The Radicalism of the American Revolution

“Diverse persons related to each other only through their common tie to the king, much as children became brothers and sisters only through their common parentage. Since the kind, said William Blackstone, was the ‘pater familias of the nation,’ to be a subject was to be a kind of child, to be personally subordinated to a paternal dominion.”

The social structure of the American colonies consisted of a number of tight-knit community made up of one or more families. There was often a father-figure who was in charge of the colony. This grew into vertical class hierarchy that included a patron-based tradition. Wood shows that this structure of colonial society was based on the monarchial government under which the colonies were founded.

“‘Gentleman’ originally meant noble by birth and applied to all of the aristocracy, including even the king. But from the sixteenth century on, with the enlargement of the aristocracy from below by the entry of numerous lesser gentry, the hereditary peerage sought to confine the term ‘gentleman’ to all those who stood as ‘a middle rank betwixt the nobles and common people.’”

Gentlemen play an important role in the American colonies in that they were the larger portion of aristocratic class and were the men who most often held political office before the Revolution. This definition marks the line between noble aristocrats and common men. It also illustrates the strict lines in the hierarchy that became significant as the social structure of the colonies changed through the Revolution.

“So distinctive and so separated was the aristocracy from ordinary folk that many still thought the two groups represented two orders of being. Indeed, we will never appreciate the radicalism of the eighteenth-century revolutionary idea that all men were created equal unless we see it within this age-old tradition of difference. Gentlemen and commoners had different psyches, different emotional make-ups, different natures. Ordinary people were made only ‘to be born and eat and sleep and die, and be forgotten.’”

Wood explores his theme of Radicalism and its Role in the American Revolution in his consideration of the social structure of the American colonies. Wood points out how radical it was for the founding fathers to declare all men equal when the hierarchy of the colonies was structured in such a way that the common man was considered to be inconsequential to the character of the nation.