On The American Revolution

By Paul Manton.

One overcast afternoon in the spring of 1990, I stood quietly in a room in a farmhouse in Lexington, Massachusetts. Built in 1737, it was here on the evening of April 18, 1775 that two men nervously played cards late into the night when, for their personal safety, they were compelled to leave abruptly.

The British force that moved through the countryside seeking to arrest two troublemakers - John Hancock and Samuel Adams - never found their men but when they marched into a village green just a few minutes walk away the next morning, they were greeted by militiamen. Nobody knows who fired the first musket round that morning, the 'shot heard 'round the world', but everyone knows what ensued.    

The following autumn, I walked in an open field in Yorktown, Virginia where, 210 years earlier, the army of Charles, Lord Cornwallis surrendered to General George Washington ending the fighting on American soil. The war would continue in the West Indies, on the high seas, and in India before the combatants - Great Britain, the United States, France, Spain, the Netherlands, various German principalities, and sundry American Indian nations - were idled in 1783 by the Treaty of Paris.    

How odd it is that the global superpower of the early 21st Century was created as a result of an arrest gone awry. We have all learned the official, sanitized, romanticized version of the American Revolution from generations of pious school marms, patriotic speeches by politicians, and pop culture shibboleths distilled by Hollywood. But the actual events surrounding the origin of the United States are far more complex, counterintuitive, and interesting.

Consider, for example, that most of the colonists in 1776 didn't want independence from Great Britain; that the American Revolution was a theatre of operation for a larger global military conflict fought on three continents and two oceans; that this 'popular uprising of the common folk' was led by some of the wealthiest subjects in the British Empire; that the British public and Parliament was completely polarized with respect to a plan of action to address "the American crisis"; that the Founding Fathers possessed no single vision of the nation they sought to midwife: John Adams visualized a quasi-monarchy, Thomas Jefferson dreamt of a bucolic utopia of Anglo-Saxon yeomen, Thomas Paine imagined a pseudo-socialist republic and Alexander Hamilton prognosticated an industrial mercantile state. All thought of the Roman Republic. (Perhaps, too, Benjamin Franklin was the Founding Father who would have been most at home in 2013; would have best understood the relationships between commerce, technology, and the media).

The American Revolution, in other words, was less a rebellion or crusade than a grand morality play whereupon all the vices that afflict our species and all the virtues that grace it, were magnified and displayed for the edification of humanity. It gave rise to the most noble of historical figures as well as to the most dastardly profligates on both sides.    

 The success of the American Revolution was met with mixed reviews. On one hand, in more backward and/or absolutist situations, news of the colonist's victory was met with enthusiasm. Unpopular monarchs quaked in their boots. On the other hand, many people, better schooled in history and human nature, saw both challenges and opportunities; feared that republicanism would morph into a radical, militant, and expansionist ideology that, in due course, would give rise to its own entrenched power-elite, its own blood-thirsty tyrants, and its own conquerors. For better or worse, the 'shot heard 'round the world" still echoes.

Much, indeed, happened from that tense evening in the Massachusetts farmhouse to that October day when the army of Lord Cornwallis lay down its  arms in a Virginia field.