OBJECTIVE AND KEY QUESTIONS

This learning module examines the literary roots of the American Revolution. It examines both the writings of American colonial authors as well as the sources that inspired their revolutionary writing. It also examines several of the literary forms that these writings appeared in.

1. How did American colonists justify their revolutionary thoughts?
2. Who did American authors turn to for inspiration?
3. What forms of printed material aided the spread of revolutionary writing?
4. What crises were important to revolutionary writing?
5. How did American revolutionary expression compare to European writers?

Using both primary and secondary sources, this module provides an overview of the revolutionary literature that ignited a rebellion against England.

INTRODUCTION

The American Revolution was a series of ideas that resulted in the political separation of thirteen colonies in North America from the British Empire and the creation of the United States of America. The American War for Independence , which spanned 1775-1783, was the military outlet of the revolution, but the revolution by the colonists began well before the first shot was ever fired at Lexington and Concord . The American Revolution was a radically novel event, based on the ideology of republicanism. Not only did the Revolution impact Americans, but it had a profound impact on world history.

After the end of the French and Indian War, the British government decided to change the way they managed their North American possessions. During the war years, Britain 's war debt had grown to an alarming amount. England wanted to make the colonists responsible for the cost of their own defense. They reasoned that since the colonists were reaping the benefits of the peace that had been won by British blood and expense, they would be willing to fund their defense.

Protests against British acts led to the emergence of the popular slogan “no taxation without representation,” in which colonists argued that only their colonial assemblies had the right to levy taxes. Taxation without representation purported threats against liberty and justice, a view that England had corrupted its Constitution all fed the colonial desire for independence. However, one problem that the colonies faced was that they were a divided people, split into thirteen colonies and lacking a common political center. Before a union could be formed, the colonists needed to feel connected, they needed to share information and exchange ideas. The question that must be answered then, how were these ideas disseminated, what medium was used to fan the flames of revolution?

The pre-revolutionary literature produced in America is a full of discord and passion. This was a time of constant and critical change. The leaders of the American Revolution made good use of every medium of written expression. In the course of little more than a decade, American presses churned out a “rich literature of theory, argument, opinion, and polemic.” A very informative account of colonial modes of communication can be found here .

An image of “Rhetorica” from Margarita Philosophia, 1508. The emblem acknowledges the interconnectedness of various sources of ideas and information. (http://www.assumption.edu/ahc/1770s/pcomcirmodes.html )

PAMPHLETS

Pamphlets were important and characteristic of the American Revolution. During the Revolution over 2,000 pamphlets were published. It's “greatest asset was perhaps its flexibility in size, for while it could contain only a very few pages and hence be used for publishing short squibs and sharp, quick rebuttals, it could also accommodate much longer, more serious and permanent writing as well.” The size of the pamphlet allowed full development of an argument. The writer was able to explore premises, expand logic, and draw conclusions. “Highly flexible, easy to manufacture, and cheap, pamphlets were printed in the American colonies wherever there were printing presses, intellectual ambitions, and political concerns.” Pamphlets thrilled patriots and filled loyalists with dread.

Pamphlets of the Revolution can be grouped into three categories. Most were responses to critical events of the time. For example, the Stamp Act and the Townshend duties caused a flurry of activity among Revolutionary writers. Most colonies had little to say about the Townshend policies until a man named John Dickinson wrote Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania . Dickinson was the son of a planter who studied law at the Middle Temple in London . He returned to Philadelphia to practice law and eventually found his way into politics. Dickinson 's letters were first published in the Pennsylvania Chronicle and eventually reprinted in all but four colonial newspapers. They were also condensed and distributed in pamphlet form. The essays “appealed to a people fatigued by the strain of extravagant rhetoric and violent measures.” The essays urged repeal of the Townshend duties, and proposed economy, frugality, hard work, and home manufacturing. All of these measures were meant to lessen American dependence on English goods.

Samuel Adams also authored a response to the Townshend duties, in the form of a circular letter sent out in 1768. This letter, sent to the colonial legislatures, called for a united front against British taxation. “Nothing new appeared here except a firm rejection of the idea that the colonies could ever be represented in Parliament. The letter also stated well a view increasingly common in America that although Parliament was the supreme legislative body in the empire, it, like all governmental and political agencies, derived its authority from the constitution, the fundamental law which not incidentally guaranteed all subjects the right to be taxed only with their consent.” In response, the British governor of Massachusetts abolished the state's legislature. British troops were then stationed in Boston which inflamed already hostile relations with American politicians in the city.

A second type of pamphlet resulted from what might be called “chain-reacting personal polemics: strings of individual exchanges – arguments, replies, rebuttals, and counter-rebuttals – in which may be found heated personifications of the larger conflict.” Thomas Paine's Common Sense touched off a string of such polemic exchanges. Common Sense chastised America about the long-standing connection to England . He claimed that this relationship violated laws of nature and human reason. “And as for the institution to which they had always given their loyalty – the monarchy – it was ridiculous, and as unnatural as the traditional tie to the mother country.” Paine's words were accepted easily by most Americans because he gave them exactly what they wanted to hear. Six months after Common Sense appeared, America declared its independence, “citing the laws of nature and of nature's God as justification.”

