Title: The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution
Author: Bernard Bailyn
Year of Publication: 1967
Thesis:
The American Revolution is something that happened in the minds of thinkers long before the Revolutionary War (see Jefferson quote in 1815 in Chapter I) and especially rooted in British thought, much of what was consumed with concern over the limits of power and conflict with liberty. Questions of representation and limitations of government into distinct spheres to check absolute power were key.
Time: 1600s-Am.Rev. (1776)
Geography: American Colonies
Organization:
Foreword
- That political theorists using terms such as "slavery" "corruption" and "conspiracy" felt these deeply and weren't simply propaganda (to them).
Chapter I - The Literature of Revolution
- Pamphlets are small but long enough to contain full arguments / cheap to produce. Types: public events, polemical series, "ritualistic character of its themes and language." (this style comes from English pamphleteering (includes satire, sarcasm, direct attacks (5,9)
- Denigrates the literary quality of the American pamphlets vs. the British (12-13)
Chapter II - Sources and Traditions
Chapter III - Power and Liberty: A Theory of Politics
IV - The Logic of Rebellion
V - Transformation
- Section in Slavery on "the vengeance of God" added to anti-slavery tracts. (245)
VI - The Contagion of Liberty
Postcript - Fulfillment: A Commentary on the Constitution
Type: Intellectual
Methods:
Sources:
Newspapers, personal correspondence, state papers, speeches (vii) historical essays, political theory & arguments, sermons, poems (ix)
Historiography:
Keywords:
Themes:
power vs. liberty
conspiracy
virtual representation
Critiques:
"It was not grasped by all at once, nor did it become effective evenly through the colonies. But gradually the contradiction be- tween the proclaimed principles of freedom and the facts of life in America became generally recognized. How embarrassing this obvious discrepancy could be to enthusiastic libertarians was re- vealed early in the period." (235) - Seems to me that Black folks had unveiled this critique long before the intellectuals Bailyn is talking about did.
Doesn't use a single slave narrative or any Black thinkers in the slavery section. This definitely centers the antecedents of the Revolution all within European thought.
Questions:
Quotes:
"The transmission from England to America of the literature of political opposition that furnished the substance of the ideology of the Revolution had been so swift in the early years of the eighteenth century as to seem almost instantaneous; and, for reasons that reach into the heart of early American politics, these ideas acquired in the colonies an importance, a relevance in politics, they did not then have - and never would have - in England itself. " (xv)
"The pamphlet of this middle length was perfectly suited to the needs of the Revolutionary writers. It was spacious enough to allow for the full development of an argument- to investigate premises, explore logic, and consider conclusions; it could accommodate the elaborate involutions of eighteenth-century literary forms; it gave range for the publication of fully wrought, leisurely-paced sermons; it could conveniently carry state papers, collections of newspaper columns, and strings of correspondence." (3)
"For while the colonial writers were obviously acquainted with and capable of imitating the forms of sophisticated polemics, they had not truly mastered them; they were rarely capable of keeping their literary contrivances in control." (15)
"For the primary goal of the American Revolution, which transformed American life and introduced a new era in human history, was not the over- throw or even the alteration of the existing social order but the preservation of political liberty threatened by the apparent cor- ruption of the constitution, and the establishment in principle of the existing conditions of liberty. " (19)
"The original issue of the Anglo-American conflict was, of course, the question of the extent of Parliament's jurisdiction in the colonies. But that could not be discussed in isolation. The debate involved eventually a wide range of social and political problems, and it ended by 1776 in what may be called the conceptualization of American life. By then Americans had come to think of themselves as in a special category, uniquely placed by history to capitalize on, to complete and fulfill, the promise of man's existence. The changes that had overtaken their provincial societies, they saw, had been good: elements not of deviance and retrogression but of betterment and progress; not a lapse into primitivism, but an elevation to a higher plane of political and social life than had ever been reached before. Their rustic blemishes had become the marks of a chosen people. "The liberties of mankind and the glory of human nature is in their keeping," John Adams wrote in the year of the Stamp Act. "America was designed by Providence for the theatre on which man was to make his true figure, on which science, virtue, liberty, happiness, and glory were to exist in peace." (20)
Notes: