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The American Revolution: A History (Modern Library Chronicles) Paperback – August 19, 2003
byGordon S. Wood(Author)
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“An elegant synthesis done by the leading scholar in the field, which nicely integrates the work on the American Revolution over the last three decades but never loses contact with the older, classic questions that we have been arguing about for over two hundred years.”—Joseph J. Ellis, author ofFounding Brothers
A magnificent account of the revolution in arms and consciousness that gave birth to the American republic.
When Abraham Lincoln sought to define the significance of the United States, he naturally looked back to the American Revolution. He knew that the Revolution not only had legally created the United States, but also had produced all of the great hopes and values of the American people. Our noblest ideals and aspirations-our commitments to freedom, constitutionalism, the well-being of ordinary people, and equality-came out of the Revolutionary era. Lincoln saw as well that the Revolution had convinced Americans that they were a special people with a special destiny to lead the world toward liberty. The Revolution, in short, gave birth to whatever sense of nationhood and national purpose Americans have had.
No doubt the story is a dramatic one: Thirteen insignificant colonies three thousand miles from the centers of Western civilization fought off British rule to become, in fewer than three decades, a huge, sprawling, rambunctious republic of nearly four million citizens. But the history of the American Revolution, like the history of the nation as a whole, ought not to be viewed simply as a story of right and wrong from which moral lessons are to be drawn. It is a complicated and at times ironic story that needs to be explained and understood, not blindly celebrated or condemned. How did this great revolution come about? What was its character? What were its consequences? These are the questions this short history seeks to answer. That it succeeds in such a profound and enthralling way is a tribute to Gordon Wood’s mastery of his subject, and of the historian’s craft.
“An elegant synthesis done by the leading scholar in the field, which nicely integrates the work on the American Revolution over the last three decades but never loses contact with the older, classic questions that we have been arguing about for over two hundred years.”—Joseph J. Ellis, author ofFounding Brothers
A magnificent account of the revolution in arms and consciousness that gave birth to the American republic.
When Abraham Lincoln sought to define the significance of the United States, he naturally looked back to the American Revolution. He knew that the Revolution not only had legally created the United States, but also had produced all of the great hopes and values of the American people. Our noblest ideals and aspirations-our commitments to freedom, constitutionalism, the well-being of ordinary people, and equality-came out of the Revolutionary era. Lincoln saw as well that the Revolution had convinced Americans that they were a special people with a special destiny to lead the world toward liberty. The Revolution, in short, gave birth to whatever sense of nationhood and national purpose Americans have had.
No doubt the story is a dramatic one: Thirteen insignificant colonies three thousand miles from the centers of Western civilization fought off British rule to become, in fewer than three decades, a huge, sprawling, rambunctious republic of nearly four million citizens. But the history of the American Revolution, like the history of the nation as a whole, ought not to be viewed simply as a story of right and wrong from which moral lessons are to be drawn. It is a complicated and at times ironic story that needs to be explained and understood, not blindly celebrated or condemned. How did this great revolution come about? What was its character? What were its consequences? These are the questions this short history seeks to answer. That it succeeds in such a profound and enthralling way is a tribute to Gordon Wood’s mastery of his subject, and of the historian’s craft.
- Print length224 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherModern Library
- Publication dateAugust 19, 2003
- Dimensions5.25 x 0.47 x 8 inches
- ISBN-100812970411
- ISBN-13978-0812970418
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From the Publisher
Editorial Reviews
Review
“Remarkable, invaluable.”—Jonathan Yardley,The Washington Post Book World
“Wood is the preeminent historian of the Revolution. . . . Here . . . he manages to boil down to its essence this crucial period in the country’s history without in the process reducing it to History Lite. . . . His account of the emergence and development of rank-and-file political opinion is especially provocative and informative, but then so is just about everything else in this remarkable, invaluable book.”—The Washington Post Book World
“An elegant, concise and lucid summary of the Revolution’s origins, the war itself, and the social and political changes wrought by the struggle for American independence.”—The Wall Street Journal
“This slim book tells a big story: one that invites the reader to contemplate the relationships between liberty, power, rights and the unpredictable outcomes of human action.”—Los Angeles Times Book Review
“An elegant synthesis done by the leading scholar in the field, which nicely integrates the work on the American Revolution over the last three decades but never loses contact with the older, classic questions that we have been arguing about for over two hundred years.”—Joseph J. Ellis, author of Founding Brothers
“Wood is the preeminent historian of the Revolution. . . . Here . . . he manages to boil down to its essence this crucial period in the country’s history without in the process reducing it to History Lite. . . . His account of the emergence and development of rank-and-file political opinion is especially provocative and informative, but then so is just about everything else in this remarkable, invaluable book.”—The Washington Post Book World
“An elegant, concise and lucid summary of the Revolution’s origins, the war itself, and the social and political changes wrought by the struggle for American independence.”—The Wall Street Journal
“This slim book tells a big story: one that invites the reader to contemplate the relationships between liberty, power, rights and the unpredictable outcomes of human action.”—Los Angeles Times Book Review
“An elegant synthesis done by the leading scholar in the field, which nicely integrates the work on the American Revolution over the last three decades but never loses contact with the older, classic questions that we have been arguing about for over two hundred years.”—Joseph J. Ellis, author of Founding Brothers
From the Inside Flap
?An elegant synthesis done by the leading scholar in the field, which nicely integrates the work on the American Revolution over the last three decades but never loses contact with the older, classic questions that we have been arguing about for over two hundred years.?
-Joseph J. Ellis, author ofFounding Brothers
A magnificent account of the revolution in arms and consciousness that gave birth to the American republic.
