THE SOCIAL IMPACT OF THE REVOLUTION

AMERICAN ENTERPRISE INSTITUTE'S DISTINGUISHED LECTURE SERIES Robert Nisbet, historical sociologist and intellectual historian, is Albert Schweitzer professor-elect o[ the humanities at Columbia University. ROBERTA. NISBET THE SOCIAL IMPACT OF THE REVOLUTION Distinguished Lecture Series on the Bicentennial

This lecture is one in a series sponsored by the American Enterprise Institute in celebration of the Bicentennial of the United States. The views expressed are those of the lecturers and do not necessarily reflect the views of the staff,officers or trustees of AEI. All of the lectures in this series will be collected later in a single volume.

revolution · continuity · promise ROBERTA. NISBET THE SOCIAL IMPACT OF THE REVOLUTION

Delivered in Gaston Hall, Georgetown University, Washington, D.C. on December 13, 1973

American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research Washington, D.C. © 1974 by American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research, Washington, D.C. ISBN 0-8447-1303-1 Library of Congress Catalog Card Number L.C. 74-77313 Printed in the United States of America as there in fact an American Revolution at the end of the eighteenth century? I mean a revolu­ tion involving sudden, decisive, and irreversible changes in social institutions, groups, and traditions, in addition to the war of libera­ tion from England that we are more likely to celebrate. Clearly, this is a question that generates much controversy. There are scholars whose answer to the question is strongly nega­ tive, and others whose affirmativeanswer is equally strong. Indeed, ever since Edmund Burke's time there have been students to de­ clare that revolution in any precise sense of the word did not take place-that in substance the American Revolution was no more than a group of Englishmen fighting on distant shores for tradi­ tionally English political rights against a government that had sought to exploit and tyrannize. The essence, in other words, was a war of restitution and liberation, not revolution; the outcome, one set of political governors replaced by another. This view is widespread in our time and is found as often among ideological conservatives as among liberals and radicals. At the opposite extreme is the view that a full-blown revolu­ tion: did indeed take place. This is clearly what John Adams believed: "The Revolution was in the minds and hearts of people; a change in their religious sentiments, of their duties and obliga­ tions. . . . This radical change in the principles, opinions, senti­ ments, and affectsof the people was the real American Revolution." And Samuel Adams, more radical in ideology and hence more demanding in defining a revolution, asked rhetorically, "Was

1 there ever a revolution brought about, especially one so important as this, without great internal tumults and violent convulsions?" If there was a genuine revolution in America we shall find it not in the sphere of ideological tractarianism-which, history demonstrates, may or may not yield actual revolution-but rather in the social sphere. The comparative study of revolution makes clear, I think, that the heart of each of the great modern revolu­ tions is to be seen in the complex of authorities, functions, bonds, and allegiances which we define as social. More specifically, I refer to property, kinship, religion, and social class. I shall refer to this area, following the practice of many French historians of the mod­ ern area, as intermediate-that is, intermediate between individual and state. Without exception, the major revolutions of modern history have had immense and sometimes devastating effects upon this intermediate area. Whether we follow Tocqueville and Taine in seeing centralization and collectivization of political power as the principal consequence of revolution, or more radical historians in seeing individual liberty and welfare as the chief consequence, it is invariably the ties rising from land, kindred, class, estate, and servitude of one kind or another that are at the heart of the matter. If there was indeed a revolution as well as a war of liberation in America at the end of the eighteenth century, we should find its evidences in this intermediate social sphere. It is always useful to turn to comparative aspects of one's subject. Consider the French Revolution. Scholars may differ among themselves as to whether, in the final analysis, it was the individual with his rights and liberties or the political state with its centralized power and national solidarity that had the greater triumph. But what obviously is not subject to debate, what is unmistakably clear, is that the whole complex of social authorities. allegiances, and functions which are intermediate to individual and state, so largely the heritage of the medieval period, was vitally changed during the French Revolution. The real essence of this Revolution was not its reign of terror, formidable as that was, but the legislation enacted by successive revolutionary governments­ legislation that profoundly affected the nobility, the traditional family, the corporate nature of property, the laws of primogeniture

2 and entail, the place of religion in society, the guilds, and other elements of traditional society. Allowing only for inevitable differencesof detail and intensity, such changes in intermediate society are to be seen vividly in other modern revolutions-in some degree in the Puritan Revolu­ tion of seventeenth century England, in far greater degree in the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, and in our own time in some of the New Nations in the non-Western world. Whether in Europe or in other places, modern patterns of social individualism and political unification, even collectivism, take their rise in revolu­ tionary circumstances, in the impact of political power, upon this intermediate social sphere. Now, it is worth stressing that this sphere is commonly feudal in nature when we find it being assaulted by the hammer blows of revolution, using the word "feudal" in its broadest sense. More than any other type of social organization, feudalism seems not only to invite but to succumb to revolution. I am inclined to think that it invites revolution because it virtually consecrates inequality-the prime cause of revolution everywhere, as Tocque­ ville pointed out-and that it succumbs rather easily because of its seeming inability to command wide loyalties and because it is un­ able, by its nature, to mobilize the necessary military power quickly and effectively. Its characteristic diffusion and decentralization of power results in an inability to draw upon power in crises. Marxists have told us much about how capitalism and its associated political structures are subject to revolution. But, in all truth, all the revo­ lutions of modern history have been those launched against systems more nearly feudal than capitalist. It may well be true, as a long line of scholars beginning with Tocqueville has emphasized, that the overriding effect of modernity in both its economic and politi­ cal manifestations is to sterilize the revolutionary impulse. I

