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THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
A GRAND MISTAKE
By LELAND G. STAUBER
Prometheus Books
Copyright © 2010 Leland G. Stauber
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-59102-763-8
Introduction
THE ISSUES POSED
The American War of Independence played a pivotal role in the creation of the United States—as a political entity.
On the other hand, the deeper origins of American society include the traditions of society and government, mostly English, that were transplanted from Europe by the long colonial history prior to 1775. In the latter connection, it made a profound difference that the thirteen American colonies had been English colonies rather than French or Spanish colonies.
The American Revolution also played a pivotal role in creating an American sense of national identity, based, initially, on anti-British feeling.
Further, the escalated American frustration with British authority and the armed struggle against it shifted American attitudes not only against British authority but also against governmental authority in general. The result was a pronounced ideological determination to avoid, for the American future, excessive governmental authority over society. This ideological orientation was a key element in "the American spirit" and in the theme of "liberty," and it formed part of an American sense of national identity from the outset.
Thus, both politically and psychologically, the origins of the United States lay in a specifically anti-British development, although later the United States absorbed large pieces of the French and Spanish, and, in the case of the Mexican Southwest, former Spanish, empires; initially, the United States was those particular English colonies in North America that chose to rebel against British rule in the period 1775-83, unlike those to the north and the south—in what is now Canada, Florida, and the West Indies—that did not.
Given this profound importance of the American Revolution, in fact, in the formation of the United States and in the sense of national identity and ideological predispositions of its people, it is no surprise that, on the plane of emotion, the American Revolution has been a central national saga and has had a powerful place in the political socialization of each generation of Americans.
The more intense a saga, however, the more likely it is to be subjective in focusing attention on some realities at the expense of other realities. It may also, through abstract rhetoric, paralyze thought about practical consequences of decisions, policies, and institutions, and thus be politically useful to whatever interests may benefit from this situation. Sagas often become political industries.
In the American case, Americans from childhood have been taught that the American Revolution was both a glorious event and a great and unmixed blessing for America's future.
The present book reexamines this latter proposition. The great question is: Have things really been this simple?
Several preliminaries are in order.
First, what "blessings," or "advantages," or "disadvantages," or "lost opportunities," are depends, of course, on what standards of normative judgment are applied. These, in turn, reflect purposes and priorities of the observer, not simply facts alone.
Second, Americans tend to assume that "independence" is an all-or-nothing proposition, when in fact independence can be a matter of degrees, can relate to many separable fields of policy, and may evolve gradually—as the history of many Commonwealth and other nations demonstrates.
Finally, the American Revolution did not "decide" the ultimate "independence" of the United States. Though far less visible in the late eighteenth century, it is clear from the subsequent history that the ultimate independence of all the major British possessions in North America was inevitable in any case, given the growing density and size of the populations involved and the irresistible nationalist pressures these developments were to set in motion. What the American Revolution actually decided, therefore, was the mode and the timing, not the ultimate fact, of American independence.
The American Revolution had at least four major consequences in which Americans take enormous pride and in which Americans universally count as great positive advantages, which can be weighed against other considerations. These advantages may be identified as follows:
(1) The "Great Declaration"
The phrase "all men are created equal" in the Declaration of Independence, often known as the "Great Declaration," whatever the exact meaning or meanings in the minds of Jefferson and other members of the Continental Congress, has been a great inspiration and a potent political instrument for all efforts toward greater equality of rights and opportunities in society. In the United States, Lincoln used it during the American Civil War in his Gettysburg Address. For African Americans, it has been a beacon of hope, even in the darkest periods of American development. In Europe, most of the great Liberal reform movements of the nineteenth century made use of this famous phrase in the American Declaration of Independence.
(2) Ideological Rejection of a Titled Nobility and Monarchy
There was, further, the ideological and constitutional rejection of a titled nobility and of monarchy, which were parts of the several themes of what later came to be called "Liberalism" in Europe, in its more radical and republican variants. This was radical for Europe in the late eighteenth century and for much of Europe in the nineteenth century. It was, however, not very radical for North America, because, with limited qualifications, it reflected a preexisting "natural" situation. Little of the European aristocracy was motivated to emigrate to North America, unlike emigration to South America of younger sons of the nobility of Spain and Portugal, which greatly affected social structures and subsequent political history in Latin America.
