America's Revolutionary Mind

Preface to the Paperback Edition

I’m pleased to announce that Encounter Books has just published the paperback edition of America’s Revolutionary Mind: A Moral History of the American Revolution and the Declaration that Defined It. The new Preface that I’ve written for it gave me the opportunity to reflect on what I was trying to do when I first set out to write the book and to view it from the perspective of how it was received by the public when it was published. The world is a different place today than it was when the book was published. The book’s message is, I think, more needed today than when it was first published two-and-a-half years ago.

Although the envious nature of men, so prompt to blame and so slow to praise, makes the discovery and introduction of any new principles and systems as dangerous almost as the exploration of unknown seas and continents, yet, animated by that desire which impels me to do what may prove for the common benefit of all, I have resolved to open a new route, which has not yet been followed by any one, and may prove difficult and troublesome, but may also bring me some reward in the approbation of those who will kindly appreciate my efforts.

—Niccolò Machiavelli, DISCOURSES on the FIRST TEN BOOKS OF TITUS LIVIUS.

I am delighted to have the opportunity to write a Preface for the paperback edition of America’s Revolutionary Mind. Other than a few typos, I am not inclined to change a single word of this book. Even though it was written in a white heat over the course of 365 days, I am satisfied that the book says exactly what I wanted to say when I sat down to write it on July 1, 2016. I could no doubt improve it in minor ways, but on the whole I am pleased with the book as it stands.

Still, the benefit of time and distance has allowed me to look at what I produced in a slightly altered way. For instance, learning what readers and reviewers have seen or taken from the book has broadened and deepened my perspective on what I wrote. The public reaction to the book both surprised and delighted me.

America’s Revolutionary Mind seems to have struck a chord with scholars of the revolutionary period and with the general reading (and now listening) public. I suspect this is so for a couple of reasons.

First, there’s a basic supply and demand issue. Ordinary Americans still love the history of America’s revolutionary-founding moment, but academic historians have, for the most part, abandoned the topic—or at least have stopped writing books that the general public wants to read. The demand of the general public for books on the American Revolution is, thankfully, insatiable.

Second, the book was published at a curious moment in American history when America’s founding principles have become very much contested. Ideologically and politically, the forces of the progressive Left and the reactionary Right have, each in their own way, launched attacks in recent years on America’s founding principles and institutions. Once again, ordinary Americans and some scholars are looking for intellectual sustenance as they confront the left-wing and right-wing forces of illiberalism in the United States.

I suppose I should not be surprised, then, that America’s Revolutionary Mind has been caught in the maelstrom of early twenty-first century politics. The book was published at the end of 2019, just as America was roaring into its twenty-first century Weimar phase, but the America of then seems different from the intellectual, cultural, and political milieu of 2022. Much has changed in two years. The nation and the rest of the world have been struck hard by a virus that has killed hundreds of thousands of Americans and by the lockdowns and mandates that have come with it. During the brief interlude between the first publication of this book and now the paperback edition, we’ve also watched as many of America’s cities have been torched and destroyed. We’ve seen the United States Capitol Building breached by protestors. America seems like a different place now, which means that the context in which the book is being read has changed.

Obviously, the book was not written with these subsequent problems and controversies in mind. In fact, America’s Revolutionary Mind was in no sense written for any particular occasion, movement, or event. It was not written to be a tract, homily, or manifesto.

Instead, the book was written as a work of history and political philosophy on the subject of America’s national origins and the philosophy that became identified with it.

That some now want to transform or politicize the book to fit their immediate political purposes is beyond my control. Nor does the book reflect, in my view, the general “climate of opinion” surrounding its publication. The truth of the matter is that the book was written to transcend the “spirit of the times,” particularly the academic zeitgeist. In many ways, my book, while bearing the weight of past scholarship on the revolutionary-founding period, goes beyond the academic scholarship of the last century.

As I now look back over America’s Revolutionary Mind, what strikes me is how different it is from almost anything else ever written on the American Revolution. It doesn’t read like your standard history of the Revolution, nor does it read like your standard interpretation of the Revolution by a political theorist. Historical examinations of the Revolution tend to be a mile wide and a foot deep, while books of political theory tend to be a foot wide and a mile deep. My book attempts to find the methodological mean between the best of what historians and political theorists do.

