The American Revolutionary ideology from 1764 to 1783

Résumé du document

The historiography concerning the American Revolution has been peculiarly rich and contradictory with respect to the main sources and causes of this two-decade complex process that led loyal Englishmen to brutally and irrevocably break with their mother-country. Older interpretations about the origins, the effects and the very nature of the Revolution, were classically based on the tenet that far from constituting a real rupture with the British politics and domination, the revolutionary movement was to a great extent conservative. It was meant to protect the colonists' rights against the British oppressive interferences and threatening purposes, rather than to overthrow the structures of society. This is the thesis of the great historian of the Revolution, Jack Greene, when he contends that any theory that emphasizes the importance of the Revolution as a decisive phase in the creation of the American nation and the construction of the American national identity "seriously underestimates the powerful continuities between the colonial and the national eras and thereby significantly overestimates the revolutionary character of the revolution".

Extraits

[...] Influential as all these ideological traditions were, they were far from constituting a coherent intellectual pattern and were sometimes contradictory each other or simply too artificially understood. They needed a common denominator to be more than miscellaneous and disconnected sources, often awkwardly used by the pamphleteers. More than any source, the radical Whig ideology provided a comprehensive ideological support that helped to shape the colonists' view of English politics and of English constitution, which was broadly an Opposition view. This distinctive harmonizing force for all the discordant and random elements of the Revolutionary thought finds its origins in the 17th century - during the English Civil War and what was called the Commonwealth period with authors as Milton, Harrington or Sidney - , but it has been really elaborated in the beginning of the 18th century in the writings of a group of prolific opposition theorists, politicians, publicists and religious dissenters, who gave their interpretation of British politics and institutions with a “country” outlook - as opposed to the urban established centres of power. [...]

[...] The meaning of words as “democracy”, or “republicanism” changed, the time accelerated. If the Americans had rebelled against what they saw as the decay of the English constitution, their very perception of it was so tinted with peculiar interpretations that every agreement with the crown became more and more illusionary, and in an intellectual process that they by no means have anticipated, their protest became more than a simple attempt to fight against British overrule. Meanwhile, influenced by the eulogistic portraits made by all the 18th century liberal and Enlightened Europeans, who considered the Americans as the people the most fitted for liberty, the colonists became more and more aware of the peculiarities of their social development and system of values and they began to think themselves as a special category, entitled to the divine mission of fulfilling the hope of mankind's liberty all over the world. [...]

[...] What was primarily a loyal attempt to preserve political liberty led to the proclamation, by the colonies, of their independence, which was accepted by England only with the Treaty of Paris in 1783. Meanwhile, a revolutionary war had occurred, and the Americans had created, around the ideology of republicanism, an entirely new conception of politics, that emphasized their unique destiny in world and history (III). During the years of crisis from 1764 to 1776, Americans tried to tackle what was seen as harmful encroachments on their rights and their liberty by progressively developing a view on the world and on politics. [...]

[...] In those characteristic writings of the American thought, the colonists sought to coin ideas strong enough to convince England to respect and to apply what they considered as their inherited Englishmen's rights. In the discussion of such fundamental issues as representation and consent, nature of constitution and rights, sense of sovereignty - which were matters of immediate urgency for the colonists a striking and powerful dialectic between the inheritance of Anglo-Saxon culture and political thought and an innovative experimentation and emancipation was visible. [...]

[...] The progressive evolution of their thinking, alongside the escalating radicalization of the relationships with the mother-country, led them to fight off royalty and to declare their independence, which was totally not anticipated at the beginning of the 1760s. Overall, they forge their own identity by becoming republicans and built the future of a new American people. The American Revolution, deep- rooted in its ideological origins, more than legally create the United States; it transformed American society”[16]. Bibliography - Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, Belknap Press, Cambridge reissued in pages - Gordon S. [...]