and people naturally explained human events as caused by the motives and wills of those who seemed to be in charge, headed the chains of interest, and made decisions. No one as yet could conceive of the massive and impersonal social processes—industrialization, urbanization, modernization—that we invoke so blithely to describe large-scale social developments. Such complicated processes were simply not part of people’s consciousness.
In this culture the question asked of events was not “how did they happen?” but “who did them?” Specific identifiable individuals did things and were personally accountable for what happened. […] The political and social world still seemed small and intimate enough to hold particular men morally responsible for all that occurred within it. Which is why the colonists especially were quick to explain a concatenation of events as caused by a conspiracy.
Conspiratorial fears were widespread in the English-speaking world at this moment of transition from a highly personal pre-modern past to today’s highly impersonal modern societies. For the colonists, rebellion against the king finally emerged as the only sufficient political response to the grand tyrannical designs they saw—they were, they repeatedly said, defending not just their own rights, but the global cause of liberty for all humankind.
2. Republicanism and Gentility in the 1770s
The Founders were not only idealistic, but full-on utopian. The word “republic” comes from the Latin res publica, a “thing of the people,” and the Founders truly believed that the citizens of the new independent republics they were creating were capable of setting aside their own private interests for the benefit of the whole society (pp. 104–105):
The virtue that classical republicanism encouraged was public virtue. […] Public virtue was the sacrifice of private desires and interests for the public interest. It was devotion to the commonweal. All men of genius and leisure, all gentlemen, had an obligation to serve the state. […] Republicanism thus put an enormous burden on individuals. They were expected to suppress their private wants and interests and develop disinterestedness—the term the eighteenth century most often used as a synonym for civic virtue: it better conveyed the increasing threats from interests that virtue now faced. […] We today have lost most of this older meaning. […] Perhaps we cannot quite conceive of the characteristic that disinterestedness describes: we cannot quite imagine someone who is capable of rising above private profit and private advantage and being unselfish and unbiased where a personal interest might be present.
In rejecting the hierarchy and dependence inherent in monarchy and seeking to replace them with republican virtue, these men were attempting to transform a society based on “clusters of personal and familial influence” to one structured by “talent and the will of the people”—people referring not yet to all of society, but just to the gentlemen, a traditional social category that was in the process of changing under the influence of republicanism (pp. 194–197):
To be a gentleman now took on a moral as well as a social meaning, and in this sense gentility became republicanized. Pure monarchists might still define aristocracies exclusively by the pride of their families, the size of their estates, the lavishness of their ostentation, and the haughtiness of their bearing, but others increasingly downplayed or ridiculed these characteristics. The enlightened age emphasized new, man-made criteria of gentility—politeness, grace, taste, learning, and character. […] It would be difficult to exaggerate the importance of these new enlightened republican ideals of gentility for the American revolutionary leaders.
They were men of high ambitions yet of relatively modest origins, and this combination made achieved rather than ascribed standards of aristocracy very appealing to them. Family and kinship had nothing to offer them, and they not only directed their anger at all hereditary and monarchical values but also were determined to establish new measures of gentility. […] We shall never understand the unique character of the revolutionary leaders until we appreciate the seriousness with which they took these new republican ideas of what it was to be a gentleman. No generation in American history has ever been so self-conscious about the moral and social values necessary for public leadership.
3. Independence and Dependence in the 1770s
Gentlemen, in the ancient framework of republicanism, were independent in that they were free from the influence of others, and ownership of property was the traditional source of this independence. Everyone else in society was considered to be dependent on the wills of these more powerful figures; for that reason, they had historically been excluded from participating in politics through voting, for their wills were not their own and were susceptible to coercion. In the colonies, the list of such dependents was long, including “women, servants, apprentices, short-term tenants, minors, and sons over twenty-one still living at home with their parents” (p. 56). In his later book Power and Liberty, Wood explains the contemporary context for this apparently limited suffrage, which was in reality extremely progressive for its time (pp. 13–14):
In fact, in 1765 the British electorate made up only a tiny proportion of the nation; probably only one in six British adult males had the right to vote. Still, that was a larger electorate than any place on the continent, which was why Britain prided itself on its House of Commons. There was nothing like it anywhere in Europe.
