Once the momentary euphoria of the celebrations for the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, it seems time to return to reflect on the meaning of the events that characterized British colonial America in the last quarter of the eighteenth century and led to the birth of the United States.
He tried to do it, for example, Jennifer Schuessler last July 6th with an article in the “New York Times”, How Revolutionary Was the American Revolution?, focusing on the efforts of conservative and progressive historians respectively to downplay or accentuate the revolutionary dimension of the events of two and a half centuries ago, also in light of the triumphalist and unproblematic reading spread by the presidency of Donald Trump.
The underlying question, however, goes beyond the question in Schuessler's title and concerns the very concept of revolution.
A “revolution” by convention
Schuessler states, with an argument that is nothing short of self-evident, that “the revolutionary character of the American Revolution is inherent in its very name.” Define "Revolution" What happened at the end of the eighteenth century on the Atlantic coast of North America, however, was the result of a convention and the desire to conform to an established linguistic usage, regardless of the manifestation of real radical social changes which, in fact, did not occur.
This practice became established almost immediately, starting from the publication of one of the initial reconstructions of such events, the History of the American Revolution, written in 1789, almost live, by David Ramsay, who was one of the minor protagonists of independence. The volume had been preceded four years earlier by another work of the same nature, the History of the Revolution of South Carolina, released in 1785.
Celebrate July 2nd or 4th?
Ramsay was among the first to describe the events of 1776 as a "revolution," presenting it as the result of a demand for freedom not only for the English living in North America, but for humanity as a whole. Ramsay's interpretation followed the same lines as Thomas Paine's, in his most successful synthesis of independence demands. Common Sense, a pamphlet printed anonymously in January 1776, while the military clash against the London authorities was still in its infancy, and immediately became a real best seller of the time.
According to Paine, the rebellion of the thirteen colonies against the English sovereign George III was not only a right, but even a duty that had to be fulfilled in the name of the entire human race, since the insurrection was supposed to stimulate the rise of movements for the liberation of other nations from monarchic regimes in the rest of the world and, above all, in Europe.
It is no coincidence that the Independence Day should be celebrated on July 4th, rather than two days earlier. Yet it was the 2 July 1776 that the thirteen colonies formally proclaimed their secession from the British Empire. That day, in fact, the Continental Congress, the body representing the rebel colonies, approved a laconic resolution introduced by Virginia delegate Richard Henry Lee: "Be it Resolved, That these united Colonies are, and of Right ought to be, Free and Independent States, that they are released from all Obligations of Allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain is, and ought to be, totally dissolved."
Convinced that July 2nd had marked a significant turning point, that same evening, John Adams, one of the delegates from Massachusetts, wrote to his wife that the occasion of that day “will be celebrated by generations to come as a great anniversary.
It should be commemorated as the day of liberation […] made solemn with ceremonies and parades, with shows, games, sports, salutes of cannon, ringing of bells, bonfires and illuminations.” But Adams was wrong. Everything he hypothesized would happen on July 4th, rather than the 2nd. Lee's document merely acknowledged a factual situation. Instead, the subsequent Declaration of Independence expressed the legal and moral reasons the colonists advanced to justify their secession from the Empire. In particular, it enunciated the principles—equality and the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness—in the name of which the thirteen colonies claimed the legitimacy of their constitution as a sovereign nation.
These values not only ennobled the birth of the United States, but defined the foundations of a model of society that would inspire other peoples to follow the example of the rebellious colonies. For this reason, July 4th was chosen as the date of celebration over July 2nd.
Beyond the military clash
Il July 4th also ended up prevailing over the anniversary of April 19, 1775, when fighting began between British regular troops and American rebels in Concord and Lexington, Massachusetts. Today, only eight of the fifty states of the Union celebrate Patriots' Day – the opening of hostilities against Britain, that is, the beginning of the armed conflict.
