“The
American Revolution was not a common event,” John Adams wrote to the newspaper
editor Hezekiah Niles in 1818. “Its effects and consequences have already been
awful over a great part of the globe.” Adams then inquired: “But what do we
mean by the American Revolution?” For Adams, the revolution was not just the
Revolutionary War. The war had accelerated the revolution, to be sure, and the
break with Britain enabled it to develop more freely. But the revolution itself
involved a change in thought—new ideas about who “the people” were, how they
interacted with each other and how they related to their government. “This
radical change in the principles, opinions, sentiments and affections of the
people,” Adams claimed, “was the real American Revolution.”
How did
that radical change occur? By what means had the people of thirteen separate
colonies come together “in the same principles in theory and the same system of
action”? …
The
most obvious change involved the elimination of monarchy and the establishment
of a republic, which turned dependent subjects into independent citizens.
May I
(blogger) add: They emerged from being rational individuals (animals) to
self-transcending persons as God is Person, and this because of seeking the
freedom to worship God as He was calling them to, and pursuing a life of work
and prayer for150 years on this land. It was this inner experience of
self-transcendence in the immanence of the created world that drove
them.
Gordon Wood wrote: “The
American Revolution has always seemed to be an extraordinary kind of revolution,
and no more so than to the Revolutionaries themselves… Because it did not seem
to have been a usual revolution, the
sources of its force and it momentum appeared strangely unaccountable. ‘In
other revolutions, the sword has been drawn by the arm of offended freedom,
under an oppression that threatened the vital powers of society.’ But this
seemd hardly true of the American Revolution. There was none of the legendary
tyranny of history that had so often driven desperate people into rebellion.
The Americans were not an oppressed people; they had no crushing imperial
shackles to throw off. In fact, the Americans knew they were probably freer
ande less burdened with the cumbersome feudal and hierarchical restraints than
any part of mankind in the eighteenth century. To its victims, the Tories, the
Revolution was truly incomprehensible. Never in history, said Daniel Loenard,
had t here been so much rebellion with so ‘little real cause.’ It was, wrote
Peter Oliver, ‘the most wanton and unnatural rebellion that ever existed.’ The Americans’ response was out of all propor
tion to the stimuli…As early as 1775 Edmund Burke had noted in the House of Commons
that the colonists’ intensive study of law and politics had made them acutely inquisitive
and sensitive about their liberties. Where the people of other countries had
invoked principles only after they had endured ‘an actual grievance,’ the
Americans, said Burke, were anticipating their grievances and resorting to principles
even before they actually suffered. ‘They augur misgovernment at a distance and
snuff the approach of tyranny in very tainted breeze.’ The crucial question in
the colonists’ minds, wrote John Dickinson in 1768, was ‘not, what evil has
actually attended particular measures – but,
what evil, in the nature of things, is likely to attend them.’ Because ‘nations
, in general, are not apt to think until they feel… therefore nations in general have lost their liberty.’ But
not the Americans, as the Abbe Ranal observed. They were an ‘enlightened people’
who knew their rights and the limits of power and who, unlike any people before
them, aimed to think before they felt.” (Edmund Burke: “Speech on Moving His
Resolution for Conciliation with the Colonies,’ Mar. 22, 1775.
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