The colonies had an even broader electorate for their provincial assemblies, their miniature parliaments: as many as two out of three adult white males could vote. Certainly, this was not democratic by modern standards, since slaves and women and property-less white males could not vote, but it was certainly the largest percentage of voters of any people in the world at that time.
The extension of the franchise was one of the great consequences of the American Revolution, but it was not achieved rapidly or completely. Even by 1825, suffrage did not extend to all white men in Rhode Island, Virginia, or Louisiana!
C. The Political Consequences of the American Revolution
1. Equality and Democracy
Wood argues that equality was “the most radical and most powerful ideological force let loose in the Revolution” (pp. 232–233):
Once invoked, the idea of equality could not be stopped, and it tore through American society and culture with awesome power. […] Within decades following the Declaration of Independence, the United States became the most egalitarian nation in the history of the world, and it remains so today, regardless of its great disparities of wealth.
As discussed in Republicanism and Gentility above, the Founders had attempted to replace the “artificial” aristocracies that existed within monarchical society with a new “natural” meritocratic aristocracy of virtuous republican gentlemen; to their surprise, the egalitarian democratic impulses that they had unleashed went on to undermine even that distinction (pp. 241–244):
The warning was now out against all displays of superiority, whether it was attending exclusive balls and tea parties or flaunting a college degree. […] Indeed, by the mid-1780s aristocrats of all sorts, natural as well as artificial, were becoming increasingly cautious about claiming any superiority at all. Equality became the rallying cry for those seeking to challenge every form of authority and superiority, including the rank of gentlemen. […] As early as the 1780s the principal antagonists in the society were no longer patriots vs. courtiers but had become democrats vs. aristocrats. The legislative halls and the press were filled with diatribes against aristocracy, and gentlemen whose fathers were ordinary farmers suddenly found their new claims to gentility—often only a degree from Harvard, Yale, or Princeton—had become objects of bitter denunciation. […] Others would soon discover that equality in America meant not just that a man was as good as his neighbor and possessed equal rights, but that he was “weighed by his purse, not by his mind, and according to the preponderance of that, he rises or sinks in the scale of individual opinion.” That was a kind of equality no revolutionary had anticipated.
In the eighteenth century, democracy was not yet the article of faith that it would soon become for Americans. It was still essentially a technical term of political theory—referring to government literally by the people, which was an impossibility for any large community. But from the beginning of the revolutionary movement, Americans sought to overcome this impossibility in every conceivable way; and in the process they became the first society in the modern world to bring ordinary people into the affairs of government—not just as voters but as actual rulers. This participation of common people in government became the essence of American democracy, and the Revolution made it so. Although premonitions of this democratic future appeared early in America’s colonial history, only with the imperial crisis in the 1760s and 1770s did a full-scale ideological defense of the participation in government by ordinary people actually emerge.
2. Representation and the Origins of Interest-Group Politics
For non-gentlemen to take part in the function of government itself violated a fundamental assumption of the classical republican worldview: that only independent leisured gentlemen were free from dependence and interests and thus capable of making disinterested judgments for the good of the whole society. This ancient justification too was soon challenged (p. 245):
In 1770 artisans in Philadelphia won four of the ten elected city offices. In the wake of their success, other particular interests—religious and ethnic groups—clamored for equal recognition through representation in government. By 1774 the Philadelphia Committee of Nineteen, the principal organization of the resistance movement, invited six persons from each religious association in the city to take part in its deliberations. When in June 1774 the Philadelphia radicals proposed to add seven mechanics and six Germans to the list of nominees to the committee that would succeed the Nineteen, a significant moment in the history of American politics occurred. This marked the beginning of what would eventually become the very staple and stuff of American politics—a consciously pluralistic, ethnic, interest-group politics.
