The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution

The Anglo-American debate during the Revolutionary era led colonists into more advanced thinking regarding political issues; however, often “the ideas the colonists put forward, rather than creating a new condition of fact, expressed one that had long existed” (162). In other words, the Revolutionary thinkers often were articulating and systematizing realities that had haphazardly emerged over time in the colonies. One reason the American Revolution did not create “the great social shocks” (19) of the French and Russian Revolutions is that many changes and adjustments “had taken place in America in the course of the previous century, slowly, silently, almost imperceptibly, not as a sudden avalanche” (19). By 1763, the great institutions of British life, the authoritative state and the established church, had been weakened “in their exposure to the open, wilderness environment of America” (20). These institutional changes in the colonies, remote from the sophisticated center of the British Empire, were often labeled as defects and regressions to a more primitive condition. However, during the turbulent 1760s, these unplanned changes were used as grounds for a reconsideration of political problems.

The structure of largely autonomous colonial towns that had little reason to identify their interests with those of the central government had resulted in the colonists’ practice of binding their representatives to local interests. Therefore, Americans’ view of representation greatly differed from that of the virtual representation in England, in which members of Parliament spoke for all British subjects. American Revolutionary theorists then developed their concept of representation even further to make it a government not only for the people, but by the people. In addition, “from the beginning of settlement, circumstances in America had run directly counter” (203) to the 18th-century definition of sovereignty as indivisible and unlimited. Although the British government had retained control over certain colonial policies, “all other powers were enjoyed, in fact if not in constitutional theory, by local, colonial organs of government” (203). The colonies were anomalous, according to 18th-century political theory, which meant they experienced “extreme decentralization of authority within an empire presumably ruled by a single, absolute, undivided sovereign” (204). The colonists began to attempt to “state in the language of constitutional theory, the truth of the world they knew” (204). The Revolutionary thinkers, who had long experienced a division of authority, eventually developed the federalist system:

premised on the assumption that the ultimate sovereignty […] rested with the people, that it was not only conceivable but in certain circumstances salutary to divide and distribute the attributes of government sovereignty among different levels of institutions (228).

The colonists differed as well from the British in the definition of “constitution.” The British conceived of “constitution” as the unwritten, existing arrangement of government institutions. The longtime colonial experience of written charters as frames of government meant that for Revolutionary theorists “it took no wrench of mind, no daring leap, to accept, by then, the concept of a fixed, written constitution limiting the ordinary actions of government” (193). Well-known prototypes present in the colonies for over a century gave the now-explicit idea of a written constitution “propulsive power” (193).

By 1776, the colonists were developing a new system that more accurately matched the underlying realities that had evolved over time. Americans began to view the changes that had occurred in their provincial societies as “elements not of deviance […] but of […] progress; not a lapse into primitivism, but an elevation to a higher plane of political and social life than had ever been reached before” (20).