Conceived in Liberty (279 page)

Discontent with the results of home rule swelled the ranks of the Volunteers, who even began to admit Catholics into their ranks. In consequence, Grattan and the Irish Whigs, whose victory for home rule had rested on the Volunteers, now denounced these peoples’ troops as an anarchic menace. The Volunteers pressed on to hold their first “Grand National Convention”—the world’s first national convention—in late 1783. Their reform plan having been rejected by Parliament, the Volunteer ranks grew further in the following year; Roman Catholics were increasingly welcomed, and the Irish radicals began to talk openly of revolution. In particular, the American example was increasingly held up as a model, and the reformers began to call for a national “Congress,” in open imitation of revolutionary America. But the attorney general suppressed the radical press, and arrested the sympathetic sheriff of Dublin. The Volunteer movement soon faded away, largely because it never resolved its contradiction on Roman Catholic emancipation, and hence because it never had the courage to openly enlist the Roman Catholic masses on its side.

Edmund Burke, significantly enough, staunchly favored the conservative side, the side of prescriptive custom. At the same time he bitterly opposed English Parliamentary reform; there he went to the logical conclusion of conservatism that
any
sharp change in government was simply “anarchy.” “For to discredit the only form of government which we either possess or can project, what is this but to destroy all government? And this is anarchy.”

Thus, in four countries in western Europe, armed liberal mass movements arose during the 1780s, inspired by the success of the American Revolution. (In England a feebler association movement collapsed with the division of the reform forces between Pitt and Fox.) In three of these cases—Holland, Belgium, and Geneva—the movement proceeded to the point of revolution. But in each of them the revolution failed and was crushed by armed counter-revolution. By the end of the 1780s, the first liberal impetus had been crushed by a regnant counter-revolution
that, in most of these cases, relied on armed foreign aid to help crush the revolutionary forces; generally it was Great Britain to whom the reactionaries looked for succor. This was true of the Dutch, of the Irish magnates, and of the Belgian right; and, of course, it had also been true of the American Tories before their expulsion. Everywhere, England began to emerge as the home, the nucleus of international armed counterrevolution.

In reaction to England’s role, the liberal and democratic forces in Europe—and, for that matter, in America—had begun to turn to France for aid and sustenance. France, England’s ancient foe, played this role, interestingly enough, long before the French Revolution, aiding the left in America, Holland, and Ireland, and providing a haven for refugees of all of the lost revolutions. This was done not because of idealism (as its own role in crushing Genevan liberalism made evident), but to help even the score with Great Britain.

And so outside of America the wave of liberal revolutions had failed abysmally. They failed basically because they were bourgeois rebellions that did not tap support among the peasant masses by mounting a total assault on the feudal land system. By failing to be truly revolutionary, the middle classes could not command mass support and left themselves vulnerable to armed force. As Palmer explains:

The democratic movement failed everywhere, before 1789, except in America.... Moderate though it was, or seems in retrospect, it failed to obtain any concessions at all... all the efforts of English and Irish parliamentary reformers and of Dutch, Belgian and Genevese democrats, had come to absolutely nothing. Indeed, matters were if anything worse, for the fear and vindictiveness of threatened oligarchies had been aroused.

The democratic movement had failed for various reasons, in some places because the forces of the old order had successfully called upon foreign aid, and in all cases because the democratic interests, though important and enlightened, were a numerical minority in the country as a whole. They had no mass following. The “mass,” outside London, Paris, or Amsterdam, really meant the rural population. Country people at lower income levels in the countries now being considered, were politically unaroused.... So far as the ruling aristocracies drew their incomes from land, or their influence from the good will of the tenantry, they had little to fear from disaffected lawyers or impudent pamphleteers; the one thing that would undermine them was wholesale defection on their own estates. This did not happen until it happened in France in the summer of 1789.