This advancing egalitarianism prompted a backlash from the elites, because it undermined the foundation of republican society as it had always been understood (pp. 246–247):
However whiggish and revolutionary some gentlemen might be, they were not prepared to accept the participation in government of carpenters, butchers, and shoemakers. […] It was not just their lack of ability that disqualified artisans from important governmental office. It was their deep involvement, their occupations, in work, trade, and business—their very interestedness—that made such ignoble men unsuitable for high office.
They lacked the requisite liberal, disinterested, cosmopolitan outlook that presumably was possessed only by enlightened and educated persons—only by gentlemen. When artisans and other “interests” in the 1760s and 1770s defended their self-interestedness and claimed that they and their marketplace interests had a right to be personally involved in government, they were in effect demanding to be judges in their own cause; they were insisting that party or faction be made a legitimate participant in government. This was tantamount to saying that the object of government was the pursuit of private interests instead of the public good. Such ideas ran too strongly against the grain of enlightened republican thinking to be acceptable as yet. […] But such arguments did not go away.
In the 1780s, the end of the war led to an economic downturn in the thirteen independent republics, producing a new period of crisis. In violation of the utopian expectations of the Founders, state legislatures were not working for the shared common good of society, but instead were acting on behalf of private and local interests. Wood explains the response to such financial legislation by the gentry, who were struggling against the cultural power of democracy to maintain the traditional republican society they thought they had created (pp. 251–252):
We shall never understand why the inflation created by the printing of paper money aroused such extreme anxiety and such deep moral indignation […] until we appreciate better the nature of their proprietary wealth and the social identity and influence that stemmed from that wealth. […] [M]ost gentry who stood up for credit and the honest payment of debts did not see themselves as just another interest in a pluralistic society. They were defending the only social order they could conceive of. […] As far as they were concerned, all the paper money and debtor-relief legislation of the states were simply the consequence of men using government to promote their private interests at the expense of the public good. Thus the revolutionary gentry began to appreciate for the first time what democracy in America might mean—the prevalence of private interests in government.
It was these perceived excesses of democracy, counter to the virtues of republicanism, that precipitated the unplanned, unexpected, and unauthorized abandonment of the Articles of Confederation, leading to the construction and implementation of an entirely new national government in 1787—a desperate reassertion of gentlemanly control of government and politics by men who called themselves Federalists (pp. 254–256):
The new federal Constitution was designed to ensure that governmental leadership would be entrusted as much as possible to just those kinds of disinterested gentlemen who had neither occupations nor narrow mercantile interests to promote […]. Because the Constitution seemed to be perpetuating the classical tradition of virtuous patrician leadership in government, the Anti-Federalists felt compelled to challenge that tradition. […] That elite had its own particular interests to promote. However educated and elevated such gentry might be, they were no more free of the lures and interests of the marketplace than anyone else.
The consequences of such thinking were immense and indeed devastating for republican government. If gentlemen were involved in the marketplace and had interests just like everyone else, they were really no different from all those common people—artisans, shopkeepers, traders, and others—who had traditionally been denied a role in political leadership because of their overriding absorption in their private occupational interests. In short, the Anti-Federalists were saying that liberally educated gentlemen were no more capable than ordinary people of classical republican disinterestedness and virtue and that consequently there was no one in the society equipped to promote an exclusive public interest that was distinguishable from the private interests of people.
Following this defense of the integration of private interests into politics, with republicanism in apparent decline and an egalitarian democracy on the rise, the stage was set for increasingly contentious electioneering by men with political ambitions, which led to a transformation of the role of equality in representation, election, and voting (p. 259):
The grass-roots Anti-Federalists concluded that, given the variety of competing interests and the fact that all people had interests, the only way for a person to be fairly and accurately represented in government was to have someone like himself with his same interests speak for him; no one else could be trusted to do so. Ultimately, the logic of this conception of actual representation determined that no one could be represented in government unless he had the right to vote. The interests of a person were so particular, so personal, that only by exercising the ballot could he protect and promote his interests. Election in America became the sole criterion of representation. Insofar as American politics became localist and dominated by interest groups and calls for extending the suffrage, the Anti-Federalists prepared the way.