To dwell on the military conflict – that is, on the “war of independence”, as the Italian historian Carlo Botta defined it at the beginning of the nineteenth century (History of the American Revolutionary War, 1809) – is definitely a less popular approach because it distracts attention from other implications.
Talking about the "American Revolution", in fact, also means giving importance to the Declaration of July 4, 1776, that is, the paradigm through which the United States has attributed to itself the role of a beacon of freedom for the rest of the world and has at the same time claimed the alleged exceptionality of its own historical experience, something that would have made its national history different from events in any other country.
The consolidation of the universalist interpretation of 1776
La international reach of the "American Revolution" had its consecration with the two-volume study by Robert R. Palmer The Age of the Democratic Revolution: A Political History of Europe and America, 1760–1800 (1959 and 1964). According to Palmer, the upheavals in North America that led to the formation of the United States were the opening act of a revolutionary period that crossed the Atlantic to then affect France in 1789.
For the historian and philosopher Hannah Arendt, compared to the French one, "the American Revolution, despite its triumphal success, remained an event with little more than local importance" (On Revolution, 1963): the French one would have been social and radical; the American one political and conservative. Instead, with Palmer, what happened in the United States had an international scope and was seen as the beginning of modernity, thanks to the transoceanic diffusion of democratic principles, reworked in North America starting from a European matrix and then re-exported to the Old World.
A globalist interpretation, not confined to the Atlantic world and extended over time well beyond the end of the eighteenth century, was later proposed by david armitage (The Declaration of Independence: A Global History, 2007), which definitively brought the "American Revolution" out of the shadow of the French one and rescued it from the presumed marginal position to which Arendt had helped relegate it. From the Manifesto of the Province of Flanders of January 4, 1790 (the revolt of the Belgian region against the Austrian rule of the Habsburgs) to the Rhodesian Declaration of Independence from the United Kingdom of November 11, 1965, all these documents drew some inspiration from the American model. According to Armitage, paradoxically and ironically, the post-World War II anti-colonial text that most explicitly modeled on the American precedent was the one drafted by Vietnamese leader Ho Chi Minh at the time of the collapse of the French Empire in Indochina in 1945.
La Atlantic dimension, if not even global due to the vastness of the English dominions at the end of the eighteenth century, had also been highlighted by the so-called Imperial School of American historiography, which developed between the end of the nineteenth century and the first decades of the twentieth century coinciding with the political, even more than the cultural, rapprochement between the United States and the United Kingdom. However, contrary to Armitage's perspective, the result of this interpretation was a downplaying of the significance of the "American Revolution," dismissing it as something superfluous if not downright useless, as it was attributed not to a supposed tyrannical and liberticidal involution of London's policy towards the colonies, but rather to the simplest side effects of the rapid growth of the administrative structures of a rapidly expanding empire such as the English one.
A conservative “revolution”?
What relativizes the notion of "American Revolution" in favor of valorizing the concept of "war of independence" is above all the awareness of a lack of radical restructuring of the social hierarchy in the transition from the thirteen colonies to the United States.
I Founding Fathers, founding fathers of the Republic, were members of the North American establishment under British authority and remained so even after independence was achieved. Already on the eve of the First World War, historian Charles A. Beard concluded that the "revolution" had been promoted by the wealthier classes to strengthen their own power and that the delegates to the Philadelphia Convention of 1787, charged with drafting the federal Constitution, were the spokesmen of the social elites and economic lobbies of the time, all interested in protecting their own interests from the demands of the people (An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States, 1913). Not surprisingly, more than a year passed between the battles of Concord and Lexington and the formalization of the colonies' exit from the British Empire.
The colonial elite postponed this moment as long as possible, fearing that independence could turn into a full-blown revolution, risking the loss of the power they already held. Moreover, the system of indirect election of the United States president was designed to isolate the federal institutional leadership from the population through a double filter. Indeed, the electors, who still formally elect the president, were originally appointed by the legislative assemblies of the individual states of the Union, elected by census suffrage, rather than being chosen, as is the case today, by voters.
