This entry is a subentry of Revolutionary War (1775 – 83).
It has been argued that the American Revolution is the central event of American history, and it has occasioned more scholarship than any other episode save the Civil War. Yet, when former President John Adams asked Thomas McKean in 1815 who would write the Revolution's history, he posed a challenge that historians still confront. The secret sessions and debates, now lost along with other critical information that vanished when the participants died, leave many vital gaps in our understanding. What was the real story?
Historians, of course, have not hesitated to offer accounts of the Revolution. Several key questions have defined their interpretations. How and when did the Americans come to consider themselves a nation different from Great Britain? Was the Revolutionary War inevitable? To what degree was the Revolutionary War a civil war? Was there a struggle for power among the factions in the United States during the war? Why independence? Could the British government have prevented the separation? Why did the British pursue the measures they did?
Military historians have often focused on George Washington's overall strategy and have debated whether the American victory could have been achieved without the Continental army, which was its centerpiece. Was the French Alliance critical, or not? To what extent did British strategy and tactics work against an imperial victory by politicizing the American population? Why did the British devastate so much of Scotland in warfare thirty years earlier but do so little, comparatively, to the rebellious colonies in North America?
Finally, how should we interpret the U.S. Constitution? Was it a counterrevolutionary document created to serve the class interests of its framers, or did it realize and embody the ideological promise of revolutionary republicanism? Perhaps most intriguing of all, why did the Revolution not turn upon itself and devour its own as in so many other revolutions? There was no terror—once the war ended, its violence was soon forgotten, and its effects dissipated; unlike most other revolutionary peoples in the Americas, those of the United States escaped militarization or dictatorship by their War of Independence.
The Revolution's first historians witnessed the events they described. Their highly colored, contingent, localized, and biased narratives made impassioned arguments for the justice of their cause, whether loyalist or Whig. Two valuable loyalist accounts are Peter Oliver's violently partisan Origin and Progress of the American Rebellion (1781; published 1961), and the third and fourth volumes of Thomas Hutchinson's History of the Colony and Province of Massachusetts Bay (1767, 1828), which provide a more balanced and insightful view. Their Whig counterparts are Mercy Otis Warren's three‐volume History of the Rise, Progress and Termination of the American Revolution (1805), which gives a contemporary woman's view of politics and a relatively balanced account; and Dr. David Ramsay's History of the American Revolution (1789), the only contemporary narrative to focus on the Revolution outside New England. The most significant work published in the immediate post‐Revolutionary period, Mason Locke Weem's Life of Washington (1809), treated Washington's as an exemplary life, and fictionalized shamelessly to make its points. It influenced more Americans than any of the other early accounts.
The first significant school of interpretation on the Revolution, the Nationalist school, emerged in the mid‐nineteenth century. These historians collected thousands of documents and built the first archives of Revolutionary writings; their narratives stressed the inevitability of the American victory and endowed the story with providential significance. Jared Sparks, the librarian of Harvard College, was the first great figure of this school, publishing some 100 volumes on the Revolutionary period, including a 12‐volume Life and Writings of George Washington (1833–39) and a 10‐volume Works of Benjamin Franklin (1836–40). The dominating writer of Nationalist history, George Bancroft, published a ten‐volume History of the United States (1834–74), the last six volumes of which detail the events of the Revolution. For the Nationalists, the Revolution was above all a moral tale, acted out by great men whose virtue ensured America's progress toward its destiny of freedom.
The first academic interpreters of the Revolution, the Imperial school, appeared at the end of the nineteenth century. Writing principally from British documents and employing the critical methods pioneered by the German historian Leopold von Ranke, the Imperial historians scorned the providentialism of the Nationalists. Their version of the Revolution emphasized institutional factors and tended to empathize with the British; the most ardent among them regarded the Revolution as the result of a series of unfortunate misunderstandings—a colossal mistake. The most important figures and works in this school include Charles McLean Andrews, The Colonial Background of the American Revolution (1931); Lawrence Henry Gipson, The British Empire Before the American Revolution, fourteen vols. (1936–69); and Leonard Woods Larabee, Royal Government in America (1930).
