Declaring “Revolution”

Americans have long debated the causes and consequences, as well as the meanings and significance, of our break with Britain in 1776. But they have pretty much agreed on what to call that signal moment in the shaping of our nation. It was the American Revolution, secured by victory in the War of Independence. What else is there to say?

As it turns out, it took time for the fight against British taxes and tyranny to claim the character of a revolution. In the long run-up to armed conflict, from Boston to Savannah, the protesters called themselves Sons of Liberty (or Liberty-men); their aim was to block Britain from taxing the colonists without their consent. The New York City Sons denied any desire for a “change of Government”; their goal was simply a “preservation of the [British] Constitution.” When King and Parliament revoked the Massachusetts charter in 1774 and curtailed the role of white, male property-holders in self-government, their arbitrary actions provoked the uprising. Far from seeking independence, the patriots took up arms to restore the previous status quo. George III may have condemned them as rebels. But even after fighting broke out at Lexington and Concord on April 19, 1775, colonists still issued writs for town meetings in “his Majesties name,” and the Continental Congress, professing themselves “faithful subjects,” sought reconciliation with Britain in an elaborate display of “the utmost deference” known as the Olive Branch Petition. No matter what the King said in his August 23, 1775, proclamation condemning “dangerous and ill-designing Men” for deluding “loyal Subjects” into “disorderly Acts” and “traitorous Conspiracies,” this was not yet an “open and avowed Rebellion.”

Only in spring 1776 did public sentiment tilt in favor of independence. Even then, nobody declared for revolution, certainly not the 56 Continental Congress delegates who endorsed the Declaration of Independence, which nullified the ancien régime. Only Loyalists would remain faithful to the old order. For the rest of 1776, the term “revolution” didn’t appear in the newspapers, pamphlets, and periodicals on this side of the Atlantic; in Britain the conflict remained the “rebellion” and “the American War.” Nor was “revolution” present in the press of 1777. In the absence of a name that would convey the purpose of their collective effort, patriots pledged their lives, fortunes, and sacred honor to “the Cause” or, in more effusive moments, to “the glorious Cause.” George Washington took command of the Continental Army in that pursuit. Time and again he inspired his troops by reminding them they fought for “the best of causes” — the liberties of their country — against “base hirelings and mercenaries.” For the sake of principle, they could join together without having to define more fully what that cause was.

Not everyone shied away from acknowledging the “revolution” on which the colonists had embarked. In April 1776, South Carolina’s chief justice, William Henry Drayton, celebrated the ongoing break with the past. “Carolinians,” he told grand jurors, “heretofore you were bound — by the American Revolution you are now free.” But talk of revolution was mostly reserved for private correspondence. Even there, its precise meaning was contested. John Adams recognized that “we are in the very midst of a Revolution” in a June 1776 letter, by which he meant the creation of a new nation and not an upheaval in the social order; as the “Atlas of Independence,” he led the charge in the Continental Congress for a circumscribed goal. A year later, he used the phrase again in a letter to 10-year-old son John Quincy, in which he contemplated the “entertaining and instructive Amusement” of comparing “our American Revolution with others that Resemble it,” such as England’s Glorious Revolution of 1688. Four months earlier, Rev. William Gordon of Roxbury informed Adams that he was gathering “Materials for an history of the rise progress and successful issue of the American revolution” — a work more than a decade in the making. 

Why did it take so long for “revolution” to go public? The concept was available. Until recently, the consensus among historians has been that in the 18th century revolution was more familiar as a term in science, in astronomy and phenology, than in government. It connoted cyclical movements — the annual circuit of the earth around the sun and the succession of the seasons. It had not yet acquired its modern meaning as the overthrow of government and the unsettlement of politics and society in “an open-ended and linear process of change.” But new scholarship by historian Nathan Perl-Rosenthal makes plain that Enlightened thinkers on both sides of the Atlantic were well-aware of the revolutions that toppled free governments in the ancient world, as republics devolved into tyrannies that were overthrown by force and a new order, a cycle that repeated again and again. European history confirmed this association of revolutions with regime change, often accompanied by “confusions,” “disorders,” and violence. While they sometimes effected a new structure of power, as in England’s Glorious Revolution, more often they introduced “rapid changes” into a state, with no end in sight.

No wonder the Patriots hesitated to call their movement a revolution. Or perhaps the problem lay in the diversity of states constituting the “united colonies.” Theirs was a fragile coalition that found it hard to compromise their differences of interest. It took the Continental Congress over two years to adopt the Articles of Confederation and another three years for all the states to ratify the compact. Calling the Revolution “American” was a stretch.

But the redefinition of terms did accelerate in 1778, just as it appeared that the Continental Army was fighting the British forces to a draw and the Americans were being fortified by the alliance with France. Independence was no longer a distant dream. In this setting it became important to define what independence was for. And we have two men to thank for opening up the discussion. One was the herald of independence and republicanism, Thomas Paine, who hailed the new American republic in his 1776 pamphlet Common Sense as something new under the sun: a republic based on the people, free of “absurd” monarchs and corrupt aristocrats. Once the War of Independence started, he strove to sustain American morale with a steady series of essays, the most famous of which opened in December 1776 with the memorable line, “These are the times that try men’s souls.” In the fifth number of the “Crisis” series, published in March 1778, Paine celebrated the new order wrought by the Declaration of Independence and held up this “revolution of America” as “the most virtuous & illustrious revolution that ever graced the history of mankind.” Eleven months later, in an official report for the Continental Congress, the influential delegate Gouverneur Morris issued an address to the American public entitled, for the first time, Observations on the American Revolution.

