Conceived in Liberty (204 page)

But now the economic determinists were confronted by a basic problem: If indeed the Revolution was against the class interests of the mass of the farmers, why did the latter support the revolutionary movement? To this key question, the determinists had two answers. One was the common, mistaken view—criticized above—that the Revolution was supported only by a minority of the population. Their second answer was that the farmers were deluded into such support by the “propaganda” beamed at them by the upper classes. In effect, these historians transferred the analysis of the role of ideology as a rationalization of class interests from its proper use in explaining
state
action, to a fallacious use in trying to understand antistate mass movements. In this approach, they relied on the jejune theory of “propaganda,” pervasive in the
1920s and 1930s under the influence of Harold Lasswell: namely, that no one sincerely holds any ideas or ideology, and therefore, that no ideological statements whatever can be taken at face value, but must be regarded only as insincere rhetoric for the purposes of “propaganda.” Again, the Beard-Becker school was trapped by its failure to give any primary role to ideas in history.

After World War II, as part of the general “American celebration” among the American intellectuals of that era, the newly dominant “consensus school” of American history demonstrated that the Revolution was indeed supported by the majority of the population. Unfortunately, however, under the aegis of such major consensus theoreticians as the “neo-conservatives” Daniel Boorstin and Clinton Rossiter, the consensus school moved to the truly absurd conclusion that the American Revolution, in contrast to all other revolutions in history, was not
really
a revolution at all, but a purely measured and conservative reflex against the restrictive measures of the Crown. Under the spell of the American celebration and of the hostility to all modern revolutions generated by the post—World War II era, the consensus historians were constrained to deny any and all conflicts in American history, whether economic or ideological, and to absolve the American republic from the original sin of having been born
via
revolution. Thus, the consensus historians were fully as hostile to ideology as a prime moving force in history as their enemies, the economic determinists. The difference is that where the determinists saw class conflict, the consensus school maintained that the genius of Americans has always been to remain unfettered by abstract ideology of any kind, and that instead they have met every issue as ad-hoc problem-solving pragmatists.

Thus, the consensus school, in its eagerness to deny the revolutionary nature of the American Revolution, failed to see that all revolutions against state power are necessarily radical and hence “revolutionary” acts, and, further, that they must be genuine mass movements guided by an informed and radical ideology.

Fortunately, however, the most recent and now dominant school of historiography on the American Revolution—that of Professor Bernard Bailyn—brings radical ideology (and radical
libertarian
ideology at that) into the forefront of the causes of the Revolution. Against the hostility of both of the older schools of historians, Bailyn has managed, in scarcely a decade, to emerge as the leading interpreter of the Revolution. Bailyn’s great contribution was to discover for the first time the truly dominant role of ideology among the revolutionaries. He stressed not only that the Revolution was a genuine revolutionary and multiclass mass movement among the colonists, but also that it was guided and impelled, above all, by the ideology of radical libertarianism—or, as Bailyn happily calls it, the “transforming libertarian radicalism of the Revolution.”

In one sense, Bailyn harked back to a generation of historians at the turn of the twentieth century, the so-called Constitutionalists, who had also stressed
the dominant role of ideas in the revolutionary movement. But Bailyn correctly saw that the mistake of the Constitutionalists was in ascribing the central and guiding role, first, to sober and measured legalistic arguments about the British Constitution and, second, to John Locke’s philosophy of natural rights and the right of revolution. Bailyn saw that the problem of this interpretation was to miss the major motive power of the revolutionaries. Constitutional legalisms, as later critics pointed out, were dry-as-dust arguments that hardly stimulated the requisite revolutionary passions, and furthermore they neglected the important problem of the economic depredations by Great Britain; and Locke’s philosophy, though ultimately highly important, was too abstract to generate the passions or to stimulate widespread reading by the bulk of the colonists. Something, Bailyn rightly felt, was missing: the intermediate-level ideology that could stimulate revolutionary passions.