3. The Origins of Politicians and Political Parties
The debate over the ratification of the Constitution in the late 1780s and the disagreement over the direction of the country during Washington’s and Adams’s presidencies in the 1790s had led to the formation of groups calling themselves “Federalists” and “Republicans” (successors of the Anti-Federalists). Neither, however, was a political party in the modern sense; they both saw themselves as temporary associations while continuing to denounce the harmful influence of “party spirit” or factionalism. To the dismay of these men, a whole new politics was now developing (p. 298):
These changes prepared the way for the development of modern political parties, which in the end helped to legitimate the changes the Revolution had brought about and to make democracy acceptable to Americans. The Democratic-Republican parties that emerged at the end of the second decade of the nineteenth century [...] were the first modern parties in American history and perhaps in Western history. These parties were impersonal and permanent organizations of professional salaried politicians that were designed solely to recruit leaders, mobilize voters, win elections, and compete regularly and legitimately with other opposition parties. As such, they were unlike the earlier Federalist and Republican parties and indeed were unlike any party that had ever existed before.
Gentlemen in a republic had only “stood” for election; it would have been unseemly to “run” as a candidate and solicit votes. The validation of interest-group politics created opportunities for new politicians whose place in society came from holding office, rather than the other way around.
4. Labor and the Origins of Populism
As discussed above in the sections Republicanism and Gentility and Independence and Dependence, the classical signifier of being a gentleman had historically derived from leisure, which made possible the virtue of disinterestedness, which obligated public service. As noted in Equality and Democracy and Representation and the Origins of Interest-Group Politics, the democratic egalitarianism unleashed by the Revolution had gone on to cast doubt on the true extent of disinterestedness exhibited by these gentlemen, while at the same time denying the superiority of gentility itself.
Leisure, like other aristocratic distinctions, soon enough became viewed negatively by common people, while their labor was increasingly dignified. In the contemporary societal division between democrats and aristocrats, all who worked for a living saw themselves as politically united against their alleged betters (pp. 280–281):
As great as the distinction between rich capitalist employers and poor workers would eventually become, in the early decades of the Republic large-scale manufacturers [...] and small craftsmen [...] still shared common resentments of a genteel world that had humiliated them and held them in contempt from the beginning of time. Nor should it be surprising that [..] a mule trader would take up the political cause of artisans and manufacturers [... and identify] with their loathing of the Federalist aristocracy [...].
Despite all the apparent differences between wealthy mule merchants, small shoemakers, and big manufacturers, socially and psychologically they were still the same—which has caused no end of trouble for those modern historians looking to celebrate a heroic working class but despising businessmen. Now in the aftermath of the Revolution all these workers and businessmen saw that their day was coming and joined the Jeffersonian Republicans in a democratic attack on all those gentlemen “who do not labor.”
So prevalent did this kind of rhetoric against gentlemen of leisure become that now even southern slaveholding aristocrats felt compelled to identify themselves with hard work and productive labor. One of the most curious anomalies in American history was the way southern aristocrats led by Jefferson and Madison assumed leadership of a Republican party that in the North was composed mostly of unaristocratic sorts—common farmers, artisans, manufacturers, and hustling entrepreneurs. The southern planters were able to link themselves with these ordinary working people in the North by stressing their common involvement in productive labor in contrast to all those northern Federalist professionals, bankers, speculators, and moneyed men who never grew or made a single thing and lived off their proprietary wealth and other men’s labor.
