What Caused the American Revolution? Historians’ Views From the Sesquicentennial Era

As we begin commemorating “America 250,” historians continue to debate what caused the American Revolution. Historians were doing the same thing around the time of America 150 and advancing new insights and interpretations. As is often the case in our field, we can gain some insights by looking back at how our predecessor historians approached things. Many of their ideas may seem familiar to us today because they inspired and helped shape future scholarship on the Revolution down to the present.

In the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries, historians, many of them gifted writers without formal history training, had mostly painted a simple, patriotic picture when explaining what caused the Revolution: blame the British for their oppressive policies, heap praise on the patriots for their courage and determination.

By the 1920s, a new generation of historians, many of them the products of recently established history Ph.D. programs, and more inclined to delve into archival records and other original sources, presented deeper, more complex interpretations of the Revolution.

Their work was timely. There was rising professional and public interest around the sesquicentennial and 150^th anniversary commemorations in many states and communities. Congress created a commission early in 1926 to encourage sesquicentennial activities around the country. Over six million people attended the grand Sesquicentennial Exposition in Philadelphia. President Calvin Coolidge gave an oration there about the Declaration of Independence on July 5. There was in the same period spirited public discussion over whether school history texts were too lenient on the British and too critical of patriots for bringing on the war.

The works of several historians are presented below, selected because they were leading-edge and influential at the time and articulated new perspectives, some of which are still useful. Some of the authors boosted this leavening effect along by their additional writings and through the many students they educated. Their leadership in the profession helped, too., e.g., Charles M. Andrews, Charles A. Beard, Carl Becker, J. Franklin Jameson, Charles Howard McIlwain and Arthur M. Schlesinger all served as presidents of the American Historical Association.

These historians based their work on extensive research and solid evidence. They conveyed their own interpretations—but explained those interpretations and backed them up with citations to original documents and other primary sources. Furthermore, they were practitioners of “history with a purpose,” to use the term of a later historian C. Vann Woodward in his book Thinking Back: The Perils of Writing History (1986). Historian James Harvey Robinson, a contemporary of the Sesquicentennial Era writers, put it this way in his 1912 book The New History: Essays Demonstrating the Modern Historical Outlook: “History is…. ever-changing, and it will, if we will permit it, illuminate and explain our lives as nothing else can do. For our lives are made up almost altogether of the past and each age should feel free to select from the annals of the past those matters which have a bearing on the matters it has specially at heart.”

To understand the Revolution, we must first understand British colonial policies

Charles M. Andrews, a professor at Bryn Mawr College, and Herbert L. Osgood, who taught at Columbia University, opened a new chapter in the discussion with papers at the 1898 meeting of the American Historical Association. Both had studied archival documents in the United States and in Britain, and they were both leaders in the emerging campaign to preserve, copy, publish, and study primary documents. Both argued that Americans needed to know more about British colonial policies and administration and, in effect, see things from both sides of the Atlantic.

Andrews’ presentation, on “American Colonial History, 1690-1750”, made the case for studying British colonial administration policies. Osgood went further in his paper on “The Study of American Colonial History”:

We must look at the period under consideration not only from the colonial but from the British standpoint; full justice must be done to both sides. To that end we need to understand better than we do what the old British colonial system actually was; how and from what policy and under the influence of what ideas the affairs of the colonies were administered; what was the scope of the rights which the home government had over them; how far these rights were exercised and to what extent they were allowed to lie dormant.

The Revolution was a dispute over economics

University of Iowa historian Arthur M. Schlesinger nudged the debate in a new direction with a 1919 essay in the Political Science Quarterly on “The American Revolution Reconsidered.” The Revolution, he insisted, was mostly about economics.

Americans were content until 1763, said Schlesinger, when London began imposing new colonial regulations and taxes to pay for the just-completed war against France. “[T]he new imperial policy involved additional tax burdens, loss of trading profits and limitation of self-government, liberties,” Schlesinger explained. At heart, it was “the problem of the reconciliation of centralized imperial control with colonial home rule.”

Schlesinger soon moved to Harvard and published his essay as a chapter in his influential book New Viewpoints in American History in 1922, which emphasized class tensions and economic conflict and gave his views on the Revolution heightened attention.