In light of these observations, let us now consider our main subject, the American Revolution. Was there in the colonies a social order that can reasonably be called

3 feudal? Can conflicts ongmating in inequality, in social class, property, and religion be discerned, in whatever degree, analogous to the conflicts leading up to the English, French, and Russian revolutions? Finally, can substantial changes, effected politically, within revolutionary circumstances, be found taking place in the social structure of America during the two decades following the outbreak of war with England? If answers to these questions are affirmative, as I think they are, then I believe we are obliged to accept the view that revolution in the true sense of this word did indeed take place at the end of the eighteenth century in America, and that a good deal more than mere war of liberation from England was at work. That nothing resembling the zeal, ferocity, and terror of the other revolutions is to be found in the American experience need not be stressed here. That fact is obvious. But, as I have suggested, the essence of any genuine revolution is not the terror that may or may not be associated with it, nor even the kind of millennialist passion that is so often to be observed in modern revolutions. The essence lies in the social changes involved: changes in such institutions as property, family, religion, and social class. These changes, as I want to show, were very much a part of the American experience at the end of the eighteenth century. The first point to make clear is that there was indeed a solid substructure of feudalism in the American colonies. Since a "feudal stage" has so often been denied to the Americans, has so often been effaced by historians in their stress on the homogeneous middle­ class character of American colonial history, we must be emphatic on this point. Needless to say, in referring to feudalism, I do not mean the tidy thing Sir Henry Spelman had in mind when he coined the word in the seventeenth century, much less the ideal feudalism planned for Jerusalem by the medieval Crusaders. (It would indeed have been hard to findthat feudalism even in Europe by the eighteenth century. And it is chastening to bear in mind that more than a few continental scholars have denied England its feudalism on the ground that the oath exacted by William I of all freemen in England in 1086 instantaneously removed the possi­ bility of the true hierarchy of power, the stress upon intermediate institutions, and the decentralization which define feudalism.)

4 From the point of view of the comparative historian and soci­ ologist, feudalism has less to do with political and military struc­ tures, with knights, castles, and dukedoms, than with what Marc Bloch calls "the ties of dependence" uniting individuals of all classes into a society. When we find a people in a large area for whom there is little sense of. collective political solidarity, little centralization of administration, but great consciousness of local­ ism, regionalism, and of the whole realm of intermediate associa­ tion that begins with kinship, parish, and local community-a people strong in social classes and the obligations they embody, tending to make little distinction between the authority of property and the authority of law, depending heavily upon custom and tradition rather than prescriptive law, and closely associated with the land generation after generation in family lines-when we find these elements we can properly refer to a feudal society, at least in the social and economic sense of the word. I am inclined to think that a feudal system necessarily emerges whenever a relatively small number of persons seek to live in a new territory with great expanses of land to be had by the well-off or energetic, where ties with a central authority are weak or absent, where localism is enforced by topography as well as custom, and where landed property tends to create the fundamental rights and privileges in society. Certainly by the middle of the eighteenth century the American colonies met these and other distinctively feudal criteria, no matter how loath we may be to apply these criteria to Pilgrims and others of established historical fancy who, as we are prone to believe, left not only Europe but all European history behind them when they came to the New World. In the colonies land counted for a very great deal. What Sir Lewis Namier has written with England in mind applies no less to the American colonies: The relations of groups of men to plots of land, or organized communities to units of territory, form the basic content of political history ...; social stratifications and convulsions, primarily arising from relationship of men to land, make the greater, not always conscious, part of the domestic history of nations-and even under urban

5 '

and industrial conditions ownership of land counts for more than is usually supposed. 1 From Maine to Georgia American life was rooted in the land, and this was just as true of New England-its fisheries and manu­ factures, so often exaggerated in their importance, notwithstand­ ing-as it was in other parts of America. And where a social system is rooted in the land, land-hunger is the common and abiding accompaniment, and it directs itself particularly to the large manorial estates. These were much in evidence, New England excepted, in the colonies. We are told that nearly three million acres in New York alone were occupied by large, essentially manorial estates. The Van Rensselaer manor up the Hudson alone measured some twenty-four by twenty miles. The Fairfax · estate in Virginia had, at the height of its prosperity, some six million acres. There were very large estates in the Carolinas, and in most of the other colonies as well-New England alone, as I say, forming the exception. How could there not have been a substan­ tial admixture of feudalism in those parts of the colonies where such land holdings existed, assuming, as we have every right to assume, the grafting onto these of customs, conventions, and authorities brought to the New World from the Old? There were indeed small independent farms in America. But so were there in England long before the Puritan Revolution, and in France just prior to the Revolution there. We have Georges Lefebvre's word for it in his valuable study of the French Revolu­ tion that the majority of the French peasants had been free for generations and were in possession of some 30 percent of all French land at the time of the outbreak of that Revolution. These facts in no way minimize the hatred in both England and France for the large manors and their withholding of land from possible purchase and for the inequalities which were bound to seem intolerable once an opportunity for ending them arose. I would not for a moment suppose these hatreds were ever as great in the colonies as they were in France where class ties were much older and more deeply set. But to suppose they were altogether absent in the colonies is to suppose nonsense.

