This article is part of a series discussing competing perspectives on American history. Cross-reference to Chapters 3 and 4 of A Patriot’s History of the United States, and Chapters 4 and 5 of A People’s History of the United States. Here we cover the American Revolution and the ultimate adoption of the U.S. Constitution.
Following the British victory in the Seven Years’ War, the victor found itself in dire financial straits, prompting changes in the tax laws toward the American colonies. This proved unpalatable to some colonists, who ultimately brought about the coordinated revolts that toppled British rule and established independent government. A subsequent revolution—this one peaceful—occurred in the American political discourse, leading to the adoption and ratification of the U.S. Constitution, which set the framework for American government as we know it today.
As already evident, our authors see history from different lenses, no less in this period than any other. But People’s, especially, holds to a focus on ideology that leads it to simply ignore many of the more “standard” events and narratives—perhaps consistent with the book’s critical review, which claims that People’s represents a “survey” of American history from the perspective of the “new scholarship” that came out of cultural and university tumult of the 1960s. Whatever the underlying explanation, this focus leaves People’s sounding less survey than manifesto. Because of this, we will present the underlying themes from People’s and Patriot’s separately, as there are only a few points upon which the authors either address opposing views or achieve common ground.
Class Struggle, from Machiavelli to Massachusetts
In People’s, Zinn makes clear that the American Revolution was pure class exploitation, as a rising class of colonial elites realized they no longer “needed” Britain, and determined to enlist lower-class discontent (which was widespread—18 rebellions had already sought to overthrow at least one colonial government) to overthrow the British (rather than overthrow themselves), and throw to the masses the sop of “a nation, a symbol, a legal unity called the United States”. He calls this part of the “long history of American politics, the mobilization of lower-class energy by upper-class politicians, for their own purposes.” The critical balance of revolutionary leadership, therefore, was to both harness the mob and restrain its more radical impulses.
The note of class manipulation would have resonated with Niccolò Machiavelli, who in his writings characterized society as three classes: high, low, and middle. A key aim of the high is to retain their power. The aim of the low is to achieve pure equity and abolish class. The aim of the middle is to pander to the lower class with rhetoric and false promises, enlisting popular support to propel themselves to the top of the hierarchy—at which point such promises are, in practice, repudiated.
As evidence for this necessity to redirect the class anger of poor Americans toward their British governors, People’s points to a trend of rural uprisings in the pre-Revolution period—from Green Mountain Boys in Vermont (not yet a colony itself) to the Regulator movement in North Carolina. The Regulators organized to prevent the collection of taxes, and petitioned the colonial government with their grievances, citing “unequal chances the poor and the weak have in contentions with the rich and powerful.” The assembly responded with “mild reform” while also preparing “to crush them militarily.” A May 1771 battle saw several thousand Regulators defeated by cannon-shot.
Such a class-conscious angle requires some definition of class, and ultimately some assumption about what “justice” and “equality” entail. To Zinn, class was wealth, which was as unequally distributed in the colonies as it is today—the wealthiest 10% of Bostonians held 66% of taxable wealth, while today the richest 10% of Americans own ~69% of all property. Yet the concept of “class” suggests something more immutable and fatalistic than wealth, which can be acquired and created, spent and wasted. If class and wealth are one and the same, then can government be truly free for all people in a society of unequal wealth? Equality of opportunity will lead to unequal distributions of wealth that match the unequal distribution of intelligence and propensity for hard work. Equality of outcome will lead to disproportion rewards for less productive contributors to society, penalizing those who contribute most. Either way, one cannot both have the cake and eat it.
To Zinn’s credit, he recognizes at least half of this dilemma, asking “How could people truly have equal rights, with stark differences in wealth?” This echoes Tocqueville’s concerns that the system of fine-based punishment common creates disproportionate consequences for offenders based on riches.
The events of the actual war merit a single paragraph in People’s, but much is made of the point that it was the poor white men who did the actual fighting and dying. However, Zinn asserts that the southern lower classes “resisted being mobilized”; since they felt the presence of the elite colonists more acutely, they were less incensed against the British.
People’s also overlooks the Confederation government which governed the country from 1776 to 1787. It instead skips right to the Constitution, and does not mince words. Drawing from work by Charles Beard, People’s claims that the signers of the Constitution were predominantly rich lawyers, and that they created a framework of government designed to benefit the “interests they represented”—but not necessarily to benefit themselves. This is a strange distinction, suggesting that people are more motivated by the interests of their class rather than their individual interests—while many, like Alexander Hamilton, saw people as governed first and foremost by their own interests. People’s overarching point returns to class again, asserting that governments “are not neutral”, and are meant to “represent the dominant economic interests.” In this vein, the equality of opportunity offered by the American system is seen as simply a justification for perpetuating inequalities.
