Obtaining an Accurate Depiction of Revolutionary Causes in a Top-Down Fashion?
social history, social historians
by
Patrick Fagan
Last revision 4-26-03
The American Revolution Pyramid is an original product of Patrick Fagan,
and the
ARP figure below has been copyrighted. This
paper is also
considered to be a sphere of silence article.
Examinations
of revolutionary causes have gone from analyses of causes produced by the
relationship between Britain and America before 1763; the British-American
relationship between 1763 and 1776; the British government and its American
advocates between 1763 and 1783; and the social and political life of the
colonies (Greene, 18). The major actors involved in the causes have been
colonial leaders, elite, blacks, women, Indians, the British, individual
colonies, and America as a whole. These participants can be categorized
into a
pyramid, with the colonies and collective Americans forming the society at the
base. The figure on the right shows the American Revolution Pyramid. Its name
is appropriate because such a pyramid would have different participants for
different revolutions, such as those in China and France.
As can be imagined from viewing the pyramid, its elements have been scrutinized by scholars independently, in the middle, from the top down, and from the bottom up. It is true that the base of a typical pyramid supports the top, but it is often the top leaders who must get the base society to support the same cause. When studies of a society consist of British influence and supporters, Indians, blacks, women, elite, and a few talented leaders, the result produced will be a political mixture of interest, impotence, and apathy for the revolutionary cause. It is useful and necessary in order to get a complete picture of the Revolution that the steps of the pyramid be analyzed independently, dependently, singularly, and collectively. However, in order to get an accurate answer for what used to be a narrow question on revolutionary causes, it is more realistic—although not entirely less problematic—to focus on the top. Sometimes a narrow question calls for top-down history.
Yet there is something about historians that makes them believe they now have to begin their investigations at the bottom and work their way up or start as far out as possible and work their way in. With this method, a clearer picture of what really happened is supposedly formed by including all participants of the period. More often than not, though, a chaotic mass is created from a plethora of historians who have their own interpretation, and each seems valid. Those numerous interpretations are eventually tucked neatly into specific themes which then are approved and disproved by different generations of historians. The American Revolution and its causes is the archetype of this phenomenon.
Charles Beard narrowly focused his famous work on the elite. So did Forrest McDonald. Both authors were concerned with the motives of the Founding Fathers. Each had markedly different interpretations, with Beard’s more pernicious to the Founders’ reputation than McDonald’s. The Founders, according to Beard, were more concerned with the minority mercantile class than the majority agricultural class. Detractors of Beard said that he misplaced his present-day ideas of property and liberty in the Framer’s era (Diggins, 723). Unlike Beard, McDonald found no interest in property for which the Founders had ulterior motives. State legislatures had passed laws that made it much easier for the state to take property, but the Founders—in the Constitution—clearly tried to make land confiscation by the government more difficult. What is more, Congress already owned the entire Northwest Territory. In short, to Beard the motives of the Founders were predicated on self-interest; to McDonald, they were based on Americans’ best interest. Beard’s portrayal was originally lauded, but it is now widely discounted and McDonald’s is cheered. Despite their ulterior motives, the elite in Beard’s and McDonald’s works were clearly guiding the nonelite to and through revolutionary causes.
Woody Holton also centers his attention on the elite, and he does it in a top-down fashion. Holton refers to his main subjects as the gentry, which is another word for the elite. In 1775 there were an estimated 280,000 white Virginians, and Holton’s gentry was the wealthiest ten percent of them. Holton puts Indians, slaves, and especially small farmers into nonelite status. Setting aside another ten percent of the population as artisans, traders, and slave overseers, Holton says that the nonelite would have numbered about 200,000.
According to Holton’s interpretation, the elite were forced into revolution by indirect actions of the nonelite. Class conflict, at least in Virginia, led the elite to rebel against the British. This is a marked delineation from historians of the 1950s who saw absolutely “no internal class upheaval in the Revolution” (Wood, 11). Furthermore, in the 1960s some historians had discounted social and economic issues in earlier Virginia (Wood, citing Jack Greene and Thad Tate, 12). Just as Beard and his understanding of the earlier colonial leaders’ motives came to be attacked, Holton has been assailed by hypercritical historians for his explanations based on top-down history. He made inferences of nonelite motives from overwhelmingly elite sources, even though most of the nonelite could not write and records from the literate members are scarce. Using this method allowed Holton to see division and determination in Virginian elite where others have not. This does not mean his view is right, but it makes one wonder whose is wrong.