Bailyn found the missing ingredient in the radical libertarian Lockean English writers of the eighteenth century—especially John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon of
Cato’s Letters.
These writers applied and transformed Lockean natural-rights theory into a radical and passionate, and explicitly political, libertarian and anti-British framework. Trenchard and Gordon, and the other influential libertarian writers, clearly and passionately set forth the libertarian theory of natural rights, went on to point out that government in general, and the British government specifically, was the great violator of such rights, and warned also that power—government—stood ever ready to conspire to violate the liberties of the individual. To stop this crippling and destructive invasion of liberty by power, the people must be ever wary, ever vigilant, ever alert to the conspiracies of the rulers to expand their power and aggress against their subjects. It was this spirit that the American colonists eagerly imbibed, and that accounted for their “conspiracy view” of the English government, a view which historians like Bernhard Knollenberg have shown was basically correct, since, after 1760, such conspiracies were all too real. Thus, what some historians have derided as the “paranoia” of the colonists turned out to be not paranoia at all but an insightful apprehension of reality, an insight that was of course fueled by the colonists’ libertarian understanding of the very nature and essence of state power itself.

Thus, in the deepest sense, the American Revolution was a conscious majority revolution in behalf of libertarianism and against power, a libertarian ideology that stressed the conjoined rights of “Liberty and Property.” The American Revolution was not only the first great modern revolution. It was a libertarian revolution as well.
**

*
Professor Alden has shown that the myth of present-day historians that only one-third of the American public backed the Revolution, with an equal number opposed, stems from a misreading of a letter by John Adams (John R. Alden,
The American Revolution, 1775–1783
[New York: Harper & Row, 1954], p. 87). Historians of such disparate views as Robert E. Brown and Herbert Aptheker now support the view that the Revolution was a majority movement. Thus, see Brown,
Middle-Class Democracy, passim,
and Aptheker,
The American Revolution, 1763–1783
(New York: International Publishers, 1960), pp. 52ff.

*
For a further elaboration of this thesis, see Murray N. Rothbard, “Economic Determinism, Ideology, and the American Revolution,”
The Libertarian forum
(November 1974): 4–7; see also Rothbard, “The American Revolution Reconsidered,”
Books for Libertarians
(July 1974): pp.
6–
8. For a summary of Bailyn’s views, see Bernard Bailyn, “The Central Themes of the American Revolution: An Interpretation,” in S. Kurtz and J. Hutson, eds.,
Essays on the American Revolution
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1973), pp. 3–31.

Despite the importance of this period in American history, there has until recently been no satisfactory overall treatment. Fortunately, this lack has now been remedied with the completion of Bernhard Knollenberg’s two-volume masterpiece on the development of the American Revolution:
Origin of the American Revolution, 1759–1766
(1960), and
Growth of the American Revolution, 1766–1775
(1975). The Knollenberg volumes are thorough in detail and masterly and up to date in interpretation. Also useful but far less sound in interpretation is Merrill Jensen,
The Founding of a Nation: A History of the American Revolution, 1763–1776
(1968). Highly inaccurate is the old standby of John C. Miller,
Origins of the American Revolution
(1943). A realistic account of the use of mobs in the resistance movement is presented in Pauline Maier,
From Resistance to Revolution: Colonial Radicals and the Development of American Opposition to Britain, 1765–1776
(1972). Lawrence H. Gipson,
The Coming of the Revolution, 1763–1775
(1954), and
The British Empire Before the American Revolution,
vols. 9–12 (1956–1965), presents the British imperalist point of view. There are useful essays in Herbert Aptheker,
The American Revolution, 1763–1783
(1960).