1 Lewis Namier, England in the Age of the American Revolution (New York: Mentor Books, 1964), p. 17.

6 From these great manorial holdings in America sprang a class system that was a vivid, if today often minimized, feature of colonial life. Feudal in essence, it had the large landowners at the top. In wealth, power, breeding, and culture, this upper class was a fit analogue to anything in England. As Richard B. Morris has emphasized, families such as the Livingstons, De Lanceys, and Schuylers had a place in social class and in politics not a bit differ­ ent from what was enjoyed in England at that time by such mem­ bers of the nobility as the Duke of Bedford, the Marquess of Rockingham, and Lord Shelburne.2 Below the landed class fell tenant farmers, artisans, mechanics, small freeholders, laborers, indentured servants and, not to be forgotten, the very large class . of Negro slaves. There was little rhetoric in colonial times about homogeneity and equality when it came to classes as distinct in their powers and privileges as some of these were. Jackson Turner Main, in his The Social Structure of Revolutionary America, has concluded indeed that the long-term tendency was "toward greater inequality, with marked class distinctions." Such distinctions, it may be safely inferred, were cultural and social, even psychological, as well as economic and political. Nor were class lines absent from the cities. Carl Bridenbaugh's studies of urban colonial America have made us vividly aware of the highly developed sense of solidarity-on a national, not simply local, basis-within the upper class that could be found in each of America's five important cities. A great deal of the inbreeding and the close social and political solidarity Sir Lewis Namier has found in eighteenth century England existed, and was surely increasing in intensity, in pre­ revolutionary America. An established religon is another aspect of life that is feudal in root and connotation. In most of the colonies religious estab­ lishment existed in one degree or other. Congregationalism reigned in Massachusetts, New Hampshire and Connecticut, and the Church of England in a number of other colonies. In none, so far as I can ascertain, did a majority of the people actually profess the established faith. Is it difficult to suppose widespread resentment

2 Richard B. Morris, The American Revolution Reconsidered (New York: Harper & Row, 1967), pp. 57-58. In this splendid book Professor Morris builds admirably and also comparatively upon the seminal insights of J. Franklin Jameson and Allan Nevins a generation ago.

7 on the part of this majority at the thought of paying taxes to sup­ port a church they did not belong to and may even have detested? Even where, as was sometimes the case, taxes were light and only randomly collected, the symbolic aspect was important. It always is in these matters. Can one imagine, other than that the large numbers of Presbyterians, Lutherans, Baptists, and Methodists in Virginia, say, deeply resented paying taxes in support of the Church of England and a clergy notoriously given to sloth and drink? Where feudalism exists in any degree, so do the customs of primogeniture and entail, the first granting inheritance of fixed property only to the oldest son, the second fixing land firmly to family line. These customs were to be found all over Europe, and it would have been extraordinary if the European settlers had not brought them to America. In fact, all the colonies knew both customs down until just before the time of the Revolution. When the Revolution broke out, only two colonies had abolished primo­ geniture, only one entail. And, as I shall indicate in a moment, among all the changes effected in the states after the war with England had ended, few could have been more popular, judging from the speed with which they took place, than those which terminated these ancient feudal restrictions on the inheritance of property. I am aware that some historians of the American Revolution belittle the seriousness for the colonists of the laws of primogeniture and entail and of religious establishment, because contemporary research into the records of that time finds evidence of only infre­ quent legal recourse or attempted recourse. But the comparative study of revolutions makes plain enough that there is little cor­ relation between the symbolic importance of issues involved in revolutions and measurable hardship. After all, is it likely that the issue of busing in our time, which we know to be of very high importance indeed with the American public, will loom that im­ portant a century hence when there are only legal records to examine? The same can be said of the significance of the undoubted economic prosperity the colonies had experienced for decades be­ fore the war with England. Given this prosperity, it is sometimes argued, social tensions could not have been severe. Again, how­ ever, we learn from the study of revolutions that there is nothing

8 so calculated to focus attention upon social resentments as a period of relative economic prosperity, one that raises popular expecta­ tions and demands. n I have suggested that there was a distinct feudal character to American colonial society, that inequal­ ities existed which could only have generated tensions akin to (if not necessarily as intense as) those in Europe where the inequali­ ties were necessarily much older, and that in matters of social class, religion, and property a real ferment can be found-the kind of ferment comparative history teaches us so often results in revo­ lution. But would there have been a revolution in these social areas if the war with England had not broken out? Would internal social tensions themselves have led to revolution? The answer lies not simply in an intensive study of the American experience but in a comparative study of all modern Western revolutions. My own guess, and it can only be that, is that no such revolu­ tion would have occurred without a precipitating war in which ideological values were strong. Quite probably the social changes we see in the American Revolution would have occurred more slowly, under the spur of rising pressures during the next century, as such changes occurred in Canada. But who can be sure in these matters? The nature and consequences of a revolution are better known than the residual causes. So large is the myth that revolu­ tions are invariably caused by volcanic pressures from below that we still find it difficult to fix attention upon factors other than these pressures. But such factors, although widely regarded as only extraneous or coincidental, may prove to have far more to do with causing revolutions than the explanations we so commonly draw from the familiar myth. If war was the necessary precipitating factor in the American social revolution, let it be remembered that war has accompanied each of the other major Western revolutions of modern times. The link between war and revolution is both existentially and historically close, especially when war is either intense or pro-

9 longed. Both destroy traditional authorities, classes, and types of wealth; both create new kinds of power, rank, and wealth. With much reason, conservatives have been as suspicious of war as of revolution. It was, after all, in the wake of war that revolutionary changes occurred in ancient Athens at the end of the fifth century B.C. and in the Rome of Augustus. Nor should it be overlooked that almost all the intensity of the French Revolution burst upon the French people in war and under the justification of war emergency. Much the same is true of the development of commu­ nism in Russia, starting with the period of "war communism" and continuing through the subsequent hostile relationship with the West. Finally, we need only be reminded of the number of elements in modern welfare states whose actual historical origins lie not in socialist ideology, least of all in socialist governments, but rather in periods of war. Consider the United States and such matters as civil rights, minimum wage laws, management-worker councils, guarantees of union organization, improvements in work­ ing conditions, and so on. Now let us again consider the American Revolution, this time looking at the changes which took place so suddenly in traditional social institutions and values, changes fully meriting the label "revolutionary." There is first the relation between land and the family. As I have noted, although discontent with the laws of primogeniture and entail had certainly existed for a long time, only Pennsylvania and Maryland had abolished the former and only South Carolina the latter. Yet within a single decade of the signing of the Declara­ tion of Independence, all but two states abolished entail, and in these two entail had become relatively insignificant in any case. Within another fiveyears, all the states made primogeniture illegal and established some form of partible inheritance. In an astonish­ ingly short time considering the number of separate state actions required, partage force, as the French revolutionaries were to call it, became the law of the land in America. We may not be inclined today to regard abolition of primo­ geniture and entail as a revolutionary change in social structure. It is well to be advised in the matter by two nineteenth century authorities, Frederick Le Play and Alexis de Tocqueville. Le Play, without question the foremost comparative sociologist before Max

10 Weber, considered the abolition of primogeniture and entail the most revolutionary changes effected during the French Revolution. Conservative and traditionalist in spirit as well as scientific in thrust, he thought that the reestablishment of both laws would do more for stability in the France of his day than any other single reform. His notable recommendation of what he called la famille souche (the "stem family") was based upon such a reestablishment. So did Tocqueville regard the forced division of property in­ heritance as a revolutionary change, whether in its French or American form. Looking back a half-century into American his­ tory, on the occasion of his notable visit to America, he spoke of society being "shaken to its center" by the adoption of legislation leading to the abolition of primogeniture and entail. Tocqueville was already steeped in the comparative aspects of the study of revo­ lution, if only by virtue of the obsessive influence of the French Revolution on his young and aristocratic mind, and he knew very well indeed that strong family systems everywhere are rooted in corporateness and continuity of family property. He also knew that the best possible prescription for the individualization and in time, the economic rootlessness of a population is to separate kinship from its foundation, the continuity of landed property. Not only does the law of partible inheritance make it difficult for families to preserve their ancestral domains, Tocqueville pointed out, but it soon deprives them of the desire to attempt the preserva­ tion. No one familiar with the social character of the France of his day, he added, would wish to question the influence of partible inheritance. Tocqueville, after interviewing responsible Americans in order to discover the effects of the abolition of primogeniture and entail, was convinced that the effects were substantial. Historians of our own day such as Jameson, Nevins, and Morris only echo his conviction (though with far greater documentation). One need reflect but a moment on the incentives-to land speculators, not to mention to the heirs-that would have been aroused by this abolition. Only two states, North Carolina and New Jersey, failed to include daughters as well as sons in the new laws of inheritance. Elsewhere full equality was the rule. As we think about it, the uniformity of action in the thirteen states is little short of astonishing. By comparison, how simple it

11 was for France to effect such changes two decades later. After all, there only a single act by a single body of lawmakers was required, such was the centralization that had been wrought by monarchs and then confirmed by the revolutionary assembly. The same can be said of analogous Russian changes following the triumph of the Bolsheviks. How remarkable, then, that in America one of the most telling acts of equalization known in social history was effected virtually in unison by thirteen different legislatures. To say, as many American students of the Revolution have said, that laws of primogeniture and entail mattered little in the colonies-that they were at best hardly more than vestigial memories-scarcely fits the swift and uniform eradication of these laws by the state legislatures. Nor, in this connection, should we overlook the revolutionary impact of the confiscations of large estates owned by Tories, with shares of these holdings going to American patriots. The exact number of acres involved is less significant than the fact of confis­ cation and distribution. For an appropriate parallel in our own day we should have to imagine government confiscation of a sub­ stantial number of large "disloyal" business corporations, with ownership of shares given over to loyal citizens of our nation. The popular sense of revolutionary acquisition in that day of over­ whelmingly landed wealth should not be underestimated. If it is said that these confiscations of Tory estates were mea­ sures of war-that is, acts of retribution against those who refused to disavow their ties with England-the same must be said of the later expropriations of the noble estates in France during the Revolution there. It was not originally out of passion for the abstract ideal of equality that the Jacobins took over the estates of certain aristocrats: if this had been the case, all of the land holdings of the French nobility would have been seized. But this was not what happened. French expropriations, like those earlier in Amer­ ica, were levelled at estate holders who had joined the enemy when war broke out. Again the lesson is taught: war is often as much the confiscator and equalizer as is revolution itself and it is not always easy to tell their effects apart. Inevitably the shocks of the war with England were to produce revolutionary consequences in the religious as well as the civil