(3) Early Economic Independence
The early British empire involved a pattern of considerable restrictions on colonial economic life. There was a long series of acts, beginning in 1650, that came to be known collectively as the "navigation laws." These aimed to create a monopoly in colonial trade and its transport in ships. There were two purposes behind this. One was to increase British profit margins by excluding foreign competition from British colonies. A second was to support a large merchant marine whose ships and crews could be used by the British navy in wartime. There were, further, restrictions on manufacturing and other economic activities in British colonies that might compete with industries in Britain.
British restrictions on colonial economic life were gradually repealed in the nineteenth century, beginning in the 1820s and particularly from 1846 on, as Britain turned to a general policy of free trade. But for some time following the American Revolution the older pattern of restrictions was maintained.
One consequence of the American Revolution, therefore, was an early liberation of the United States from direct application of such economic restrictions.
(4) Early Democratization to Universal White Manhood Suffrage
The American Revolution was a nationalist, not primarily a social, revolution. Its immediate result was largely a continuation of the colonial version of British society, minus the connections to the monarchy and the aristocracy, and minus the state-supported Anglican Church at the federal level, although various state churches continued to exist for some time at the state level.
The American Revolution did produce extensions of representative government. But most members of the Philadelphia Convention believed in property requirements for voting, though they could not agree on how high or low they ought to be; their outlook, thus, was mostly Liberal, in the European sense of this term, but largely predemocratic. The US Constitution framed by the Philadelphia Convention did not establish democratic government; rather, it left the door open to later evolution to full popular government, except its provisions giving indirect but decisive protections to slavery in the South.
British attitudes, in the era of the American Revolution, reflected the domestic social and political structures in Britain, and hence, in that era, were opposed to full popular government in North America.
One consequence of the American Revolution, therefore, was liberation of the United States from the constraints of conservative British attitudes in this particular area. As a result, the United States evolved to universal adult white male suffrage by a process that came earlier than in any European nation—far earlier than in most European nations, and earlier than in Canada, though only by a few decades.
* * *
On the one hand, these four major consequences of the American Revolution have been enormously celebrated in the United States. On the other, much, though not all, of the distinctiveness of the United States dissipated with time, as British policies evolved from empire to commonwealth and many other nations, within and outside the British orbit, followed the paths of independence and democratization.
Were there, however, with the advantage of hindsight, also major disadvantages to the train of events that led to the total independence of the United States, as distinct from enlarged autonomy and partial independence, at the early date of 1783 and in the context of armed conflict? Would there have been major advantages for American society if the United States had followed something closer to the Canadian path of peaceful and gradual evolution (setting aside the separable matters of Canada's membership in the Commonwealth and symbolic connection to the British Crown)? This is a vast question, and some of its dimensions must remain imponderable.
To raise this fundamental question is to collide with much in the whole "American Proposition" about unique American wisdom and with that, an enormous volume of American pride. But pride and sentiment are irrelevant to examining the fundamental question at issue here about practical societal consequences.
Moreover, there can hardly be any objective analysis of the consequences of the American Revolution or any objective understanding by Americans of their own society without probing this fundamental question of comparison with the Canadian path, no matter how imponderable some of its dimensions may be.
There are many questions here that fall into four general areas. These are later treated in chapter 4 but are also set out here as follows:
(1) The Dilemma of Slavery
American pride, in effect, has always declared confidently that the United States was "ready" for full independence in 1783.
Yet in what sense were the American people or their leaders "ready," that is, either willing or able, to take on the task of bringing slavery to an end in the American Deep South? The United States attained total independence from Britain before it had abolished slavery or devised any realistic plan for bringing it to an end. Rather, once full independence had arrived, the American leaders were forced to rely on a scheme of purely voluntary federation as the only possible method of national unification. If all thirteen states were to be brought into the Union, the framers then had no choice but to make concessions to the slave states such that slavery was anchored in the Constitution by decisive, if indirect, devices.
This set the stage for the American Civil War, which was one of the bloodiest conflicts anywhere in the world between the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815 and the outbreak of the Mexican Revolution in 1910.
This whole history has powerfully affected the social fabric of the United States, even long after the Civil War and down to the present day.
American tradition has regularly portrayed the early American leaders as possessing almost unlimited capacity for farsighted statesmanship. Yet if all this constituted "success" in nation-building, what, exactly, would constitute "failure"?
