The Roots of Revolution: The Story of America [Ep. 4]

00:00:10
Speaker 1: This is Lee Habib, and this is Our American Stories, the show where America is the star and the American people. Up next, another story from our series about Us, The Story of America. Here to tell it is Hillsdale College Professor Bill McLay. At the conclusion of the French and Indian War, one thing was abundantly clear. The continent was Britain’s for the taking, not the French or Spanish. But with victory came division, change, and events in the colonies that would forever shape our character. Let’s get to Episode Four, The Roots of Revolution. Take it away, Bill.

00:00:57
Speaker 2: In the end, the British win, as a treaty of Paris settles the fate of North America. It would be British North America. Americans were very grateful, and rightly so, but the British prime minister threw in a lot of money to win the battle, doubling the national debt. Imagine that. There’s a reasonable view on the British side: the colonies ought to be paying part of the freight for their own protection. That does not seem crazy, does it? It doesn’t to me. But for a people who’ve been used to ruling themselves, their rationale for paying taxes—direct taxes levied by the Parliament and not by their local legislators. Taxation without representation, it’s a form of tyranny. That’s the point of view. That also makes a lot of sense. If you’re used to ruling yourself, you’ve been ruling yourself as in Massachusetts for one hundred and fifty years, so sure, taxation without representation looks a whole lot like tyranny. There are other things, something different, something new going on. Culturally, there were spiritual forces at work that contributed to the idea. The residents of North America were Americans. The Great Awakening—it’s a movement of evangelistic, revivalistic, religious fervor that sweeps up and down the coastline—had an enormous effect. Ministers called the people to renewal of their faith, giving these open-air sermons that were not denominational in character. They weren’t arguing for any particular “ism.” They were arguing for a spiritual renewal, for rededication to God in Christ, and they attracted many, many people. Revivalists like George Whitefield. His voice could be heard across many city blocks. Benjamin Franklin went to hear him. Benjamin Franklin was sort of a skeptic about religion, but he ended up emptying his pocket because he was so impressed. But what this did—the Great Awakening—is it placed on the individual person much of the weight for their religious well-being. You had to make a decision for Christ, and you had to do it individually. Conversion was an individual thing. It wasn’t something that could be vouchsafed by the church giving you the sacrament to eat, or by some other work of the church as an institutional body. It was very much an individualistic thing. This is very different from the approach of the Pilgrims and Puritans. There was no need for a mediator between the individual and God. So, another element of the culture which is very different—I won’t say that it’s opposed, but it was very different—was the spread of the Enlightenment. America was a perfect place for the Enlightenment to take root. It was a place where custom and tradition, and the authority of tradition, were much less entrenched than anywhere in Europe. We were making it up as we were going along. We were trying out our utopian experiments and adapting them, and the Enlightenment really empowers the individual to decide cases for himself on the basis of reason. We all possess reason. Reason is actually the single most important commonality that all of us have that also plays upon and takes advantage of the weakness of traditional authority. In America, America was Nature’s Nation. In France, let’s say, the Enlightenment had to compete with the Catholic Church, which was a very wealthy and entrenched and established church—an established church. So you had to fight all that to be able to sort of pursue the Enlightenment. In America, there was nothing like that. There was no established church, no established religion. There wasn’t even a very conception of America. So, the Enlightenment and the Great Awakening—these two seemingly very different, but complementary (one, the emotionalism and fervor; the other, a devotion to reason)—these two things took root here, and they contributed to a sense of Americanness. The Great Awakening, especially because it was an event that took place through all of the colonies. Everywhere you went, George Whitefield was there with his enormous voice and his appeal to the sentiments of his listeners, not to church doctrine. This was especially appealing to the less educated people who didn’t quite have the educational background to be attracted to the Enlightenment. The Enlightenment was a movement of the elite, for sure, but there is this commonality of an appeal to the individual in both cases, and that ends up being very American, too. So there’s not a lot of regard for establishment orthodoxies of any kind—social, political, religious. This kind of turbulence, a very creative turbulence in American life, is, I think, something that still lingers with us today: that sense that establishments are all always to be suspected, always on trial. We’re actually rather suspiciously Americans of institutions, period. That’s been something that’s been with us always. So these are kind of laying the groundwork here for a change of identity—of Americans thinking of themselves as Americans.

00:07:24
Speaker 1: When we come back, more of The Story of America, Episode Four: Roots of Revolution, here on Our American Stories. Folks, if you love the stories we tell about this great country, and especially the stories of America’s rich past, know that all of our stories about American history—from war to innovation, culture, and faith—are brought to us by the great folks at Hillsdale College. And if you can’t get to Hillsdale, Hillsdale will come to you with their free and terrific online courses. Go to Hillsdale.edu to learn more. And we return to The Story of America series here on Our American Stories and with Hillsdale College Professor Bill McLay, author of the fantastic book Land of Hope and The Young Leader’s Edition as well. Pick up either or both at Amazon or the usual suspects. When we last left off, Bill had told us about two seemingly opposing movements that were actually very similar in their promotion of individualism that had swept across the colonies, the Great Awakening and the Enlightenment. These two movements helped create the idea of being American, and the idea of being America was about to get a huge push forward because of war debts. Let’s continue with the story. Here again is Bill McLay.