The third type of pamphlet was “distinguished by the ritualistic character of its themes and language.” These pamphlets celebrated events such as the repeal of the Stamp Act, of the Boston Massacre, and the landing of the Pilgrims. Whereas such pamphlets had tended to be religious in nature prior to the 1760's, the Revolutionary period changed their theme to one of a political nature.

The pamphlets of the American Revolution were not great documents when compared to the more artful pamphlets of eighteenth-century England . “There is nothing in the American literature that approaches in sheer literary skill such imaginatively conceived and expertly written pamphlets as Swift's Modest Proposal and Defoe's Shortest Way with the Dissenters .” American pamphleteers were amateurs next to the like of England 's crop. No person in America was capable of earning a living with their pen prior to 1776.

American pamphleteers were almost all lawyers, ministers, merchants, or planters. These men were dedicated to their profession and at best, pamphleteering was a comfortable diversion.

American writers wrote pamphlets that were quite reasonable. “Their pamphlets convey scorn, anger, and indignation; but rarely blind hate, rarely panic fear. They sought to convince their opponents, not, like the English pamphleteers of the eighteenth century, to annihilate them.” The hope of the American Revolution was not the overthrow or destruction of the existing social order but rather the preservation of political liberty that was threatened by corruption in England .

NEWSPAPERS

In a young democracy, political writings had to be clear to appeal to the voters. Because of the influx of immigration in the United States , it was absolutely essential that writings be clear. The newspaper accomplished this goal during the Revolution. More newspapers were read in America during the Revolution than anywhere else in the world.

In 1754, only four newspapers were printed in New England , they were all out printed in Boston . They were weekly papers with an average circulation of 600 copies per press. By 1775, a period of only twenty-one years, more copies of a newspaper were issued weekly from the village press at Worcester, Massachusetts, than were printed in all New England, in 1755; and one paper contained as much matter as did all four published in Boston in 1754. Newspapers were chiefly filled with political essays and editorials.
 

BROADSIDES

Broadsides were single sheets which could be pinned up in houses and ale-houses. They carried public notices, government proclamations, opinion papers, advertisements, news, speeches, and songs that could be read aloud to a group. Broadsides had a distinct impact in colonial America .

SOURCES OF REVOLUTIONARY THOUGHT

Writers of the Revolutionary period possessed knowledge of classical antiquity. “Knowledge of classical authors was universal among colonists with any degree of education and references to them and their works abound in the literature.” Great figures of Greco-Roman times figured prominently in colonial thought. Names such as Homer , Sophocles , Plato , Cicero , Aristotle , Plutarch , and Horace all were cited in Revolutionary literature. Revolutionaries such as Jefferson and James Otis were careful scholars of the classic texts. What were especially important to the Revolutionaries were those writers who had “lived either when the republic was being fundamentally challenged or when its greatest days were already past and its moral and political virtues decayed.” Colonists saw the trends of their own time and were terrified. They looked to the past as an age of virtue and liberty. They saw their own situation – challenged by a corrupt England political system – echoing the voices of the past. The classics “heightened the colonists' sensitivity to ideas and attitudes otherwise derived.” Books tended to have been written by authors who had defended the cause of liberty. “Cato's letters, the Independent Whig, and such productions, were common in one extreme of the Colonies, while in the other, histories of the Puritans kept alive the remembrance of the sufferings of their forefathers, and inspired a warm attachment, both to the civil and the religious rights of human nature.”

The writings of the Age of Enlightenment had a more direct influence over the thoughts and writings of the Revolutionaries. “The ideas and writings of the leading secular thinkers of the European Enlightenment – reformers and social critics like Voltaire , Rousseau , and Beccaria as well as conservative analysts like Montesquieu – were quoted everywhere in the colonies, by everyone who claimed a broad awareness.” John Locke was cited about natural rights and social and political contract. Montesquieu was quoted on the character of British liberty and Voltaire about the evils of clerical oppression. These natural right philosophers saw self-defense as nature's law from which many other legal principles could be drawn.

Citations of Enlightenment authors were extremely pervasive in Revolutionary writing. However, much like the citations of ancient texts, these citations sometime revealed a very superficial understanding. Locke was often quoted with precision on points of political theory, but at other times “he is referred to in the most offhand way, as if he could be relied on to support anything the writers happened to be arguing.” No political work was found in more colonial libraries than Locke's two treatises on government. American revolutionaries hardly qualified as experts on contract theory. Their contributions to the area of social contract theory was limited to resolutions, instructions to legislators, or newspaper articles, all brief references to the contract. Yet Americans did understand Locke's theories well enough to use two basic concepts: the right of revolution and the origin of government in consent.

