ZadekpediaThe Revolution as an intellectual event
C. Bradley Thompson told Bob Zadek that John Adams described the American Revolution not as the war but as a revolution in the minds of the people in the 15 years before Lexington and Concord. Reading that quotation, Thompson said, he realized the true story of the Revolution was an intellectual and moral revolution in the 10 or 15 years before independence, and he broadened his book from a study of the Declaration of Independence into America’s Revolutionary Mind: A Moral History of the American Revolution and the Declaration That Defined It. He traced his own interest to a childhood book, The How and Why Wonder Book of the American Revolution, read at age seven in Ontario, and said a book on the Declaration by a Harvard professor offended him so deeply that he decided to write his own. C. Bradley Thompson on America’s Revolutionary Mind (2019)
Veterans, the Society of the Cincinnati, and money in politics
Thomas Fleming, described by Zadek as one of the nation’s leading historians of the American Revolution, discussed the Society of the Cincinnati, which Zadek called one of the oldest organizations in America, founded in 1783 by veterans of the Revolution to make sure America honored its promises to those veterans. Fleming corrected the membership rule: it is restricted to descendants of officers, one officer descendant per family, divided up by state like the 13 original states. Fleming, an honorary member, said he received the honor during the Bicentennial after giving many unpaid speeches, and that he is the George Washington scholar for the New York State Society of the Cincinnati. George Washington Was Our Guest (2011)
Fleming said Washington was uncomfortable participating because Ben Franklin and others, including Jefferson, thought the society would be the foundation of an American aristocracy and would undermine the whole idea of the Revolution; Franklin wrote a satire of it. On money and politics, Fleming said there were not enough corporations in the first ten years of the Republic to make much difference, that wealthy men like Robert Morris of Philadelphia faced no bar to participating in politics as candidates or donors, and that this was part of their rights as citizens. He said the Founders had a strong sense of ongoing conflict between rich and poor, and that after 1800 there began a tradition of fighting and defeating the rich in American politics. He described the first stock market crash in 1792, when a man named Duer tried to corner the market in shares of the Bank of the United States, failed, and lost his shirt; Jefferson, then Secretary of State, exulted in a letter that there was not a single man in New York who was not bankrupt. George Washington Was Our Guest (2011)
The Revolution as a rhetorical standard
Zadek, who calls himself a student of the American Revolution, said he had used the phrase “Second American Revolution” and had concluded that the 2012 election was maybe the most important since ratification of the Constitution. Who’s Looking Out for Us? (2012)
Vít Jedlička, founder of the Free Republic of Liberland, said the flag was planted on April 13, likely Thomas Jefferson’s birthday, to appreciate Jefferson’s personal involvement in the American Revolution and to invoke its spirit, calling the Declaration of Independence a great document. He described Liberland as a modern-day tax exodus or a new kind of Tea Party movement creating a new country in Europe, and said a constitutional lawyer from London drafted an initial constitution that was used in the final version, with everything being put on blockchain as smart contracts. Founding the Free Republic of Liberland (2021)
History in the curriculum
Zadek said North Carolina’s Chief Academic Officer, Rebecca Garland, would remove pre-1877 history from the high school curriculum, so that graduates would not know about the American Revolution, the Declaration of Independence, the Civil War, or the War of 1812, because students cannot relate to it. Best of: Changing the Face of History (2010)
Across episodes
The episodes show no development across episodes: the Revolution appears in the 2010 episode as a subject being dropped from a curriculum, in the 2011 episode through Fleming’s account of its veterans and the Founders’ politics, in 2012 as a rhetorical standard for a modern election, in 2019 as an intellectual and moral revolution, and in 2021 as the inspiration for a new micronation.
Book summary
Notes and highlights for
America’s Revolutionary Mind
Thompson, C. Bradley
Preface
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What is most needed today is a book that challenges us to rethink the deepest causes and consequences of the American Revolution, one that will allow us to see this world-changing event in a new light. I have attempted to do that with America’s Revolutionary Mind .
Introduction
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question: is there anything original left to say about the American Revolution and its causes ? The answer is, in my view, unequivocally yes. Historians have only scratched the surface, I now believe, in their understanding of its nature and meaning. As a longtime scholar of the American Revolution, I only recently came to this startling — if not controversial — conclusion after reading and reflecting on four remarkable statements about the Revolution and its causes by four of its most articulate spokesmen: John Adams, Thomas Paine, Joel Barlow, and Thomas Jefferson .
In a fascinating letter written to Thomas Jefferson in 1815, he asked a simple question: “ What do we mean by the Revolution ? ” Surely not the war, he answered rhetorically. “ That was no part of the Revolution, ” he declared. Rather, the war “ was only an Effect and Consequence ” of the Revolution. The true Revolution, he continued, “ was in the Minds of the People, and this was effected … in the course of fifteen years before a drop of blood was shed at Lexington. ” Three years later, Adams suggested again that the “ real American Revolution ” was represented by a “ radical change in the principles, opinions, sentiments, and affections ” of the American people .
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a radical change in the colonists ’ moral reasoning and political principles .
