Rev. Erudite Redneck, B.S., B.S., M.A., M.Div.

The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, By Bernard Bailyn. (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1992, pp. iv, 379).

By The Erudite Redneck

Bernard Bailyn’s neotraditionalist history of the American Revolution – a check on a previous generation of historians’ heavy reliance on economics as the main driving force -- posits that the colonists, rather than being carried to revolution by events greater then themselves, thoughtfully plodded toward it. Nor, however, were the colonists united in answering a holy call to national greatness in an early form of American exceptionalism, according to Bailyn. The colonists were exceptional, Bailyn argues, in their thinking, as they worked through the “realization, the comprehension and fulfillment, of the inheritance of liberty and of what was taken to be America’s destiny in the context of world history.” (19)

Bailyn’s object was to explore leading colonial thought processes and philosophy. His method was to probe and synthesize colonial-era pamphlets before Independence – single responses to public events, “chain-reacting personal polemics” (4), and regular commemorative publications – that included personal letters, sermons, speeches, essays and other communications. He finds a revolution in leading men’s minds concerning the ideas of liberty and the role of government. Pamphlets reveal that individual freedom was more important to leading colonists than government authority; pamphleteers saw themselves as resisting, for their own sake as well as that of all British subjects, a conspiracy among royal ministers to establish tyranny over the colonies. Bailyn shows that from the earliest years of resistance, colonists were arguing fine points of philosophy of checks and balances within government – as well as checks against excessive private power.

Bailyn goes beyond consideration of content alone. He delves into tone, sourcing and the intellectual heritage of the Enlightenment, English common law, libertarianism, New England Puritanism and other undercurrents of colonial thinking as they refracted around their experiences and interpretation of events and crises of the period. Bailyn spends much effort documenting the development and maintenance of the conspiracy theory leading colonists used to justify, and frame, their discontent and firming resistance. He spends as much effort documenting colonial thought as it wrestled with fundamental concepts such as liberty, sovereignty, loyalty, the role of society and the place of religion, played against what many saw as a collapse of morality and near wholesale abandonment of virtue in the Mother Country.

Bailyn starts The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution with his sources, the pamphlets, explaining their role in their time as well as in his own work, then lets his synthesis follow the familiar major events of the period. The book won the Pulitzer Prize for history as well as the Bancroft Prize.

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