The American Revolution Is Not Complete
It was telling that the last pop culture sensation to tackle the American Revolution—the 2015 musical Hamilton—felt that the best way to make the nation’s founding legible to modern audiences was to cast a Founding Father as a plucky immigrant. So distant was their world from ours that its creator, Lin-Manuel Miranda, seemed to think that audiences could only relate to the founding if it was retrofitted into more contemporary terms. For all the absurdities of that musical and that moment—a quasi-monarchist, low-key slave peddler, and architect of the nation’s first banking system, recast as a hip-hop singing immigrant striver and fawned over by liberal elites—what went virtually unnoticed amid the commentary was just how remote it made the Revolution feel. Even the sharpest critiques focused mainly on the historical distortions, adding to the sense that the Revolution was far behind us, a subject best left to historians rather than to playwrights and politicians.Now that the nation’s 250th anniversary is upon us, you could forgive liberals for feeling conflicted. Few seem in the mood to participate in what will likely be the even grosser distortions offered at Trump-sponsored events. But equally troubling is that many feel that the Revolution doesn’t offer much in the way of inspiration. Whatever the Declaration of Independence’s radicalism, with its bedrock assumption that “all men are created equal,” the Founders, as a group, largely failed to put those ideals into practice. Despite the demands of thousands of enslaved people, poor white men, and women during the war years, by century’s end the Founders had rolled back what few liberties they had won. And forget about Native Americans: No matter which side they took, the patriot victory unleashed a torrent of land theft and state violence against which Native nations would continue to fight for at least another century. But what if this way of understanding the nation’s birth rests on its own faulty assumptions? What if the Revolution can only be judged a failure if we assume it ended in the Founders’ lifetime? Two new books suggest, in very different ways, that one reason the Revolution disappoints is because we assume it ended too soon. Historians typically mark the end of the Revolution with either the ratification of the Constitution in 1788, or, at the very latest, the War of 1812, when the new nation fought a second and final war against the British. But deep into the nineteenth century, many ordinary Americans saw the Revolution as ongoing—an unfinished fight for freedom and equality that only began with the first shots at Lexington and Concord in 1775 and continued for at least another century, until the end of Reconstruction. If we take the long view, they suggest, and focus on lesser-known figures who tried to fulfill the Revolution’s radical promise, perhaps this year’s anniversary need not feel like such a downer.That many Americans sensed the Revolution was still being fought nearly a century after the patriots ended the war with Britain conjures a worldview closer to Marxism than American republicanism. “Permanent revolution” is how socialist and communist leaders have long understood their projects, but in The Long Revolution, Nathan Perl-Rosenthal’s wonderful new book, he suggests that, despite their differences, many early Americans saw their Revolution in not entirely dissimilar terms. Drawing on an original database of nearly 2,500 Fourth of July speeches delivered around the country between 1776 and 1876, he charts the often-clashing ways Americans made sense of the Revolution and its meaning in their lives. Whatever their politics, most orators—Black and white, men and women, rich and poor—believed their agenda would fulfill the Revolution’s promise and were haunted by the idea that their “experiment” in democratic self-government might fail.Some of the earliest July Fourth orators saw the Revolution as the first domino in a series of democratic revolutions toppling hierarchical regimes around the world. And for good reason: The French Revolution began the same year the first Congress sat, in 1789; the Haitian Revolution began two years later; and the Latin American wars of independence followed less than two decades after that. Of course, most early orators—mostly small-town white male dignitaries—saw only what they wanted to see. Many avoided references to the Haitian Revolution, wary of associating their “glorious cause” with a republican uprising led by enslaved people. And after initially celebrating the outbreak of Latin American revolutions—“Their cause ought to excite our sympathies … for they are now, as we once were,” noted one Independence Day orator in 1816—many kept their distance as some Latin American republics faltered in the 1820s.There were also outliers. At the turn of the century, Hamilton’s party, the Federalists—mostly wealthy Northeastern supporters of centralized federal power—advanced a more limited view of the Revolution. Rooted in the struggle to ratify the U.S. Constitution, which they supported in part because it curtailed the power of more democratic state governments, Federalist orators were more likely to portray the Revolution as finished, “the better to reestablish order and hierarchy in the new nation,” Perl-Rosenthal writes.One might expect that the passage of time would have made orators more comfortable celebrating what the Founders achieved. But