Other historians, like Egnal and Martin, have divided the elite into groups. In James Martin’s Men in Rebellion, the elite are split into two levels, and he believes that conflicts between the two groups led to the Revolution. Deference to the nonelite are prevalent throughout this book and his Human Dimensions of Nation Making. Though at times he forgets that not all elites wanted to be leaders, in both works there are a distinction between elite and leaders.
In his Mighty Empire, Marc Egnal separates his elite into expansionists and nonexpansionists. He too creates a differentiation between elites and leaders. Like Holton, Egnal believes rural remonstration moved the elite into action. The nonelite in the years before the Declaration of Independence were no longer as deferent, so the elite had to make remarkable changes in the government to control them.
The elites in Egnal’s and Martin’s work, although split into groups, were still ten percent of the richest population. Including Holton’s work with these modern authors, the nonelites are seen coercing the actions of the elite with the elite responding to protect themselves. Such a portrayal is akin to Beard’s old interpretation in that the elite acted only to protect themselves or to further their own political interests. Whether elite or leader, however, both groups belong in the top of the pyramid.
The elite also were acting upon nonelite coercion in Pauline Maier’s From Resistance to Revolution. Her depiction of colonial leaders are not as self-concerned as Egnal’s and Martin’s. Instead, years of diplomatic attempts of both elite and nonelite to achieve greater freedoms from Britain deteriorated to mob disorder. Whig leaders through their ideology, which emanated controlled resistance to a legal authority, convinced the masses to follow them into revolution.
Holton’s, Martin’s, and Egnal’s concentration on a few leaders is faulted by historians. While none of these authors will say resolutely that the elite alone caused the Revolution, they would admit that these few leaders had economic motives to the extent that they used the debate “with Britain to accomplish other, more important political, economic, and social ends within the colonies” (Greene, Flight From Determinism, 14).
Of course the Revolution was effected by the whole of society, which lies at the bottom of the pyramid. That is, it took each element of the pyramid to carry out the Revolution, but it is more likely that it was commenced by the few leaders at the top. Holton portrays various nonelite members who force the Virginian elite into declaring independence, but it matters who cries for independence first. The elite do little leading in Holton’s book, but they very well could have done the instigating.
John Adams said that no popular leader “had ever been able to persuade a large people . . . to think themselves wronged, injured, and oppressed, unless they really were” (Wood, citing John Adams, 31). Leaders disseminate ideas throughout society all the time in order to garner support for some cause. Jesus did it. Mao Zedong did it. George W. Bush did it with political pushings on Iraq. Jesus and Mao persuaded many people that their society could be better. Bush passionately attempted to persuade his fellow Americans and the world community that Saddam was a threat to both. Bush’s move on Iraq, in this instance, is an idea planted by leaders that can be implemented only with large societal support. While the year 2002 is not like the year 1776, especially when political grievances are at issue, the leaders of the eras are similar in at least one circumstance. The leaders must convince society to act. Leaders do this with their ideas.
Gordon Wood says it was ideas that led to the American Revolution. He writes that historians thought Virginia “was the most lacking in obvious social tensions,” so its residents supported the Revolution wholeheartedly “because of their devotion to constitutional principles” (Thad Tate, citing Wood, 27). Arthur Schlesinger does not think historians should emphasize “abstract governmental rights” when determining what started the Revolution (Wood, citing Schlesinger, 10), but that does not stop Wood from believing their ideas of liberty pushed Americans to rebellion. Of course without long-term propaganda the colonists would not have become successful revolutionaries, but no one should ever lose focus of the elite who made the propaganda possible.
This might be a self-evident truth, but whether the Revolution was predicated on propaganda, specific ideas, or tangible acts, it had to take the elite who held the political power to put those ideas and acts into motion, just like they did when they created the Declaration of Independence. The alternative would have been mob action. Much of the revolutionary mob action that did occur was direct retaliation against Britain. It is obvious that the nonelite had to be mobilized for a revolution. That is, without the nonelite there could have been no Revolution. At the risk of becoming circular, it is strikingly logical that it was the elite who began that mobilization.