When Abraham Lincoln sought to define the significance of the United States, he naturally looked back to the American Revolution. He knew that the Revolution not only had legally created the United States, but also had produced all of the great hopes and values of the American people. Our noblest ideals and aspirations-our commitments to freedom, constitutionalism, the well-being of ordinary people, and equality-came out of the Revolutionary era. Lincoln saw as well that the Revolution had convinced Americans that they were a special people with a special destiny to lead the world toward liberty. The Revolution, in short, gave birth to whatever sense of nationhood and national purpose Americans have had.
No doubt the story is a dramatic one: Thirteen insignificant colonies three thousand miles from the centers of Western civilization fought off British rule to become, in fewer than three decades, a huge, sprawling, rambunctious republic of nearly four million citizens. But the history of the American Revolution, like the history of the nation as a whole, ought not to be viewed simply as a story of right and wrong from which moral lessons are to be drawn. It is a complicated and at times ironic story that needs to be explained and understood, not blindly celebrated or condemned. How did this great revolution come about? What was its character? What were its consequences? These are the questions this short history seeks to answer. That it succeeds in such a profound and enthralling way is a tribute to Gordon Wood?s mastery of his subject, and of the historian?s craft.
From the Hardcover edition.
-Joseph J. Ellis, author ofFounding Brothers
A magnificent account of the revolution in arms and consciousness that gave birth to the American republic.
When Abraham Lincoln sought to define the significance of the United States, he naturally looked back to the American Revolution. He knew that the Revolution not only had legally created the United States, but also had produced all of the great hopes and values of the American people. Our noblest ideals and aspirations-our commitments to freedom, constitutionalism, the well-being of ordinary people, and equality-came out of the Revolutionary era. Lincoln saw as well that the Revolution had convinced Americans that they were a special people with a special destiny to lead the world toward liberty. The Revolution, in short, gave birth to whatever sense of nationhood and national purpose Americans have had.
No doubt the story is a dramatic one: Thirteen insignificant colonies three thousand miles from the centers of Western civilization fought off British rule to become, in fewer than three decades, a huge, sprawling, rambunctious republic of nearly four million citizens. But the history of the American Revolution, like the history of the nation as a whole, ought not to be viewed simply as a story of right and wrong from which moral lessons are to be drawn. It is a complicated and at times ironic story that needs to be explained and understood, not blindly celebrated or condemned. How did this great revolution come about? What was its character? What were its consequences? These are the questions this short history seeks to answer. That it succeeds in such a profound and enthralling way is a tribute to Gordon Wood?s mastery of his subject, and of the historian?s craft.
From the Hardcover edition.
From the Back Cover
"An elegant synthesis done by the leading scholar in the field, which nicely integrates the work on the American Revolution over the last three decades but never loses contact with the older, classic questions that we have been arguing about for over two hundred years."
-Joseph J. Ellis, author of Founding Brothers
A magnificent account of the revolution in arms and consciousness that gave birth to the American republic.
When Abraham Lincoln sought to define the significance of the United States, he naturally looked back to the American Revolution. He knew that the Revolution not only had legally created the United States, but also had produced all of the great hopes and values of the American people. Our noblest ideals and aspirations-our commitments to freedom, constitutionalism, the well-being of ordinary people, and equality-came out of the Revolutionary era. Lincoln saw as well that the Revolution had convinced Americans that they were a special people with a special destiny to lead the world toward liberty. The Revolution, in short, gave birth to whatever sense of nationhood and national purpose Americans have had.
No doubt the story is a dramatic one: Thirteen insignificant colonies three thousand miles from the centers of Western civilization fought off British rule to become, in fewer than three decades, a huge, sprawling, rambunctious republic of nearly four million citizens. But the history of the American Revolution, like the history of the nation as a whole, ought not to be viewed simply as a story of right and wrong from which moral lessons are to be drawn. It is a complicated and at times ironic story that needs to be explained and understood, not blindlycelebrated or condemned. How did this great revolution come about? What was its character? What were its consequences? These are the questions this short history seeks to answer. That it succeeds in such a profound and enthralling way is a tribute to Gordon Wood's mastery of his subject, and of the historian's craft.
-Joseph J. Ellis, author of Founding Brothers
A magnificent account of the revolution in arms and consciousness that gave birth to the American republic.
When Abraham Lincoln sought to define the significance of the United States, he naturally looked back to the American Revolution. He knew that the Revolution not only had legally created the United States, but also had produced all of the great hopes and values of the American people. Our noblest ideals and aspirations-our commitments to freedom, constitutionalism, the well-being of ordinary people, and equality-came out of the Revolutionary era. Lincoln saw as well that the Revolution had convinced Americans that they were a special people with a special destiny to lead the world toward liberty. The Revolution, in short, gave birth to whatever sense of nationhood and national purpose Americans have had.
No doubt the story is a dramatic one: Thirteen insignificant colonies three thousand miles from the centers of Western civilization fought off British rule to become, in fewer than three decades, a huge, sprawling, rambunctious republic of nearly four million citizens. But the history of the American Revolution, like the history of the nation as a whole, ought not to be viewed simply as a story of right and wrong from which moral lessons are to be drawn. It is a complicated and at times ironic story that needs to be explained and understood, not blindlycelebrated or condemned. How did this great revolution come about? What was its character? What were its consequences? These are the questions this short history seeks to answer. That it succeeds in such a profound and enthralling way is a tribute to Gordon Wood's mastery of his subject, and of the historian's craft.
"From the Hardcover edition.