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Like Adams, Thomas Paine also understood that a revolutionary transformation had taken place in the American consciousness in the years leading up to 1776. As Paine put it so strikingly in Common Sense, “ a new æra for politics is struck ; a new method of thinking hath arisen. ”
Paine identified the precise meaning of that revolution when he wrote in Rights of Man: “ the Independence of America ” was “ accompanied by a revolution in the principles and practice of governments. ”
But what exactly was this “ new method of thinking ” and the new “ moral theory ” associated with the American Revolution ? How and why did colonial Americans develop a “ moral theory ” about the “ indefeasible, hereditary rights of man ” ? In 1792, Joel Barlow, the American poet, diplomat, and politician, announced in his Advice to the Privileged Orders, in the Several States of Europe, Resulting from the Necessity and Propriety of a General Revolution in the Principle of Government, one of the first American books on the French Revolution, that the greatest difference between free and unfree peoples had nothing to do with an “ original capacity of the mind ” but was instead connected to a certain “ habit of thinking. ” Man’s “ second nature ” as shaped by ideas and experience, he continued, was “ the only foundation ” on which to build a free and just society .
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The habit of thinking developed by the colonists after the end of the Seven Years ’ War was rooted in that “ science of liberty, ” a notion that sums up perfectly both the method of reasoning and the substance of the American mind as it came to exist in 1776 .
1825, Thomas Jefferson wrote a now well-known letter to Henry Lee in which he described the Declaration of Independence as “ an expression of the American mind. ” 8 These are the most important words ever written about the Declaration, and they provide an important key to unlocking its deepest meaning. Through this felicitous phrase, the Declaration can now be seen as the fulfillment and symbol of Adams’s “ real ” revolution ,
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To speak of an American mind suggests that certain ideas and modes of reasoning were representative of a distinct intellectual culture. Broadly defined, it refers to the modes of reasoning and the unique system of moral and political principles discovered, developed, and then implemented by American revolutionaries in the fifteen years on each side of 1776 .
This book traces the fundamental shift in ideas and values that occurred during the Revolutionary era that culminated in the development of and fealty to a common philosophy that was expressed in the Declaration and launched with the words, “ We hold these truths to be self-evident. ”
There has probably never been another time in our history when the life of the American mind was so alive, so penetrating, and so innovative as it was during the Revolutionary period .
To that end, I have developed a new approach to history writing that I call the new moral history . Broadly speaking, the new moral history employed in this book is concerned with the nature of causation and agency in the course of human events .
Its primary goal is to examine the intersection between moral thought and moral action, between what people say and what they do ( or don’t do ) .
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The new moral history begins with certain assumptions about human nature: first, that individuals are the primary unit of moral value ; second, that human nature is knowable and sometimes predictable ; third, that man’s faculty of reason can know cause-and-effect relationships in nature and human nature ; fourth, that individuals are confronted every day with choices, and that they have the free will to choose between alternatives ; fifth, that freely thinking ( rationally and irrationally ) and freely acting ( morally and immorally ) individuals are capable of making decisions and acting on them ; sixth, that purposive human agents cause events to happen ; and finally, that human thought and action can have intended and unintended consequences .
All American revolutionaries believed that there are moral and political truths — truths absolute, certain, universal, permanent, and immutable — that can be known by reason and acted on. Such was the purpose of the Declaration of Independence — to declare certain self-evident truths thought to be accessible to all men everywhere .
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Eighteenth-century Americans also assumed that society is made up of autonomous moral agents who define the course of events. Understanding men’s moral principles, their modes of reasoning, their motives, their options, their choices, and their actions was the key to understanding the role of causation in human action and history. They believed that motives explain actions, that moral principles explain motives, and that moral reasoning explains moral principles .
The thirty-year period between 1760 and 1790 supplies an ideal setting in which to observe how an imported and abstract system of ideas was adapted to unique local circumstances and then revolutionized during a period of political crisis. This testing ground offers a rare opportunity to extract certain generalizations about the
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Over two hundred years ago, Adams recommended that all future scholars of the American Revolution “ undertake the laborious … task, of searching and collecting all the records, pamphlets, newspapers, and even handbills, which in any way contributed to change the temper and views of the people, and compose them into an independent nation. ”
Following Jefferson’s advice, I have read and used virtually all of the official documents of the Revolutionary period ( i.e., laws, legislative debates, petitions, resolutions, declarations, remonstrances, circular letters, and constitutions ) as well as the major and minor treatises, pamphlets, essays, sermons, speeches, diaries, and newspaper articles, some of which have never been seen or used by scholars before .
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extended archeological excavation of America’s revolutionary mind .
Chapter 1 The Enlightenment and the Declaration of Independence
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The American Revolution and the Declaration that expressed it were the existential embodiment of the Enlightenment’s highest ideals. They restored to mankind, Jefferson implied, “ the free right to the unbounded exercise of reason and freedom of opinion. ” And with the “ general spread of the light of science ” in the eighteenth century, the veil of ignorance that had covered men’s eyes was lifted .
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Understanding the Enlightenment’s core tenets is therefore a precondition for understanding the principles of the Declaration and the American Revolution .
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Thomas Jefferson identified the “ three greatest men that have ever lived, without any exception ” as Francis Bacon, Isaac Newton, and John Locke .