Where did Thomas Paine, Washington, Jefferson, and Madison get the idea that they could revolt from the world’s greatest empire and claim that “all men are created equal?”
What caused Americans to rebel against their own country, Great Britain? For some, convinced by Charles Beard’s 1913 book, An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States, the American Revolution was a conflict between classes—a conflict that expelled the British but was ultimately resolved in favor of wealthy American planters and merchants who replaced the British as exploiters of American labor. This is often termed the Marxist or “progressive” view.
In 1967, Bernard Bailyn, professor of history at Harvard, authored the modern anti-Marxist answer to where Americans’ revolutionary ideas came from. His book The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, won the Pulitzer Prize for history. Bailyn argued that ideas matter more than mere economic self-interest, or at least they mattered more in 1775 and 1776. He traced the roots of American discontent to the ideology of the country Whigs of English politics, who, from the 1600’s onward, opposed the growing power of the British crown and its infringements on liberty. American thinkers, writers, and politicians of the 1760s and 1770s adapted these ideas to their colonial circumstances, expanding the English conception of liberty from one of merely protecting life, property, and freedom from arbitrary royal decree to one grounded in a broader theory of natural rights, indeed “certain inalienable Rights, and that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness—that to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed…”
"The History of Our Freedoms" is produced by KEDT-FM in Corpus Christi. Dr. Bill Chriss is a historian and legal scholar. For more on history and the constitution, check out his blog at https://drbillchriss.substack.com/.
