The American Revolution Wasn’t the Main Event
Historians deal in secular truths. Slavery is an appropriate explanation for the Civil War; God’s will is not. Still, some occurrences are so improbable they can make it hard to believe that we’re entirely alone, that there are no fates or hobgoblins pulling the strings.
Thomas Jefferson’s death is one. That Jefferson, an ailing octogenarian, should die in his bed was unsurprising. That he should die on the same day as his fellow-Founder John Adams was perhaps a tad eerie. But that both should die on the Fourth of July, 1826, the fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, which Jefferson had written and Adams had signed? This was coincidence beyond belief.
From his deathbed, Jefferson reflected on the Declaration’s meaning. More than announcing a separation, it had repudiated the age-old notion that some people were born with “saddles on their backs” and that others were born with boots and spurs to ride them. The message was meant for the entire world, Jefferson felt. It would extend “to some parts sooner, to others later, but finally to all.”
Discover notable new fiction, nonfiction, and poetry.
It was a bit grandiose of Jefferson to suppose that a document he’d written in less than three weeks would liberate all of humanity. But Adams, his political rival, seemed to agree. The post-Declaration era should be called “the Age of Revolutions and Constitutions,” Adams proposed. The French Revolution started in the first months of George Washington’s Presidency. Then came revolts and revolutions in Ireland, the Swiss cantons, the Rhineland, the Netherlands, the Italian states, and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. In the early nineteenth century, more than a dozen colonies in the Americas gained their freedom, including Haiti, Mexico, Brazil, Argentina, Colombia, and Peru. Kings were killed, rights proclaimed, independences declared. “We began the Dance,” Adams gleefully insisted.
The American rebels had their own MAGA hat: the soft red liberty cap, based on the headgear of freed Greco-Roman slaves. (It’s what the Smurfs wear.) Soon, it was everywhere. French republicans adopted it as their symbol, as did Latin American ones. It appeared on the emblems of France, Bolivia, Argentina, Colombia, El Salvador, Haiti, and Cuba.
America’s influence went beyond haberdashery. Several of the world’s leading revolutionaries had spent time in the country. The English-born Thomas Paine started his radical career writing “Common Sense” in Philadelphia before serving as a delegate to France’s National Convention. Tadeusz Kościuszko, Henri Christophe, Francisco de Miranda, and the Marquis de Lafayette all fought the British in America before becoming heroes in Poland, Haiti, Venezuela, and France, respectively. Lafayette named his only son Georges Washington.
Americans watched liberty’s growth with parental pride. After the French Revolution, many donned tricolor cockades and started addressing one another as “citizen” and “citizeness.” After Simón Bolívar led several of Spain’s Latin American colonies to independence, U.S. parents christened sons “Bolivar,” hence the Civil War general Simon Bolivar Buckner. All these overseas uprisings could be seen as part of the “novus ordo seclorum,” the new world order established by the United States and announced on its great seal. (Look under the eye-pyramid on the dollar bill.)
Belief in the American Revolution’s transcendent importance persists. It was “the most significant event in human history since the birth of Christ,” the documentarian Ken Burns has repeatedly proclaimed. Two recent books, however, put that to the test. “Republic and Empire” (Yale), by Andrew Jackson O’Shaughnessy and the late Trevor Burnard, presents the Revolution from the British vantage. “Freedom Round the Globe” (Doubleday), by Sarah Pearsall, follows it all over the map—Jamaica, France, India, China. These fascinating, mind-scrambling books show familiar events from unfamiliar perspectives. But, in doing so, they lead you to wonder whether the stories Jefferson and Adams told were true. What if, in the age of revolution, America just didn’t matter that much?
To eighteenth-century Europeans, North America was essentially a wilderness. Although on paper the continent was divided into British, French, Spanish, and Russian territory, this was a preposterous cartographic fiction. In reality, the land was mainly Indigenous. Even populous British colonies like Virginia and Pennsylvania grew blurry on their western frontiers, where indistinct borders were protected by a few lonely forts.
For the British Crown, such frontiers were smudges on the edge of the map. What truly mattered was protecting Britain’s trade with the European continent against French interference. So, when French colonists built forts in the contested borderland of the Ohio Valley, near Pittsburgh, King George III went through the motions of shooing them away. This task was unimportant enough, however, to fall to an American-born major who’d been in uniform less than a year, a twenty-one-year-old named George Washington.
