Was It A Revolution?

 Josh Marshall lays out Gordon Wood's argument that the American Revolution was a proper revolution.

I've struggled with the idea of revolutions and whether America's qualifies. In the end, most revolutionary studies find a beginning date - usually easy enough - and then some sort of conclusion - which is much more fraught. If we assess a revolutionary era's beginning - what is the status quo that is being overturned - and then we look at the outcome - did it succeed in overturning that status quo, then the date you pick is critical to determining the success of the revolutionary movement.

Marshall makes the case that America unleashed powerful language of "liberationist" rhetoric. He leans into Wood at the end, but Wood's mentor was Bernard Bailyn, and Bailyn points to how the American colonies existed within the political discourse and traditions of Britain, but also outside of them. Basically, the Radical Whigs of mid-18th century Britain were, well, radicals. Few listened to them outside the coffeehouses of London. America lacked the constraining presence of elaborate social hierarchies - with the obvious exception of race. Those Radical Whig writers had few censors among the educated elites of America. 

American egalitarianism predated Lexington and Concord, and it was based heavily on the shared racial superiority of White, Anglo Americans over Africans, Native Americans and Catholics. America was equal among a reasonably large group of white men. However, few had the vote. (Briefly women were given the vote in New Jersey by accident, but it was the Jeffersonian Republicans who stripped that right away; the ballot was for white men.)

True political democracy was largely kept at bay, even prior to the so-called counterrevolution of 1787, and the writing of the Constitution. While the Revolution may have unleashed revolutionary rhetoric, it rarely worked to truly upend society, the way the French and 20th century revolutions did. Yes, there were a few societies established - mostly in the Upper South - to end slavery...but they achieved nothing. Yes, as mentioned, women were extended the vote...and it was snatched away. Yes, there was talk of levelling economic differences...but if you were wealthy and supported independence, you largely stayed wealthy. Loyalists might be stripped of their estates, but it was not wealth that made them targets, but their support for independence. 

After the ratification of the Constitution in 1788 and the relative conservatism of the Federalist years until 1801, you could make a case that America returned to its British roots: a bicameral legislature with a separate head of state, common law courts, even a financial entity modelled on the Bank of England. 

America was, perhaps, inherently radical in its embrace of white, Protestant male equality, though even there, areas like the Hudson Valley or South Carolina were very much unequal. But as Edmund Burke noted in his defense of the American "revolutionaries" they were simply defending the institutions and norms that had evolved there for 150 years. That Burke could agree with Thomas Paine about the American "Revolution" and disagree so vehemently over the French Revolution tells us something important about those respective moments of change.

After Jefferson became president, a broad expansion of suffrage for white men occurred over the next three decades. It was political evolution, rather than true revolution. It proceeded from the ideas of the Declaration of Independence and Jefferson's advocacy for those principles in his presidency, through the rise of Andrew Jackson and Martin Van Buren and the Democracy. James Madison thought political parties a terrible evil; Martin Van Buren created them as forces to organize the new mass politics. 

If you want to pick the end date of the American revolution, is it 1783 and the Treaty of Paris? Was it the suppression of Shays's Rebellion? The drafting of the Constitution? The election of Jefferson? Jackson? The Civil War and Reconstruction?

You can't find an end date to the American Revolution because it wasn't a true revolution. It was a war of independence that sparked some social upheaval. That social upheaval was at first suppressed in Massachusetts in 1786 and with Washington crushing the Whiskey Rebellion in 1794. It was then channeled into political movements that coalesced into the first intentional political parties under Jackson and Van Buren.

Calling that a "revolution" seems a stretch. Certainly Paine felt that way, as he turned his back on America after the war, because he felt it insufficiently revolutionary.