Twentieth‐century historians can be grouped into three major schools: the Progressives, the Neo‐Whigs, and the Modernists. The Progressives emphasized social science methods, embraced the frontier theory of Frederick Jackson Turner, and tended to explain the Revolution in terms of class conflict—a struggle not only for home rule but over who (as Carl Becker put it) “should rule at home.” They rejected the institutional focus and anglophilia of the Imperial historians and created a Revolution that was preeminently a struggle between common men with democratic aspirations, and their aristocratic, would‐be masters. Charles A. Beard, An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States (1913), Carl Becker, The Declaration of Independence (1922), Arthur M. Schlesinger, Sr., The Colonial Merchant and the American Revolution (1918), John Franklin Jameson, The American Revolution Considered as a Social Movement (1926), and John C. Miller, Samuel Adams (1936) are some of the more significant works by members of this school.
The post–World War II generation of scholars, called Neo‐Whigs, reacted against the Progressives' class conflict–based interpretation and described a revolutionary movement that emerged from a broadly shared republican (or “Real Whig”) political ideology. Concerned with decision making and explaining human behavior in conflict situations, these historians generally view the Revolution as a conservative movement to protect American rights from the acts of Parliament after 1760. The most influential figure in this school, Bernard Bailyn, has produced several books and essays, most notably The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (1967) and The Ordeal of Thomas Hutchinson (1974). Other significant representatives include Daniel Boorstin, The Americans: The Colonial Experience (1958); and Edmund and Helen Morgan, The Stamp Act Crisis (1953), Bernhard Knollenberg, Origins of the American Revolution (1960), Pauline Maier, From Resistance to Revolution (1972), Richard D. Brown, Revolutionary Politics in Massachusetts (1970), and Jack Rakove, The Beginnings of National Politics (1979).
Modernists carry on the interpretative debates of earlier historians. Gordon S. Wood, in two of the most important works on the era, The Creation of the American Republic (1969) and The Radicalism of the American Revolution (1992), synthesizes the Progressive argument for a counterrevolutionary Constitution with the ideological analysis of the Neo‐Whigs, and argues that the Revolution represented a real change in colonial society, not a conservative reaction. In A Struggle for Power (1996), Theodore Draper provides a detailed synthesis covering the ten years before the war began, and explicitly downplays the ideological quality of the Revolution in favor of the political pragmatism of the revolutionaries. Draper's lack of interest in ideology as opposed to power mirrors the earlier work of James Kirby Martin, Men in Rebellion (1973).
The war itself has received increasing notice as an agent of revolutionary change. John Shy's suggestive essays in A People Numerous and Armed (1976), first pointed the way toward interpreting the Revolution as dynamically related to the War of Independence; two other distinguished collections of articles edited by Ronald Hoffman and Peter Albert, Arms and Independence (1984) and An Uncivil War (1985), offer valuable case studies of the war in local contexts. E. Wayne Carp explains the roles of localism and political culture as they influenced the supply and support of the Continental army in his To Starve the Army at Pleasure (1984). Charles Royster describes the interactions between the war, republicanism, and the Continental army in A Revolutionary People at War (1979). R. Arthur Bowler explores an important cause of the British failure to crush the rebellion in Logistics and the Failure of the British Army in America (1975), while Sylvia R. Frey describes the British army's social character in The British Soldier in America (1981). In The Military Experience in the Age of Reason (1988), Christopher Duffy develops a clear perspective on how war and society intertwined in the eighteenth century. Other significant works on the British forces and the war include
One notable trend in modern scholarship is to include the story of common people and minority groups.
Two classics in the history of Revolutionary‐era women are
Native Americans have lately received notable treatments in
In general, there are two areas where further scholarship is needed. Apart from works on diplomacy and
Bibliography
- James Kirby Martin, A Respectable Army: The Military Origins of the Republic, 1763–1789, 1982.
- Colin D. Calloway, The American Revolution in Indian Country, 1995.
- Martin V. Kwasny, Washington's Partisan War, 1775–1783, 1996.
- Holly A. Mayer, Belonging to the Army: Camp Followers and Community During the American Revolution, 1996.
- Charles P. Neimeyer, America Goes to War: A Social History of the Continental Army, 1996.
- Richard Buel, Jr., In Irons: Britain's Naval Supremacy and the American Revolutionary Economy, 1998