About the Author
Gordon S. Woodis the Alva O. Way University Professor and professor of history emeritus at Brown University. His 1969 book,The Creation of the American Republic, 1776–1787, received the Bancroft and John H. Dunning prizes and was nominated for the National Book Award. Wood’s 1992 book,The Radicalism of the American Revolution, won the Pulitzer Prize and the Emerson Prize. His 2009 book,Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789–1815, won the New-York Historical Society American History Book Prize. In 2010, Wood was awarded a National Humanities Medal by President Obama.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Chapter I
Origins
The origins of the Revolution necessarily lie deep in America’s past. A century and a half of dynamic developments in the British continental colonies of the New World had fundamentally transformed inherited European institutions and customary patterns of life and had left many colonists believing that they were seriously deviating from the cultivated norms of European life. In comparison with prosperous and powerful metropolitan England, America in the middle of the eighteenth century seemed a primitive, backward place, disordered and turbulent, without a real aristocracy, without magnificent courts or large urban centers, indeed, without any of the attributes of the civilized world. Consequently, the colonists repeatedly felt pressed to apologize for the crudity of their society, the insignificance of their art and literature, and the triviality of their affairs.
Suddenly in the 1760s Great Britain thrust its imperial power into this changing world with a thoroughness that had not been felt in a century and precipitated a crisis within the loosely organized empire. American resistance turned into rebellion; but as the colonists groped to make sense of the peculiarities of their society, this rebellion became a justification and idealization of American life as it had gradually and unintentionally developed over the previous century and a half. Instead of being in the backwaters of history, Americans suddenly saw themselves as a new society ideally equipped for a republican future. In this sense, as John Adams later said, “the Revolution was effected before the war commenced.” It was a change “in the minds and hearts of the people.”
But this change was not the whole American Revolution. The Revolution was not simply an intellectual endorsement of a previously existing social reality. It was also an integral part of the great transforming process that carried America into the liberal democratic society of the modern world. Although colonial America was already a different place from Europe in 1760, it still retained, along with powdered wigs and knee breeches, many traditional habits of monarchical behavior and dependent social relationships. The Revolution shattered what remained of these traditional patterns of life and prepared the way for the more fluid, bustling, individualistic world that followed.
The changes were remarkable, and they gave the American people as grand a vision of their future as any people have ever had. Americans saw their new nation not only leading a world revolution on behalf of republicanism and liberty but also becoming the place where the best of all the arts and sciences would flourish. What began as a colonial rebellion on the very edges of the civilized world was transformed into an earth-shaking event—an event that promised, as one clergyman declared, to create out of the “perishing World . . . a new World, a young world, a World of countless Millions, all in the fair Bloom of Piety.”
THE GROWTH AND MOVEMENT OF POPULATION
In 1763, Great Britain straddled the world with the greatest and richest empire since the fall of Rome. From India to the Mississippi River its armies and navies had been victorious. The Peace of Paris that concluded the Seven Years’ War— or the French and Indian War, as the Americans called it—gave Britain undisputed dominance over the eastern half of North America. From the defeated powers, France and Spain, Britain acquired huge chunks of territory in the New World—all of Canada, East and West Florida, and millions of fertile acres between the Appalachian Mountains and the Mississippi River. France turned over to Spain the territory of Louisiana in compensation for Spain’s loss of Florida; and thus this most fearsome of Britain’s enemies removed itself altogether from the North American continent.
Yet at the moment of Britain’s supremacy there were powerful forces at work that would soon, almost overnight, change everything. In the aftermath of the Seven Years’ War, British officials found themselves having to make long-postponed decisions concerning the colonies that would set in motion a chain of events that ultimately shattered the empire.
Ever since the formation of the British Empire in the late seventeenth century, royal officials and bureaucrats had been interested in reforming the ramshackle imperial structure and in expanding royal authority over the American colonists. But most of their schemes had been blocked by English ministries more concerned with the patronage of English politics than with colonial reform. Under such circumstances the empire had been allowed to grow haphazardly, without much control from London. People from different places in Europe had been allowed to settle in the colonies, and land had been given out freely.
Although few imperial officials had ever doubted that the colonies were supposed to be inferior to the mother country and dependent on it, in fact the empire had not worked that way. The relationship that had developed reflected the irrational and inefficient nature of the imperial system—the variety of offices, the diffusion of power, and the looseness of organization. Even in trade regulation, which was the empire’s main business, inefficiency, loopholes, and numerous opportunities for corruption prevented the imperial authorities from interfering substantively with the colonists’ pursuit of their own economic and social interests.
By the middle of the eighteenth century, however, new circumstances began forcing changes in this irrational but working relationship. The British colonies—there were twenty-two of them in the Western Hemisphere in 1760—were becoming too important to be treated as casually as the mother country had treated them in the first half of the eighteenth century. Dynamic developments throughout the greater British world demanded that England pay more attention to its North Ameri- can colonies.
The most basic of these developments were the growth and movement of population. In the middle decades of the eighteenth century, the number of people throughout the whole English-speaking world—in Britain and the colonies alike—was increasing at unprecedented rates. During the 1740s the population of England, which had hardly grown at all for half a century, suddenly began to increase. The populations of Ireland and Scotland had been rising steadily since the beginning of the eighteenth century. The population of the North American colonies was growing even faster— virtually exploding—and had been doing so almost since the beginning of the settlements. Indeed, the North American colonists continued to multiply more rapidly than any other people in the Western world. Between 1750 and 1770 they doubled in number, from 1 million to more than 2 million, and thereby became an even more important part of the British world. In 1700 the American population had been only one twentieth of the British and Irish populations combined; by 1770 it was nearly one fifth, and such farsighted colonists as Benjamin Franklin were predicting that sooner or later the center of the British Empire would shift to America.
Everywhere the expanding British population was in motion, moving from village to village and from continent to continent. In Britain growing numbers of migrants in a few decades created the new industrial cities of Birmingham, Manchester, and Leeds and made London the largest urban center in the Western world. A steady stream moved from the British Isles across the Atlantic to the New World. The migration of Protestant Irish and Scots that had begun early in the century increased after the Seven Years’ War of the 1750s. Between 1764 and 1776 some 125,000 people left the British Isles for the American colonies. From the colonial port towns, particularly Philadelphia, British immigrants and Germans from the Rhine Valley joined with increasing numbers of colonists to spread over half a continent along a variety of routes.