No discussion of class is complete without “class traitors”: individuals whose actions and words so clearly run against the class-struggle grain that the Marxist framework must condemn them as deviants rather than question the validity of the framework itself. Zinn cites two interesting examples on this note.
The first was Thomas Jefferson, who, despite his status as slaveholding landed gentry, escapes much of the class criticism that Zinn reserves for Washington, Hamilton, Adams, and others. Jefferson, more than most founders, gave powerful voice to the discontents of the masses. Writing from France at the time of popular uprisings in the post-war, pre-Constitution period, he observed: “God forbid that we should ever be twenty years without such a rebellion. The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure.” One wonders if Jefferson’s time in 1780s France left him with an appreciation of French revolutionary character. One also wonders if, with an extra century of hindsight into regime changes, bloodshed, and tyranny in France, Jefferson still would have made such a bold claim.
The ”rich” working classes, meanwhile, betrayed their poor brethren. City workingmen, especially in New York, allied with the wealthy merchants and propertied folk to support ratification of the Constitution. To People’s, this represented a break in interests among the lower classes that Zinn explained thus:
The Constitution, then, illustrates the complexity of the American system: that is serves the interests of a wealthy elite, but also does enough for small property owners, for middle-income mechanics and farmers, to build a broad base of support. The slightly prosperous people who make up this base of support are buffers against the blacks, the Indians, the very poor whites. They enable the elite to keep control with a minimum of coercion, a maximum of law—all made palatable by the fanfare of patriotism and unity.
In sum, the broad base of the middle class was not oppressed like the poorest people were—which, by this admission, must be viewed as an immense step forward, especially when the idea of a middle class was still relatively new in the human experience, and considering the increasing proportion of Americans that would ultimately reach this level of prosperity.
A Second Revolution?
We find in Patriot’s much more of the standard fare that we’ve come to expect in reading about America’s Revolution—from British tax impositions and land policies that drew colonial ire, to the almost mythical tales of Washington’s heroic generalship keeping the Continental Army in the field.
Schweikart & Allen saw two principal British policies that drove a wedge between Whitehall and the colonies: prohibited settlement of frontier lands—intended to pacify Indians, this policy instead frustrated would-be settlers, many of whom were likely poor and seeking more autonomy and prosperity—and changes in the tax law. British taxation strategy, contrary to common portrayals, was changed to reduce overall tax rates, but expand the level of enforcement, especially to middle-class and poor colonists. British claims of colonists having received “government on the cheap for decades” were likely true, but the longstanding tradition of lax colonial enforcement left the colonists unreceptive to such arguments.
Patriot’s also gives an overview of three Enlightenment philosophers who laid much of the intellectual groundwork for America’s experiments: John Locke, Thomas Hobbes, and Charles de Montesquieu. Each of these writers—whose works are worth reading separately on their own merits—contributed to the understanding of relations between “natural man” and government. Both Hobbes and Locke saw government as artificial, a concession by mankind rather than natural to it. From Montesquieu came the concept of divided government power, ultimately reflected in our three branches of government.
While People’s dismisses the events of the war, Patriot’s outlines the basic plot. The rebellions began in New England, with hastily organized militia making a stand at Lexington before harassing the British column on the way to/from Concord. Rebels on Breed’s Hill fought off British reinforcements until running out of ammunition, abandoned Boston. The occupying British in Boston was ultimately forced to withdraw when Washington set up captured British cannon on the heights above the city.
The second British intervention came at New York, with a large British force and fleet forcing Washington to retreat across New Jersey. The rebel armies went back across the Delaware river on Christmas, 1776, surprising the British and their mercenary allies. While People’s simply credits Trenton and Princeton as “minor” victories, authors such as George F. Will in The Conservative Sensibility saw this as a critical moment at which Washington was able to conjure positive momentum when it was most needed. Ultimately, the British force in New York marched up the Hudson to link with an invading force from Canada—only to be defeated at Saratoga in 1777, prompting France to come more and more to the rebels’ aid. British forces repeated the New York pattern later with Philadelphia, occupying the city and simply remaining there, while Washington’s army endured a harsh winter at Valley Forge.
A third British wave came in the south, where, contrary to Zinn’s claims, they were met by Scotch-Irish settlers with a special hatred for the English. Southern planters faced high debt burdens that British taxes and trade monopolies simply made worse. The southern campaign came to an end at Yorktown when the British army, penned in by the French navy and Franco-American forces, surrendered.
