Was the American Revolution Really a Revolution" essay

Dr. Ufland’s Notes on the American Revolution

The question that we discussed in class, and which forms the central topic of your essay assignment, is whether the American Revolution was really a revolution. In other words, did the American Revolution create radical change. This question remains a point of considerable debate among historians, as evidenced by the articles that I have provided you with. Ultimately, there are solid arguments to be made on both sides of this interpretive divide.

If, however, we look at the impact of the Revolution on the system of governance employed in the states and on the polity (political society/members) of the new nation, we can legitimately claim that it brought about a political revolution. Perhaps the most obvious, and yet profound, example of the radical political changes created by the American Revolution lays in the notion of limited government. While the concept of limited government ( a government that can do somethings but not others) was not wholly a creation of the American Revolution, it was essentially non-existent anywhere else. While Englishmen spoke of their rights, thus implying that their government was not all powerful, such concepts applied to a very few in society and remained unwritten. In contrast, in both the newly formed states and eventually the United States of America as a whole (under the Constitution), the concept of limited government was articulated explicitly, through written constitutions, and enforced thoroughly. Even before they had won their independence, Americans wrote constitutions for their states that clearly, and often excessively limited government. As Thomas Paine noted in his famous Revolutionary Era pamphlet, “Common Sense,” “In England the King is Law; In America the law is king.” Thus, from the very beginning of the independence movement, Americans worked to ensure that in the future, pieces of paper (state and national constitutions) would exercise ultimate sovereignty (power) in the American system of government and would clearly spell out what government could and could not do.

Americans did not constrain their adoption of limited government as their guiding philosophy to simply a conceptual level. Rather, they filled their state and national constitutions with series of laws that greatly reduced the practical power of government and limited the possibility that it might become too strong/ a threat to individual liberty. Most notably, a majority of states radically reduced the power of the chief executive (governors and later the president). The powers taken from the executive, most importantly the power to tax, were given to the peoples’ branch of government: the legislature. Under the new state constitutions, however, even the peoples’ branch was not to be fully trusted with power. A number of innovations were explicitly included in these laws to ensure that even the legislatures could not become tyrannical: elections were scheduled on a regular basis (to ensure that legislators could be removed from office if they did not protect their constituents); representative district were made more equitable (to ensure that all regions of the states/voting populations were equally powerful); plans were established to regularly adjust the distribution of legislative representation so that new areas of settlement would have equal say in the governance of the state/country; the number of actual voters was greatly expanded; and in some cases, the voters were given the right of instruction (the ability of voters to tell their representatives exactly how to vote in the legislature) and recall (the power to remove their representative from office before the next election). Taken together, the creation of written constitutions and structural limitations on the power of elected officials ensured that in the newly formed United States of America neither governors nor legislators would wield ultimate political power. Instead, sovereignty would lay in the laws themselves and the hands of the people.

The American Revolution produced a truly revolutionary change in politics in one other sense as well. In England, and indeed the rest of Europe in which some sort of democracy and limited government existed, representative government was largely an illusion. The number of people fully involved in such governments (as voters) was, by and large, miniscule. In England, for example, maybe 15% of the male population had any political rights. In essence, this amounted to a polity defined by the nobility, the upper-class, and an emerging upper-middle class. In contrast, in the states between 50 and 70% of the adult white, male population could participate fully in politics. In frontier areas, the percentage was even higher, as almost all male household heads could claim ownership of some land.

Some might argue that the difference between 15% adult male political participation and 50-70% adult, white male representation is nothing more than a difference in statistics. In either case, the nature of democracy was limited by property ownership, not to mention race and gender. Such arguments, however, fail to recognize the larger impact of such broad political participation. In Europe, political participation was so constrained as to ensure that it not only remained the province of the elite and thus answerable only to their interests, but also to maintain a society and culture in which the vast majority of common folk remained ignored, uninvolved, and oppressed. Moreover, this political culture created a sense of subservience among the common folk of Europe. In the new United States, however, the fact that such high percentages of white men could vote, at least on the state level, led to the emergence of a political culture and society in which regular folk not only expected to be consulted and heard, but in fact demanded to be included in governance in every imaginable way. Thus, the American Revolution resulted in a radical new form of government and political society: one in which the common folk refused to defer to the elite and instead claimed an equal stake in governing.