For nearly a century and a half the colonists had been confined to a several-hundred-mile-wide strip of territory along the Atlantic coast. But in the middle decades of the eighteenth century, the pressures of increasing population density began to be felt. Overcultivated soil in the East was becoming depleted. Particularly in the Chesapeake areas the number of tenants was visibly growing. Older towns now seemed overcrowded, especially in New England, and young men coming of age could no longer count on obtaining pieces of land as their fathers had done. Throughout the colonies more and more people were on the move; many drifted into the small colonial cities, which were ill equipped to handle them. By 1772 in Philadelphia, the percentage of poor was eight times greater than it had been twenty years earlier, and almshouses were being constructed and filled as never before. Most of these transient poor, however, saw the cities only as way stations in their endless search for land on which they might re-create the stability they had been forced to abandon.
With the defeat of the French, people set out in all directions, eager to take advantage of the newly acquired land in the interior. In 1759 speculators and settlers moved into the area around Lake Champlain and westward along the Mohawk River into central New York. Between 1749 and 1771, New York’s population grew from 73,348 to 168,007. Tens of thousands of colonists and new immigrants pushed into western Pennsylvania and southward into the Carolinas along routes on each side of Virginia’s Blue Ridge. Along these roads strings of towns—from York, Pennsylvania, to Camden, South Carolina—quickly developed to service the travelers and to distribute produce to distant markets. The growth of settlement was phenomenal. In Pennsylvania twenty-nine new localities were created between 1756 and 1765—more in these few years than in the colony’s entire previous history. North Carolina increased its population sixfold between 1750 and 1775 to become the fourth-largest colony.
New frontiers appeared everywhere throughout British North America. By the early 1760s hunters and explorers such as Daniel Boone began opening up paths westward through the Appalachians. Settlers soon followed. Some moved southward to the valley of the Holston River and to the headwaters of the Cumberland and Tennessee Rivers, and others spread northwest into the Ohio Valley and the Kentucky basin. Some drifted down the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers to join overland migrants from the southern colonies in the new province of West Florida, and thus completed a huge encirclement of the new western territory.
During the decade and a half before Independence, New England throbbed with movement. By the early 1760s the number of transients drifting from town to town through- out the region multiplied dramatically, in some counties doubling or tripling the numbers of the previous decade. Many farmers gave up searching for opportunities within established communities and set out for distant places on the very edges of the expanded empire. Massachusetts and Connecticut colonists trekked not only to northern New England and Nova Scotia, but to areas as far away as the Susquehanna River in Pennsylvania and the lower Mississippi River. Indeed, the largest single addition to the population of West Florida came from the settlement of four hundred families from Connecticut in 1773–74. Between 1760 and 1776 some 20,000 people from southern New England moved up the Connecticut River into New Hampshire and into what would later become Vermont. In that same period migrants from Massachusetts streamed into Maine and founded 94 towns. A total of 264 new towns were established in northern New England during the years between 1760 and 1776.
British and colonial authorities could scarcely comprehend the meaning of this enormous explosion of people in search of land. The colonists, one astonished official observed, were moving “as their avidity and restlessness incite them. They acquire no attachment to place: but wandering about seems engrafted in their nature; and it is a weakness incident to it that they should forever imagine the lands further off are still better than those upon which they are already settled.” Land fever infected all levels of society. While Ezra Stiles, a minister in Newport, Rhode Island, and later the president of Yale University, bought and sold small shares in places all over New England and in Pennsylvania and New York, more influential figures like Benjamin Franklin were concocting huge speculative schemes in the vast unsettled lands of the West.
All this movement had far-reaching effects on American society and its place in the British Empire. The fragmentation of households, churches, and communities increased, and the colonial governments lost control of the mushrooming new settlements. In the backcountry, lawlessness and vagrancy became common, and disputes over land claims and colonial boundaries increased sharply. But the most immediate effect of this rapid spread of people—and the effect that was most obvious to imperial officials by mid-century—was the pressure that the migrations placed on the native peoples.
At the beginning of the Seven Years’ War, the problems of restless and angry Native Americans in the West compelled the British government for the first time to take over from the colonies the direct control of Indian affairs. Two British officials, one each for the northern and southern regions, now had the task of pacifying tribes of Indians, whom one of the superintendents described as “the most formidable of any uncivilized body of people in the world.”
Although the European invasion of the New World had drastically reduced the numbers of the native peoples, largely through the spread of disease, about 150,000 Indians remained in the area east of the Mississippi. New England had few hostile Indians, but in New York there were 2,000 warriors, mostly fierce Senecas, left from the once formidable Six Nations of the Iroquois. In the Susquehanna and Ohio Valleys dwelled a variety of tribes, mostly Delawares, Shawnees, Mingos, and Hurons, who claimed about 12,000 fighting men. On the southern frontiers the Indian presence was even more forbidding. From the Carolinas to the Yazoo River were some 14,000 warriors, mainly Cherokees, Creeks, Chocktaws, and Chickasaws. Although these native peoples were often deeply divided from one another and had reached different degrees of accommodation with the European settlers, most of them were anxious to resist further white encroachment on their lands.
After French authority had been eliminated from Canada and Spanish authority from Florida, the Native Americans were no longer able to play one European power off against the other. Britain now had sole responsibility for regulating the profitable fur trade and for maintaining peace between whites and Indians. The problems were awesome. Not only were many whites prepared to use brandy and rum to achieve their aims, but they had conflicting interests. Some traders favored regulation of the fur trade, and others did not. But all traders favored the establishment in the West of Indian reservations that settlers would not be permitted to invade, and they drew on the support of humanitarian groups who were concerned with the Indians’ fate. Land speculators, however, wanted to move the Indians westward and open more territory for white settlement. Confused, lied to, and cheated of their land and their furs by greedy white traders and land-hungry migrants, the Indians retaliated with atrocities and raids. Some tribes attempted to form coalitions and wage full-scale war.