The paradox of this situation was of course unsustainable, but it would not be resolved in the Revolutionary era. For now, the relentless advance of democracy continued to sweep away old social structures and further flatten the American hierarchy relative to Europe (p. 286):
All people became laborers and all activities, including public office-holding, were reduced to the making of a living—a severe leveling unprecedented in history that no other society in the modern world quite duplicated. No wonder, then, that an American, inquiring about a European visitor and being told he was a duke, could reply: “A Duke! I wonder what he does for a living?”
5. The Emergence of the “Self-Made Man”
The increasing values placed on economic activity and equality combined in an unexpected way to further the decline of traditional gentlemanly status, reduce the respect for “superiors” by their “inferiors,” and continue to upend the old dichotomy between leisure and labor (pp. 341–342):
Only in the context of this rejection of “knowledge,” “character,” and “extensive connections” as the criteria of social distinction can we appreciate the celebration of what came to be called the “self-made man.” This became such a familiar symbol for Americans that we have forgotten what a novel, indeed radical, notion it originally was. Of course, there had always been social mobility in Western society, sometimes and in some places more than others. Colonial America had experienced a good deal of it, and, as we have seen, many of the revolutionary leaders were the products of considerable social mobility, usually being the first in their families to go to college.
But this social mobility in the past generally had been a mobility of a peculiar sort, an often sponsored mobility in which the patronized individual had acquired the attributes of the social status to which he was raised while at the same time trying to forget and disguise the lowly sources from whence he had come. The genteel sons of artisans did not usually celebrate their origins. Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography was unusual for doing just that. But we must remember that it was not published in Franklin’s lifetime, and Franklin’s countrymen made little of his obscure origins while he was alive. Indeed, in 1790 at the time of Franklin’s death his principal eulogist passed over his youth as being too mean and embarrassing to dwell upon. In a traditional society, social mobility had not been something to be proud of, as indicated by the pejorative terms—“upstarts,” “arrivistes,” “parvenus”—used to disparage those participants unable to hide their rise.
Just as esteem for leisure had been replaced by esteem for labor, esteem for education was being replaced by esteem for trade in the new rising middle class (p. 342):
But already in America independent mobile men were boasting not only of their humble origins but also of their lack of polish and a gentleman’s education. They had made it, they said, on their own, without family influence, without patronage, and without going to Harvard or Princeton or indeed any college at all. When a South Carolina politician in 1784 was celebrated in the press for being a self-established man who “had no relations or friends, but what his money made for him,” a subtle but radical revolution in thinking had taken place. During the first decade of the nineteenth century the modern image of Benjamin Franklin as the “self-made man” was first created, helped by dozens of editions of his Autobiography and the propaganda of ambitious artisans and businessmen. […] For many it was sponsored mobility and the useless ornaments of a liberal arts education that were becoming embarrassing. […] For many Americans the ability to make money—not whom one knew, or who one’s father was, or where one went to college—now became the only proper democratic means for distinguishing one man from another.
When earned wealth became the criterion for judging social standing, the age-old separation between the mass of common people below and the few gentlemen who stood above them, which had begun to erode in the wake of the revolution, finally collapsed (pp. 343):
Thus our attempts to demonstrate the inequality of the society of the early Republic by measuring wealth alone misses the point of what happened. It is true that by the 1820s some were already trying to put poor vs. rich in place of democrats vs. aristocrats as the major antagonists in the society. Yet many could still feel equal to those of superior wealth as long as that wealth was seen as self-achieved and, more important, was not accompanied by any other pretensions to social superiority, such as those cultural attributes claimed by eighteenth-century gentlemen that money could not easily buy.
Indeed this leveling through money put enormous pressure on the traditional distinction between ordinary people and gentlemen, between those who labored and those who did not, between those who were in trade and those who were not. […] The distinction between gentlemen and commoners did not disappear, but it was buffeted and blurred and was eventually transformed. To visiting foreigners, it seemed that nearly every white adult male had become a gentleman.