12 realm. Agitation for release from the exactions of religious estab­ lishment could hardly help but become part of the very act of war against England in those colonies where the Church of England was established. And this agitation was bound to have reverberations in those colonies where the Congregational Church was established. True,the laws on religion were not everywhere overthrown in a single spasm. In parts of New England disestablishment did not occur until the nineteenth century. Nor was there by any means firm agreement among the leaders of the revolutionary war as to its desirability. John Adams and others had serious misgivings on the matter,and those Baptists and Quakers who had begun to work for religious freedom before the Revolution found considerable opposition to their labors. It was the Revolution that changed this situation substantially. Granted that "disestablishment was neither an original goal nor completely a product of the Revolution," as Professor Bailyn has properly noted,it remains nevertheless true,also in Bailyn's words, that everything already existing along this line was "touched by the magic of Revolutionary thought,and ...transformed." 3 It may be true that even had there been no Revolution,no war with England,disestablishment would still have taken place in due time. But the length of time actually required in parts of New England, and the fierce debate on the matter in Virginia where the Declara­ tion of Rights was promulgated in 1776,should make us chary of assuming the certainty and especially the rapidity of change in this area. How important religious liberty became to Americans as a result of the Revolution is evidenced by one response to the Consti­ tution when this document was given to the states for ratification. The lack of any safeguards for liberty of faith at once struck critics in all sections. The Virginia Convention proposed an amendment guaranteeing freedom of con­ science. North Carolina's Convention seconded the pro­ posal, adopting the same language. . . . In the first Congress attention was directed to the oversight by James

3 Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1967), p. 271.

13 Madison, and the required guarantee was made the first constitutional amendment proposed to the nation.4 It is hardly necessary to stress here that, of all the consequences of the American Revolution, the most heralded in other parts of the world was the firm creation of religious freedom. Tocqueville was but one of many who thought this creation the most remarkable of American achievements. There remains the profound and deeply troubling question of the Negro slaves in America at the time of the Revolution. It would be splendid indeed if we could say that under the principles of liberty and equality proclaimed by the American founders these slaves had been given their freedom. Obviously we cannot. But from this it by no means follows that the position of the Negroes in America was insulated from revolutionary thought and action­ not by any means. There were at the time of the Revolution-there had been for years in America-leading men who found the thought of slavery repugnant. It would have been strange if the agitation of the 1770s and 1780s, touching as it did so many vital areas, had not also touched the problem of slavery. At the time the Revolution broke out, there were about a half million slaves in the thirteen colonies-most of them in the South, but a fair number, perhaps 55,000, in the North. The first anti-slavery society in the United States, or anywhere else for that matter, was founded in April 1775, largely by Philadelphia Quakers. Other soc;ietiessoon followed. The Continental Congress in 1774 had decreed an "American Association" (that is, a non­ importation agreement), and the prohibition on slave trading seems to have held up throughout the war. Legislatures began to act. In July 1774, Rhode Island enacted a law that thenceforth all slaves brought into the colony should be free. The law's preamble, which begins as follows, is instructive: Whereas the inhabitants of America are generally engaged in the preservation of their own rights and liberties, among which that of personal freedom must be considered as the greatest, and as those who are desirous

4 Allan Nevins, The American States During and After the Revolution, 1775-1798 (Clifton, N. J.: Augustus M. Kelley, 1924), p. 440.

14 of enjoying all the advantages of liberty themselves should be willing to extend personal liberty to others ....5 Delaware prohibited importation in 1776, Virginia in 1778, and Maryland in 1783 (for a term of years), with North Carolina imposing an increased duty on each Negro imported. Even more to the point, the states where there were few slaves proceeded under the stimulus of the Revolution to effect the immediate or gradual abolition of slavery itself. In short, the seeds of abolitionism were first planted as one of the major acts of the American Revolution. True, there is a conflicting element in this that it would be dis­ ingenuous not to mention. A great many blacks saw, and had every reason to see, more hope of freedom with the British than with American plantation owners. Nor were the British timid about using the bait of freedom for the blacks as a weapon against the Americans. Moreover, there can be no doubt that the eagerness with which a good many southern plantation owners entered the war sprang from fear that an English victory would bring emancipa­ tion for the slaves. In other words, a case could be made that war with England only hardened the determination of many southerners to maintain the institution of slavery.6 Even so, we cannot miss the strong tide of abolitionism that rose at the time of the Revolution. The minds of the men who led that Revolution and its war were sensitive and humane. The contrast between the principles of freedom and equality on the one hand and the presence of a half million black slaves on the other no more escaped men like Jefferson and Adams than it did Edmund Burke and other Whigs in England. It is precisely aware­ ness of this contrast that marks the real beginning of the long and tragic story of black liberation in America, a story that would have its next great episode in the Civil War and that would still be going on during the black civil rights revolution of the 1960s. We must concede that the American Revolution failed the Negro. Nevertheless, as Bernard Bailyn has written, "as long as the institution of slavery lasted, the burden of proof would lie with

O Quoted in J. Franklin Jameson, The American Revolution Considered as a Social Movement (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1926), p. 36. o Morris, The American Revolution Reconsidered, p. 74.

