Radicalism of the American revolution

American History

The Radicalism of the American Revolution

In the Introduction to his book, The Radicalism of the American Revolution, Gordon S. Wood makes clear that the drive for independence in the young American nation "was as radical and social as any revolution in history" (4). Wood makes this statement because some of the themes that have been passed down through history regarding the American Revolution have painted it as "an intellectual event," an "unusually conservative affair, concerned almost exclusively with politics and constitutional rights...[and indeed] hardly a revolution at all."

The Revolution did not just eliminate monarchy...it actually...brought about an entirely new kind of popular politics," Wood explains (8). And in doing so, he explains, "it also released powerful popular entrepreneurial and commercial energies that few realized existed."

Society in England and the colonies leading up to and following the Revolution (as presented by Gordon W. Wood)

Meanwhile, what was it like living in England in the mid-18th Century - the country which colonial Americans had begun abandoning a hundred years earlier? Wood (13-14) writes that though the English were "free from arbitrary arrest and punishment," had "no standing army," had "freedom of speech...and their right to trade and travel," few men and no women "could vote for representatives.,"

And for the colonists, living under a monarchy that was an ocean away, royal authority in the colonies was "more deep rooted and more effective...then ever before." It is Wood's style to fashion narrative that builds up to the actual revolution slowly and deliberately with thoughtful and well-crafted descriptions of the comfort level of colonists; for example, he quotes Ben Franklin on page 38 (talking about how a gentleman would rather let someone else do the grunt work): "Who is there that can be handsomely Supported in Affluence, Ease and Pleasure by another, that will chuse rather to earn his Bread by the Sweat of his own Brows?"

And referring to the fact that the King was revered - even in the "most distant parts of his dominions" - on page 43, Wood quotes Montesquieu in an analogy to father-family relationships: "...that nature having established paternal authority, the most natural government was that of a single person." It was a common thread throughout the early and mid-18th Century that people understood and accepted dependency; and in fact Wood writes on page 51 that "it has been estimated that one-half to two-thirds of all immigrants to the colonies came as indentured servants."

Even convicts (of course very dependent on their incarcerators) and "vagabonds" - an estimated 50,000 of them - were brought to the colonies "and bound over as servants for periods of seven or fourteen years" (51-52). And just because one was an indentured servant does not mean one held "an unrespectable status"; many such servants "were skilled craftsmen" and "schoolmasters." So, again, Wood has painted a picture that shows dependency as a way of life (which explains why the king was initially accepted but slowly that was changing) - "society was held together by intricate networks of personal loyalties, obligations, and quasi-dependencies" - but that way of life (58-59) became "so repugnant" that restlessness emerged as a near-universal theme.

The way things changes in the colonies leading up to the revolution was (95-96) the "disintegration of the traditional 18th Century monarchical society of paternal and dependent relationships" which led to "republicanism" - the capitalistic, liberal, democratic form of government which "ate away" at the monarchy, "corroded it, slowly, gradually, steadily..." And the emergence of republicanism was more of a "counterculture to monarchy" (96), Wood explains, more than a desire to "cut off the heads of kings." Still, he continues, though those advocating a republican state of governing did not call for violent revolution, their intellectual, rhetorical attacks on the king, "the abuses," and monarchy in general was "in every way a radical ideology," as radical for the 18th Century as Marxism was for the next century.

It was not a matter of American inventing republicanism in 1776, "they only had to bring it to the surface" (109) because "it was there all along." And though there was little evidence of the social conditions historians generally report as associated with revolution ("no mass poverty; no seething social discontent; no grinding oppression") (169).

Wood explains that the push for independence was not just a desire "for independence of the country from Great Britain" (though there was ample desire for that) but rather a hunger for "the independence of individuals from personal influence..." And a wish to "prevent the undue and overwhelming influence of great landholders in elections." Without property, a person could not vote, could not participate in democracy, and this aspect was, Wood explains, pivotal in stoking the fires of revolution.

But after the revolution - which destroyed "the ligaments of patronage and kinship that had held the old monarchical society together" - there still needed to be the other half of the "radicalism of the republican revolution." And that other half was "enlightenment...changing the culture...pushing back the boundaries of darkness and barbarism and spreading light and knowledge" (191). Enlightenment was "a matter of personal and social morality," education and manners - all juxtaposed to the old social values of mere wealth and status and land owning.

And as the country evolved into a system of political parties, political patronage (Jefferson said on page 301 "solicitations to office" were the "most painful" parts of executive leadership; Andrew Jackson, indeed, appointed "only party loyalists" to many government positions), and successful businessmen, many new lessons were to be learned about republicanism as a better way than monarchy. And as the westward movement of the population became "spectacular," those new social norms following the revolution were being lost: "A certain loss of civility is inevitable" (310).

Natalie Zemon Davis' book, The Return of Martin Guerre

And these above-mentioned descriptions of colonial society evolving up to and after the American Revolution exhibited the type of evidence Wood used in presenting his book. He researched the writings of the thinkers, leaders, literary and scholarly researchers, in order to lay out his version of the "radical" nature of the revolution. In a way, he solves the mystery of how a colony on a distant continent was changed from being under the authority of a monarch to a republic based on a new way of thinking.

It is with a very different style of presentation that author Natalie Zemon Davis offers her mystery, The Return of Martin Guerre. "Did individual villagers ever try to fashion their lives in unusual and unexpected ways?" "...How do historians discover such things about anyone in the past?" she continues. "We look at letters and diaries, autobiographies, memoirs, family histories," she writes (1). Writers also look at plays, poems, and stories, she adds. Moreover, she explores the question of just what were the motivations of people in the 16th Century? Her story (based on true peasant events) of how an imposter became a husband - gaining property and siring a child - for over three years, until being exposed, utilized (554) "recent innovations in anthropology, ethnography, and literary criticism" (Finlay, 1988).

And while the styles of Davis and Wood are very different - in terms of the recounting of historical events - within the context of the story Davis tells there are two dramatically different approaches to the telling of that tale, albeit the tale has the same plot, characters, setting and themes.

The type of approach to the mental world of Bertrande de Rols, the wife who actually collaborated with the imposter Arnaud de Tilh, that Davis offers in her book, Finlay writes, is "radically different" than that of author Jean de Coras' version. This makes a fascinating study into two versions of the same essential story. Coras, on the one hand, was most interested in "the marvelous deception" carried out by Arnaud, and had a "certain admiration" for Arnaud's cunning, Finlay writes (555). Meanwhile, Davis' focus is on the fact that the wife, Bertrande, was actually "Arnaud's accomplice, for she knew that the man claiming to be her husband was a fraud."

In Davis' account, Bertrande fell in love with the imposter, rather than in Coras' version where Bertrande was duped by a sly fellow who was out for sexual favors and a thrill. In Davis' account, the tragedy is not that Bertrande wound up sleeping with a man for three years who was not her husband, but rather, the tragedy is that the collaboration of Bertrande and Arnaud was discovered.