Sending Washington wasn’t exactly sending the big guns. When he ordered the French to leave, they refused. He returned the next year to build a fort. As he prepared to do so, though, the Seneca leader Tanaghrisson approached Washington, warned him that the French were near, and proposed an ambush. Washington went along, and the two managed, with their combined forces, to capture a French unit. But things spun out of his control when Tanaghrisson drove a hatchet into the French commander’s skull and his men began killing the wounded. In another fates-or-hobgoblins moment, a discombobulated Washington had started a war.
A huge one. In the United States, it’s known as the French and Indian War, but that was just the American portion of the conflict. The Seven Years’ War drew in all the great Western powers. It reached Europe, Africa, and Asia, leading Winston Churchill to call it “the first world war.” As in the later World Wars, Britain’s side won. Lagos, Le Havre, Quebec, Quiberon Bay—“Our bells are worn threadbare with ringing for victories,” Horace Walpole wrote.
George Washington, trudging through a muddy Pennsylvania forest, had inadvertently set cannons roaring from Prague to Manila. This surely confirmed the colonists’ sense of their own importance. But it also revealed them to be cogwheels in a vast imperial machinery, one they neither controlled nor comprehended.
In the traditional telling, the Seven Years’ War drained British coffers, prompted higher taxes, and placed the grumbling Americans on their path to freedom. That isn’t wrong: the first surge of revolt across the colonies, in response to the Stamp Act of 1765, led rebels from Maryland to Massachusetts to hang Crown officials in effigy. But that standard story rarely mentions the British Caribbean, where the Stamp Act fell hardest. A crowd in St. Kitts pushed the tax collector to the ground and threatened to string him up if he didn’t resign. After he fled to nearby Nevis, furious colonists followed him there, burning houses and baying for blood.
If St. Kitts and Nevis seem odd sites for unrest, that’s because most narratives of the Revolution present a tightly cropped picture. John Adams is frequently quoted as describing how America’s disparate colonies became a nation: “Thirteen Clocks were made to Strike together.” In fact, Britain had twenty-six American colonies, and only half of them rose up. The physically largest, Quebec, remained loyal, as did the most lucrative, Jamaica. And East and West Florida, though they would be absorbed later, didn’t join the rebellion, either.
The rebels were fully aware of these other colonies and sought to include them. The Continental Congress distributed a letter in French imploring Canadians to rise up “in the defence of our common liberty.” (It was signed “Jean Hancock,” le “Président du Congrès.”) The Articles of Confederation made provisions for other colonies to join. In his draft of the Articles, Benjamin Franklin listed the colonies he had in mind: Britain’s Caribbean and Canadian holdings, Bermuda, the Floridas, and Ireland. In 1778, U.S. diplomats signed a treaty with the Lenapes (also known as the Delawares) that, had Congress approved, would have made the Lenape Nation a U.S. state.
The Founders portrayed themselves as reluctant revolutionaries, patriots who had endured such “a long train of abuses and usurpations” (as Jefferson’s Declaration put it) that they were forced by their principles to seek freedom. But, in a wide-frame shot with Britain’s whole empire in view, it’s hard to see them as especially aggrieved or especially liberty-loving.
Their burdens, at least, were light. The well-fed colonists avoided the famines that recurred in Ireland and British India. (Pearsall describes one in Bengal that killed at least a million people and possibly far more.) Indeed, American settlers enjoyed incomes “equal, or slightly superior, to those in England,” Burnard and O’Shaughnessy write, adding that, even at the same level, American incomes “bought a great deal more” than English ones did. The historian Robin L. Einhorn has observed that American colonial taxes were lighter, more progressive, and less aggressively collected than levies in Europe.
Perhaps the thirteen colonies were uniquely allergic to tyranny? This would have come as news to the Highland Scots who invaded England in 1745 or the Irish Whiteboys who terrorized landlords and tax collectors a few decades later. The seventeen-sixties, in particular, were a time of empire-wide defiance. That was when the enslaved population of Jamaica staged a vast uprising, a Native confederacy fought the British from Virginia to present-day Michigan, and the Sultan of Mysore, Hyder Ali, launched the first of four wars against Britain’s East India Company. Next to these, American protests of the Stamp Act looked almost sweet. “There is not a single native of our country,” Ben Franklin could claim in 1768, “who is not firmly attached to his King by principle and by affection.”