Although Bailyn describes how power was derived from communication that had turned into ideology, he does focus on the elite. Bailyn writes that “power is not autonomous” and that it “can only formulate, reshape, and direct forward moods, attitudes, ideas, and aspirations that . . . already exist” (11). There is much credibility to his thinking, but pre-existing ideas should not be tantamount to researchers who seek the true causes of the Revolution at the top of the pyramid. Even if the ideas already existed, without the goading of leaders, the ideas would not have been acted upon by the politically impotent.
Bailyn boldly disagrees with all common interpretations of the revolutionary origins. He claims the “outbreak of the Revolution was not the result of social discontent, or economic disturbances” and there was no “transformation of mob behavior” (Bailyn, 12). Interactions between the British and Americans, to Bailyn, were on a natural course of mutuality. Paradoxically, he goes on to write:
American resistance in the 1760s and 1770s was a response to acts of power deemed arbitrary, degrading, and uncontrollable . . . that was inflamed to the point of explosion by ideological currents generating fears everywhere in America that irresponsible and self-seeking adventurers . . . had gained the power of the English government and were turning first . . . to that Rhineland of their aggressions, the colonies. . . . Inflamed sensibilities—exaggerated distrust and fear—surrounded the hard core of the Anglo-American conflict and gave it distinctive shape (13).
In spite of Bailyn’s well-known disbelief of social and economic causes of the Revolution, of course all of this from the quotation above is social discontent. He correctly traces the source of these revolutionary anxieties to New England leaders. Though Bailyn’s pamphlet readers and writers constituted a tiny elite, the discontent was still initiated by leaders.
Some academicians could argue that effecting ideas can work both ways. That is, riots like those in Los Angeles or those derived from involvement in Vietnam were caused specifically at the bottom level. Surely no members in the top of the pyramid would encourage the residents of Los Angeles to terrorize and destroy their own city? What is more, these riots can be viewed as failure of leaders to convince society that the underlying cause of the riots was noble. Leaders could not act quickly enough to show that the criminal justice system was not flawed for blacks. Nor could they persuade people for too long that helping Vietnam was worth the growing cost in American lives. It is also important to remember here that these riots were not the Revolution and did not even cause a revolution. Perhaps this is a circumvention to say, but in those contemporary instances of riot, society could act only for the inferior action of the elite.
Besides, the locus here is the American Revolution, and not all revolutions are created equally. In spite of other revolutions and riots commencing at the bottom, Pauline Maier made obvious that colonial leaders could act to stop riots or to convince mobs to use a lesser form of political frustration to accomplish its goals. The alternative to elite power, mob action, has been mentioned previously. The French Revolution had to have mob action via a revolt of peasants. With George III being across the seas, it would take more than peasants to overthrow him from America. A fiery revolution in eighteenth century America needed kindling by the elite. That is no longer the view from historians who have moved down the Revolution Pyramid to seek causes of the Revolution.
Originally to learn the cause of the American Revolution all one had to do was start at the year of the Declaration of Independence, 1776, and work backward through history to a period in which political turmoil was considerably less than in the 1770s. Once the period was fixed, the sources of the turmoil had to be uncovered. The immediate cause of the Revolution then became too evident. Bernhard Knollenberg in his Origin of the American Revolution tried abortively to use this method, and it does sound like a simple methodology. The product of this research method will be one immediate cause of the Revolution: the colonial opposition to Britain. Logically and nobly most historians will want to know why America opposed its mother country. The next level of research will suggest that it was actually British policy that America contested. Various British policies are then singled out. To learn why those policies caused so much dissent, historians go to the local level. Fewer and fewer historians now start at the top and work down. They start down and work up. This method has been glorified in social history and it is changing the understanding of the traditional revolutionary causes—perhaps inaccurately.
Social history is a comparison of all historical factors between two or more groups of people. The interaction between groups calls for historians to examine the characteristics that unite or divide people on the basis of gender, race, ethnicity, religion, social class, and sexual and political orientation (Cayton, p.xvii). Groups relegated to the bottom of society in historical research had traditionally been women, blacks, Indians, immigrants, poor, and laborers. These types of people supposedly did not make history; they only endured it (Himmelfarb, 149).