Thus the end of the Seven Years’ War did not end vio- lence on the frontier. From the devastating Cherokee War of 1759–61 in South Carolina to the assault on the Shawnees in 1774 by Lord Dunmore, the royal governor of Virginia, British officials repeatedly had to use royal troops to put down Indian revolts. The biggest Indian rebellion of the period occurred in 1763 following the British takeover of the former French forts in the West. In just a few weeks Indians from several tribes that had joined together under the leadership of an Ottawa chief named Pontiac surprised and destroyed all but three of the British posts west of the Appalachians. Before they were pushed back by British troops, the angry warriors had penetrated eastward into the backcountry of Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Virginia and had killed more than 2,000 colonists. It is no wonder that many royal authorities in the 1760s concluded that only the presence of regular troops of the British army could maintain peace in the American borderlands of the empire.
Origins
The origins of the Revolution necessarily lie deep in America’s past. A century and a half of dynamic developments in the British continental colonies of the New World had fundamentally transformed inherited European institutions and customary patterns of life and had left many colonists believing that they were seriously deviating from the cultivated norms of European life. In comparison with prosperous and powerful metropolitan England, America in the middle of the eighteenth century seemed a primitive, backward place, disordered and turbulent, without a real aristocracy, without magnificent courts or large urban centers, indeed, without any of the attributes of the civilized world. Consequently, the colonists repeatedly felt pressed to apologize for the crudity of their society, the insignificance of their art and literature, and the triviality of their affairs.
Suddenly in the 1760s Great Britain thrust its imperial power into this changing world with a thoroughness that had not been felt in a century and precipitated a crisis within the loosely organized empire. American resistance turned into rebellion; but as the colonists groped to make sense of the peculiarities of their society, this rebellion became a justification and idealization of American life as it had gradually and unintentionally developed over the previous century and a half. Instead of being in the backwaters of history, Americans suddenly saw themselves as a new society ideally equipped for a republican future. In this sense, as John Adams later said, “the Revolution was effected before the war commenced.” It was a change “in the minds and hearts of the people.”
But this change was not the whole American Revolution. The Revolution was not simply an intellectual endorsement of a previously existing social reality. It was also an integral part of the great transforming process that carried America into the liberal democratic society of the modern world. Although colonial America was already a different place from Europe in 1760, it still retained, along with powdered wigs and knee breeches, many traditional habits of monarchical behavior and dependent social relationships. The Revolution shattered what remained of these traditional patterns of life and prepared the way for the more fluid, bustling, individualistic world that followed.
The changes were remarkable, and they gave the American people as grand a vision of their future as any people have ever had. Americans saw their new nation not only leading a world revolution on behalf of republicanism and liberty but also becoming the place where the best of all the arts and sciences would flourish. What began as a colonial rebellion on the very edges of the civilized world was transformed into an earth-shaking event—an event that promised, as one clergyman declared, to create out of the “perishing World . . . a new World, a young world, a World of countless Millions, all in the fair Bloom of Piety.”
THE GROWTH AND MOVEMENT OF POPULATION
In 1763, Great Britain straddled the world with the greatest and richest empire since the fall of Rome. From India to the Mississippi River its armies and navies had been victorious. The Peace of Paris that concluded the Seven Years’ War— or the French and Indian War, as the Americans called it—gave Britain undisputed dominance over the eastern half of North America. From the defeated powers, France and Spain, Britain acquired huge chunks of territory in the New World—all of Canada, East and West Florida, and millions of fertile acres between the Appalachian Mountains and the Mississippi River. France turned over to Spain the territory of Louisiana in compensation for Spain’s loss of Florida; and thus this most fearsome of Britain’s enemies removed itself altogether from the North American continent.
Yet at the moment of Britain’s supremacy there were powerful forces at work that would soon, almost overnight, change everything. In the aftermath of the Seven Years’ War, British officials found themselves having to make long-postponed decisions concerning the colonies that would set in motion a chain of events that ultimately shattered the empire.
Ever since the formation of the British Empire in the late seventeenth century, royal officials and bureaucrats had been interested in reforming the ramshackle imperial structure and in expanding royal authority over the American colonists. But most of their schemes had been blocked by English ministries more concerned with the patronage of English politics than with colonial reform. Under such circumstances the empire had been allowed to grow haphazardly, without much control from London. People from different places in Europe had been allowed to settle in the colonies, and land had been given out freely.
Although few imperial officials had ever doubted that the colonies were supposed to be inferior to the mother country and dependent on it, in fact the empire had not worked that way. The relationship that had developed reflected the irrational and inefficient nature of the imperial system—the variety of offices, the diffusion of power, and the looseness of organization. Even in trade regulation, which was the empire’s main business, inefficiency, loopholes, and numerous opportunities for corruption prevented the imperial authorities from interfering substantively with the colonists’ pursuit of their own economic and social interests.
By the middle of the eighteenth century, however, new circumstances began forcing changes in this irrational but working relationship. The British colonies—there were twenty-two of them in the Western Hemisphere in 1760—were becoming too important to be treated as casually as the mother country had treated them in the first half of the eighteenth century. Dynamic developments throughout the greater British world demanded that England pay more attention to its North Ameri- can colonies.
