Since this went beyond both the thread topic and the bounds of General Questions, I spun it off into its own GD thread.
Can I make a joke about it just taking longer and point to Joe McCarthy, or is that too unfair?
No, I think the successful purge of the Tories was probably “enough.” And that still sent a huge minority of households into exile. Of course, since then, Royalists have been able to move back into British imperial territory, and the USA can welcome British republicans. That may have had some effect, as new comrades escaping the ostensible yoke of oppressive monarchy keep joining and refreshing the body politic with a more classic sense of the meaning of the Republic.
Well, the Adams administration was under huge and very ugly pressure, and some have said that Alexander Hamilton was thinking of a military coup.
I’ve only seen one reference to this, but it was in the superlative book “Six Frigates, the Epic History of the Founding of the U.S. Navy” by Ian W. Toll. He mentions the danger of Hamilton’s coup. If it had happened, Hamilton would have been America’s Napoleon.
There was also some loose talk of a civil war between the northern and southern states…during Adams’ administration, and there was the “almost war” with France. So, there was the solid possibility of the new Republic self-destructing under only its second President.
I think a key factor was that the American Revolution was really more about secession than revolution. The Americans were just looking to break off from Britain and form their own government along lines broadly similar to Britain’s. This limited the amount of change the Americans were looking to establish. And equally important, it sharply limited opportunities for purges - it’s not like the Americans were going to get their hands on British government officials back in London.
And there was a local purge, although it was relatively non-violent. Americans who had too openly supported the British side during the Revolution were strongly encouraged to leave the new country once independence was won. The majority of loyalists left America and resettled somewhere else in the Empire.
Yup, what Little Nemo said. The “American Revolution” wasn’t really a revolution in the social sense; it was a colonial war of independence, but didn’t really seek any change to the social order, or any change (beyond independence) to domestic power structures. MD2000, in the post linked in the OP, suggests that a “reign of terror” phase is pretty much to be expected in any revolution, but if you define “revolution” widely enough to include wars of independence as such, the claim is patently not true.
Neither the Glorious Revolution nor the American Revolution devolved into purges because they weren’t utopian and didn’t seek to centralize control through government. Ataturk’s transformation of Turkey was a social revolution and it did get messy but that was because ethnic groups were intertwined; it never got into Stalin/Mao/Pol Pot/Robespierre-like purges. They weren’t about pursuing an ideal or making tabula rasa.
If you are to make tabula rasa like the French Revolution (which as an example of its tabula rasa-tendencies tried to install a new calendar) or Cambodia’s Year Zero, a lot will have to be wiped away. The lot will likely involve people who won’t get with the program.
If you believe that you are pursuing an ideal (as opposed to just using a regulating ideal but that bit tends to be forgotten by idealists) then any price is worth it and anyone who isn’t for it is against it; it gets Manichean, messianic and ultimately, messy.
Those who try to create gradual improvements don’t tend to purge much. It’s people who try to bring Heaven on earth who do.
Also, a lot of the purge-y governments were very much in favor of government control of the economy. Which means that pretty much anyone who wanted to do anything had to get involved in the powerplays and intrigues of government. The Soviet government was like that from the start and Stalin pretty much had to do purges (although not to the extend he did) to not be putsched out and herd those cats to industrialize the USSR before the war(s) he expected. Other Communist government either consciously modeled themselves on him and/or it’s a feature of that centralized system.
How much of this had to do with the sheer forcefulness of George Washington’s personality? I am not familiar enough with his biography to say one way or the other, so I hope someone can chime in on the moderating effect his presidency had in the political climate after the revolution.
Not sure what you mean by forcefulness of personality but it’s difficult to imagine that Stalin and Mao didn’t have at least as much of it.
Oh, and another thing: Britain in 1688 and the US in 1783 didn’t see themselves as backward, vulnerable to nearby powers and desperate to catch up. That was the case for Russia, China and likely Cambodia.
Stalin and Mao also had very different ideas about governing and handing over of power. I think the american revolution may have turned out differently if someone with a less benevolent personality (at least publicly) had been elected president and set the country off with a more toxic political environment.
A good amount. One biographer referred to Washington as “the indispensable man” and that’s pretty accurate. Here’s a list of some of the things that Washington did that might not have happened if somebody else had been in his place:
Got the Continental Army started. And then switched from the militia system to a professional drilled army.