15 its advocates to show why the statement that 'all men are created equal' did not mean precisely what it said: all men, 'white or black."' 7 And Benjamin Quarles, whose study of the Negro in the American Revolution is the most detailed investigation of the subject yet made, has written: The American Revolution touches all classes in society, even Negroes. On the eve of the conflict, the same religious and political idealism that stirred the resistance to Britain deepened the sentiment against slavery.... Ultimately the colored people of America benefited from the irreversible commitment of the new nation to the principles of liberty and equality. 8 m Now I want to turn to a very dif­ ferent aspect of my subject: the justly celebrated moderateness of spirit of the American Revolution, the absence of the kind of passion, zeal, and millennialist conviction that in other countries produced terror and left a heritage of bitterness lasting to the present day. I have suggested that a revolution did indeed occur in America, one involving social structures and values, the same ones indeed which form the substance of the European revolutions. Why, then, did no Terror, no Thermidor, no military dictatorship make its appearance? We cannot doubt that egalitarianism was buoyant in America; we need look only at the many pamphlets written and circulated before and during the revolutionary war. Nor can we doubt that significant sections of the American people were bound to have felt the impact of laws directed at slavery, against religious establishment and traditional inheritance of property, not to emphasize the expropriation of estates. It is absurd to pretend we are dealing with issues which are not explosive, which do not ordinarily arouse the deepest passions. How do we

7 Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, p. 246. s Benjamin Quarles, The Negro in the American Revolution (Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 1967), p. 197.

16 account for the fact of the widespread spirit of acceptance of the Revolution in America, a spirit that included conservatives, liberals, and radicals, a spirit properly characterized as one of con­ sensus and continuity? Clearly these questions are difficult ones, and the efforts of some of our best historians have gone into their answer. There are those who explain the spirit of moderation by simply denying that a revolution worthy of the name occurred at all. This answer I have already rejected. There is no question in my mind that a real social revolution took place. Other historians speak of a spirit of moderation and pragmatism in the American experience that contrasts with the ideological passions of Europe. This does not, however, carry us very far, for such an explanation only restates, albeit in causative terms, what requires explanation: that is, the spirit of moderateness. In any event, looking at the subsequent history of America, from the War of 1812 through the Civil War down to World War I and II, and bearing in mind some of the fierce ideological passions that have flared often enough in our history, it would be risky to appeal to any such embedded spirit. Finally, there are many writers who refer to the temper of the leadership that the American Revolution was fortunate in having. We cannot fail to see the restraint, responsibility, and wisdom of such men as John Adams, Jefferson, Madison, Dickinson, Franklin, Hamilton, and others, and I would not for a moment dismiss the importance of this factor. It is crucial. It does leave the question, however, of how such restrained and moderate leadership survived throughout. After all, the English and French revolutions began in moderation, and something of the same can be said of the Russian if we are willing to consider the Kerensky government the first phase of that Revolution. In sum, there were men of good judgment, temperateness, and moderation at one time or other in command of the European revolutions, as well as the American. Why, then, we must ask, did revolutions succumb to ever more radical and zealous leaders in Europe but not in America where individuals of this stripe assuredly existed? Any answer to so complex a question must be offeredin the spirit of hypothesis. And it is in that spirit alone that I present the following possible explanations:

17 First, the American Revolution was, by virtue of the nature of colonial America, a dispersed revolution. This dispersion flowed from the demographic character of American colonial life-a char­ acter evidenced in the lack of social and political channels through which strong collective passions might easily have flowed. Nothing comparable to a London, Paris or Moscow existed in America, no large city steeped in historical traditions of turbulence and occasional revolt. Our five cities were small and uncongested by European standards, lacking moreover the kinds of visible evi­ dences of extreme wealth or extreme poverty that could only be inflammatory in the European cities where revolutions broke out. Tensions rooted in social and economic conditions certainly existed in New York and Boston, and possibly in our other cities; but there was not, there could not have been, the cumulative disorder or the air of incipient revolt we know to have existed in the great European cities, if only by virtue of their size _and long histories. Nor was there anything in America, either before or after the Revolution, approximating the centralization of political power and administration that England, France, and Russia knew so well before the outbreaks of their revolutions. The concentrated nature of the French and Russian revolutions especially must be seen against a background of long developing centralization. Each of the European revolutions was a focused revolution, which made it easy for the sudden passions of ideologues or the crowd to be trans­ lated into acts which could affect the entire country. In America, we must look to the thirteen separate colonies or states to findthe vital elements of the social revolution. Communi­ cation among the colonies and states there certainly was; but it was communication among separate, independent, and proud political societies, and, as we know only too well, acts taken by the Constitutional Convention and then by the new federal govern­ ment were watched carefully, often jealously, by the states. Disper­ sion and decentralization of power thus moderated passion and inclination so far as the nation as a whole was concerned. The vital principle of countervailing power-of intermediate authority, of division of rule-operated to reduce, at least for a long time, the national impact of intellectual and social movements arising in any one part of the nation.