00:09:02
Speaker 2: The French and Indian War pushed a whole different dynamic into the field. That is money. You know, ideas are one thing, money is another. Some people will get very serious about money. Americans were willing to think of themselves as subjects of the King. But what happened is a struggle between the British trying to find ways to get the Americans to pay, and the Americans rejecting the proposals that came along one after another. It actually started even before the end of the war. There were certain Americans that were involved in smuggling. You know, this always happens in wars: that there are people who are willing to trade with both sides to make money off of both. Well, the British were very unhappy with American merchants who traded with the French. They made a decree that they could make unwarranted, warrantless searches. This was a violation of the rights of Americans as Englishmen. There was another problem. The British had the lands west of the Appalachian Mountains. Settlers wanted to move into that area. They did; they encountered resistance from the tribes. The British looked at it: “We don’t want to have to deal with this kind of thing,” and so they adopted a policy that no settlers were to cross over this imaginary line across the tops, really, of the Appalachian Mountains. That was not liked by the colonies. They didn’t care for it at all, although they didn’t raise a huge ruckus about it because they realized they could get away with violating it anyway. Why make too much of a big deal of it? And then there were a whole succession of acts that were designed both, both to extract revenues from the colonies and to show the colonies who was really in charge, because this is something that actually had been left unresolved. They issued—never been tested—so you have the Sugar Act. The worst part was that those who would be tried for violating the Sugar Act would not be tried in American courts; they would be tried by British naval officers in Halifax, Canada. At the same time, the Currency Act declared the colonists couldn’t emit their own money. They couldn’t create Massachusetts money, Georgia money, whatever.

00:11:42
Speaker 1: You know.

00:11:43
Speaker 2: Obviously, there are problems when any governmental entity can emit money, but there’s no national government on the North American continent. Paper money was a necessity for the growth of the economy, and the ability to emit paper currency is a property of self-government. Seventeen sixty-five: major ratcheting up with the Stamp Act, which was a taxation on all legal documents and printed materials. This would be sort of like placing a tax on the Internet. How did people, including revolutionaries, communicate their ideas? Well, they did it through newspapers, they did it through pamphlets, they did it through printed materials. Also, Parliament passed the Quartering Act, basically said that the colonial legislators had to supply British troops with places to stay, food in the houses of American citizens of those colonies, a gross violation of the property rights of individuals. These various measures failed. The Sugar Act failed; the Stamp Act failed because the colonists refused to obey it. So the British, working up, fixed: everything they tried was not working, and it didn’t work from the standpoint of generating funds, generating revenue. But it also didn’t work from the standpoint of convincing the colonists that they were, after all, colonists who owed fealty to the British government. But they took away with one hand what they gave with another. And Americans were grateful that the Stamp Act had been repealed, but they were not happy with something else the British did at the same time, on the very same day. So the message was unmistakable: these two things are connected. What they did on the same day was they passed a Declaratory Act, which stated that Parliament had an unlimited power over the colonies. “As a prince, who was in charge? Who rules? Who is in control of the colonies?” And it wasn’t the colonists. That principle was really kind of an in-your-face assertion of sovereignty and was going to mean that the battle that was going on was not going to be temporary; it was going to continue. The British were hell-bent on reordering the empire with the Declaratory Act, actual up. Next came the Townshend Duties, a new plan by the British to be imposed on the colonists. The Townshend Duties were also unsuccessful. They led to boycotts. All classes participated, and they helped to create a sense of common cause. And in seventeen seventy-three, a group of colonists who were disguised as Indians dumped a load of tea into Boston Harbor, and this infuriated the British. This is the Boston Tea Party, of course, and Parliament reacted by imposing what were called the Coercive Acts. Americans called them the Intolerable Acts that would really take control of Massachusetts. Massachusetts was the crucible of the American Revolution, so the Coercive Acts were designed to take complete control of the system in Massachusetts: the economy, the law, the structure of governance. Occupy the city with British troops, and humiliate it, make it an example to all any other colonies that would have the effrontery to behave in this way. The other colonies stuck with them; they rallied, and eventually this led to the creation of something called the Continental Congress. It was a kind of intercolonial, legislative, quasi-legislative body created out of necessity. Now you really do have the beginnings of an institutional expression of American identity. It’s just the beginnings. It’s just the beginnings of the revolution itself. And here’s the hardest part to really ascertain: what were they thinking? We don’t have any Gallup poll data, which maybe we should be thankful for that. The best estimate—the one that I think all of us in history tend to advert to—is John Adams’s statement that about a third were in favor of the revolution, about a third were opposed, about a third to know what they thought. But what was changing clearly was the attitude—the hearts and minds—of the colonists. John Adams, many years later, he says, “What do we mean by the American Revolution? Do we mean the war?”

00:17:10
Speaker 3: He said, “Well, you know, no, the revolution.” Adams says this is so profound. He says, “The Revolution was in the minds and hearts of the people—a change in their religious sentiments, of their duties and obligations. While the King and all authority under him were believed to govern, they were dutiful towards the King. But when they saw those powers renouncing the principles of authority and bent on the destruction of the security of their lives, liberties, and properties, then they thought of their duty to pray for the Continental Congress.”

00:17:49
Speaker 1: And a special thanks to Hillsdale College Professor Bill McLay, The Story of America, Episode Four, here on Our American Stories.