Neither Burnard and O’Shaughnessy nor Pearsall attempts a grand explanation of why thirteen American colonies ultimately sought independence while thirteen others didn’t. In the Caribbean, slavery was an obvious factor, Burnard and O’Shaughnessy note. Because sugar plantations were so large and enslaved populations were so preponderant, whites feared that any tumult would end with their heads on pikes. They wanted more British soldiers around, not fewer.
Nationalist rebellion was likelier in Canada. Indeed, the first colonists to attack a statue of George III were in Montreal; they blackened the King’s face and garlanded him with a rosary made from potatoes. (They later beheaded him.) The Catholic-Protestant divide impeded North American solidarity. Still, Pearsall argues, had the U.S. invasion of Canada in 1775-76 gone better—more heartening victories, fewer supplies confiscated from the locals—Canadians might well have joined the cause.
It’s not always the most downtrodden who rise up. In a global context, the Founders appear not as the wretched of the earth but as the fortunate sons of Britain who, at a certain point, found it more advantageous to become sons of liberty.
In 1773, Bostonians disguised as Mohawks hurled hundreds of chests of British tea into the ocean. Though the Boston Tea Party is commonly assumed to have been about taxes, the tea in question had had its taxes reduced to help the East India Company. The colonists’ concern was that cheap Company tea would undercut smugglers and local venders—they were like cabdrivers protesting Uber. John Dickinson, one of the wealthiest colonists, warned that the vile East India Company, having devastated India, would start in on America. “We are not Sea Poys, nor Marattas, but British Subjects, who are born to Liberty,” he protested. Tea Partiers dressed like the Indians of one continent to show that they would not be treated like the Indians of another.
For a war of independence, it is bizarre how many foreigners featured in the American Revolution. The greatest American hero after Washington was the Marquis de Lafayette, who arrived, in 1777, barely speaking English. Washington and Lafayette’s war-ending triumph over Lord Cornwallis at Yorktown, in 1781, owed much to Comte de Rochambeau’s French soldiers and Comte de Grasse’s French ships. About a quarter of the British Army troops, meanwhile, were actually German—the hated Hessians.
There’s a reason for this. Once the colonists showed they could win battles, Britain’s many enemies piled on. The result was “a Russian doll of a war, with conflicts nested in other ones, far beyond the thirteen colonies,” Pearsall writes. There is no one name for the connected conflicts, which include the Anglo-French War of 1778-83, the Anglo-Spanish War of 1779-83, the Fourth Anglo-Dutch War, and the Second Mysore War. Pearsall suggests “the Nine Years’ War.”
How central were the thirteen colonies here? Burnard and O’Shaughnessy point out that, whereas Britain regularly sent nobles to govern the Caribbean colonies—and dukes and earls to Ireland—the men appointed to administer the thirteen colonies more often lacked titles and were paid less. The Massachusetts governor during the Boston Tea Party, Thomas Hutchinson, was a local merchant.
Hence the Hessians. George III made do with mercenaries from German lands because he needed British troops to protect a place that mattered more: Ireland.
Even within the Americas, the thirteen colonies weren’t top priority. In 1778, the British commander Henry Clinton was ordered to abandon his occupation of Philadelphia, the largest city there, and send the troops instead to St. Lucia (five thousand men), St. Augustine (three thousand), and Canada (two thousand). The Cabinet discussed—and George III supported—withdrawing from the coastal colonies entirely in favor of the Caribbean. Britain didn’t withdraw, but its Royal Navy gradually redistributed its ships. Forty-one per cent of the fleet was at the North American mainland in the summer of 1778, thirteen per cent in the summer of 1780, and eleven per cent in the summer of 1781.
Lord Cornwallis encountered these imperial priorities in 1778, when he was briefly ordered to leave America along with four thousand troops during a panic that the French might invade Jamaica. He ran fully aground on the same priorities in 1781, when rebel forces surrounded him at Yorktown. Cornwallis needed reinforcements, and one reason too few came was that Britain had sent ships to the Indian Ocean, where it was fighting the Sultan of Mysore, Hyder Ali. The battles in southern India “were on a scale that far surpassed those of America,” Burnard and O’Shaughnessy write, and they burned through British resources. Pearsall deems Hyder Ali the unsung hero of Yorktown.
Cornwallis laid down his arms in October, 1781. Yet a puzzle for schoolchildren is: If the war basically finished with Yorktown in 1781, why wasn’t the peace treaty ratified until 1784? In fact, only the American fighting had ended. Major engagements lay ahead: Britain’s triumphant defense of Jamaica against France in the Battle of the Saintes, in 1782; the exhaustion of the Franco-Spanish siege of Gibraltar, in 1783. Combat in southern India raged until 1784.