Paine, the ne’er-do-well immigrant to the colonies and advocate of workingmen, was the polar opposite of Morris, scion of New York’s landed aristocracy. Paine promoted the interests and aspirations of artisans in Philadelphia politics; Morris was skeptical of popular influence in public affairs. In 1774 he witnessed a street demonstration against British imperial policy and feared for the future. “The mob begin to think and to reason,” he opined in a letter; “if the disputes with Great Britain continue, we shall be under the worst of all possible dominions … a riotous mob.” The two men became political enemies in the Continental Congress, where Morris represented New York (his family estate comprised much of the Bronx), and Paine held a paid position as secretary to the committee on foreign affairs. In December 1778, Paine accused the Connecticut merchant Silas Deane, who had negotiated secret French arms sales to the United States, of corruptly enriching himself. Morris defended the financier and turned the attack on Paine for jeopardizing the American alliance with France by disclosing state secrets. The rhetorical assault was deeply personal. Morris was not above social snobbery. Paine was no gentleman, Morris charged, but rather “a mere adventurer from England, without fortune, without family or connexions, ignorant even of grammar” and hence utterly unsuited to his office. Paine was fired while Morris left Congress after losing re-election from New York. 

Yet, in their joint embrace of “the American Revolution,” the adversaries gave the movement for independence a meaning that speaks to the heart of our national crisis of identity today, as the Trump administration closes the door on the asylum program and other forms of legal immigration, and Vice President JD Vance espouses a form of “blood and soil” nationalism. On our 250th birthday as a nation, the broad vision of the United States welcoming immigrants to its doors is once again on the defense. Ironically, Morris and Paine shared a vision of the American republic as a beacon to people from all over the globe. The author of Common Sense, it’s well-known, held out a utopian vision of the new republic as an “asylum” of liberty for all humankind. As it turns out, so did Morris. His Observations on the American Revolution, composed on behalf of the Continental Congress on the eve of his departure from its ranks, were designed to justify the Continental Congress’ recent rejection of British overtures for peace, since they fell short of recognizing American independence. The pamphlet included official documents from 1774 to 1778, all attesting to the abuses and oppression of King and Parliament. It was a legal compendium fit for a lawyer, Morris’ profession, but at the very end, it opens out to a prospect as expansive as Paine’s.

Neither Paine nor Morris explained their introduction of “the American Revolution” into public discourse nor what it was supposed to mean. It was seemingly as self-evident as those truths Jefferson had proclaimed at the opening of the Declaration of Independence. It announced the regime change implicit in the 18th-century idea of revolution. In that sense, it was tantamount to independence and the establishment of republican governments in the states. But it did more than that. It affirmed the distinctiveness of the new nation, as it claimed its place “among the powers of the earth.” What was independence for? The “United States of North-America,” as Morris called it, had assured to its citizens “the blessings of that peace, liberty and safety for which we have virtuously and vigorously contended.” But for Morris, the goals of the new nation need not stop there. Independence could also open wide the “portals of the temple we have raised to freedom” and provide “an asylum to mankind.” Morris even outdid Paine in his vision of free trade and open borders, the very opposite of the closed circuits of commerce in the mercantilist empires of Europe, and as an opponent of slavery, he welcomed immigrants from Africa and Asia to equal citizenship with Europeans: “America shall receive to her bosom and comfort and cheer the oppressed, the miserable and the poor of every nation and of every clime.” He continued:

The enterprise of extending commerce shall wave her friendly flag over the billows of the remotest regions. Industry shall collect and bear to her shores all the virtuous productions of the earth, and all by which human life and human manners are polished and adorned.

Thomas Paine was not impressed. Now out of office, he submitted a negative review of Morris’ Observations to the Pennsylvania Packet of March 20, 1779. Writing under the pseudonym “Common Sense,” Paine complained bitterly that the New York-New Jersey campaign of 1776, in which George Washington had set back the British advance, was omitted from Morris’ narrative of the War of Independence. The journalist, who had served as a volunteer aide-de-camp to General Nathanael Greene in that fighting, was offended by the oversight. It denied the people of New Jersey and Pennsylvania, “who turned out to repel the torrent which threatened destruction to America,” proper credit for their military service. In effect, it represented sectionalism, favoring some states over others, in a biased account of the American Revolution. 

Paine’s critique was soon forgotten, as were Morris’ Observations. But both authors had made enduring contributions to the new nation in the meanings they gave to the national struggle for independence. At the very moment they were hailing the achievement of independence and self-government in “the American Revolution,” the two thinkers were adding still more to the cause. More than a century before Emma Lazarus’ words on the Statue of Liberty welcomed “the huddled masses yearning to be free,” both Paine the popular radical and Morris the enlightened elitist gave the American confederation a purpose for all humankind. To celebrate July 4 is to herald a victory for all people everywhere. 

Want to keep reading about the 250th? Here is Bruce W. Dearstyne on how Calvin Coolidge celebrated the United States’ 150th anniversary, Marc Egnal on the historiography of the causes of the American Revolution, and Marc Stein on 1976. Find even more to explore on Bunk.