Held the army together through a string of defeats and retreats.
Always supported the Continental Congress and by doing so gave that institution some stature.
Decisively broke up plans for the military to intimidate the civilian government.
Retired after the war when he could easily have seized power.
Lent his prestige to the Constitutional Convention.
Retired a second time after serving two terms in office.
Agree with much of what has been said above, but want to emphasise that unlike the French/Russian etc revolutions, the Glorious and American Revolutions were fundamentally conservative ones. They were fighting to preserve what already existed or what had only recently come under threat, rather than actively seeking out a bright new dawn.
The root meaning of “revolution”, in the political sense, is a return to an state of affairs which existed before - which, after all, is what a wheels, celestial bodies, etc do when they completes a revolution. So political revolutionaries originally saw themselves as restoring the original ideal of the state. This sense of the word first turns up in Italian in the fourteenth century, when opposing factions struggling for control of various Italian civic republics each accuse the other of having corrupted the republic in the pursuit of vested interests, and each claim themselves to be reasserting the original pristine republican ideal. But by the time the word acquires a political sense in English, in the early sixteenth century, this sense has been lost; “revolution” is simply a synonym for “rebellion”.
I suppose it’s possible, by the late eighteenth century, that some republican political thinkers in the US, France and elsewhere had rediscovered the original nuance of the word, or at least were using “revolution” to imply constructing a new order, if not reconstructing an old one, as opposed to “rebellion”, a mere grab for power. And of course Marx and his followers really grab that idea and run with it.
But the American revolutionaries were not trying to assert a new order. They may well have seen themselves as reasserting an old one - claiming for themselves the unjustly-denied liberties of Britons.
One thing to keep in mind is that many American colonialists didn’t *want *to secede. They wanted representation in the British Parliament. Many thought that they would win the war and then go back to Britain after a few years at the most. This is one of the reasons (plus, of course, politics of the day) that it took four years for all of the colonial states to ratify the Articles of Confederation.
Many people considered themselves British for years - and even the British more or less considered America theirs after the war - even though they “recognized” the US as a sovereign nation in the Treaty of Paris. They attempted to use economic pressure to get the Americans to “return to the fold.” Since America was supported in trade via other European powers, notably France, this didn’t do much to the colonies. Britain also began impressment into the Royal Navy of American sailors to bolster their ranks - a right they assumed they had since they never intended to give up the American colonies. In addition, Britain started interfering with trade with France as well as worked to setup a British state of Indian nations in Ohio (which Americans wanted for themselves). These issues eventually led into the War of 1812.
Thus, the war of independence didn’t, as a lot of people noted above, seek to change anything - it started as the colonies sought to claim what was viewed as a right in the British Empire: representation. That the nation survived and prospered is largely due to a host of factors that turned towards the American’s favor, such as the British Empire needing their war operations elsewhere in 1783 as well as France being willing to help the new country to spite their rival the British. If the American colonies had revolted earlier or later, it’s possible that the British would have been able to fling their entire war machine at us. If it had happened later, we might not have been supported by the French aristocracy (having lost their heads, and all). In the timeline of world events, the American Revolution likely couldn’t have happened, or been nearly as successful, as at the time it did happen.
As mentioned above, there was no ideological enemy who would be a threat to the new system. In fact, the entire premise of a democratic government emphasizes that people are allowed to disagree and express their discontent. Other countries that have seen bloody purges in recent years happened because dictators couldn’t tolerate dissenting opinions or believed that anyone of the enemy class / race / ideology / religion deserved to be put to death. There was no such sentiment in the US.
The fact that the ‘enemy’ was on the other side of the ocean also helped. There were no local government officials or royalty that needed to be whacked.
But the key point I’ve been encountering lately is that folks just weren’t very invested in the whole revolution thing. It seems like it was very much the work of a handful of wealthy landowners. After a brief surge of patriotism at the start of the war, most people just went back to whatever they were doing and tried to stay out of it.
I am not a historian, so this is just speculation, but I think it’s important to remember that the US did not go straight from the revolution to our current federal government. We had a 7 year experiment with a more decentralized government under the Articles of Confederation. Perhaps the major figures of the revolution felt secure that they would maintain power in their respective states, and there was no need to risk everything in a civil war or purge.