The most basic of these developments were the growth and movement of population. In the middle decades of the eighteenth century, the number of people throughout the whole English-speaking world—in Britain and the colonies alike—was increasing at unprecedented rates. During the 1740s the population of England, which had hardly grown at all for half a century, suddenly began to increase. The populations of Ireland and Scotland had been rising steadily since the beginning of the eighteenth century. The population of the North American colonies was growing even faster— virtually exploding—and had been doing so almost since the beginning of the settlements. Indeed, the North American colonists continued to multiply more rapidly than any other people in the Western world. Between 1750 and 1770 they doubled in number, from 1 million to more than 2 million, and thereby became an even more important part of the British world. In 1700 the American population had been only one twentieth of the British and Irish populations combined; by 1770 it was nearly one fifth, and such farsighted colonists as Benjamin Franklin were predicting that sooner or later the center of the British Empire would shift to America.
Everywhere the expanding British population was in motion, moving from village to village and from continent to continent. In Britain growing numbers of migrants in a few decades created the new industrial cities of Birmingham, Manchester, and Leeds and made London the largest urban center in the Western world. A steady stream moved from the British Isles across the Atlantic to the New World. The migration of Protestant Irish and Scots that had begun early in the century increased after the Seven Years’ War of the 1750s. Between 1764 and 1776 some 125,000 people left the British Isles for the American colonies. From the colonial port towns, particularly Philadelphia, British immigrants and Germans from the Rhine Valley joined with increasing numbers of colonists to spread over half a continent along a variety of routes.
For nearly a century and a half the colonists had been confined to a several-hundred-mile-wide strip of territory along the Atlantic coast. But in the middle decades of the eighteenth century, the pressures of increasing population density began to be felt. Overcultivated soil in the East was becoming depleted. Particularly in the Chesapeake areas the number of tenants was visibly growing. Older towns now seemed overcrowded, especially in New England, and young men coming of age could no longer count on obtaining pieces of land as their fathers had done. Throughout the colonies more and more people were on the move; many drifted into the small colonial cities, which were ill equipped to handle them. By 1772 in Philadelphia, the percentage of poor was eight times greater than it had been twenty years earlier, and almshouses were being constructed and filled as never before. Most of these transient poor, however, saw the cities only as way stations in their endless search for land on which they might re-create the stability they had been forced to abandon.
With the defeat of the French, people set out in all directions, eager to take advantage of the newly acquired land in the interior. In 1759 speculators and settlers moved into the area around Lake Champlain and westward along the Mohawk River into central New York. Between 1749 and 1771, New York’s population grew from 73,348 to 168,007. Tens of thousands of colonists and new immigrants pushed into western Pennsylvania and southward into the Carolinas along routes on each side of Virginia’s Blue Ridge. Along these roads strings of towns—from York, Pennsylvania, to Camden, South Carolina—quickly developed to service the travelers and to distribute produce to distant markets. The growth of settlement was phenomenal. In Pennsylvania twenty-nine new localities were created between 1756 and 1765—more in these few years than in the colony’s entire previous history. North Carolina increased its population sixfold between 1750 and 1775 to become the fourth-largest colony.
New frontiers appeared everywhere throughout British North America. By the early 1760s hunters and explorers such as Daniel Boone began opening up paths westward through the Appalachians. Settlers soon followed. Some moved southward to the valley of the Holston River and to the headwaters of the Cumberland and Tennessee Rivers, and others spread northwest into the Ohio Valley and the Kentucky basin. Some drifted down the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers to join overland migrants from the southern colonies in the new province of West Florida, and thus completed a huge encirclement of the new western territory.
During the decade and a half before Independence, New England throbbed with movement. By the early 1760s the number of transients drifting from town to town through- out the region multiplied dramatically, in some counties doubling or tripling the numbers of the previous decade. Many farmers gave up searching for opportunities within established communities and set out for distant places on the very edges of the expanded empire. Massachusetts and Connecticut colonists trekked not only to northern New England and Nova Scotia, but to areas as far away as the Susquehanna River in Pennsylvania and the lower Mississippi River. Indeed, the largest single addition to the population of West Florida came from the settlement of four hundred families from Connecticut in 1773–74. Between 1760 and 1776 some 20,000 people from southern New England moved up the Connecticut River into New Hampshire and into what would later become Vermont. In that same period migrants from Massachusetts streamed into Maine and founded 94 towns. A total of 264 new towns were established in northern New England during the years between 1760 and 1776.
British and colonial authorities could scarcely comprehend the meaning of this enormous explosion of people in search of land. The colonists, one astonished official observed, were moving “as their avidity and restlessness incite them. They acquire no attachment to place: but wandering about seems engrafted in their nature; and it is a weakness incident to it that they should forever imagine the lands further off are still better than those upon which they are already settled.” Land fever infected all levels of society. While Ezra Stiles, a minister in Newport, Rhode Island, and later the president of Yale University, bought and sold small shares in places all over New England and in Pennsylvania and New York, more influential figures like Benjamin Franklin were concocting huge speculative schemes in the vast unsettled lands of the West.
All this movement had far-reaching effects on American society and its place in the British Empire. The fragmentation of households, churches, and communities increased, and the colonial governments lost control of the mushrooming new settlements. In the backcountry, lawlessness and vagrancy became common, and disputes over land claims and colonial boundaries increased sharply. But the most immediate effect of this rapid spread of people—and the effect that was most obvious to imperial officials by mid-century—was the pressure that the migrations placed on the native peoples.
At the beginning of the Seven Years’ War, the problems of restless and angry Native Americans in the West compelled the British government for the first time to take over from the colonies the direct control of Indian affairs. Two British officials, one each for the northern and southern regions, now had the task of pacifying tribes of Indians, whom one of the superintendents described as “the most formidable of any uncivilized body of people in the world.”