(2) Legislative Union vs. Purely Voluntary Federation
Americans tend to assume, and have been indoctrinated since childhood to assume, that purely voluntary federation is the wisest and only virtuous method of national unification.
The United States attained total independence from Britain before it had created, beyond the feeble Articles of Confederation, any substantial national government.
Full independence meant that the American leaders were forced to create a national government by relying, again, on purely voluntary federation as the only possible method of national unification. Did this, however, produce a national government possessing sufficient explicit constitutional powers or an amendment procedure sufficiently flexible to meet the needs for social and economic regulation that arrived with the Industrial Revolution in the decades immediately following the Civil War? Or were urgently needed social and economic measures delayed for decades, in many instances until 1937, because an inadequate and rigid federal constitution, sacred in much of the public mind and to much of the nation's political leadership, was long interpreted by the US Supreme Court on the basis of "strict construction"?
Would, then, a "legislative union"—a union created formally by British legislation, whatever the influences behind the scenes shaping its substance, and whatever prior representative conferences might be used—have been a superior method of national unification to a purely voluntary federation? In the final analysis, was, then, the British North America Act of 1867, which created the Dominion of Canada, a superior constitutional instrument to the US Constitution framed in 1787 by the Philadelphia Convention?
(3) The American System of Government
The system of government devised by the Philadelphia Convention, with its ramified "checks and balances," basically duplicated at the state level, was deliberately designed to make social change and governmental action difficult. It originated in concepts of "mixed" government prevailing in Europe in the eighteenth century and in the American framers' own social conservatism. While this design helped to gain popular acceptance of the establishment of a stronger central government at a time of intense popular fear of central authority, it inherently stacked the cards in favor of conservative interests, including a powerful business community concerned to block governmental actions. It also ranks low, in international comparison, in capacity for coherent decision making.
If the United States had settled for partial independence in the 1770s, there would have been, for some period, a British governor-general, who would have surrounded himself with an executive council (cabinet). The natural tension between an American central legislature and such a British governor-general would have inspired that legislature to reach out and acquire control, in more and more fields of policy, of that cabinet, pulling it "out from under" the governor-general, who could have gradually been forced into a figurehead role. The situation regardless of abstract theories or initial intentions would thereby have been structured to lead to parliamentary government, in part as a means to fuller national independence.
Americans have been brought up to believe that their system of government is based on profound theories, and they also tend to assume that it is not "stacked" but politically neutral. Much of the rest of the world, particularly in industrialized nations, considers it to be old-fashioned and obsolete.
Which view then more closely accords with the purposes and priorities that are appropriate for the United States under modern conditions?
The issue is basically one not simply of facts but precisely of purposes and priorities.
(4) Underlying American Mind-Sets about the Role of Government
Finally, one of the most profound and far-reaching consequences of the era of the American Revolution lies in its effects upon the psychology of its American participants themselves, and, through the resulting national saga, of succeeding generations of Americans down to the present day.
What is involved here is the familiar mechanism of projection, or transference.
Following the end of the Seven Years' War in 1763, conflict between various British governments and American colonists was allowed to rise in a haphazard fever, during which hard-line elements on both sides stimulated each other and strengthened each other against moderate elements on both sides of the Atlantic. This eventually led to hardened, irreconcilable positions and the outbreak of war.
The struggle against what was perceived to be British "tyranny" then meant that a particular (intense) experience (of only a few years) was projected into a general conviction, the preconception that all government is intrinsically evil and that a profound wisdom attaches to avoiding, or, minimizing, its use for societal purposes.
This psychology is the main reason why, today, Americans are more reluctant to use government for societal purposes than are Canadians, for Canada attained its independence from Britain by a gradual process that did not discredit governmental authority per se. Government was not mentally associated with "tyranny."
Further, if the United States, Canada, and Western Europe are compared, this psychology is one major reason why, today, the United States, despite the experience of the Great Depression and the New Deal, lies toward the conservative end of the spectrum of industrialized nations in its use of government for societal purposes.
Has then this basic orientation of American political culture represented "unique wisdom," validated by classical Liberalism, or an underlying psychological condition that has crippled the United States from the beginning in efforts to build a more decent society?
(Continues...)
Excerpted from THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION by LELAND G. STAUBER Copyright © 2010 by Leland G. Stauber. Excerpted by permission of Prometheus Books. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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