If these events prove anything, it is perhaps that no purely middle-class or “bourgeois” revolution could succeed. Lawyers, bankers, merchants, shopkeepers, students, and professors could not alone unseat the holders of political power.... Another reason for the democratic failure, applying at least
to Holland, Belgium and Geneva, was that these countries had the misfortune to be small, and hence easy objects of intervention. The attempt of conservative Europe to intervene in France in 1792, was to have a very different outcome.
*

Above all it was necessary to engage the masses, as the American revolutionaries had done. But in Europe, ridden as America had not been by internal feudalism, still dominated by monarchy and by theocracy, mass upheaval would have had to rend and disrupt the entire social fabric. The stage was set for France to pick up the baton of the American Revolution. The seemingly far greater radicalism of the French Revolution was merely a function of the far greater built-in resistance to libertarian principles. As Palmer justly concludes:

The American and the French Revolutions “proceeded from the same principles.” The difference is that these principles were much more deeply rooted in America, and that contrary or competing principles, monarchist or aristocratic or feudal or ecclesiastical, though not absent from America, were, in comparison to Europe, very weak. Assertion of the same principles therefore provoked less conflict in America than in France... it was the weakness of conservative forces in eighteenth century America, not their strength, that made the American Revolution as moderate as it was.... The difference lay in the fact that certain ideas of the Age of Enlightenment, found on both sides of the Atlantic—ideas of constitutionalism, individual liberty, or legal equality—were more fully incorporated and less disputed in America than in Europe.... For a century after the American Revolution, as is well known, partisans of the revolutionary or liberal movements in Europe looked upon the United States generally with approval, and European conservatives viewed it with hostility or downright contempt.
**

The French, indeed the European liberals in general, had to face far more entrenched opposition than had the Americans, and Palmer brilliantly concludes that in France “the revolution was itself a reaction against an immovable conservatism already formed.” Just as in America British aggrandizement radicalized public opinion, so the tendency of European counter-revolution to harden after suppression of the revolts of the 1780s radicalized French revolutionary opinion.

It should be noted that the European theorists of the old order did not take the current neoconservative tack of praising the American Revolution and reviling the French. These reactionary ideologues knew their enemy, and that most emphatically included the American Revolution, which was attacked with the same phrases later used to denounce the
French. Similarly denounced were the Dutch, Genevan and Belgian revolutions of the 1780s. The Abbé Feller, theorist of the Belgian right, Mallet du Pan in France, and Schlozer and other historical jurists (as opposed to natural rights jurists) in Germany all became noted opponents of the French Revolution and were equally hostile to the American. Edmund Burke formed his defense of reaction in the cauldron of the moderate and liberal Dutch, Irish, and English reform agitations long before he attacked the alleged horrors of the French Revolution. The American Revolution, the European right realized, was a vital milestone in the advance and development of the western revolutionary tradition.
*

*
Palmer rightly concludes that “the Dutch Republic first lost its independence not to the ’Jacobins’ in 1795, but to the already well-developed forces of the European counterrevolution in 1787.” Palmer,
Age of the Democratic Revolution. I
p. 340.

*
Palmer,
Age of Democratic Revolution, I,
pp. 368–69.

**
Palmer,
Age of Democratic Revolution. I,
p. 189.

*
On the linkage of the American and French revolutions, see Louis Gottschalk, “The Place of the American Revolution in the Causal Pattern of the French Revolution,” in H. Ausubel, ed.,
The Making of Modern Europe
(New York: Holt, 1951), I:494–510; and Jacques Godechot,
La Grande Nation
(Paris, 1956), and Godechot,
France and the Atlantic Revolution of the Eighteenth Century, 1770–1799
(New York: Free Press, 1965).

The material written on the American Revolution is almost limitless, and it would be folly to try to list all of it in a brief space. Indeed, the purpose of this as well as of the bibliographic essays in the companion volumes of
Conceived in Liberty
is not to cite an endless array of sources, but to highlight for the reader the most important works on the period, those to which it would be most fruitful for him to turn next. This essay is deliberately confined to secondary sources; primary sources from the period are cited in the secondary sources which we discuss below.