Although the European invasion of the New World had drastically reduced the numbers of the native peoples, largely through the spread of disease, about 150,000 Indians remained in the area east of the Mississippi. New England had few hostile Indians, but in New York there were 2,000 warriors, mostly fierce Senecas, left from the once formidable Six Nations of the Iroquois. In the Susquehanna and Ohio Valleys dwelled a variety of tribes, mostly Delawares, Shawnees, Mingos, and Hurons, who claimed about 12,000 fighting men. On the southern frontiers the Indian presence was even more forbidding. From the Carolinas to the Yazoo River were some 14,000 warriors, mainly Cherokees, Creeks, Chocktaws, and Chickasaws. Although these native peoples were often deeply divided from one another and had reached different degrees of accommodation with the European settlers, most of them were anxious to resist further white encroachment on their lands.
After French authority had been eliminated from Canada and Spanish authority from Florida, the Native Americans were no longer able to play one European power off against the other. Britain now had sole responsibility for regulating the profitable fur trade and for maintaining peace between whites and Indians. The problems were awesome. Not only were many whites prepared to use brandy and rum to achieve their aims, but they had conflicting interests. Some traders favored regulation of the fur trade, and others did not. But all traders favored the establishment in the West of Indian reservations that settlers would not be permitted to invade, and they drew on the support of humanitarian groups who were concerned with the Indians’ fate. Land speculators, however, wanted to move the Indians westward and open more territory for white settlement. Confused, lied to, and cheated of their land and their furs by greedy white traders and land-hungry migrants, the Indians retaliated with atrocities and raids. Some tribes attempted to form coalitions and wage full-scale war.
Thus the end of the Seven Years’ War did not end vio- lence on the frontier. From the devastating Cherokee War of 1759–61 in South Carolina to the assault on the Shawnees in 1774 by Lord Dunmore, the royal governor of Virginia, British officials repeatedly had to use royal troops to put down Indian revolts. The biggest Indian rebellion of the period occurred in 1763 following the British takeover of the former French forts in the West. In just a few weeks Indians from several tribes that had joined together under the leadership of an Ottawa chief named Pontiac surprised and destroyed all but three of the British posts west of the Appalachians. Before they were pushed back by British troops, the angry warriors had penetrated eastward into the backcountry of Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Virginia and had killed more than 2,000 colonists. It is no wonder that many royal authorities in the 1760s concluded that only the presence of regular troops of the British army could maintain peace in the American borderlands of the empire.
Product details
- Publisher : Modern Library
- Publication date : August 19, 2003
- Language : English
- Print length : 224 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0812970411
- ISBN-13 : 978-0812970418
- Item Weight : 2.31 pounds
- Dimensions : 5.25 x 0.47 x 8 inches
- Book 9 of 33 : Modern Library Chronicles
- Best Sellers Rank: #64,684 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #56 inDemocracy (Books)
- #90 inU.S. Revolution & Founding History
- #764 inWorld History (Books)
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Gordon S. Wood is Alva O. Way Professor of History Emeritus at Brown University. His books include the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Radicalism of the American Revolution, the Bancroft Prize-winning The Creation of the American Republic, 1776-1787, The Americanization of Benjamin Franklin, and The Purpose of the Past: Reflections on the Uses of History. He writes frequently for The New York Review of Books and The New Republic.
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Customers find this book highly readable and well-written, with one review noting its practical fact-driven prose. Moreover, the book provides an extraordinarily insightful overview of the American Revolution, particularly focusing on its philosophical underpinnings. Additionally, customers appreciate its concise length and find it an interesting read.
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45 customers mention readability, 44 positive, 1 negative
Great Book!!!Read more
This is a classic andexcellent book. The book covers in great details the events that lead to the american revolution....Read more
...This book is clear, simple andeasy to read. It finds its spot on my bookshelf! It is a basic to have.....Read more
Anexcellent, well written, concise history of the American Revolution and our country's entry into the world. A great addition to anyone's library.Read more
37 customers mention information quality, 35 positive, 2 negative
Very academically written. Have yet to finish the book but it'svery informative. I'll finish it some day when I finish it.Read more
Informative....however slow read.Read more
Agood overview, but I think Wood overstates the case for American unity before and during the revolution....Read more
Fantastic explanation of the attitudes and actions that contributed to the American Revolution....Read more
32 customers mention history, 30 positive, 2 negative
Great summary of the American Revolution, connecting the past and present....Read more
Short overview of the American revolution that reads like bullet points....Read more
This volume's two strongest recommendations are its brevity and itsbibliography....Read more
...of an extraordinary coalescence of intellectual, social andpolitical change that forged not only a new nation and way of governance, but one that...Read more
13 customers mention writing style, 11 positive, 2 negative
Short +concise. Stick to the facts and add some depth. Light on the North battles but better than average coverage of the southRead more
This is aconcise book written about the American Revolution War. It is subtitled as a history....Read more
Well written bookRead more
In very readable andconcise manner Wood takes one from the events leading to American revolution to the adoption of the Constitution....Read more
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...It isshort, sweet, and masterfully organized and written. I am a lawyer and a student of political science and American history....Read more
This volume's two strongest recommendations are itsbrevity and its bibliography....Read more
Thebook is not lengthy and that's ok. However, the print is too small. It's like reading the directions on a medicine bottle.Read more
...This book ticks all the boxes: well-written,short enough to be a summary, and long enough to create your own leads to follow.Read more
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5 out of 5 stars
A brief history of the Revolution, showing both the good and negative results of it
I recently read Gordon S. Wood's 2002 work “The American Revolution” as a brief overview to refresh myself on the subject. I bought my used-like new copy for $3 at Half Price Books, and thus there is no verified purchase tag on this review. However, I included a pic of me with it to show that I do have a copy, and that this is a legitimate review. In about 170 pages, Professor Wood carefully works his way through the lead up causes to the Revolution, the political and military aspects of the Revolution, and the Constitution making and Republic theories after the war ended. Professor Wood at one point proclaims that: “This republicanism was in every way a radical ideology -as radical for the eighteenth century as Marxism was to be for the nineteenth century”. Very true. As I am a Southern Nationalist, I would concur. The “spirit of 76” unleashed democracy and egalitarianism, set the stage for the French Revolution a decade later, and allowed (((Marx))) to rise from obscurity. I enjoyed Professor Wood’s book, and would recommend it to others seeking a brief understanding of the ideology of the American Revolution. The great R.L Dabney (1820-1898) warned us of where America was heading over a century ago, as he condemned Negro emancipation and women’s suffrage. History has vindicated Dabney as correct. In time, the principles of 1776 inextricably lead to legalizing abortion and transgenderism. The American Revolution erred, by swaying way too far to the left.