The global war concluded inconclusively, with territory changing hands in many directions. Yet this didn’t leave the warring empires on equal footing. France ended basically insolvent, and the financial strain brought down its monarchy. The ensuing turmoil upended Spain, which lost most of its empire. All this may explain why the war doesn’t linger in British memory as a painful loss. Taking a broad view, it’s possible to argue that Britain won the American Revolutionary War.
Certainly, Britain “flourished as never before,” Burnard and O’Shaughnessy write. It kept its monarchy and its valuable Caribbean territories. (Even today, Jamaica’s head of state is officially King Charles III.) Although Britain lost the thirteen colonies’ allegiance, it retained their trade. In 1820, the politician Henry Clay deemed the United States to be “sort of independent colonies” of England, “politically free, commercially slaves.”
Beyond America, Britain grew explosively. Cornwallis, known in the U.S. as the poor sap who lost the war, is remembered differently in the U.K. After Yorktown, he became the governor-general of British India. Using hundreds of elephants to haul artillery, Cornwallis invaded Mysore and carved up the sultanate. He was, according to the British foreign-affairs adviser John Bew, “among the most effective of all British empire builders.”
The American colonists didn’t overthrow the British monarchy; they escaped from it. Nonetheless, they might have brought other kings down. This, at least, is what they believed: that their ideas ignited revolutions.
But that’s not how it looks from the outside. “The sad truth of the matter,” the German theorist Hannah Arendt wrote, is that France’s revolution “made world history” whereas America’s was “of little more than local importance.” Two classic transnational histories by British authors, Eric Hobsbawm’s “The Age of Revolution, 1789-1848” (1962) and C. A. Bayly’s “The Birth of the Modern World, 1780-1914” (2003) conspicuously start with the seventeen-eighties, the decade after the American Revolution began.
Bayly, unimpressed by the thirteen colonies’ influence, argued that the main engine of political modernity wasn’t a revolution in ideas but one in arms. By the eighteenth century, developments in military technology and state organization had made wars punishingly expensive. That’s why Britain, after the Seven Years’ War, needed to hike taxes, setting off the American Revolution. And it’s why France, after the American Revolutionary War, had to do the same, which led to the calling of the Estates General, the revolt of the Third Estate, and the monarchy’s fall.
The American Revolution helped cause the French one in this strictly fiscal sense. Ideologically, though, the connection was murkier. French revolutionaries sought to remake their society, executing tens of thousands of those who stood in their way. Even Thomas Paine, the Revolution’s best-known foreign champion, was imprisoned as a counter-revolutionary in 1793. If not for a stroke of luck to do with markings on cell doors, he, too, would probably have been killed.
France’s revolution set off a slave uprising in its colony of Saint-Domingue. The French National Convention accepted this and abolished slavery throughout the empire. When Napoleon later sought to reëstablish it, Saint-Domingue’s leaders declared independence from France, forming the Black republic of Haiti, in 1804. They initially modelled their declaration on Jefferson’s but scrapped it. “To write this Act,” the declaration’s author explained, “we need the skin of a white man for parchment, his skull for an inkwell, his blood for ink, and a bayonet for a pen!”
All this puts America in clarifying perspective. It’s telling that several key words of late-eighteenth-century political confrontation—democrat, aristocrat, and revolutionary (as a noun)—were unknown in the American Revolution. Had that even been a revolution? Black and Native Americans, the most clear-cut victims of tyranny, fought largely against the secessionists. This is understandable; independence placed power in the hands of America’s local élite, many of whose members held slaves (as eight of the first ten U.S. Presidents did). “I would have never drawn my sword in the cause of America, if I could have conceived that thereby I was founding a land of slavery,” Lafayette said. It’s hard to imagine the Founders surviving long in France or Haiti.
Although U.S. leaders initially cheered foreign uprisings, their enthusiasm curdled into disenchantment and disavowal. It didn’t take long for George Washington and his followers to recoil from French radicalism. The difference between the American and French revolutions, John Adams huffed, is “the difference between right and wrong.” When Francophiles aligned with Jefferson wore tricolor cockades, Washington’s men responded with sombre black ones. Division over the French Revolution became a major cause of America’s first partisan split: Democratic-Republicans were for it, Federalists against.
