An Ideological Revolution?

Article by Liam Geoghegan. Edited by Harriet di Francesco. Additional Research by Lauren Puckey. 

It may surprise some of you to read that America’s struggle for independence from Britain in the late 1700s was the result of the colonists’ deep intimacy and admiration for the English constitution. It was certainly a revelation to me when I finally approached an area of history from a non Eurocentric viewpoint. This has taken me over 21 years; a History GCSE, a full History A-Level, a degree in History, and about a third of a Masters course. I had learned about the American Revolution during my final A Level year, but from a distinctly British perspective. At A Level we looked at the mistakes of the British government and military leaders; only briefly did we study the maturing political system of the Thirteen Colonies and the canny tactics of generals such as George Washington. I admit that my first venture into history from outside the EU member states was more forced upon me than chosen (it turns out no-one else wanted to learn how to read Italian for use in historical research this year). Once I had started, however, I jumped headfirst into the module entitled: ‘The Eighteenth-Century British American Colonies.’ I even volunteered to lead the first seminar which was based on a book, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, by the celebrated American historian Bernard Bailyn, writing in the middle of the twentieth century. 

Initially I recognised a few of the names Bailyn mentions (Adams, Jefferson, Wilkes, Walpole…), and familiarised with the catastrophic acts of parliament he discusses (the Stamp Act, the Townshend Duties, the Tea Act…). What I was not prepared for was his assertion that English common law ‘stood side by side with Enlightenment rationalism in the minds of the Revolutionary generation’, and that it was ‘the radical social and political thought of the English Civil War and of the Commonwealth period’ that brought together all of the many ideological threads which informed the American Revolution. According to Bailyn the Americans saw the British political constitution as the champion of government policy, at least in theory. The constitution included all three of the Aristotelian classifications of government: monarchy, aristocracy, democracy – represented by the king, the House of Lords and the House of Commons, respectively – and it was set up in such a way that the three functioned together harmoniously. Neither the king, nor the aristocracy, nor the people had too much power in relation to the other groups. When the colonists began to worry that this balance was being threatened they feared not only for their own liberty, but for the welfare of Britain and the entire British Empire.

They saw this threat manifest itself in their own territories with the Stamp Act (a tax on all printed materials) and the Tea Act (which threatened to undercut local merchants). According to Bailyn, however, the fundamental threat was that towards the British constitution. For them the constitution was an example of unparalleled statutory quality, and it was worth defending. 

Whilst figures such as John Wilkes were supported only by a “radical” minority in England, these oppositional voices were celebrated across the Atlantic. Whole newspapers were devoted to the reprinting of dissenting British writers. Their polemic was read by more people in America than the rest of the Empire. Eventually, the corruption of the British government became too much and America cut loose. 

For a few moments this seems all well and good, and Bailyn is certainly assured in his writing. However, if we dig a little deeper, as historians have done every decade since Bailyn’s book was published, Bailyn’s theory seems to be missing one or two factors. There is not much denying the fact that some American colonists did hold the ideological views expressed in Bailyn, and it follows that these same people may eventually be incensed to the point of rebellion, but how widespread were these views exactly? The pamphlets and magazines that discussed these views were only really read regularly and by any great number in the urban areas of the colonies, and even these were extremely small compared to English cities. It is also basically impossible to determine who read these ideas, and even more difficult to determine who agreed with them. Bailyn’s is a top-down, intellectual history, whereas later historians have looked at the influence of growing social inequality and unrest on the revolution, as well as the place of religion, poverty and slavery. Bailyn’s is a convincing argument if we narrow the revolution to its intellectual leaders, but it is far from clear whether ideology (of any sort) was the driving force behind its ground troops.

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