We should focus on the Declaration of Independence, a brilliant polemic document alongside a natural rights philosophy

Cornell University Professor Carl L. Becker moved the spotlight to the Declaration itself in his book The Declaration of Independence: A Study of Political Ideas in 1922. Becker sidestepped both the constitutional and economic interpretations to concentrate on the document itself. He argued that the Declaration was a brilliant piece of work, leading with eighteenth-century Enlightenment ideas, especially natural rights and consent of the governed, and then laying out twenty-seven accusations against King George III as justification for independence.

The document was persuasive in inspiring the Revolution and setting forth a new set of ideas about governing.

“In the Declaration the foundation of the United States is indissolubly associated with a theory of politics, a philosophy of human rights which is valid…. not for Americans only, but for all men.” The Revolution’s success “conferred upon the Declaration a distinction, a fame, which could not be ignored, and gave to its philosophy of human rights the support of a concrete historical example.”

It began as a demand for English liberty

University of Michigan historian Claude H. Van Tyne published The Causes of the War of Independence in 1922. This book added a new twist; the war resulted from a demand for traditional English liberties.

“English liberty was second to none in all the world,” he noted. Through long years of struggle, the principles had been established that there were limits on royal power and that the consent of the governed was required, which Englishmen had secured, more or less, through Parliament.

English authorities should have realized that the empire would be “brought to that disaster by the insistent demand of Englishmen in America for the full enjoyment of those liberties which England had fostered beyond any other country in the world.” The Revolution’s success meant that “Americans had outstripped Englishmen in the race for political freedom.”

It began as a defense of longstanding English rights

Harvard professor Charles Howard McIlwain, in his 1923 book The American Revolution: A Constitutional Interpretation, which won the Pulitzer Prize for history in 1924, offered a similar but somewhat different take on the theme that the Revolution stemmed from a denial of English liberties.

The colonists were defending what they believed were their rights as Englishmen under the British constitution (the Magna Carta of 1215, Petition of Rights of 1628, and English Bill of Rights of 1689 and an unwritten, evolving system of laws and customs, which the book explained) and precedents from English history (including policy toward Ireland).

Americans were alarmed at what they regarded as parliamentary overreach undermining those rights. By 1774, the patriots’ position had hardened: only their elected representative assemblies could tax and regulate them, and Parliament, where they were not represented, really had no rights over them.

“In this indictment which the Americans brought against the British Parliament, there are several counts, an infringement of colonial charters, a violation of the law of nature which is part of English law, and a breach of the constitution of the British Empire. Of these counts, the last is the essential one and the most far-reaching…”

It boiled down to a divergence of visions and aspirations

Charles M. Andrews, who had moved from Bryn Mawr to Yale, in 1924 published The Colonial Background of the American Revolution. It drew heavily on both American and English primary sources. Andrews presented the conflict as the inevitable confrontation between Britain, determined to enforce longstanding imperial governance and trade regulations, and America, where the people had grown used to governing through their own representative assemblies.

The second-rate British statesmen of the pre-Revolutionary era lacked imagination and flexibility. They were unaware of growing American sentiment that only their own elected representatives could govern them. The colonials formed a political identity and system that no longer fit with Britain’s imperial vision.

Andrews served as acting president of the American Historical Association in 1924 when the elected president, former U.S. President (and historian) Woodrow Wilson died before taking office. His presidential address, on “These Forty Years”, explored the professionalization of the field since the founding of the American Historical Association in 1884.

Elected president in his own right in 1925, Andrews had a second shot at an AHA presidential address on the verge of the nation’s sesquicentennial commemoration. This time, he spoke on “The American Revolution: An Interpretation.” In the speech, he went beyond the points in his book. Historical scholars needed to steer clear of simplistic interpretations, he said, and approach the subject with “a full recognition of the complexity of the problems involved.”

He explained that the basic problem was the difference in “mental attitudes and convictions” between England and its American colonists. Complacent English statesmen, caught in “a state of immobility” were “not true statesmen: they had no policies, no future hopes, no spirit of advance, no gifts of foresight or prophecy.” They were unwilling or unable to accommodate changing attitudes in America or their growing reliance on—and confidence in—their own assemblies.

“Primarily, the American Revolution was a political and constitutional movement and only secondarily one that was either financial, commercial or social,” he concluded.