The historically disadvantaged groups have finally and justifiably been brought to the forefront with social history. As a consequence, the elites have lost their direct importance in the making of the Revolution. Emphasis has gone to results of the Revolution rather than causes. The causes of the Revolution have become obscure due to historians supplanting causes with origins. Obscurity increases when historians move down the pyramid and away from immediate causes to circuitous causes. In a dearth of adequate sources at the bottom of the pyramid narrative becomes interpretation which becomes speculation which becomes imagination which becomes invention which subverts the original picture by making it incomplete or faulty. The use of scant sources or using sources just because they are the only existing ones can seriously distort what was reality in the past. As early as the middle 1950s it was said that social and economic historians of the Revolution were projecting “into the eighteenth-century America a situation which existed in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries” (Morgan, 12). The Revolution will still be approached differently by each generation of historians, who try “to understand it in terms that would be meaningful to them” (Greene, 2). It is still being done.
James Martin’s Men in Rebellion is a study based on 487 people from thirteen colonies. Even with computer assistance in statistical methods, the broad generalization that new elite office holders rebelled in order to keep or get higher offices is not justified. It is well-proven that many modern politicians seek and desire higher offices. Assuming the same during the Revolution without compelling evidence is just an assumption. What is more, while fewer and fewer politicians today accept political office because of dedication and duty, evidence abounds aplenty that many Revolutionaries did.
Yet Martin is not the only historian who portrays the revolutionaries in this negative light. From historian Charles Neimeyer it appears that men did not join the Continental Army for the noble cause of repelling the British. Rather, they joined mostly for land, clothes, money, and food. While it is certain that a few joined for these contemporarily ignoble reasons, ascribing disgraceful choices to most of the soldiers in the Continental Army, as Neimeyer mostly does, defies logic.
In Gary Nash’s Urban Crucible, scholars of the Revolution do not have the elite and nonelite. They have been given an upper class, middle class, and lower class instead. Nash’s purpose is not to show what caused the Revolution, but he believes that British policies and other events before 1775, which have been a perennial discussion of historians, were made possible by the economic conditions and positions of laborers. Like Holton, Nash has few nonelite sources. The main region of study for Nash is urban, which during the Revolution was home to less than ten percent of the total population. Any effect urban residents had on revolutionary causes had to be Lilliputian, so Nash was wise not to seek revolutionary causes in his work, although he did examine origins. The origins of the Revolution to Nash were all about class conflict. Unlike Holton, Nash gives the impression that colonials were more worried about disparity in wealth than despotism from Britain.
With social historians the American Revolution is reverting to an event rather than an era, an event being something that merely takes place and an era being something comprised of many events. Even in the late 1780s some noted how the war with Britain was over but the second phase of the Revolution was just beginning (Morris, 29). Clearly the Revolution was an era, but era is not as important to social historians as population growth, wealth disparity, age, marital status, and other demographics. It is not as important as their evidence endemic mostly to social historians, such as probate and divorce records. However, such evidence allows social historians to move precariously down the Revolution Pyramid.
It is noble to explore how the Revolution affected women, blacks, and Indians, but seeing the Revolution through their eyes shows how the Revolution affected them rather than the other way around. Their numbers were just not large enough to believe that their absence would have changed the revolutionary outcome. No effect of outcome equals no cause, but so much work on the lower half of the pyramid from historians intimates that its components were more important in causing the Revolution. As Richard Morris so movingly illustrates, “We did not declare our independence of George III in order to reform the land laws, change the criminal codes, spread popular education, or separate church and state” (p.26). Nor did widespread colonists seek to liberate women, blacks, and Indians. Yet, from the work of social historians that is what the next generation of students will think, even though colonists “broke with England to achieve political independence, freedom from external controls, emancipation . . . of the bourgeoisie from mercantilist restraints” (Morris, p.26). Historians have given so much importance to social history, as Edmund Morgan says, that “they have uttered the wildest kind of nonsense . . . about the social and economic basis of a religious movement like the Great Awakening of the 1740s” (p.4). Morgan wrote that in 1956.
Historians have rushed since the 1960s to make visible the groups of people that had previously been left invisible. No one wants to be left behind in history, and thanks to social historians nobody will be. Emphasis on the top of the Revolution Pyramid does not necessarily result in the nonelite, women, blacks, and Indians being kept invisible. Innumerable social historians have studied the revolutionary era and will continue to do so. However, the effects will be that the duration of the American Revolution—in which its causes could clearly be found between 1763 and 1776 (Bailyn, Ideological Origins, 22)—will be pushed further back or further ahead than necessary. Interpretations of the causes of the American Revolution will become a greater jumble as a consequence.