The libertarian ideology animating the American revolutionaries is made clear in the deservedly influential work by Bernard Bailyn,
The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution
(1967), an expansion of his “General Introduction” to Bernard Bailyn, ed.,
Pamphlets of the American Revolution, 1750–1776,
vol. 1,
1750–1765
(1965). The influence of French libertarian thought may be found in Howard Mumford Jones,
America and French Culture, 1750–1848
(1927); see also H. Trevor Colbourn,
The Lamp of Experience: Whig History and the Intellectual Origins of the American Revolution
(1965). The influence of, and the colonists’ relations with, the Wilkite movement may be found in George Rudé,
Wilkes and Liberty: A Social Study of 1763 to 1774
(1962); Pauline Maier, “John Wilkes and American Disillusionment with Britain,”
William and Mary Quarterly
(1963), pp. 373–95; and Jack P. Greene, “Bridge to Revolution: The Wilkes Fund Controversy in South Carolina, 1769–1775,”
Journal of Southern History
(1963), pp. 19–52. English libertarians are depicted in Caroline Robbins’ great work,
The Eighteenth Century Commonwealthman
(1959), and the activities of a particularly influential though neglected libertarian organizer in Robbins, “The Strenuous Whig: Thomas Hollis of Lincoln’s Inn,”
William and Mary Quarterly
(1950), pp. 406–53.

Religion played an important role in the development of revolutionary ideas. The best work on the “black regiment” of Congregationalist ministers is still Alice M. Baldwin,
The New England Clergy and the American Revolution
(1928). While scarcely definitive, Herbert M. Morais,
Deism in Eighteenth
Century America
(1934), is still the only work on this important subject. Arthur L. Cross’s classic work on the struggle over Anglican bishops in America,
The Anglican Episcopate and the American Colonies
(1902), has now been supplemented and partially replaced by Carl Bridenbaugh,
Mitre and Sceptre: Transatlantic Faiths, Ideas, Personalities, and Politics, 1689–1775
(1962). The great radical Massachusetts minister Jonathan Mayhew is studied in Charles W. Akers,
Called unto Liberty: A Life of Jonathan Mayhew, 1720–1766
(1964).

Mercantilist acts and enforcement by Britain as causes of the American resistance are treated in Oliver M. Dickerson,
The Navigation Acts and the American Revolution
(1951); Carl Ubbelohde,
The Vice-Admiralty Courts and the American Revolution
(1960); and Joseph J. Malone,
Pine Trees and Politics: The Naval Stores and Forest Policy in Colonial New England, 1691–1775
(1964). While marred by errors of interpretation, Arthur M. Schlesinger’s
The Colonial Merchants and the American Revolution, 1763–1776
(1918) is an important, thorough, and still definitive account of the merchants and the various movements and struggles for nonimportation from England. There are still useful essays in Richard B. Morris, ed.,
The Era of the American Revolution
(1939).

The important influence of land-grabbing and speculation in the Western lands is covered in Clarence W. Alvord,
Mississippi Valley in British Politics: A Study of the Trade, Land Speculation, and Experiments in Imperialism Culminating in the American Revolution
(2 vols., 1917); and Thomas P. Abernethy,
Western Lands and the American Revolution
(1937). Dale Van Every,
Forth to the Wilderness: The First American Frontier,
1754–1774 (1961), is a vivid story of relations with Indians in the West; and Nicholas B. Wainwright,
George Croghan: Wilderness Diplomat
(1959), is an excellent account of the adventurer and swindler important to frontier and Indian relations in the early part of our period. Howard H. Peckham,
Pontiac and the Indian Uprising
(1947), supersedes the old classic by Francis Parkman,
The Conspiracy of Pontiac
(1851, 1962), as an account of the Pontiac Rebellion. Francis S. Philbrick,
The Rise of the West, 1754–1830
(1965), is a good overall account of the Western frontier.

The best discussion of the struggles over the British army and the growth of American resistance before the Revolution is in John Shy,
Toward Lexington: The Role of the British Army in the Coming of the American Revolution
(1965). The reader should also consult the excellent and up-to-date first two chapters on the military background of the American Revolution in Don Higginbotham,
The War of American Independence: Military Attitudes, Policies, and Practice, 1763–1789
(1971).

The role of the press in revolutionary agitation is admirably treated in Arthur M. Schlesinger,
Prelude to Independence: The Newspaper War on Britain, 1764–1776
(1958). This volume supersedes Philip G. Davidson,
Propaganda and the American Revolution, 1763–1783
(1941), which is fatally marred by the view that all ideology is mere “propaganda.”