As I’ve indicated already, when started writing this book, I had no thought of engaging in a culture war or promoting the ideological-political interests of any particular movement or party. The original plan was simply to write a relatively short monograph on the Declaration of Independence. As readers may recall from the book’s original Preface, that intention was abandoned only weeks into the project when I reread a well-known 1815 letter from John Adams to Thomas Jefferson. Adams there pondered the meaning of the American Revolution and how it ought to be understood by his and later generations. “What do We mean by the Revolution?” Adams asked. His answer hit me like a lightning bolt: “The War? That was no part of the Revolution. It was only an Effect and Consequence of it. The Revolution was in the Minds of the People, and this was effected, from 1760 to 1775, in the course of fifteen Years before a drop of blood was drawn at Lexington.” In another letter, Adams suggested that the “real” American Revolution was represented by a “radical change in the principles, opinions, sentiments, and affections” of the American people. This change, Adams believed, had something to do with the moral principles and reasoning of the colonists in the years just before and just after the passage of the Stamp Act. He was certain the moral constitution of the American people had undergone some kind of profound transformation.

The effect of Adams’s letter on me was akin to Immanuel Kant’s reaction to David Hume’s theory of causation: it “interrupted my dogmatic slumber.”  Adams’s view of the Revolution seemed in flat contradiction to the standard scholarly interpretations of the Revolution. The three grand interpretative frameworks that dominated twentieth-century scholarship on the revolutionary-founding period—Charles Beard’s economic interpretation, Bernard Bailyn’s ideological interpretation, and Gordon S. Woods republican interpretation—now seemed deficient to me. They could not account for Adams’s letter. I concluded that a new approach to studying the Revolution was therefore necessary in order to make sense of Adams’s letter.

I had of course been deeply immersed for many years in the primary-source literature of the revolutionary-founding period, but rereading Adams’s letter for the umpteenth time resulted in a sort of philosophic-historical epiphany for me. Not to be overly dramatic, but Adams’s rumination on the causes and meaning of the Revolution served as something of a Rosetta Stone for my thinking. The letter opened up a whole new way of thinking about the causes and consequences of the Revolution. I then and there cast out of my mind all of the various interpretations of the Revolution with which I was familiar and sometimes even sympathetic. I then attempted to begin afresh with a historical tabula rasa. From that point forward, I only read primary sources and in the light of Adams’s letter.

At that moment, the ambition for the book that I was just starting to write on the Declaration of Independence transformed itself into to a much more capacious project presenting a radically new way to think about the causes and meaning of the American Revolution. Because the American Revolution is, along with the Civil War, the most written about topic in American history, the thought of reinterpreting the Revolution as a whole seemed rather daunting at the time.

What could I possibly say about the Revolution that had not been said many times before?

There have been, of course, countless social, ethnographic, demographic, psychological, sociological, religious, political, economic, military, intellectual, and constitutional histories of the American Revolution and its various aspects, but there had never been a “moral history” of the Revolution when I set out to write my book. Realizing this fact was the key insight that led me to transition from writing a simple monograph on the Declaration to reinterpreting the Revolution as a whole.

By a “moral history,” I mean two things.  

First, following Adams’s lead, I began to study the moral lens through which colonial Americans viewed their conflict with Great Britain. I was struck by the fact that American Patriots constantly reduced the political-constitutional debate with British imperial officials to moral principles and categories. The American response to the Sugar, Stamp, Declaratory, Townshend, Tea, Coercive, and Prohibitory Acts was always couched in highly moralistic language. And it became clear to me that the revolutionaries’ moral language was no mere window dressing or rationalization. As I reread virtually all of the major and minor pamphlets, newspaper essays, letters, and official documents from the era, I became convinced that these were not just flowery words for the colonists, but instead principles for which they were willing to risk everything. They were constantly talking about moral or anti-moral principles such as liberty, equality, rights, justice, slavery and tyranny during the fifteen years before Lexington and Concord, but the colonists’ definitions of those principles changed rather quickly once the crisis was initiated.