The Revolution was a clash between two competing economic systems

Charles and Mary Beard’s 1927 book The Rise of American Civilization, Volume I, The Agricultural Era was a comprehensive history of American social and economic history from colonial times to the Civil War. The Beards emphasized the impact of social and economic forces, the influence of various groups, the rise of the middle class, and the role of women.

In this book, they explained that the Revolution was the result of a struggle between two competing, and diverging, economic system—the Americans’ maturing, self-reliant mercantile and agrarian interests and the British imperial mercantile system, which aimed to control them. There were tensions over trade restrictions, taxation, and westward expansion.

“Out of the interest of English landlords and merchants, illuminated no doubt by visions of empire not foreign to their advantage, flowed acts of Parliament controlling the economic undertakings of American colonists and measures of administration directed to the same end,” the Beards wrote. They continued that “in the thousands of complaints, appeals, petitions, memorials, vetoes, decisions and instructions recorded in the papers of the Crown agencies for controlling American trade and industry disclosed the continuous conflict of English and American forces which hammered and welded thirteen jealous colonies into a society ready for revolution. The subjects of the controversy were definite and mainly economic in character.”

The Revolution was a social movement

J. Franklin Jameson altered the discussion in a 1926 book entitled The American Revolution Considered as a Social Movement. Jameson was serving as Director of Historical Research at the Carnegie Institution in Washington at the time, after teaching stints at Johns Hopkins, Brown, and the University of Chicago. We need to consider the Revolution “in broader aspects than simply the political or the military,” he began. Those subjects had had plenty of coverage, he explained.

Rather, we need to look at the Revolution’s wellsprings, which Jameson placed with “the plain people…the peasantry…small farmers and frontiersmen.” It was at heart a struggle between aristocratic groups and common people.

Jameson’s main point was that the Revolution had substantial social consequences. Civic engagement and political participation increased. Colonial elites and aristocrats lost status; the era of “the common man” ensued. Industry and commerce, freed from British restrictions, flourished. Loyalist estates were distributed to small farmers. English-style land practices, including primogeniture and entail, were abolished, helping to democratize land ownership.

From the America 150 to America 250

One message from the historians of a century ago is that we need to keep revisiting and refreshing our interpretation of the Revolution. That is a helpful insight for us today; many of the issues so earnestly debated by our predecessors are still being debated.

That makes historians’ mission all the more important.

Carl Becker, in a paper entitled “What Are Historical Facts?” at the 1926 American Historical Association meeting, emphasized that it is up to historians to select, interpret, and present history. That is a very serious obligation. “The historian has to judge the significance of…events,” being as objective as possible, but acknowledging that while “the present is the product of the past,” the opposite is also true, “the past (our imagined picture of it) is the product of…the present. We build our conceptions of history partly out of our present needs and purposes.”

In the last chapter of his book The Colonial Background of the American Revolution, Charles M. Andrews also conveyed another message that reverberates today. He warned about “propogandists [who] find in our revolutionary movements precedents and parallels available for their arguments” even if that means “twisting, warping and perverting history.” He also cautioned about people who “study but part of the evidence and fail to see that there are two sides to the story; or else prefer the kind of history which glorifies their country’s past and deem it less than one hundred percent Americanism to dim in any way their country’s achievements.”

And he reminded us of why it is so important to keep studying the Revolution—and history generally.

A nation’s attitude toward its own history is like a window into its own soul and the men and women of such a nation cannot be expected to meet the great obligations of the present if they refuse to exhibit honesty, charity, open-mindedness, and a free and growing intelligence toward the past that has made them what they are.

Many years later, in 2002, historian John Lewis Gaddis in his book The Landscape of History: How Historians Map the Past, put it differently: “We know the future only by the past we project into it. History, in this sense, is…the only data base that we have.”

Those are good sentiments to keep in mind as we head into “America 250.” There is some apprehension in the history community that President Donald Trump may put his own interpretation on American history, including the Revolution, without much concern for historical scholarship and objectivity.

Historians today may have varying interpretations of what caused the Revolution, just as their predecessors did a century ago. But in these of the “America 250” commemorations, historians need to make sure that the public, in considering the meaning of the Revolution, draws on interpretations reflecting historical research and evidence and not interpretations designed to buttress current political positions.