Perl-Rosenthal finds just the opposite: Long after the Constitution was ratified, orators consistently suggested the republic might fail. “The nation’s collapse was never far from orators’ minds,” he writes. Part of their dread stemmed from the very idea that the Revolution was unfinished, but other sources of anxiety changed over time. Before the 1820s, Americans watched as new republics abroad collapsed, democratic uprisings were crushed, and the Founders themselves began to die. Over the next three decades, as slavery expanded, Northern society commercialized, and immigration rose, their worries increasingly stemmed from problems at home.Northern white property holders tended to see the challenges of industrialization—labor movements, single women working in factories, public drunkenness—as moral problems requiring changes to individual behavior. The Revolution was thus recast as a moral struggle for self-control. On July 4, 1844, the Boston orator Peleg Chandler fused the idea of democratic self-government with “self-government by each individual,” arguing that, to save the republic from internal chaos, individual citizens must “bring themselves under ... restraint.”But these conservative orations were countered by the speeches of abolitionists, feminists, and labor organizers. Nearly all, Perl-Rosenthal finds, portrayed their fights for economic, racial, and gender equality as part of the ongoing struggle for freedom that commenced in Lexington and Concord. In 1836, the working-class leader Seth Luther cast the fight of labor against capital as an extension of the patriots’ war against Loyalists: “Workingmen of 76 stood on our battle field,” Luther said in his oration, and so must “we of 36 despise the power of domestic foes,” referring to local business owners. On July 4, 1829, the feminist Fanny Wright, for whom the Declaration of Independence was as sacred as Scripture, declared the “revolution we this day commemorate [is] incomplete and insufficient.”Black abolitionists had a particularly complex relationship with Independence Day. Since the 1820s, many of their orations mixed righteous condemnations with urgent calls to complete what the Revolution began. Others placed less emphasis on July Fourth, instead celebrating August 1, the day in 1834 when the British abolished slavery in the Caribbean, as a more resonant holiday. By the 1850s, as political debates over slavery’s expansion westward consumed the nation, some Black abolitionists turned July Fourth into what Perl-Rosenthal calls an “antiholiday”—holding their celebrations one day later, on the fifth, as if to underscore the nation’s failure to live up to the declaration’s ideals.Indeed, perhaps the most well-known July Fourth oration—Frederick Douglass’s 1852 speech—was delivered on July 5. “What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July?” Douglass famously intoned. “To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license ... a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages.” Yet for all the speech’s righteous fury, it’s often forgotten that Douglass began by praising the Founders and concluded by calling the Constitution a “glorious liberty document.” In this, Douglass was keeping with the spirit of many abolitionists, feminists, and labor organizers of his day, summoning his audience to fulfill the ideals the Founders had professed but failed to deliver.From the outbreak of the Civil War to the overthrow of Reconstruction in 1877, the orations of white Northerners and Southerners followed similar paths, albeit initially toward different ends. On the surface, Southern secessionists had the easier case to make: Leaving the Union out of fear that the federal government would destroy slavery seemed an obvious continuation of the patriots’ war against a tyrannous government. Northerners countered that secession was not a Revolution at all but an “insurrection,” and when emancipation finally became a war aim midway through the conflict, they could at last join abolitionists in seeing the war as a continuation of the Revolutionary struggle for freedom.And yet it would not last. As Reconstruction dragged into the 1870s and Northern whites lost interest in enforcing racial equality in the South, Northerners and Southerners alike increasingly spoke of the founding as if it had finally been completed—not in the sense that the enslaved had been freed, but that the fragile nation was at last on firmer footing. The Civil War had also produced a new national holiday—what became Memorial Day—which competed with Independence Day for public attention. By the nation’s first centennial in 1876, the federal government had taken over the once locally organized July Fourth celebrations, commissioning orations from across the country that had to be “historical” in nature—a sure sign the sense of a living Revolution had passed.The Long Revolution makes a smart and convincing case that the Revolution remained alive in the minds of Americans longer than we might assume. But I wonder whether the sense of an ongoing Revolution died quite as soon as Perl-Rosenthal contends. The great benefit of his sources—thousands of July Fourth speeches drawn from newspapers and pamphlets across the country—is that they reveal broad patterns across space and time. The downside is that they leave out other sources where Americans might have expressed the same sense of an unfinished Revolution. We only need know where to look.Holding up the