A concise, judicious, overall summary of the military, political, social, and economic history of the American Revolution is fortunately available in John R. Alden,
The American Revolution, 1775–1783
(1954). Alden supersedes the previous overall, one-volume history, John C. Miller,
Triumph of Freedom, 1775–1783
(1948), which tends to be unreliable.

The most important and dramatic change in interpreting the history of the American Revolutionary War has come about very recently: a realization that the Americans won because, and insofar as, they were conducting a massive guerrilla war, a “people’s war,” against the superior firepower and conventional military strategy and tactics of the British imperial power. With modern guerrilla war coming into focus since the late 1960s, recent historians have begun to apply its lessons to the American Revolution, not only to the tactical analysis of the individual battles, but also in basic strategic insights, for example, the realization that guerrilla war can only succeed if the guerrillas are backed by the great majority of the populace, a condition which obtained during the American Revolution. The valuable military histories of the Revolution, therefore, can be grouped into two
categories: those which antedate and those which incorporate modern insights into the nature and potential of guerrilla warfare.

Thus, the best detailed history of the military conflict, devoting keen analysis to each battle, is Christopher Ward,
The War of the Revolution
(2 vols., 1952). A useful and relatively brief one-volume military history is Willard M. Wallace,
Appeal to Arms: A Military History of the American Revolution
(1951). More specifically, the standard military history of the first year of the war, is Allen French,
The First Year of the American Revolution
(1934), and the initial battle of Lexington and Concord is described in Arthur B. Tourtellot,
Lexington and Concord
(1963).

None of these books, however, was written recently enough to incorporate modern insights on the importance of guerrilla as opposed to conventional war. An important one-volume military history that does so is Don Higginbotham,
The War of American Independence: Military Attitudes, Policies, and Practice, 1763–1789
(1971). Particularly important, both for guerrilla insights and for penetrating “revisionist” studies of particular generals and their strategies and tactics, is George Athan Billias, ed.,
George Washington’s Generals
(1964). Particularly important in this volume is George A. Billias, “Horatio Gates: Professional Soldier,” about the general who used guerrilla strategy and tactics against Burgoyne, culminating at Saratoga; Don Higginbotham, “Daniel Morgan: Guerrilla Fighter,” in which Higginbotham apologizes for the fact that his valuable biography of the war’s greatest guerrilla tactician had been written before the advent of his own and other general interest in guerrilla warfare (Don Higginbotham,
Daniel Morgan: Revolutionary Rifleman
(1961)); and especially John W. Shy, “Charles Lee: The Soldier as Radical,” in which Shy favorably rediscovers the outstanding military libertarian and guerrilla theorist, strategist, and general of the American Revolution. Lee, who had been drummed out of his number two post of command and court-martialled unfairly by Washington, is favorably reassessed in a biography by John R. Alden,
Charles Lee: Traitor or Patriot?
(1951). Gates has also been maltreated by historians, who tend to be sycophants of Washington, but see the reevaluation by Bernhard Knollenberg,
Washington and the Revolution: A Reappraisal
(1940).

Shy, who of all historians has the best grasp on the importance of guerrilla warfare in this period, trenchantly interprets the various phases of British strategy during the war (from police action to conventional war to counter-guerrilla attempts at “pacification” in the South) in “The American Revolution: The Military Conflict Considered as a Revolutionary War,” in S. Kurtz and J. Hutson, eds.,
Essays on the American Revolution
(1973). John Shy,
A People Numerous and Armed: Reflections on the Military Struggle for American Independence
(1976) is a collection of his essays on military history, some of which contribute to a positive reevaluation of the importance of the militia in defensive warfare. R. Arthur Bowler,
Logistics and the Failure of the British Army in America, 1775–1783
(1975) shows that the hostility of the local populations contributed to the failure of food supplies. This hostility was compounded by British attempts to seize the food they could not purchase.