Where Patriot’s most counters common notions of American history is in its examination of the Confederation Congress—the legislative body that essentially governed America from 1776 to 1787 under the Articles of Confederation. Most high-school curricula dismiss this as an incapable and powerless government—but this was partly the point. Radical American leaders did not want any centralized authority, and the Confederation Congress could only come to decisions that were agreed on by all thirteen states, presenting considerable hurdles in passing policies.
However, the Confederation Congress achieved notable successes in two areas. In the Northwest Ordinance, the Congress determined how the frontier lands would be organized separately from the original thirteen states, and ultimately admitted as states with equal status. This required several leaps in thinking at the time—away from the “coast-to-coast” claims that accompanied many original colonial charters, that states like Virginia ultimately agreed to surrender to the national domain, away from the colony model that Britain had employed. This resulting in America being “the first nation to allow for gradual democratization of its colonial empire.” Further, the township model advocated by Jefferson enabled much of this national land to be placed in the hands of actual settlers, giving an unprecedented means for common people to own land—and culminated in the Homestead Act in 1862.
Further codified in the Northwest Ordinance was a prohibition of any form of slavery north of the Ohio River. Thus Ohio, Illinois, Wisconsin, Indiana, etc. were admitted to the Union with the slavery question predetermined. While the later Southwest Ordinance in 1789 permitted slavery in what became Tennessee and Kentucky, this formalized divided between North and South was the first of many critical moments that would show the free and slave states evolving on different paths until the Civil War.
Patriot’s thus concludes that Congress served as a more effective and measured legislature than many other revolutionary regimes, such as England’s Long Parliament, the French Committee of Public Safety, and more recent communist revolutionary governments.
Despite these successes, a growing group of nationalists grew concerned that the Confederation resembled a “tyranny of the majority”, in Madison’s words. Seven states issued paper currency and required creditors to accept it. Other states mandated moratoriums on farmers’ debt payments. These state-level measures on behalf of debtors (who likely held majorities and were from the lower and middle classes) gave no small cause for concern to those seeking a stronger central authority. Further, Congress lacked the strength to conduct successful diplomacy with foreign powers. Above all, nationalists saw the Confederation government as an overabundance of democracy at the state level, paralyzed into inaction at the national level. A few of them finally took the step of proposing a convention of the states to resolve “commercial issues”—which instead became the Constitution Convention.
The U.S. Constitution ultimately was a retreat from the U.S. as a collection of sovereign democracies, and toward a union of states under a republican form of government. While People’s saw these Framers as a “monolithic ‘class’ of men”, Patriot’s retorts: “Does any society truly want nonachievers, chronic failures, malcontents, and perennial pessimists drafting the rules by which all should live?”
State’s rights was a key battleground amongst the delegates. Larger states sought greater proportional power, while smaller states feared it—this was the origin of many concessions to smaller states that remain today, such as equal representation for each state in the Senate, and the Electoral College likewise favoring smaller states—these were intended as a “shield against direct democracy.” Neither seems rational from the modern perspective of seeing states “merely as districts”, but was a critical point to convince thirteen states that saw themselves as sovereigns to relinquish a portion of their power to a new central authority.
Slavery was neither condemned nor checked in the Constitution. Through compromise, slaves would count as 3/5 of a person in determining representation and taxation. Southerners insisted on the representation, while New England delegates insisted on the taxation. The nature of property and personhood was invoked throughout this debate, with the Framers ultimately leaving the slaves in a state of limbo between the two.
To generate support for the new Constitution, the nationalists re-branded themselves as Federalists (the name formerly used by their radical democratic opponents). The newly-minted Anti-Federalists failed to defeat the Constitution, but succeeded in their insistence on a Bill of Rights, represented in the first ten Amendments to the Constitution.
Debates on the motives of the Framers have not let up in recent decades, and Patriot’s takes square aim at the assertions by Beard and Zinn, among others, that the Constitution was a document designed to perpetuate class inequalities. Not only were many of the Anti-Federalists extremely wealthy (Jefferson, Patrick Henry, Richard Henry Lee), but many of the Federalists sacrificed greatly to bring about a new vision of America. Washington endured the cold winter of Valley Forge, while others saw their property confiscated and families taken prisoners.
In sum, no matter how Beard and his successor torture the statistics, they cannot make the Constitutional Convention scream “class struggle.” The debate was genuine; it was about important ideas, and men took positions not for what they gained financially but for what they saw as the truth.
This is among the most critical determinations in understanding American history: was the Constitution a product of ideas, or of interests? If the former, it is a testament to a noble and largely successful experiment. If the latter, it doesn’t matter how successful America has been; the issues of class are as unresolved then as now. This question remains, painfully, up to interpretation.
In our next post, we’ll cover the early formative years of the American republic, which include significant foreign policy challenges and near-miss domestic crises.