La reading by Alexis de Tocqueville (Democracy in America, 1835 and 1840) on the "American Revolution" as a mere acceleration of a process aimed at establishing popular sovereignty, unlike the French one which had overthrown feudalism, was distorted by what he had seen firsthand on a trip to the United States in 1831, when the census requirements for access to the vote had already been abolished, at least for white males, except in South Carolina alone. Founding Fathers They wanted to establish a Republic, not a democracy, because they abhorred the latter form of government, considering it the legitimization of the arbitrary will of the majority to the detriment of minorities.
Il suffocation of revolutionary ideals in the process of formation of the United States, however, did not escape another of the first interpretations of the events of the late eighteenth century. In his History of the Rise, Progress and Termination of the American Revolution, published in 1805, Mercy Otis Warner denounced the betrayal of principles of 1776, placing the blame mainly on John Adams, the second president of the United States (1797-1801).
Not exactly an anti-colonial war
It has also been scaled down anti-colonial nature of the war against England which would have established a proto-principle of self-determination of peoples. For example, according to Richard W. Van Alstyne (Empire and Independence.The International History of the American Revolution, 1965), the clash with London would have been motivated by the expansionist desire of the North American colonists.
In 1763, George IIThe English had forbidden them from settling west of the Appalachian mountain range, in the territories recently wrested from France in the victorious Seven Years' War, to avoid costly military conflicts with the Native Americans who lived adjacent to the thirteen colonies east of the Mississippi. However, Virginian speculators and adventurers had their eye on this very region and had no qualms about wresting it from the natives at gunpoint. Therefore, leaving the Empire would have served to remove the political obstacles to exploiting the area from which the English sovereign intended to exclude them.
Demonstrating that the war against London had been a struggle for the conquest of North America and not simply to secure freedom from the mother country, in the subsequent peace negotiations the newly formed United States sought to achieve not only recognition of independence but also the region east of the Mississippi, which it eventually obtained, as well as Florida and Canada, objectives which it did not achieve.
The exhausting negotiations would explain why almost two years passed between the surrender of the English at Yorktown (19 October 1781) and the signing of the peace treaty (3 September 1783).
From this perspective, the war for the independence of the United States turns into a war for the subjugation of North America.
African Americans
The concept of the "American Revolution" was especially at odds with the maintenance of slavery. It is, in fact, evident that its legality prevented the principles of equality and the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness from being universalized, transforming them into privileges whose beneficiaries were limited to white individuals only.
Not by chance, in the decades of slavery, free African Americans They refused to celebrate the Fourth of July. As Frederick Douglass, the most authoritative African-descendant abolitionist and himself a former slave who had escaped from his master, stated in 1852 in a celebratory speech he deliberately chose to deliver on July 5th, before an audience composed almost exclusively of whites, Independence Day “is yours, not mine; you may rejoice, I must mourn.”
In light of the Douglass's considerations, it does not seem accidental that Palmer omitted from his “Atlantic revolutions” the insurrection of the Afro-descendant slaves of Saint-Domingue and the subsequent war for independence of Haiti from France (1791-1804).
The 1619 Project
The prolonged exclusion of African Americans from the enjoyment of the rights proclaimed in the preamble to the Declaration of Independence, first through the survival of slavery until 1865 and then through the implementation of racial segregation in the Southern states until the mid-1960s, has recently led to a redefinition of the moment of the birth of the United States.
The 1619 Project, coordinated by the African-American journalist Nikole Hannah-Joneif released through the “New York Times” in 2019, it was intended to backdate the origins of the nation’s rise from July 4, 1776, to August 20, 1619, the day in which – by convention – the first deported Africans were landed in Jamestown, Virginia, in what was still English colonial America.