6. The Emergence of Evangelical Christianity
As democracy had displaced the Founders’ position in political society, so it displaced their Enlightenment ideology in religious society. Religion was yet another arena in which the elites were out of step with the ongoing march of democracy, where they yet again found themselves “frightened and bewildered by this democratic revolution” (pp. 329–331):
At best, most of the revolutionary gentry only passively believed in organized Christianity and, at worst, privately scorned and ridiculed it. Jefferson hated orthodox clergymen, and he repeatedly denounced the “priestcraft” for having converted Christianity into “an engine for enslaving mankind, … into a mere contrivance to filch wealth and power to themselves.” […] Even puritanical John Adams thought that the argument for Christ’s divinity was an “awful blasphemy” in this new enlightened age. When Hamilton was asked why the members of the Philadelphia Convention had not recognized God in the Constitution, he allegedly replied, speaking for many of his liberal colleagues, “We forgot.”
By the early decades of the nineteenth century it was no longer so easy for enlightened gentlemen to forget God. If the democratic revolution of the decades following the Declaration of Independence meant the rise of ordinary people, it meant as well the rise of popular evangelical Christianity; for religion was the way most common people still made meaningful the world around them. By the early 1800s these common people were asserting their evangelical Christianity in ways that gentry leaders could no longer ignore. […] As the Republic became democratized, it became evangelized.
In contrast to the freedom of religion and separation between church and state championed by the Founders, religious groups succeeded in inserting Christianity into government in a variety of ways, such as “allowing chaplains in the Congress, proclaiming days of fasting and prayer, and by ending mail delivery on the Sabbath.” In parallel with the overthrowing of traditional political structure, Christianity too now underwent its own democratic revolution (p. 332):
In the decades following the Revolution the remains of traditional religious establishments were finally destroyed, and modern Christian denominationalism was born. Older churches—Congregationalists, Presbyterians, and Anglicans that had dominated eighteenth-century colonial society—were now suddenly supplanted by energetic evangelical churches—Baptists, Methodists, and entirely new groups unknown to the Old World, such as the Disciples of Christ. […] The American Revolution accelerated the challenges to religious authority that had begun with the First Great Awakening [in the mid-1700s]. Just as the people were taking over their governments, so, it was said, they should take over their churches. [...] The people were their own theologians and had no need to rely on others to tell them what to believe. […] There had been nothing before in America on such a scale quite like the evangelical defiance and democratic ferment of this Second Great Awakening.
Just as democratization in government had produced increased competition for positions, demands for representation by interest-groups, and the formation of political parties, parallel developments were occurring in Christianity (pp. 332–333):
[R]eligion in America became much more personal and voluntary than it ever had been; and people were freer to join and change religious associations whenever they wished. They thus moved from one religious group to another in a continual search for signs, prophets, or millennial promises that would make sense of their disrupted lives. With no church sure of holding its communicants, competition among the sects became fierce. Each claimed to be right, called each other names, argued endlessly over points of doctrine, mobbed and stoned and destroyed each other’s meeting houses. The result was a further fragmenting of Christianity. […] Not only were the traditional Old World churches fragmented but the fragments themselves shattered in what seemed at times to be an endless process of fission. […] Nowhere in Christendom had religion become so fragmented and so separated from society. Yet nowhere was it so vital. By the second quarter of the nineteenth century, the evangelical Protestantism of ordinary people had come to dominate American culture to an extent the founding fathers had never anticipated.