promise of the nation’s founding documents—“a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir,” as Martin Luther King Jr. put it in his “I Have a Dream” speech in 1963—has always been central to Black activism. The problem is that we tend to fixate on the scalding critiques of the Founders’ hypocrisy—the clickbait—and skim past the patriotism. A recent example is Nikole Hannah-Jones’s lead essay for The New York Times’s “1619 Project.” Critics tended to focus on some of her debatable interpretations of the nation’s founding, but they often overlooked her almost blush-worthy patriotism: “Our founding fathers may not have actually believed in the ideals they espoused,” she wrote, “but black people did.” She continued: “Black people have seen the worst of America, yet, somehow, we still believe in its best.”My sense is that Perl-Rosenthal might have seen this essay as reflecting an identitarian view of nationhood—one that locates the nation’s strength in its diversity. In that respect, he suggests, it’s not so different from JD Vance’s emphasis on a “heritage” definition of citizenship, by which Vance seems to mean the descendants of white Protestant settlers. Both conceptions rest on the idea “that Americans are those born on American soil or who have come to it—a flexible but still constraining form of blood-and-soil nationhood,” Perl-Rosenthal writes. Better, he argues, to ground citizenship in a commitment to the founding’s principles—freedom and equality for all. I don’t disagree. But speech often dismissed today as divisive identity politics, especially when it blasts the Founders, as Hannah-Jones did, frequently blends the same righteous fury and patriotic optimism—the sense of an unfinished Revolution—that we otherwise admire when spoken by men like Douglass. The question is whether we can hear the echoes of the past through the confusions of the present.If The Long Revolution documents a broad spectrum of political ideologies early Americans invested the Revolution with, Thomas Richards Jr.’s rousing The Unfinished Business of 1776 primarily focuses on causes that will resonate with today’s left. He doesn’t shy away from the Revolution’s many failures, but he’s concerned that the critical tone of much academic scholarship risks ceding this year’s anniversary to the “twisted perversion of American history” likely to be heard at official Trump celebrations. He thus offers another kind of “long” history, which highlights ordinary Americans from the early republic—rural white farmers and religious dissidents, women, Native Americans, and enslaved and free Black people—for whom the Revolution’s radical ideals were something worth fighting for.Though many Americans remember the Constitution as the Revolution’s crowning achievement, Richards reminds readers that it was in many ways a negation of its leveling spirit. The state governments created during the War of Independence were often far more democratic, lowering wealth requirements for voting and enacting tax relief that helped the poor but outraged the rich. The Constitution shifted power from the states to distant leaders, most of whom—from the president, senators, and judges—were not directly elected by the people. Many Americans thus saw it as “a betrayal of all they had fought for since 1775,” Richards writes. The anti-federalists—many of whom were small farmers and artisans who saw wealthy Founders like Hamilton as “useless and idle drones” who live “on the common stock,” as one anti-federalist put it—lost the ratification battle but forced the Founders to add the Bill of Rights, the first 10 amendments, which protect many freedoms progressives rely on today, from the right to protest and freedom of speech to the right to a fair trial.Rural white Americans continued their fight for economic justice well after the Revolutionary War ended. Herman Husband was one of hundreds of small farmers in the Pennsylvania backcountry who saw Hamilton’s whiskey tax of 1791—a regressive tax that fell largely on poor rural farmers and was intended to repay war debts owed to wealthy financiers—as “a fundamental betrayal of the American Revolution,” Richards writes. While conservatives today often remember the Revolution as a “tax revolt” against big government, Richards reminds us that tax revolts both during and after the Revolutionary War were less antecedents to modern libertarianism than fights against financial elites who bailed out the rich on the backs of the poor.In a similar vein, he argues that while the Founders supported market competition and private property, they also believed in “economic equality.” All the revolutionary states abolished inheritance laws that concentrated wealth, believing that equal wealth distribution was the linchpin of a functioning republic. Historians tend to see the Panic of 1819—the nation’s first great depression—as evidence that the unfettered capitalist view won out. But Richards highlights Kentucky’s Relief Party, which arose in response. A proto-Populist movement, the Relief Party protected small debtors from wealthy creditors and created a system of public financing that issued low-interest loans to small farmers and artisans. As the economy recovered, the party faded, but the case study brilliantly shows how left-wing economic populism—far from a recent invention—has deep roots in the Revolutionary past.Richards also seeks to restore the Revolution’s place in the history of modern feminism. Ask a