By: Taylor McNeil, Tufts Now
As the United States of America celebrates its 250th anniversary, the country’s origin story is a constant presence. But the memory of the American Revolution isn’t fixed—that era has been remembered differently throughout the country’s history.
“If we want to answer the questions the Revolution raised, we have to look at it seriously as it was and how it’s been remembered,” says David Ekbladh, professor of history.
The Revolution is ubiquitous in American culture, he says.
“A colleague from Australia told me, ‘You guys just live in the Revolution here in Boston.’ That’s very true of Boston, and true of the country. It’s hard to go a week, if not a month, and not hear some official or semi-official reference to it, let alone cultural reference.”
Tufts Now recently spoke with Ekbladh to get a broader perspective on how the Revolution was seen at the time, and how it has lived on in historical memory.
Did people living in the American colonies view the Revolution differently at the time than we do today?
People now might say that we fought the Revolution so we could have a great country with a great Constitution, but that’s not why the Revolution was fought. At the time, people in Massachusetts were feeling very put upon by officials and troops from their own empire—from the polity that they were part of and that they felt disconnected from—and they responded.
In 1775, a whole slew of issues became intractable, and by April that year the shooting started, and it tipped things over. It was basically both a police action and a show of force that went awry when the shooting started in Lexington and Concord. All of a sudden there was active fighting.
This is a point I try to make—it’s not “the British” against the colonists, because the colonists thought of themselves as British subjects. The Red Coats were the regulars—professional soldiers, fighting the local militias. It’s more like a civil war.
How have perspectives on the American Revolution changed over time?
The views started changing very early on. Contemporary conservative voices in Europe said the French Revolution, which began in 1789, had become too radical and violent, and then Americans begin to talk about their Revolution as much more legalistic, that it was about a creating a constitutional democracy as opposed to a pretty serious civil war. We even started to talk as if it was a war between Americans and Britons, as opposed to this kind of awful splitting and fragmenting.
In the 1860s, the Confederacy used the Revolution in some fundamental ways as a justification for its own actions, arguing that they were staying true to the founding principles as well as the Constitution.
And on the flip side, the Union said it was fighting to preserve what was laid down “four score and seven years ago, when our fathers brought forth a new nation.” Lincoln was saying that was what the Revolution was fought for—to create the union and for an extension of liberty.
How was historical memory of the Revolution different in the 20th century?
During the Cold War, we were fighting Castro, the Soviets, and the Chinese, who all were calling for worldwide revolution, offering other countries profound change. So the Americans showed up and said, “Hey, we understand revolution too, and we’re offering something that’s equally profound. Look at us. We are the product of a revolution. If you follow our program, you can get some of the things that we’ve gotten from our revolution.”
And while there are conservative voices today who say the American Revolution was all about liberty, there are others who point out the contradictions—about who was left out of liberty in the Revolution—people of African descent and Native peoples, for example. The Revolution raises all sorts of questions about liberty, but a lot of them got entirely ignored, or certainly not fulfilled.
In the 1960s, the Revolution was examined more from a social standpoint by historians, bringing the Native Americans and enslaved people into the narrative, and also examining the lives of everyday people at the time, not just the Adamses and Jeffersons.
Was there ever a really radical side of the American Revolution?
When you look at some of the things that people were debating in the early phases of the Revolution, they were talking about figuratively killing the king—getting rid of that form of governing.
They wanted to build a unicameral legislature, with real representation where the people could govern themselves. Granted, who those people were was still very restricted, but it was wider than most any other place in the world. For the 18th century, when democracy was almost a dangerous word—democracy was loud, raucous, unpredictable, and potentially dangerous—it was radical.
These two different views—that the Revolution was about achieving liberty through representative government and that the Revolution failed to include many people in its vision of democracy—seem hard to reconcile.
Some people want the kind of cult of the founders—guys in wigs—and want this to be very conservative, and others focus on what it didn’t do and who it didn’t include. Both of those are valid, and both are part of the story.