18 Second, religion remained a strong force in American society. I mean independent religion, one that was plural in manifestation, closely connected with locality and region, and not easy to mix with political passions. Admittedly religion as a cultural force seems to have declined somewhat during the eighteenth century, but once the symbols of establishment were removed, evangelical religions began to transform the religious landscape. We could not explain the immense burst of religiosity in the 1820s and later-carrying with it the birth of many new faiths and lasting through the century -if seeds of it had not been present earlier. This seizure of so much of the American mind by incontest­ ably religious values and aspirations consumed psychic energy that might otherwise have gone into political ideology and political movement. As students of the French Revolution from Edmund Burke down to Hannah Arendt have observed, it was with religious passion translated into political action that the Jacobins dealt with government and society. In the English Revolution, by the time it was well under way and the New Model Army had become a revolutionary as well as a military force, the line between religion and political evangelism was very thin indeed. In the twentieth century, Marxism has become the substitute for established religion in Russia and everywhere else that it has taken command. But how very different was the American experience. No one saw more clearly than Tocqueville, when he visited America during the Age of Jackson, how vital to democratic government is the existence of a strong, separate, autonomous religion-a religion that can prevent man's religious nature, his desire for the sacred, from seeking fulfillment through government or political ideology. In America, as was not the case in France or Russia, revolution never had a chance to become God. Third, and closely related to the first two factors, is the idea of voluntary association. Even before Tocqueville marvelled at the fact, the American profusion of voluntary associations was well known in Europe and (as a matter of national pride) in America. Our reputation for being a nation of joiners was made early, and neither the fact nor the reputation could have been possible had it not been for an American attitude toward these associations vitally different from any attitude easily discovered in most European countries at the time. The hatred of internal asso-

19 ciations by the French revolutionaries, a hatred manifest not only in the destruction of the guilds, monasteries, and other bodies deriving from the past, but also in explicit prohibition of almost all new associations, never existed in the United States. No specific constitutional provision guaranteed freedom of association but, given the guarantees of freedom of assembly and petition along with the strong social and cultural roots of the phenomenon, volun­ tary associations thrived. Granted there were occasional popular outbursts against the association that might seem an antidemocratic or secret society-for example, the Society of Cincinnati. But animus against voluntary associations for mutual aid or for eleemosynary, religious, journalistic, intellectual, and other pur­ poses was not often found either at the grass roots or in government. Few things are so calculated to divert human inclinations from focusing on the capture of political power and on a consuming ideology as the necessary avenue to secular salvation as is the pro­ liferation of intermediate, voluntary, and autonomous associations. The American Revolution did not choke off voluntary association, as did the French and the Russian. Voluntary associations in America could become not merely a functional refuge of the individual but also a buffer against the invasions of political cen­ tralization. It is safe to say that a great deal of American passion that would otherwise surely have gone into political movements went instead into the innumerable intermediate associations which, along with local, regional, and religious loyalties, made the Ameri­ can social landscape so different from the French in the nineteenth century. Fourth, post-revolutionary America had few if any of the politically important class divisions that we find in Europe. As I have stressed, the colonies did indeed have social classes, very distinct ones, and these were almost certainly becoming much sharper before the Revolution. It was in fact the war with England that significantly changed the pattern of social class in America, both moderating the thrust of pre-revolutionary class factors and, more important, preventing any class from becoming forever identified with a political position rising from the Revolution. Although it is true that most wealthy, educated, and socially influentialAmericans sided with Britain, in one degree or another, and that most members of the lower classes chose the side of the

20 Continental Congress, there were altogether too many exceptions in each instance to make any generalization easy-to give, that is, a distinct character of class conflict to the war. I do not think I exaggerate my point here. All serious students of social class, including Karl Marx, have noted the vital impor­ tance of conflict-conflict that is political in character, ideological in thrust-in shaping and hardening classes. Had the upper class in America solidly opposed the war instead of supplying most of that war's leaders, and had the lower class alone supported the war, the outcome (assuming war would have taken place at all) would almost certainly have been a class structure like that of Western Europe, with ideological conflict to match. That such a class structure did not materialize in America-much to the dismay of Marxists later-is, it would seem, the result of the "accident" of the war against England. For, with tenant farmers, indentured servants, and even Negroes frequently to be found on the Tory side, along with members of the upper class, and with the same kinds of individuals to be found on the patriot side, along with their leaders who were of the upper classes of New England and the South, only the slightest "class-angling" of the revolutionary war was possible. Fifth, and by no means least in importance, I would adduce the absence of an intellectual class in America at the time of the Revolution as one of the prime reasons for the lack of ideological zeal and political ferocity both during and after the Revolution. That there were individuals of superb education, well grounded in philosophy, including the philosophy of natural rights, is not to be disputed. Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, John Dickinson and a good many others did not have to defer to the brightest of intellectual lights in the salons of Europe. And, as we know, the passion for freedom, equality, and national fraternity was strong in their hearts. As well as being philosophers, they were activists in every sense of the word. Even so, they did not constitute the kind of intellectual class Europe has been noted for at least since the Renaissance. I am referring, of course, to the class of political intellectuals of which the Philosophes in France were such iridescent examples, a class that (as both Burke and Tocqueville stressed) had so much to do not only with setting the intellectual background of the Revolution