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- Reviewed in the United States on June 2, 2015Format: HardcoverVerified PurchaseThis is a concise book written about the American Revolution War. It is subtitled as a history. The author, Gordon S. Woods received his PhD from Harvard and since 1969 he has taught history at Brown University. He is even a Pulitzer Prize for The Radicalism of the American Revolution in 1993. He is a well traveled and studied author and educator. And he writes very well.
He eloquently describes how a Rabble In Arms, with a universal idea of freedom, over three decades defeated the world's mightiest army, wrote a constitution, fought a second war known as the War of 1812, and set on a world course the greatest nation filled with free people the world has ever known. It is a very unlikely story with the odds stacked against the rebels, and yet they overcame every obstacle imaginable and through world class leadership withstood all the attempts of others to bring the new nation to its knees. When the United States officially won its freedom in 1784, as a nation we started with absolutely no institutions with any history and experience behind them. We wanted our individual independence and yet we were apprehensive to submit to a federal government. And with out a strong centralized government, we couldn't control the independent colonies (states), engage in domestic as well as international trade, develop a banking system with one monies, raise an army and defend against local unrest and international rebellion.
Dr. Wood carefully takes the reader from the growth and movement of the colonial population to our Federal Constitution (circa 1787).. It is a marvelous story of intrigue, national devastation and a fight to gain and secure our independence. And finally we had to put in place a mechanism that would insure reasonable states' rights and yet maintain a strong central government. No nation had ever attempted this style of government. A truly free republic with checks and balances written into the very articles that would insure our survival as a nation.
Everything our Founding Fathers and legislators later did and did over a number of times, had never been tried before. They truly created these United States of America against all odds. And Dr. Woods lays the drama out where we can clearly understand what was going on and at the same time wonder how in the world it ever got done. What a saga and what a book. - Reviewed in the United States on February 6, 2004Format: HardcoverVerified PurchaseWith less than 200 pages of text, you may well think that Wood's THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION is no more than historical Cliffs Notes. It rises above that level as a decent read and a refresher for general readers who have not revisited this part of history since school.
As Wood notes in his preface, there is a tendency among some contemporary revisionists to downplay the significance of the American Revolution, to challenge its revolutionary stature because it did not fully achieve the full equality of humankind at the one time. In clean, practical fact-driven prose, he ably responds with a picture of an extraordinary coalescence of intellectual, social and political change that forged not only a new nation and way of governance, but one that quickly emerged as a world leader. Wood deftly sorts out the origins and spurs that produced the tensions in the colonies and in Britain, reviews the highlights of the war, and then visits the newly formed United States of America as its people try on their new identity and begin to build a new way of being. It ends with the production of the Constitution and Bill of Rights.
The central engine of the book is based in the ideas, particularly of the Enlightenment, that drove the Revolution. Only the most significant players make appearances, such as Patrick Henry, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and King George III. This is not the book to go looking for Betsy Ross or Nathan Hale. What struck this reader most of all were the issues that America faced as it took on the mantle of freedom. Many of the original tensions are still with us, and probably always will be given how democracy embraces diverse people and agenda. Wood's calm rendering of this period inspires wonder at what was in fact achieved. - Reviewed in the United States on August 11, 2017Format: PaperbackVerified PurchaseGood, concise summary of the Revolution and its causes. I like Professor Wood's analyses in general, and would recommend anything I have read that he has written about this era in American history. Wood gets very much into the political theory that the Founders knew. He tries to juxtapose all of that political theory from England, Scotland, France, and even Italy onto the thinking, motivation, and rationale that the patriots had for causing a revolution. He does it quite well in such a short book. You should read this. Wood is just trying to put some perspective on the Revolution in terms not only of the colonial heroes who pushed it into a war, but onto the political history of their roots, their lifestyle and governance as colonials, and the forces of British government that pushed them over the brink. Yes, read it.
- Reviewed in the United States on December 24, 2025Format: KindleVerified PurchaseThis is an excellent synopsis of the intellectual underpinnings of the American Revolution and the formation of the United States as a democratic republic.
- Reviewed in the United States on April 29, 2022Format: PaperbackVerified PurchasePurchased this book primarily because of Professor Woods’ scholarship regarding 18th century America and my own interest in the era. Did not know what to expect from such a short volume on such a broad subject, but I was overwhelmed by the depth of analysis and interpretation given by Professor Wood. I’m still not 100% sure how to characterize the contents of this book: a brief history of actual events? Yes. An overview of the philosophical underpinnings of The Revolution? Yes. A logical explanation of its causes and outcomes? Yes. An analysis of how The Revolution affects us still today? Yes. And much more…. Every American should read this book—especially the chapter on Republicanism—to see from whence we came.
Top reviews from other countries
- Bob TaylorReviewed in Canada on February 14, 2024
4.0 out of 5 starsExcellent short guide to revolution
Format: PaperbackVerified PurchaseThis book and the wonderful Taming Democracy by Terry Bouton describe how the ideals of the revolution were laid aside in the struggle to build a nation. Read about Robert Morris of Pennsylvania, and meditate on the futility of striving for success.
