Read Conceived in Liberty Online
Authors: Murray N. Rothbard
The classic view defending the social radicalism of the American Revolution is J. Franklin Jameson,
The American Revolution Considered as a Social Movement
(1926). This thesis was attacked and seemingly refuted during the consensus period of American historiography in the 1950s, particularly by Frederick B. Tolles, “The American Revolution Considered as a Social Movement: A Re-evaluation,”
American Historical Review
LX (1954–1955), pp. 1–12; and by Clarence Ver Steeg, “The American Revolution Considered as an Economic Movement,”
Huntington Library Quarterly
XX (1957), pp. 361–72. But Robert A. Nisbet, in a brilliant article, has now rehabilitated the thesis of the American Revolution as having radical consequences, specifically in a libertarian direction. In his
The Social Impact of the Revolution
(1974), Nisbet shows that the Revolution had a radical libertarian impact on American society in abolishing feudal land tenure, in establishing religious freedom, and in beginning to abolish slavery. Thus, to the insight of Bernard Bailyn on the libertarian sources of the Revolution (whose works were cited in the bibliographic essay in volume three of this work) is added the Nisbet discussion of its libertarian consequences.
The impact of the Revolution on suffrage may be found in Chilton Williamson,
American Suffrage from Property to Democracy, 1760–1860
(1960). Staughton Lynd revives the neglected older view of the great importance of sectional conflicts over slavery as early as the 1780s, in Staughton Lynd, “The Abolitionist Critique of the United States Constitution,” in M. Duberman, ed.,
The Anti-Slavery Vanguard
(1965). Challenging insights are to be found in Staughton Lynd, “The Revolution and the Common Man,” part one (unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Columbia University, 1962).
Finally, for further bibliography on the Revolution, John Shy, comp.
The American Revolution
(1973) is indispensable for work published before 1972; unfortunately, as in the case of all the Goldentree series, the bibliography is not annotated.
*
Part of this essay appears, in altered form, in Murray N. Rothbard, “Modern Historians Confront the American Revolution,”
Literature of Liberty
(January/March 1978), pp. 16–41.
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Article Twelve,
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Beatty, John,
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Becker, Carl,
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;
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321
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Brinckerhoff, Dirck,
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British Prohibitory Act,
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103
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(Joseph Hawley: Colonial Radical),
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