casual feminist today when the fight for women’s rights began, and they will likely say Seneca Falls (1848). But Richards dates it to Revolutionary-era New Jersey, when the state briefly allowed women with property to vote. Though scholars often interpret this as a modest and short-lived exception that underscores the Revolution’s failures as much as its promise—it applied only to propertied women, mostly white widows, and was repealed in 1807—Richards looks at the voting rolls and finds that in some counties as many as 10 percent of voters were women, surely enough to sway an election. Moreover, women suffragists throughout the nineteenth century referenced the New Jersey laws when campaigning for voting rights, linking their struggle—culminating in the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920—to the founding era.Enslaved people drew inspiration from the Revolution as well. When Virginia authorities uncovered plans for an enslaved rebellion organized by the enslaved blacksmith Gabriel in August 1800, captured conspirators revealed they intended to march under a flag reading “Death or Liberty,” a deliberate appropriation of Patrick Henry’s Revolutionary War slogan. Another captured rebel told prosecutors: “I have nothing more to offer than what General Washington would have had to offer…. I have adventured my life in endeavoring to obtain the liberty of my countrymen, and am a [sic] willing to sacrifice in their cause.” During Reconstruction, Black civil rights leaders often framed their new constitutional rights—from birthright citizenship to Black male suffrage—as fulfilling the Revolution’s promise, or, as the Black Philadelphian Charles Gibbons put it, a realization of “that divine ideal of human equality … [that] was proclaimed from Independence Hall.”The case Richards is trying to make works best when focusing on the ordinary Americans who fought for racial, gender, and economic equality in the name of the founding’s principles. But it’s more difficult to sustain for other groups. A chapter on how the Cherokee leader Chief John Ross pleaded with liberal-minded Americans to uphold the Revolution’s ideals of equality and justice and resist the Indian Removal Act of 1830 is only half-convincing. It’s not because many liberal Americans did not listen, but because the American Revolution’s relationship to Native Americans was fundamentally about land speculators and white settlers gaining a free hand to seize Native lands. From the very start of the Revolution, most Native nations saw a patriot victory as portending a loss of Indigenous sovereignty, not a promise of greater freedoms—and they were right.Other chapters don’t have clear resonance with modern left-wing ideas. A chapter on short-lived breakaway republics in antebellum California, Oregon, Utah, and Texas is framed as demonstrating how the “right to found a new nation” lived on in the minds of Americans long after the Revolutionary War ended. Richards at one point suggests that not all the chapters in this book support left-wing ideas, but it’s not clear how this might inspire liberals today. In any event, the chapter says little about the most consequential breakaway state—the Confederate States of America—which fought a civil war against the United States, and whose central purpose, the protection of slavery, was also an important motive behind Texas’s secession from Mexico in 1836, though Richards has doubts.Like Perl-Rosenthal, Richards has written a timely and provocative book. Yet readers might finish both with the impression that the chest-thumping patriotism of MAGA—with its “Don’t Tread On Me” flags lifted straight from the Revolutionary War—is simply a distortion of the Revolution’s true meaning rather than one of its genuine legacies. But as historians Steven Hahn and Jefferson Cowie have recently argued, an illiberal understanding of freedom runs straight from the founding to the present—the freedom to dominate—and being morally bankrupt does not make it a less authentic interpretation. For that matter, it’s often impossible to separate the Revolution’s illiberal impulses from what now looks like its latent progressivism. The same backcountry farmers who railed at the Founders for courting the rich were also furious at them for refusing to let them seize Native American land. And many abolitionists who fought slave labor in the name of revolutionary freedom simultaneously ignored—indeed sometimes celebrated—the rise of an exploitative system of wage labor unfolding all around them.Yet Richards’s final plea is still worth heeding: “a narrative of the American Revolution that only criticizes is a poor replacement for a narrative that only celebrates.” It may simply be that history books are not the best place to look for this “usable past,” as historians call it. In many ways, ordinary Americans are already doing that work themselves. You see one version in MAGA’s appropriation of Revolutionary symbols, from the “Don’t Tread On Me” flag to the movement’s Tea Party roots. But the impulse appears on the left as well. Bernie Sanders frequently invokes the Founders in his fight against oligarchy, even casting his first presidential campaign as part of an ongoing “political revolution” that “never ends.” Mainstream liberals, too, seem to have caught the Revolutionary spirit: What is the protest slogan “No Kings,” after all, if not a reminder that the founding still resonates, and might not be as distant as it seems?