Surviving Master's-Level History Programs at Norwich University: A ...

Anglophile American scholars of the BritishEmpire naturally could not abide the Whig School’sinterpretation. Leading intellectuals such as HerbertLevi Osgood, Charles McLean Andrews, and GeorgeLouis Beer therefore sought to contextualize andexplain the Revolution in terms as an event within thelarger framework of the Empire. They found that thecrown hardly intended to tyrannize their Americansubjects, rather after 1765 faced an imperative toconfront colonial challenges to royal authority andFrench geopolitical moves. Such views dovetailednicely with developments in British historiography (forexample, the work of Lewis Namier) that stressed theimportance of monarchical—“court” and “country”—politics to the eighteenth-century British politicalnation. These scholars noted that a small elite sharedpatronage, power, and prestige in British politics,and it remained loath to share the spoils of rule withtoo many metropolitan Britons, let alone colonists.Americans, in demanding extra-Parliamentaryprivileges (for instance, the radical notion that theymust have actual representation to be taxed) upset theeconomic applecart.Once the factors of money and wealth bubbled tothe surface, historians naturally took a closer lookat economic causes for the Revolution. The ensuingProgressive interpretation of the Revolution centeredon the conflicts between property-owning elites andothers in the colonies. For the Progressives (CharlesBeard, J. Franklin Jameson, Carl Becker, et. al.), theRevolution began as an attempt of commercial andproperty-owning elites to garner a larger piece of theEmpire’s economic pie, then to try to quash the lowerclasses’ more radical and economically egalitariandemands. The ongoing class between democratic andaristocratic classes was a logical view for a generationof historians who lived through the Great Depressionand were particularly fond of the New Deal. Well intothe 1950s, the Progressive historians wrote a consensusthat defined the Revolution as a socioeconomic event.The Cold War, and Americans’ distaste for “Marxist”interpretations that used socioeconomic factorsto power historical change, saw historians of theRevolution search for something more “noble andpure” than base economic motivations to explain whyAmericans rebelled. The Neo-Whig interpretationemerged. It pointed to the colonists’ defense offreedom and constitutional principles as the drivingforce behind the rebellion. Edmund S. and Helen M.Morgan used The Stamp Act Crisis (1953) to show thatthe colonists were not crass rabble-rousers, but ratherprincipled men who stood ready to protect abstractideas of liberty. Indeed, those ideas—the ideology—of liberty quickly became the point on which thehistoriography of the Revolution pivoted.Bernard Bailyn published the last generation-and-ahalf’s most influential book on the Revolution in 1967.His The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution,in which he argues the Revolution was an “ideologicalconstitutional”struggle that fed upon the rhetoricof British politicians who decried the dangers ofcorruption and conspiracy, defined the Revolution asessentially a conservative event, one to protect Englishrights and liberties rather than to build upon Americanideals. Gordon Wood, Bailyn’s star pupil at Harvard,responded with The Creation of the American Republic(1969) that presents Americans, over the course of theRevolution, engaged in a heated debate about creatingnew concepts. They embraced a distinctive Americanidea of divisible sovereignty that in turn engendereda federal system of rule. One of Wood’s other majorworks, The Radicalism of the Revolution (1984), asthe title suggests, points to the radical/democratic/liberal nature of the Revolution, the counter-tact toBailyn’s turn that saw the constitution as a conservativereaction to the excesses of the Revolution. The logicaloutcome of Revolutionary era republicanism was,according to Wood, Jacksonian Democracy, in all itspolitical, economic, cultural, and social facets. In the1980s, Bailyn and Wood’s writings on the Revolutionbecame fodder for the “Republican Synthesis”historians who sought to define American historyin terms of the development of a republican vice, amonarchical society and polity.35