Take, for instance, the principle of “rights.” Up until the time of the Stamp Act, most Americans considered themselves to be the proud inheritors of the so-called “rights of Englishmen,” which were the traditional privileges and liberties that had been granted to the English people over the course of many centuries by kings, parliaments, and municipalities. These “rights of Englishmen” grew out of history and were the rights of a particular people, at a particular time and in a particular place. These rights were, in one form or another, the gifts of political rulers and they could be found in ancient customs and the common law, in royal charters such as Magna Carta, and in parliamentary statutes such as “The Petition of Right.” 

After the passage of the Stamp Act in 1765, the colonial leaders of the resistance began almost immediately to search for moral-legal principles grounded in something more permanent and universal. As serious students of the British Enlightenment, they turned to philosophers such as Francis Bacon, Isaac Newton, and John Locke, from whom they learned to discover those principles though reason. They found the source of their rights not in history but in man’s nature. These so-called natural rights were beyond the authority and power of all legislatures and kings.

This revolution in their moral thinking also had consequences for their actions. Those Patriot leaders who dedicated their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor to the American cause did so because they viewed independence and all that went with it (e.g., war, privation, injury, and possibly death) as existentially and morally necessary. They viewed their situation in 1776 as confronting them with a fundamental choice between freedom or tyranny, and tyranny was not an option. They chose to live out their principles, no matter the cost. The revolutionaries’ moral logic precluded compromise on core moral principles. America’s Revolutionary Mind explains how and why American revolutionaries guided their actions via certain moral ideas.

Second, to properly examine, understand, and describe the moral revolution that occurred in the minds of the American people in the fifteen years before independence, it occurred to me that all pre-existing approaches to studying the past and writing history (e.g., Marxian, structuralist, postmodern, etc.), or at least all twentieth-century historical methodologies, were insufficient to the task of writing the moral history of a people or an event. The problem with these approaches is that they all attempt to superimpose on past thought and action twentieth-century methodologies that distort how past thinkers and actors saw themselves and what they were thinking and doing.  I realized almost immediately that a new methodology would be needed to recover that which had been buried and lost to history. To that end, I developed a new historical approach that would examine the ideas and actions from, as it were, the inside out and the bottom up. This inductive method attempts first and foremost to understand past thinkers and actors on their own terms.

This approach to studying the past I call the “new moral history,” which is concerned with the nature of causation and agency in human action. It attempts to explain the causal core of all human thought and action, which means that it is a precondition for examining all other areas of historical inquiry (e.g., social, religious, political, constitutional, military, etc.).

The new moral history is concerned with studying the interstices and the intersections among moral thought, moral decision-making, and moral action. It examines the What, Why, How, and When of moral reasoning, and then it looks for connections with the What, Why, How, and When of moral action. It takes moral thought and action not as rationalizations for underlying psychological impulses or economics interests, but rather as the primary causal forces that help us to understand and explain the course of human events.

As I think back now to that intense week at the end of July 2016 when I realized that I had discovered a hitherto unknown past reality and a new way to explain it, I’m still filled with excitement. It seemed to me at the time I started to write America’s Revolutionary Mind (and even more so now) that the great moral transformation that preceded, culminated in, and then flowed from the Revolution, demonstrated that moral decisions and actions are fundamental to the study not just of the Revolution but of all history.

In the following days, weeks, and months, as I developed and applied the principles and techniques of the new moral history, I found myself once again rereading the primary-source literature connected to the revolutionary ferment but with a new sense of wonder and urgency.  And very much to my astonishment, I discovered that many American revolutionaries viewed the causes, events, and meaning of the Revolution through the same lens as Adams. In those moments, I knew I was on to something, and possibly even something important. This new insight provided a key—a key that was in plain sight the whole time—to unlocking the deepest meaning of the most important event in American history.

Of this I am now convinced: anyone who leaves moral decision-making and action out of the past is dealing only with the epiphenomena of history. It was by recognizing the force of moral decision-making and the necessity of acting on their principles that American revolutionaries accomplished their extraordinary feats, and it is only by recognizing the role of those forces in history that we today can truly understand the revolutionaries’ achievement. By neglecting or refusing to do this, we become the victims of tyranny in its various forms.

At this point, two years after the publication of America’s Revolutionary Mind, it’s still too early to know what its full impact will be on the general public and on scholars of the revolutionary era. It will no doubt take some time for historians and political theorists to grasp the implications of the new moral history for their own work and to sort out how my interpretation of the Revolution does or does not accord with theirs. Time will tell.