CHAPTER TWO

THE REVOLUTION WITHIN

To many later Americans, the events of the two decades of conflict between the colonies and the English mother country never seemed much like a real revolution at all.  Real revolutions were something perpetrated by foreigners – temperamental Latins, Slavic terrorists throwing bombs, ranting demagogues, bent on destruction and violence.  By contrast, the American events had not been accompanied by the excesses generally associated with revolutions.  The American colonists were, for the most part, small farmers, God-fearing Protestants – in short, folks who had long been accustomed to live in a free land, under self-imposed governments, folks who had now been forced to resist a venal ministry some 3,000 miles away, which seemed determined to end their ancient privileges as Englishmen.  And it was an orderly resistance, carried out mostly by sober middle-class farmers, townspeople, and country gentlemen, none of whom ever lost their respect for law and order.  This fight for independence, in fact, was so orderly and restrained, so heroic, that their descendants could later organize patriotic societies to remember them and to pride themselves as the Sons and Daughters of the American Revolution.

At the time of the actual events, however, there was little doubt in anyone’s mind, either in America or in Europe, that what the English colonies were staging was a full-fledged revolution.  They had, almost from the very beginning of their existence, systematically attempted to take the law into their own hands. They had frequently ignored both parliamentary laws and royal decrees, and from the early 1770s on they had acted in complete and open defiance of all authority – and they had done so without even the shadow of legality.

As for the much-vaunted moderation with which the Patriots were supposed to have acted, that depended mostly on who was describing the events.  It is certainly true that America’s founders did not resort to such grim final solutions as the firing squad or the guillotine, but men like Andrew Oliver or Thomas Hutchinson and scores of other families could well have disputed such claims of a peaceful revolution.  Revolutionary America, in fact, confiscated as much private property and drove off nearly as many Loyalists as revolutionary France managed to do some fifteen years later.  What may have prevented serious purges in the United States was the fact that so many openly avowed American Loyalists left the colony – and stayed away even after the struggle had ended.  Those relatively few who did return were not enough to fan new antagonism between the revolutionists and the old rule.