Another group of writers that the colonists drew from were the writers of English common law. Figures from England 's legal history, like the seventeenth-century common lawyers, were repeatedly cited. “To the colonists it was a repository of experience in human dealings embodying the principles of justice, equity, and rights; above all, it was a form of history – ancient, indeed immemorial, history; constitutional and national history; and, as history, it helped explain the movement of events and the meaning of the present.” English law was held in the same regard as Enlightenment rationalism in the minds of the colonists.

Still another group of writers that influenced the Revolutionary generation were the political and social theories of New England Puritanism, and the ideas associated with covenant theology .

What brought this hodgepodge of thoughts together? It was the culmination of all previously mentioned sources and the social and political thought of the English Civil War and the Commonwealth period that found an outlet in a line of eighteenth-century radical writers and opposition politicians united in criticism of court and ministerial power. One important figure was Milton, author of Eikonoklastes and The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates .

The political ideas that emerged from the literature of the pre-Revolutionary years were based on the belief that “what lay behind every political scene, the ultimate explanation of every political controversy, was the disposition of power.” The colonists understood what power was and where its role lay in a political system. The definition of what they meant by power can be seen in a writing by John Adams. In the midst of the upheaval over the Stamp Act, Adams linked spiritual and secular assaults on American liberties. In his Dissertation on the Canon and Feudal Law he twice chose and then rejected the word “power,” he selected as the specification of the thought he had in mind “dominion.” Adams saw England 's plan as a direct and intentional design to enslave America . To colonists, “power” was the dominion of some men over others. In its origins, “power” is natural and necessary. Uncorrupted, it can be seen as a “result of restrictions voluntarily accepted by all for the good of all, society emerges from a state of nature and creates government to serve as trustee and custodian of the mass of surrendered individual powers.” According to Adams , liberty was an absolute right, derived from God. However, Adams saw that tradition dictated that Americans still had an absolute right to liberty even without the blessings of God because their ancestors had earned it.

RELATED LINKS

Printers and Printing

Joseph Moxon. Mechanick Exercises . London , 1683. A description of a book that offered explanations of the tools and work of the printer. The Exercises were reprinted in America in 1896. For other notes on this work, see: http://www.anvilfire.com/bookrev/pawpaw/moxon.htm

Newspapers

The Newspaper Library Web Catalogue The British Library Newspaper Library

Concise History of the British Newspaper The British Library Newspaper Library

The History of Printing

Two pages from an unidentified Boston newspaper for the week of July 4, 1776

Newspapers at the Colonial Records Project of the North Carolina Office of Archives and History

Pamphlets

African American Perspectives: Pamphlets from the Daniel A.P. Murray Collection, 1818-1907

Broadsides

Exhibit of Broadsides at William and Mary

The Massachusetts Historical Society The Collection Broadsides

Broadsides at AAS

An American Time Capsule Three Centuries of Broadsides and Other Printed Ephemera

Yesterday's News Broadsides Exhibit at the Folger

PRIMARY SOURCES

Colonial Modes of Communication
http://www.assumption.edu/ahc/1770s/pcomcirmodes.html

Thomas Paine's Common Sense
http://www.textfiles.com/etext/NONFICTION/common_sense

Swift's Modest Proposal
http://art-bin.com/art/omodest.html

Defoe's Shortest Way with the Dissenters
http://www.bartleby.com/27/12.html

John Adam's Dissertation on the Canon and Feudal Law
http://www.founding.com/library/lbody.cfm?id=140&parent=54

SECONDARY SOURCES

Bailyn, Bernard. The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution. Cambridge : Belknap Press,1967.

Becker, Carl. The Eve Of The Revolution. New Haven : Yale University Press, 1918.

Martin, James Kirby. Men In Rebellion. New Jersey : Rutgers University Press, 1973.

Royster, Charles. A Revolutionary People at War. North Carolina : The University of North Carolina Press, 1979.

Middlekauff, Robert. The Glorious Cause. New York : Oxford Press, 1982.

The American Revolution and Natural Law Theory; Lester H. Cohen

Rhetoric and Reality in the American Revolution; Gordon S. Wood

The Social Contract in America , 1774-1787: Revolutionary Theory as a Conservative Instrument; Thad W. Tate

The Religious Roots of the American Revolution and the Right to Keep and Bear Arms; David B. Kopel

Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, 1.

Bailyn, 3.

Bailyn, 4.

Middlekauff, The Glorious Cause, 156.

Middlekauff, 160.

Bailyn, 5.

Middlekauff, 4.

Middlekauff, 4.

Bailyn, 5.

Bailyn, 12-13.

Bailyn, 13-14.

Bailyn, 18-19.

Bailyn, 23-24.

Bailyn, 25.

Bailyn, 26.

Smith, 54.

Bailyn, 27.

Bailyn, 28.

Tate,376.

Bailyn, 31.

Bailyn, 55.

Bailyn, 58.