The Written Word and the American Revolution

Introduction: The Power of Ideas in Revolution

"The pen is mightier than the sword" — so it has been said. Great events in human history have been shaped by the written word, and the American Revolution is no exception. In order to bring a people to the point of overthrowing their established government, that people must first be stirred to action. They must be convinced of the errors of the old ways and shown a new path forward. The eighteenth century was full of individuals who described the shortcomings of their society and wrote down their thoughts on its ideal direction.

In France, Voltaire, Rousseau, and the other philosophes described revolutionary forms of government and society. In America, Thomas Paine, Thomas Jefferson, and their fellows expanded on these ideas and plotted strategies for change. Original thoughts on social and political reform were mingled with observations of other cultures, both ancient and modern. For many, Ancient Greece and Rome provided models of idealized democratic and republican government. For others, it was the Six Nations of the Iroquois who presented the ideal type of a free and cooperative people.

Even after the end of the war that brought the American colonies their freedom, the battle continued as the Founding Fathers sought to write laws that would give form and substance to their hard-won liberties. The arguments of the Federalist Papers and the words of the United States Constitution still inform and define the nation today. Millions continue to interpret the thoughts of those long-ago men and women and to live by their values.

French Enlightenment Influences: Rousseau and the Social Contract

The revolutionary fervor of eighteenth-century America owes a large part of its inspiration to the ideas first propounded by the French philosophes. Acting in the spirit of the Enlightenment, these thinkers took it upon themselves to dissect contemporary society, point out its numerous faults, and suggest often radical new social and political arrangements — arrangements they felt were somehow more "natural," or more in keeping with the realities of the human condition. By and large, they envisioned a world without rigid social classes, one in which various forms of democratic governance served to preserve order and advance the interests and happiness of individual men, women, and children.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau developed the concept of a Social Contract based upon notions of a General Will and Popular Sovereignty. The paternalistic relationship between England and its colonies was necessary only so long as the colonies remained scarcely developed: "Children must then remain bound to their father only as long as they have need of him for their own preservation. As soon as this need ceases the natural bond is dissolved" (Brooks, 1996). Rational adults act according to rational laws. The general will of the people governs right action and sets moral standards. Individuals not conforming to the necessary strictures of society — strictures imposed by the General Will for the good of all — will be compelled to conform. In other words, Rousseau was describing a society in which revolution was not only necessary, but incumbent upon a people who had attained maturity.

Thomas Jefferson was an avid reader of Rousseau, taking his ideas and adjusting them to the needs of the new American Republic (Shafer, 2002). The republic that Jefferson would later be instrumental in formulating would include the idea of a social contract between the government and the governed. The British King's violation of the social contract would also serve as the basis for the call to revolution:

"In essence, the King had entered into a contract with his subjects ... that they should enjoy all the rights and liberties of Englishmen for ever ... made with all the colonies, royal governments, as well as charter ones, and once this contract was violated, the King was beyond the constitutional intent of his powers" (Eicholz, 2001, p. 64).

Though not expressly stated as the basis for the king's powers over the American colonies, the social contract was nevertheless always in existence — a natural law that acted upon king and subject alike. The king had violated that law, and the American people were bound to act, or to take the law into their own hands.

Voltaire, Natural Rights, and the American Wilderness

Voltaire, too, provided intellectual fuel for the revolutionary cause. In his eyes, the wide-open spaces of the American wilderness were a paradise of freedom and liberty (Toth, 1989, p. 41). Voltaire was forever attacking the abuses and inconsistencies of the Ancien Régime. Works such as Candide and L'Ingénu revealed at one and the same time the hypocrisy of European mores and the natural goodness and nobility of the "savage" Americans. In L'Ingénu, the main character was a Huron Indian — a perfect symbol for America in its pristine, pre-civilized state. Candide also traveled among native peoples and observed much of their naïve charm and perfection, thoroughly uncontaminated by the over-sophistication and sophistry of European public life.

Like Voltaire, Jefferson and his fellow revolutionaries saw certain rights as fundamental — the natural property of all human beings, present even among the native peoples of the American continent. In later years, as he helped to frame the Constitution, Jefferson clung to exactly these precepts of the immutability of basic human and civil rights. Where other Founding Fathers, like James Madison, argued in favor of a constitution that would be binding on future generations and thus preserve the integrity of the republic for ages to come, Jefferson held that such a contract was inherently unjust and a violation of natural laws:

"The principle of the living owning the Earth was 'fundamental' and 'self-evident.' He wished to lay out his view of the nature of man and society: the living, according to Jefferson, receive as of natural right and not in the form of inheritance, the right to governance of the world. For Jefferson, the 'dead have neither powers nor rights over' the world and as such, any document such as the Constitution, which purports to bind into the future, is contrary to right and illegitimate" (Strang, 2005).

For Jefferson, society and the government that sprang from it were living organisms. Both changed to reflect differing circumstances and the varying needs and aspirations of people. To bind one generation to the desires of a previous one was to deny human beings a basic freedom of choice.