7. The Democratization of Public Opinion and the Origin of Freedom of Speech
In the new post-Revolution society, rejection of traditional authority extended from politics to religion to knowledge more generally (pp. 361–362):
Everything was being left to the reader, or the listener, or the voter, or the buyer—each person—to decide. Charles Nisbet, the Scottish clergyman who became the first president of Dickinson College in Pennsylvania, thought as early as 1789 that Americans were carrying their reliance on individual judgment to ridiculous extremes. He fully expected, he said, to see soon such books as “Every Man his own Lawyer,” “Every Man his own Physician,” and “Every Man his own Clergyman and Confessor.” […]
The result of all these assaults on elite opinion and celebrations of common ordinary judgment was a dispersion of authority and ultimately a diffusion of truth itself to a degree the world had never before seen. With every ordinary person being told that his ideas and tastes, on everything from medicine to art and government, were as good as, if not better than, those of “connoisseurs” and “speculative men” who had college degrees, it is not surprising that truth and knowledge became elusive and difficult to pin down. […] Americans of the early Republic experienced an epistemological crisis as severe as any in their history. […] Most ordinary people were no longer willing to defer to the knowledge and judgments of those who had once been their superiors. Perhaps plain people did not have the college education, the extensive travel, or the intellectual power of their aristocratic neighbors, but, their spokesmen said, they had eyes and ears, and they knew what was true for them better than some “commanding genius” or “learned sage” did. Why should they trust what such gentlemen told them?
As the eighteenth century led into the nineteenth, the aristocratic “Federalists” and their traditional worldview—of a gentlemanly elite whose natural superiority merited the responsibility of governing society—was giving way to the democratic “Republicans” and their new worldview, of a leveling egalitarianism that allowed everyone in society to participate in government. This cultural shift had consequences for the very understanding of truth itself, transforming along the way the American conception of freedom of speech (p. 363):
Ever since the debate over the Sedition Act of 1798, by which the Federalists had attempted to punish Republican writers and editors criticizing the rulers of the national government, the nature of truth and the ways to discover it had become public issues. While the Federalists clung to the traditional assumption that truth was constant and universal and capable of being discovered by enlightened and reasonable men, their Republican opponents argued that opinions about government and rulers were many and diverse and the truth of such opinions could not be determined simply by judges and members of juries, no matter how educated and reasonable such men might be. Thus many Republicans concluded that all political opinions, even those opinions that were “false, scandalous and malicious,” ought to be allowed, as Jefferson put it, to “stand undisturbed as monuments of the safety with which error of opinion may be tolerated where reason is left free to combat it.”
The Federalists were dumbfounded. “Truth,” they said, “has but one side and listening to error and falsehood is indeed a strange way to discover truth.” Any notion of multiple and varying truths would produce “universal uncertainty,” universal misery,” and “set all morality afloat.” People needed to know the “criterion by which we may determine with certainty, who are right, and who are wrong.”
Yet the Republicans did have a criterion for determining who was right and who was wrong, and it was the opinion of the whole people. Their arguments in favor of freedom of speech rested on the assumption that opinions about politics, like opinions about other subjects, were no longer the monopoly of the educated and aristocratic few. Not only were all opinions equally to be tolerated but everyone and anyone in the society should be equally able to express them.
The advancing wave of democracy had washed over “public opinion” and remade the American culture of communication and information, finally broadening the meaning of “the public” to include common people as well as gentlemen, much to the horror of traditional elites (pp. 363–364):
Nearly everyone in the eighteenth century had believed in the power of public opinion and had talked endlessly about it. Indeed, members of the old society were so preoccupied with their reputations and the honor precisely because of their intense concern for the judgment of others. […] The Revolution rapidly expanded this “public” and democratized its opinion. Every conceivable form of printed matter—books, pamphlets, handbills, posters, broadsides, and especially newspapers—multiplied and were now written and read by many more ordinary people than ever before in history.
By 1800, wrote the Reverend Samuel Miller in his elaborate compendium of the Enlightenment entitled A Brief Retrospect of the Eighteenth Century, much of the intellectual leadership of the country had fallen into “the hands of persons destitute at once of the urbanity of gentlemen, the information of scholars, and the principles of virtue.” In contrast to pre-revolutionary America, the society of the early Republic had thousands upon thousands of obscure ordinary people participating in the creation of this public opinion.
