Radical Was the American Revolution

¶ … Radical was the American Revolution

The American Revolution, as seen from the perspective of a historian began mildly enough with colonists attempting to affirm their rights, via the existing Parliament of England, (Middlekauff 160-162) and ended with the radical notion that as outsiders they would never be truly represented and therefore must reject the motherland and create a new nation. There was no place in the world, of colonial rule at the time where this was repeated and therefore the American Revolution was clearly one of the most radical of its kind.

Despite the traditional English celebration of independence and liberty, no one in this hierarchical society could be truly independent, truly free. No relationship could be exclusive or absolute; each was relative, reciprocal, and complementary. "Every service or help which one man affords another, requires its corresponding return." (Wood, 58)

From a position of initial servitude, as a monetary acquisition for the Crown, and many colonial interests, to a nation on the frontier America was a radical experiment in freedom and change. America was expected, by the virtue of its position as a colony to follow the law of England, and accept unfair taxation in exchange for the opportunity to live freely in a land of undefined opportunity, and yet America chose to reject such paternalism and build a new nation.

The Suffolk Resolves, written by Dr. Joseph Warren, Sam Adam's henchman, and adopted by Suffolk County of September 9. 1774, were rhetorically extravagant even for a day rapidly becoming accustomed to extravagant. The preamble did not stop with a declaration that the Intolerable Acts were unconstitutional-it used such words as "murderous" to describe them. And it urged resistance until the acts were repealed the people of Massachusetts should withhold taxes from the Crown, cease all trade with Great Britain, Ireland, and the West Indies, stop consuming "British merchandise and manufactures, " and prepare themselves for war. (Middlekauff 230)

Though the concepts of the situation were not new, in that Ireland and Scotland had both expressed the desire for independence and lamented against the unfair rule of the Crown the situation in America was different in that the indigenous population (native Americans) where marginalized and did not constitute a threat while the majority of the population in rebellion were mostly English or first generation children of immigrants from England. "Never before had there been so many men and women living in places where they had not been born." (Wood 130) In this fact, are both the seeds of subservience, in that there was a strong desire by many to remain citizens of the Crown and the seeds of dissent, as those who desired to be citizens of the Crown wished to be treated as full citizens of the Crown with a voice and all the rights that citizenship of England entailed.

Another issue that was clearly radical, on the part of the Americans was their desire and real attempt to create allies among other European countries, in the very least to find out how other European countries viewed the American rebellion. To most this would seem a concerted effort on the part of the Americans to create early attempts at diplomacy, as if they were acting as an independent nation already. In the end these early attempts at independent diplomacy, a radical notion in and of itself retained foreign aide from France, despite its early misgivings. This in a time that diplomatic aide to a rebellion would be seen as grounds for a new war the French recognized the Americans as an entity in need of aide and provided 1 Million livres for munitions for the Americans, in secret of course. The Americans then moved forward in hopes to draw actually military assistance from Spain and France. (Middlekauff 398-400) The radical nature of these ideas lays not in the fact that the rebellion deemed themselves in need of foreign aide but in the fact that they believed their colonial/constitutional and temporary government had the right to ask for open foreign aide, as an independent entity, potentially capable of total independence from the rule of the Crown. (400)

The rejection by America of the traditional sense of dependence, through patriarchal systems on a legal and social level coupled with other issues, may also have been said to predispose the nation to an early sense of citizenship for slaves and eventually women. Though fights for equality of human rights were not won easily and without resistance it was still America who led the way in the western world for universal suffrage among women and blacks. I suppose a reasonable argument could be made that the people in this newly formed country had generational memory of what it was like to be dependant and without voice, and therefore were inclined to eventually break with tradition and allow the un-propertied men, women and freed slaves the right to vote. (Wood 178) In one passage in Wood's work, Radicalism of the American Revolution, there is an idea that represents one of the most radical of this newly formed nation, though not quite the later reality of universal suffrage still a radical notion in and of itself;