21 in France but also with giving that Revolution the special ideologi­ cal ferocity it came to have by 1791. This class may be said to have begun with the politically minded humanists of the Italian Renais­ sance, and it grew steadily in size during the succeeding centuries. We properly include in it not only the humanists and their succes­ sors, the Philosophes, but also, later, the revolutionistes of 1848 (to be found in just about all coffee houses on the continent), Saint-Simonians, Fourierists, Positivists and, eventually anarchists, socialists, and communists. Its dominant characteristics are and have been, from the time of the humanists' rootlessness in society, an adversary position toward polity, and a fascination with power and its uses. The capacity of this class for ideological fanaticism, for sacrifice of life and institution alike in the name of principle, and even for outright blood-lust and terror is well known to com­ parative students of modern revolutions. This class was, however, almost totally lacking in America before and during the Revolution. Our principal intellectual leaders were, without exception, deeply rooted in the social order. For Jefferson or Adams or Dickinson, learning, even great learning in philosophy and the arts, could go with membership in society. It did not invite alienation or revolt. The intellectual leaders of the American Revolution were overwhelmingly landowners: they had a stake in society. That either a Jefferson or a Hamilton could have renounced what Burke called the wisdom of expediency in the interest of pursuing an abstract principle is inconceivable. No more could any of the American leaders have contemplated with delight mass executions or imprisonments, as did the millen­ nialist intellectuals of 1649, 1793, and 1917. At no point in the American Revolution or in its aftermath do we find any New Model Army Council of Agitators, any Committee of Public Safety after the French fashion, any Council of the People's Commissars, any Lilburnes, Robespierres, or Lenins. I am inclined to think that nothing so completely gave the American Revolution its distinc­ tive character as the absence in it of the European species of political intellectual. It is only in the present century that we have seen this species coming into prominence in America. In conclusion, I would argue that there was indeed an American Revolution in the full sense of the word-a social, moral, and institutional revolution that effected major changes in the

22 character of American society-as well as a war of liberation from England that was political in nature. And those who have seen it as a revolution of "great internal tumults and violent convul­ sions," as Sam Adams saw it, are on the whole better guides to its nature than those who have chosen to see it as only a war that changed one set of political governors for another. We err, it seems to me, in making the special fanaticism and ideological terror of the French and Russian revolutions the touchstone of revolution. To deny the status of revolution because of the absence of these qualities is like denying the status of war because of the absence of atrocities. Furthermore, to see the American Revolution as a merely "local" affair fails utterly to account for the excitement it created in other parts of the world. Thomas Jefferson's words to John Adams reflect the universalism so many of the leaders of the Revolution saw in the events and changes beginning in 1775: "The flames kindled on the fourth of July, 1776, have spread over too much of the globe to be extinguished by the feeble engines of despotism." And as Richard B. Morris has made evident, it is sheer travesty to see and to proclaim the American Revolution as a central experience in our national life "and to ignore the liber­ tarian currents that the event set off throughout the world." Certainly the view does gross injury to the sensibilities and percep­ tions of those who led the Revolution. The line from the social revolution of the 1770s to the civil rights revolution of the 1960s is a direct one. It is a line that passes through the Civil War-itself certainly not without revolutionary implication-and through a host of changes in the status of Ameri­ cans of all races, beliefs, and classes. The United States has indeed undergone a process of almost permanent revolution. I can think of no greater injustice to ourselves, as well as to the makers of revolution in Philadelphia, than to deny that fact and to allow the honored word revolution to be preempted today by spokesmen for societies which, through their congealed despotisms, have made revolution all but impossible.

23 Cover and book design: Pat Taylor Gaston Hall, the main assembly hall of Georgetown UniversiLy, was built by the Alumni Association in recognition of Lhe university's cenLennial in 1889. Pamphlets in AEI's Distinguished Lecture Series on the Bicentennial of the United States, 1973 - 74

• Irving Kristol The American Revolution as a Successful Revolution

• Martin Diamond The Revolution of Sober Expectations

• Paul G. Kauper The Higher Law and the Rights of Man in a Revolutionary Society

• Robert A. Nisbet The Social Impact of the Revolution

Gordon Stewart Wood Revolution and the Political Integration of the Enslaved and Disenfranchi:;;ed

Caroline Robbins The Pursuit of Happiness

Peter L. Berger Religion in a Revolutionary Society

G. Warren Nutter Freedom in a Revolutionary Economy

Vermont Royster The American Press and the Revolutionary Tradition

Edward C. Banfield The City and the Revolutionary Tradition

Leo Marx The.American Revolution and the American Landscape

Ronald S. Berman American Culture and the Climate of Revolution

Kenneth B. Clark The American Revolution: Democratic Politics and Popular Education

Daniel P. Moynihan Human Welfare and the Principles of Revolution

Forrest Carlisle Pogue The Revolutionary Transformation of the Art of War

Charles Burton Marshall American Foreign Policy as a Dimension of the American Revolution

Dean Rusk The American Revolution and the Future

• Now available in print.