According to this interpretation, it would have been the centuries-old struggle of African Americans to emancipate themselves from slavery and to achieve effective equality with whites to realize those values of freedom and equality on which the United States is founded and which the Declaration of Independence proclaimed only in the abstract and for the exclusive benefit of the Euro-descendant component of American society.
Il rejection of the caesura of July 4, 1776 is so radical in this vision that The 1619 Project he went so far as to claim, against all historical evidence, that the war of independence against England was motivated by the desire of the North American colonists to leave the empire before London decided to abolish slavery.
Therefore, independence, rather than promoting freedom and equality, would have marked a setback in their spread, since the separation of the thirteen colonies from London would have had as its main purpose that of preventing the emancipation of slaves.
The 1619 Project He also tried to downsize the European foundations of American society, of which English constitutionalism, republicanism and natural law contractualism are integral components precisely through the Declaration of Independence, as theorized almost sixty years ago by Bernard Bailyn (The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution.
“American Revolution” and culture wars
The 1619 Project It is the most recent product of a historiographical shift that has matured since the 1960s and has questioned the actual scope of the values formulated in the Declaration of Independence as well as the extent to which their universalism has been scaled down on the basis of race, class and gender.
Interpretations of the American Revolution have thus also become a framework for defining the characteristics of American society and who is legitimately part of it. It is no coincidence that, in order to reaffirm the European origins of the United States and to marginalize the African-American contribution, in contrast to The 1619 Project, Trump promoted the 1776 report, made public on January 18, 2021, two days before the end of his first term.
Precisely in anticipation of the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, with its exaltation of 1776 as the birth of the American nation, the 2021 report aimed to promote a "patriotic" interpretation of the country's history, centering the Euro-descendant component of the United States, purging it of aspects such as systemic racism and the alleged excessive focus on African-American slavery.
The "patriotic" vision of the conflict against England also assumes a cohesion among North Americans that in reality did not exist. As reconstructed, among others, Holger Hoock (Scars of Independence: America's Violent Birth, 2017), the “American Revolution” was also a brutal civil war that pitted the independentists against the loyalists, who remained faithful to George III.
The latter amounted to approximately one-fifth of the North American population, were mainly present in the South and in the colony of New York, and included in particular non-Anglo-Saxon ethnic minorities, a large portion of African-American slaves (whom the English authorities promised emancipation if they took up arms against their masters who had rebelled against the Crown), as well as numerous native tribes, such as the Cherokee, who believed the London government's policies offered greater guarantees for safeguarding their territories from the colonists' expansionist ambitions. Another two-fifths of North Americans—especially Quakers, as pacifists, and largely present in Pennsylvania—sought to remain outside the conflict.
The America of the “revolution” he had, therefore, multiple faces. Moreover, although at the end of the War of Independence several tens of thousands of Loyalists had taken the road to Canada following the defeated British troops, independence failed to forge a national identity. The opposition within the Union between the slaveholding states and those that had abolished slavery after independence made the formation of a true national identity impossible, at least until the end of the Civil War (1861-1865) and the consequent freeing of the African Americans still in chains.
To account for this complexity, the Smithsonian Institution – the main American museum network – had planned to commemorate the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence with exhibitions and events grouped under an evocative title: Many Americas, Many 1776s (many Americas, many 1776s). The emphasis on pluralism and a multiplicity of viewpoints, however, would have easily clashed with Trump's single-track thinking. Moreover, already on the occasion of the July 4th anniversary last year, the tycoon had denounced the existence of a "left-wing cultural revolution" that, he claimed, was intended to "overturn the American Revolution."
For this reason, the title and content of the Smithsonian Institution's initiatives have been reformulated into a much more reassuring one: Our Shared Future: 250 (our shared future: 250).
In this way, the meaning to be attributed to the "American Revolution" has also become one of the battlegrounds of the "culture wars," the conflict of values between conservative tradition and progressive vision that has contributed to sharpening the fractures in American society today.
