He points out, as we have also, that the nation was built up for 150 years prior to the actual revolution. What would become the nation had already been founded in many ways prior to 1776. Between 1776 and 1787, the American Republic was constructed. He also reminds us that the North American colonies were quite aristocratic, and that would continue until the revolution:
When called to church on a Sunday morning, the people of a southern colony would not enter all at once–or even family by family. The commonfolk of the parish would enter first. Then the wives and children of the major landowners. These squires assembled as a body, and entered together after all others had sat down.
True, the colonies lacked the extremes of wealth and poverty to be seen in the mother country. As Wood notes, the most opulent house in colonial America, William Byrd’s Westover, was 65 feet long. The Marquess of Rockingham had a house ten times the size; the Sackvilles’ palace of Knole had 365 rooms.
But if the hierarchy was truncated at top and bottom, it was finely elaborated in between. In New England, people carefully assessed who ranked as a mere husbandman, who counted as a yeoman, who should be addressed as “Mr.,” and who was entitled to the yet more respectful, “Your honor.”
African slaves occupied the very lowest rank in a vast system of unfreedom and dependency. Yet their condition differed only in degree from that of white indentured servants and apprentices. The servant or the apprentice might be held only for a term of years rather than for life. The apprentice might expect some kind of support and patronage after his term expired. While the indenture or apprenticeship lasted, however, white servants could be beaten just like a black slave; could be refused permission to marry; and could discover that their service had been sold to a new master.
The American revolution collapsed this elaborate hierarchical world into a new scheme that recognized only two statuses, slave and free.
He also challenges the idea that the founders were libertarian, as is often suggested by contemporary politicians. Individualism, as we understand it today, evolved over time:
What would today’s Tea Party make of this statement? “Private property is a creature of society, and is subject to the calls of that society whenever its necessities shall require it, down to the last farthing.” No, that’s not Karl Marx–that’s the Benjamin Franklin of the Constitutional period. (p. 219, The Americanization of Benjamin Franklin.)
Nor was Franklin unique. Modern libertarianism was an utterly foreign mode of thought to the revolutionary generation.
Ironically, those members of the revolutionary generation who sound most libertarian to our modern ears (Thomas Jefferson for example) were the most mistrustful of commerce and enterprise. Those most sympathetic to commerce and enterprise (Alexander Hamilton) sound least libertarian.
Yet as commerce advanced–and as pre-modern forms of authority based on claims of public virtue were rejected–American politics evolved in directions more and more recognizable to us.
In 19th century America, equality would come to mean “not just that a man was as good as his neighbor and possessed equal rights, but that he was ‘weighed by his purse, not by his mind, and according to the preponderance of that, he rises or sinks in the scale of individual opinion.’ That was a kind of equality no revolutionary had anticipated.” (p. 243, Radicalism of the American Revolution.) The quoted words come from one of the correspondents of the painter and inventor, Samuel FB Morse.