A narrow question that at one time called for top-down history is no longer so narrow. Did colonists rebel to gain their freedom or to maintain freedom they already had? Whether it was social freedom or economic freedom from the British or both being sought by revolutionists at the outset of the Revolution, historians will never know categorically. Did this town have a greater effect than that town in the origins of the Revolution? Were the leaders greedy and acting on their own self-interest, as many leaders are accused of doing today? Did class conflict spark the greatest cause of the Revolution? There will never be a consensus for the answer yes or no. As with most major historical events, there is no one true cause that leads to an action. Jack Greene says that the Revolution has so many “contradictory currents that it can support a wide variety of interpretations and may never be comprehended” (2). He is right.
Social historians should take care that they do not eventually suffer the same criticism they have ascribed to historians who have used top-down history. In their quest to tell history from the viewpoint of those who have been historically excluded, some historians might forget that early America revolved more around the elite than nonelite. With the current trend of social history it might be that one day a generation of historians will be trying to correct the history that has been corrected by the New Historians.
Historians should not be so critical of others who have narrow, top-down interpretations. So long as historians try to find the answer at the bottom of the Revolution Pyramid and fault others for not doing so, there will always be confusion and cacophony. Participants in the bottom half are too diverse. Now that social historians have gone from studying causes to origins, the diversity has increased. Indeed, there were “complexities and variations in early American society and culture—local, regional, sectional, ethnic, and class differences that historians are uncovering every day—that make difficult any generalizations about Americans as a whole” (Wood, 6).
Many historians will still severely criticize the study of a cause that is narrowly focused on the revolutionary elite. Interpretive criticism should be based on the results of the research instead of the method. If the typical causes of the Revolution are the same with top-down sources as bottom-up, the criticism will actually say more about the criticizer. Of course the only way the causes from both can be compared is to do some bottom-up history. The importance of bottom-up history throughout colonial times cannot be entirely written off. Overdoing it and overgeneralizing for revolutionary causes, however, defeats the purpose of doing it at all.
As one moves up the Revolution Pyramid the story of what caused the American Revolution gets less confusing. It might be due to having more sources from each element as the pyramid is climbed, but even that does not mean an inaccurate story is being told. Every disadvantaged or unrepresented group always has activists who strive to get the lesser voices heard. The minority view on race, gender, international politics, and national politics is well-heard from members of the elite today. They are just not always well-heeded. It is known—from studying the elite—that Indians, blacks, women, and small farmers had some representation from some elites in colonial times. Because they were so politically powerless, their revolution had to come much later. That is not to discount the power of voting, which many nonelite had. However, when the lower half of the Revolution Pyramid has absolutely no political ability, focusing on the elite produces an accurate depiction of the greatest factors that caused the American Revolution.
While concentration on the middle of the pyramid adds much to the understanding of the nonelite, nothing gleaned from these groups changes the axioms regarding revolutionary causes. The revolutionaries wanted republicanism, consensual representation, liberty, a constitution, and religious freedom. Other direct links to the Revolution have been the Trade and Navigation Acts, Townshend Duties, Boston Massacre, Coercive Acts, Stamp Act, and the first Continental Congress. Many revolutionaries wanted the slave trade stopped. Some fought to get out of debt. Even with studies based on class, it is still clear the colonists wanted greater liberty from Britain and wanted very much to protect the property rights of Americans. Is not all this evident from studying the elite and using mostly elite sources?
Focus on the elite still shows the importance of various colonies in the Revolution, like New York, Virginia, South Carolina, and Pennsylvania. Important cities like Boston and Philadelphia, even if studying elites, would still be known. Studying only the elite does not remove the agency of the nonelite. That nonelite had agency can be seen from work by Egnal, Holton, Maier, Martin, and Nash in that the elite had to act due to nonelite forces.
Should top-down historians of revolutionary causes be accused of having a one-dimensional or singular or insular view of history? If their larger findings are even remotely similar to bottom-up historians, the answer must be no. Bottom-up history with its overgeneralization of insufficient sources and misplacement of present-day influences cannot be the better method of understanding revolutionary causes. Obtaining an accurate depiction of revolutionary causes with top-down history is highly possible, and top-down historians of the Revolution should not be dissuaded from continuing such an approach.
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