By the early nineteenth century this newly enlarged and democratized public opinion had become the “vital principle” underlying American government, society, and culture. […] In every realm of endeavor—whether art, language, medicine, or politics—connoisseurs, professors, doctors, and statesmen had to give way before the power of the collective opinion of the people. Public opinion, said Federalist Theodore Sedgwick in disgust, “is of all things the most destructive of personal independence and of that weight of character which a great man ought to possess.” […] But it was too late. In no country in the world did public opinion become more awesome and powerful than it did in democratic America.
Conclusion
The American Revolution set in motion a series of events that rapidly outpaced the expectations and understanding of the people involved, changing society from a nearly unrecognizable pre-modern European monarchy to an American democracy that feels shockingly modern in its cultural values. Out of the economic and intellectual context of eighteenth-century England, a utopian conception of republican gentleman, whose independence came from the land they owned, rapidly gave way to wave after wave of democratic transformation: new conceptions of representation and election and the emergence of interest-group politics and expanded voting rights, a rejection of aristocratic merit and elevation of labor, the origins of political populism and the idea of the “self-made man,” the rise of evangelical Christianity and its dominance in politics and society, and ultimately the decline of elite opinion and the origin of freedom of speech.
On this 250th anniversary of the United States of America, The Radicalism of the American Revolution, though written toward the end of the 20th century, eloquently explains where we are as a society in the second quarter of the 21st. While Donald Trump may not be the president the Founders wanted, he seems to be the type of politician that their revolution made inevitable. Notably, they were not pleased with where the country had gone (pp. 365–367):
This democratic society was not the society the revolutionary leaders had wanted or expected. No wonder, then, that those of them who lived on into the early decades of the nineteenth century expressed anxiety over what they had wrought. Although they tried to put as good a face as they could on what had happened, they were bewildered, uneasy, and in many cases deeply disillusioned. Indeed, a pervasive pessimism, a fear that their revolutionary experiment in republicanism was not working out as they had expected, runs through the later writings of the founding fathers. All the major revolutionary leaders died less than happy with the results of the Revolution. [...]
At the end of his life, George Washington had lost all hope for democracy. Party spirit, he said in 1799, had destroyed the influence of character in politics. Members of one party or the other now could “set up a broomstick” as candidate, call it “a true son of Liberty” or a “Democrat” or “any other epithet that will suit their purpose,” and the broomstick would still “command their votes in toto!” John Adams spent much of his old age bewailing the results of the Revolution, including democracy, religious revivals, and Bible societies. [...] By the early nineteenth century, many of the founding fathers had come to share something of Alexander Hamilton’s poignant conclusion that “this American world was not made for me.” They found it difficult to accept the democratic fact that their fate now rested on the opinions and votes of small-souled and largely unreflective ordinary people.
It is up to us today, Wood seems to suggest, to determine what to do with the contradictory society we have inherited (pp. 368–369):
The founding fathers were unsettled and fearful not because the American Revolution had failed but because it had succeeded, and succeeded only too well. What happened in America in the decades following the Declaration of Independence was after all only an extension of all that the revolutionary leaders had advocated. White males had taken only too seriously the belief that they were free and equal with the right to pursue their happiness. Indeed, the principles of their achievement made possible the eventual strivings of others—black slaves and women—for their own freedom, independence, and prosperity.
The very fulfillment of these revolutionary ideals—the very success of the Revolution—made it difficult for those who benefited from that success, for ordinary people and their new democratic spokesmen, to understand the apprehensions of the founding fathers. The people looked back in awe and wonder at the revolutionary generation and saw in them leaders the likes of which they knew they would never see again in America. But they also knew that they now lived in a different world, a democratic world, that required new thoughts and new behavior. [...] No doubt the cost that America paid for this democracy was high—with its vulgarity, its materialism, its rootlessness, its anti-intellectualism. But there is no denying the wonder of it and the real earthly benefits it brought to the hitherto neglected and despised masses of common laboring people. The American Revolution created this democracy, and we are living with its consequences still.