Reflections on the American Revolution, 250 Years On

With the United States gearing up for the 250th anniversary of its founding revolution this year, historians are marking the moment. Most prominently to date, the documentary filmmaker Ken Burns produced “The American Revolution,” a 12-hour series that he hopes will help a polarized United States find common ground.

Burns’ beautifully crafted television documentary emphasizes the ideas of liberty that drew the disparate 13 colonies together to resist British rule. As Burns explained in a November appearance with Stephen Colbert, for anyone, regardless of their politics, “understanding the story of us helps to put you back together again.”

The most important event in history since the birth of Christ?

In his conversation with Colbert, Burns leaned into American exceptionalism. He described the American Revolution, in his view, as “the most important event in history since the birth of Christ . . . the beginning of the time when human beings were no longer subjects but citizens.”

While that view is certainly not shared universally around the globe, Burns’ motivation is clear: he hopes his work may inspire American citizens to find shared meaning in their history.

Beyond American exceptionalism

However, American exceptionalism is not the only lens through which to view the Revolution of 1776. Several important books published over the last year offer broader historical contexts for the American origin story.

In “Patriots Before Revolution: The Rise of Party Politics in the British Atlantic, 1714-1763,” University of Alabama historian Amy Watson locates the origins of the American Revolution in the English and Scottish patriot Whig movements. They arose in opposition to excise taxes on the British population proposed by Prime Minister Robert Walpole in the 1730s.

In the footsteps of these British opposition politicians at the time

The American Patriots followed in the footsteps of these British opposition Whigs (known as “Patriots”) in their organizing strategies and their deft deployment of the press.

Watson reminds us, moreover, that this transatlantic opposition movement was not merely anti-excise but focused on a shared political vision that was “militant, expansionist, confederal and free.” This movement spoke the language of liberty but was often pro-slavery, pro-war and in favor of Westward expansion into Native American lands.

The constraints on monarchical power

Stanford historian Dan Edelstein takes an even deeper historical dive in his book titled “The Revolution to Come: A History of an Idea from Thucydides to Lenin.” In Edelstein’s view, the American Revolution followed the playbook of 17th-century British revolutions that emphasized the Greek historian Polybius’s belief in “the well-balanced constitution.”

In such a regime, the monarch’s power was held in check by other governmental powers — in the case of England, that of Parliament.

The constraints on monarchical power following the English Revolution of the 1640s and the Glorious Revolution of 1688 shaped the American founders’ belief in checks and balances to create “a more perfect Union.” In 1787, the founders created a constitution designed to prevent future “disunion.”

Preventing a future “disunion”

A vital feature of the American Constitution is Article V, which allows for amendments that facilitate change. Key amendments enacted in the wake of the American Civil War in the mid-19th century and the Civil Rights movements in the mid-20th century show the power of amendment to promote progress without revolution.

But as Harvard historian Jill Lepore points out, “the constitution has not been meaningfully amended since 1971,” given the difficulty of achieving the necessary two-thirds majority in Congress and ratification by three-quarters of the fifty states.

In “We the People: A History of the U.S. Constitution,” she warns: “A constitution too easily amended leads to chaos. But a constitution too difficult to amend leads to chaos too.” Lepore wonders “whether the Constitution can endure” without the plausible possibility for future amendments.

France’s new conception of revolution

While the Constitutional Convention of 1787 further solidified Americans’ commitment to avoiding disunion, two years later, the French Revolution launched with what Edelstein describes as a new conception of revolution.

Rather than being based on the classical playbook described by Polybius, the French Revolution, and subsequent ones around the globe, trusted in the Enlightenment ideal “that public opinion, when properly guided, would converge on the correct answer.” This view, however, “faced a serious test in 1789,” when different factions of French revolutionaries proposed different forms of government.

Trusting public opinion?

As Edelstein explains, “These divisions among revolutionaries were doubly problematic. From an Enlightenment perspective, they were unforeseen. Progress was supposed to bring consensus. The only logical explanation, for each group, was that the others were wrong.”

Punishing or executing those with dissenting views became part of modern revolutionary practice, a practice that also often included installing a dictator. As Edelstein explains, “The modern version of history, when acted upon in a revolution, does not inevitably lead to political terror, but it predisposes revolutionary actors to use it.”

Even as Edelstein explores the revolutionary dictatorships that arose around the globe in the 19th and 20th centuries, he identifies “the greatest revolutionary threat today” as the “phenomenon of democratic backsliding” where a “regime shifts seamlessly from democracy to dictatorship.”

Conclusion

In much the same way that Lepore identifies the threat to democracy in our gradually declining ability to amend the Constitution, Edelstein is concerned about an imperceptible and unnoticed backsliding in any constitutional democracy. “Our biggest fear,” he concludes, “should be that no one even notices the revolution to come.”

The backsliding into dictatorship is something the American founders themselves anticipated. As Ken Burns documents in The American Revolution, the founders crafted the delicate system of checks and balances in our Constitution because “they feared that a demagogue might incite citizens into betraying the American experiment.”

For those of us who value the ideals that the American experiment represented, these lessons from revolutionary history remind us that we must stay vigilant to preserve them.