While I agree that the American revolution was not principally a movement against the social structure of the government (or ideologically against the ruling classes) of Great Britain, it was still the Age of Enlightenment and, given the opportunity to do a new nation, there was some enthusiasm for setting forth those principles and not just xeroxing the British approach to doing a government.
Fortunately, enlightenment principles tend towards abstract laws that are supposed to apply equally to everyone and that works against a tendency to identify and punish culprits.
My opinion is that most of the credit should go to the personalities involved. Of the major players only Hamilton showed any real craving for power. Washington deservedly gets a lot of praise but most of them played a part in the compromises that ended up with the US Constitution. Adams should get more recognition for being one of the first world leaders (maybe the first?) to peacefully hand over power to the political opposition.
I think a lot of revolutions end disastrously because the leaders can’t give up control. Washington and Adams were able to do that.
I think we got lucky with the timing. The American Revolution occurred as the Enlightenment era was winding down. The Romanticism era was rising as the counter-response. And Romanticism was not as pleasant as its name implied - it was basically the idea that men should be ruled by passion rather than reason. The American Revolution was an Enlightenment revolution and its symbol was a constitution. The French Revolution was a Romantic revolution and its symbol was a guillotine.
Agree there was some conservative influence from conservative founders but when I think of my favorite American Revolutionaries, Jefferson, Madison, Thomas Paine, Sam Adams and Ethan Allen - leader of the Green Mountain Boys who captured Fort Ticonderoga from the king’s soldiers on a strategic New England inland waterway I don’t think of them as conservatives. Conservative American are too attatchrd to the past and institutions that best protect their property and status. The Declaration of Independence was a radical document. I consider the enlightened minds that rebelled in those days to be radicals pursuing an idealistic vision against the test of war. They were radicals. Enlightenment age revolutionaries they were.
This is the essence of it I believe. Relatively few rice bowls were being overturned. Even when there were targets of British oppression at hand for the most part they weren’t a threat. Governor Penn, who actually owned 1/4 of Pennsylvania, wasn’t arrested but allowed to remain at large and only asked not to leave the state. Where there was significant local support for the Crown, mostly North Carolina and New York, it could get quite bloody, but for the most part the Tories who fled could hope for succor from the home government. And they didn’t have to leave the British Empire. It wasn’t like leaving your entire country behind like the prospect the French exiles faced.
Again I think this is correct. Washington’s reputation was a huge asset. Having a leader who was above criticism was critical during the critical formative years when gathering support for the new system. Washington’s sensitivity to how his actions might be viewed by posterity also served the government well. He might otherwise have been more autocratic. As it happens he and the Federalists were on the wrong side of history on most of their disagreements with the Republicans but at the time, as Hamilton so perceptively realized, the important thing was to quickly ensure that the interests of the powerful were aligned with the new government.
Here though I find a lot to disagree with.
There is no reason to believe that any number of others might have successfully founded the Continental Army. Washington wasn’t uniquely qualified to lead. He was a political choice. Switching to a regular army wasn’t some lonely crusade of his. It was painfully obvious that the militias were insufficient.
Absolutely. There are plenty of questions about Washington’s tactical and strategic vision but none at all about his leadership of men. His officers particularly were incredibly loyal.
Washington had little choice. Congress was not only the source of his legitimacy but also provided his logistical tail, such as it was. Demeaning Congress could only diminish its general.
On the contrary, he participated in plans for the military to intimidate the civilian government. It’s not clear how many officers would have shown up for the protest meeting if Washington even let it be known he disapproved let alone ordered them not to attend. There might have been too few to give Congress the impression that the officer corps was teetering on general revolt. Instead Washington called the meeting himself thus ensuring a good turnout. People always fail to note that the Newburgh Conspiracy succeeded. The officers got the financial considerations they had been demanding from Congress.
There is no way Washington could have easily seized power. If he had tried to to take over the goodwill he had earned in the new nation would have instantly disappeared and even if he had held the Continental Army together he would have been trading places with his British opponents. He would have become the oppressor trying and failing to hold a huge territory with limited resources.
Absolutely. And this is underselling his contribution. He is often treated as if he wasn’t significant in shaping the Constitution. Though he didn’t take part in floor debates he sat facing the delegates and his expressions of support or disapproval were visible to all. His vote was important to the nationalists in the divided Virginia delegation.
Yes. Though he wanted to retire. As Deeg points out, it is Adams who deserves more recognition for stepping down.