Yet it was the Federalists who held power in the late eighteenth century. So, when republican France went to war with its monarchical neighbors, President Washington declared neutrality. Although his famous farewell address is commonly read as a statement of general political principles—a criticism of entangling alliances—Washington’s warning that “passionate attachment” to a “favourite nation” would lead “deluded citizens” to betray their country wasn’t hard to decode. Under President John Adams, the Federalists sought to eradicate French ideological influence by raising the bar to citizenship, lowering the bar to deportation, and criminalizing malicious criticism of the federal government.
Thomas Paine, released from prison and woven back into French society, wrote a long, furious letter to George Washington. The question, Paine asked, was “whether you are an apostate or an impostor; whether you have abandoned good principles, or whether you ever had any?” His searing indictment was half the length of “Common Sense.”
U.S. hostilities with France peaked with the Quasi-War, a set of naval skirmishes between 1798 and 1800. Congress raised an army to defend the homeland, and President Adams appointed Washington to lead it. Although an invasion was unlikely, an aged Washington threw himself into preventing the French Revolution from reaching American shores.
By then, even the Democratic-Republicans had soured on France. In 1797, Jefferson proposed a “divorce” from it. Meanwhile, he regarded Saint-Domingue’s uprising with unconcealed terror. “The revolutionary storm now sweeping the globe” would soon strike the United States, he warned. “The day which begins our combustion must be near at hand.”
At the end of Jefferson’s and Adams’s lives, their Hispanophone counterpart Simón Bolívar invited the United States to a conference of American nations in Panama. Here was a more congenial setting for contemplating liberty than Paris or Port-au-Prince. The Latin American independence wars had been mostly élite-led affairs. Necks were safe in Panama.
Still, coöperating with foreigners gave pause. Latin America’s revolutions, however moderate, had nonetheless involved ending slavery. Bolívar, indeed, had taken aid from Haiti. Latin Americans seemed looser about race, too. Mexico’s second President, Vicente Guerrero, not only abolished slavery but appeared to have had African ancestry himself—some called him El Negro.
These were sticking points, my academic colleague Caitlin Fitz argues in “Our Sister Republics” (2016). When President John Quincy Adams accepted Bolívar’s invitation, his opponents pounced. Could U.S. delegates really be expected, the Virginia senator John Randolph asked, to sit “beside the native African, their American descendants, the mixed breeds, the Indians, and the half breeds”? The notion that “all men are born free and equal,” Randolph said, must be rejected “for the best of reasons, because it is not true.”
Panama became a powerful wedge issue. Attacking Bolívar’s proposal was the “first-ever collective bid for power” from the coalition that would become the Democratic Party, Fitz explains. To its members, Latin America’s leaders weren’t revolutionary peers but swarthy radicals. In two decades, the United States would, under a Democratic President, attack Mexico and seize more than a third of its territory.
In the eighteen-fifties, with the Democrats again holding the White House, Congress sought to adorn the U.S. Capitol dome with a statue. The sculptor, Thomas Crawford, was based in Rome and proposed a woman wearing a liberty cap. But Jefferson Davis, as Secretary of War, objected. The United States stood for birthright liberty, he maintained, not “the liberty of a freed slave.” Crawford replaced the liberty cap with a military helmet topped by a menacing eagle, which is how it appears today.
By the time Jefferson Davis was cancelling the liberty cap, it was hard to see the United States as leading the charge for freedom. Its kingless government, once a badge of distinction, had become normal in the mid-nineteenth-century Americas. Now the U.S. stood out for different reasons. Its refusal to abolish slavery placed it in a small club of holdouts, with Cuba and Brazil. And its violent expansionism—invading its southern neighbor, dislodging Native nations—made it a rising empire among republics.
Toward the end of his life, Jefferson wrote to Adams that “the flames kindled on the 4th of July 1776” had “spread over too much of the globe to be extinguished.” This is a familiar vision: the United States illuminating the world. Burnard and O’Shaughnessy’s and Pearsall’s books reverse the beam, showing the Revolution from without. It looks different in that light: less transcendent, more scuffed by historical forces.
Maybe that’s all right. Since 1776, Americans have been insisting that they were the protagonists of global history. After the Second World War, they did indeed catapult into a position of supremacy. This was another fates-or-hobgoblins turn of events, but many Americans took that profound luck as their rightful due. That historical egotism fuelled their headiest ambitions. Was this healthy? Jefferson’s vision of American flames igniting the planet lands differently now. One could be forgiven, these days, for wishing that the United States were a little less central in world affairs. That its inhabitants were one people among many, just like everyone else. ♦