What we make of the American Revolution—and what we can do with its memory—is to a great deal determined by the milestones we choose to narrate it. 1776 is the obvious choice, and the Declaration of Independence isn’t a bad place to start if you actually read the entire thing. It provides a panorama of colonial grievances, only some of which fit neatly into the triumphalist paradigm of American history. Colonists were indeed angry at the imperial state for “suspending our own Legislatures” and “imposing Taxes on us without our Consent” —objections that can be assimilated into any liberal democratic program. The document includes fury that the King “made Judges dependent on his Will alone,” and was “cutting off our Trade with all parts of the world.” These are readily cited today against President Donald Trump, as they should be: they are broad critiques that allow for a large coalition today (former Republicans, socialists, anarchists) as they did then (wealthy landowners, dissolute sailors).
But starting in 1776 misses a lot. Of course it does; the historian’s move is always to say that if you really want to understand something you have to begin earlier than you would think. Much of the ire and conflict over the 1619 project was an argument over whether going backward like this was acceptable at all. But looking back is necessary because of the inadequacy of any narrative based on a single moment or event or period. Every historical moment is a confluence of those that came before. Even a world-shaking revolution does not wipe the slate clean; we always have to build on the ruins of the past. That means understanding all parts of their architecture is important.
The Declaration also contains ominous warnings of the settler colonial state to come. George III—really the state he stood in for as much as headed—had “endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages.” By this they meant that Britain had been insufficiently violent. At the time the British state was trying to maintain peaceful and profitable relationships with Indians. Many colonists living on the western frontier preferred genocide. They had powerful backing among the southern elites who helped write the Declaration, who hoped to invest the profits of slavery in coerced and deceptive land deals further west.
As we move backward a decade, on the way watching the tea jump back out of Boston Harbor in 1773 and the flaming wreckage of the Gaspee reassemble and cool itself as a Patriot mob retreats from it in 1772, to early mass actions in the urban north, we find again the familiar revolution of public education and popular history. Even these events suggest more radical interpretations than they usually receive. The Boston “Massacre” feels uncomfortably familiar today: agents of the state occupying a major town panicked and fired on a mob.
While elite arguments against the Stamp Act fit neatly enough into respectability, the organizing that ultimately neutralized it does not. 1765’s Stamp Act riots—another milestone on the road to revolution—were more than a tax revolt by merchants. In Rhode Island, they started with rowdy but merchant-approved rhetoric—effigies of local conservative Loyalists—and quickly escalated as the artisans and mariners who actually made up the public went far beyond what merchant elites deemed acceptable. Martin Howard called on the King to revoke Rhode Island’s charter and replace its corrupt and limited democracy with oligarchy; Newport workers responded by sacking his house and sending him fleeing in terror across the Atlantic. Printed arguments can dominate memory and imply elites were in charge more than they were: they served an important role, but as a permission structure, probably more than an inspiration, for a popular consciousness. Often, pamphlets and newspapers lagged rather than led working people’s actions.
It was the mass action of working people in towns like Boston and Newport, not just the complaints of lawyers and merchants, that made the Stamp Act unenforceable. This takes us back earlier into 1765 and then into 1764. At the beginning of the year, the British state began enforcing long-overlooked taxes with the use of the Royal Navy. While the 1760s are often narrated as a series of outrages over tax policies, it was anger over their enforcement mechanism that made that outrage matter. The Royal Navy “pressed” men into service in order to do its work. Its presence in colonial harbors felt to many inhabitants like an occupation.
Colonists responded vigorously. Months before the Stamp Act riots, the people of Newport, Rhode Island assembled in a hundreds-strong multiracial mob to fend off the Royal Navy frigate Maidstone, which was so committed to kidnapping sailors that it had largely shut down the harbor. This threatened the food and fuel supply for the winter. In December 1764, Mainers attacked the Gaspee—later famously burned in Rhode Island—after it kidnapped a man whose “Wife and young Children” depended upon him. The year before, Newport authorities actually fired on a navy warship in a dispute that may have begun over meat theft. Artisans and sailors became a popular force for merchants to uneasily ally with against the taxes we still narrate the revolution through. Collapsing protests against state kidnapping into tax hostility neatly fits the anti-tax interests of business today—but the revolution was built on desires with more radical implications today too. A few angry merchants could not have shattered Britain’s empire—for that they needed popular support, and ordinary Americans were critical actors and theorists in their own right, not a mob led by the renowned “Founding Fathers.”
In this same year, and from a different set of non-elite Americans, we also find the white supremacist and genocidal elements of the American project. In February 1764, a settler mob known as the Paxton Boys marched on Philadelphia. 140 Indians lived there, and the Paxton Boys had become popular after; in the words of Ned Blackhawk, “word spread that they intended to kill every Indian in Pennsylvania.” Months before, in December, they murdered Conestoga Indians—English-speaking church-attending people who had done exactly what colonists promised would bring peace. Rather than execute the Paxton Boys for their violent insurrection, colonial authorities legitimized their grievances and conceded their demands for greater support in the war against Pontiac’s Indigenous coalition.
That war began in 1763 following the end of the Seven Years’ War. Indians had long held back European empires by playing French and English hegemony and alliances against each other, occupying what Richard White called a “Middle Ground.” But in the Treaty of Paris, signed in 1763, France ceded nearly all of its North American claims to England. The Middle Ground was gone. Outraged by English mistreatment, a broad coalition assembled under Pontiac fought the colonies to a stalemate thereafter. Back in England, the imperial state hoped to avoid future war with Indians by banning westward settlement. Looking from the west of the colonies rather than the east, the revolution looks like a move to defend settler colonialism against any kind of limit.
1763 is perhaps the best choice we have for partitioning the revolutionary era—but any understanding of the new nation must draw on earlier influences too. The brief period in the 1680s during which New England was administratively unified under King James into the “Dominion of New England,” was on the minds of both democratic activists and pragmatists who hoped King George might override Parliament on behalf of the colonies. During Metacom’s War in 1675-8, settlers cemented a racial consciousness that they would carry onward to justify generations of violence.
The rights later central to the revolution grew out of a conception of the “rights of Englishmen” painstakingly developed over centuries. English revolutionaries executed their king in 1649, an event which Jonathan Mayhew later commemorated in a sermon against “unlimited submission,” which radical printer Daniel Fowle published in 1750. Also in 1649, Gerrard Winstanley and his fellow “True Levellers” (better known as the Diggers) imagined a common world without private property. They and other English Civil War-era radicals advocated for a democracy more expansive than America or Britain would have for over a century and a half. Marcus Rediker and Peter Linebaugh’s classic work The Many-Headed Hydra identified an emerging revolutionary consciousness in the shipwreck of the Sea-Venture on uninhabited Bermuda in 1609.
Mainstream American popular consciousness once portrayed the nation’s history as an ever-forward progression and expansion of rights—an overcoming of our own origins. This leaves out and risks excusing enormous violence—but it also papers over the emancipatory possibilities that have always existed in America, possibilities that came from people who would not wait, who were not respectable, who were not polite. Revolutionary radicals offer rich traditions to draw on today, from the search and seizure protections that, when they are enforced, still help protect us from policing, and still call on us to imagine a fairer and more equal world.
Their actions and their results should speak to us as loudly as the hypocritical and better-known calls of men like Thomas Jefferson. Early America’s emancipatory impulses were not enough to overcome the violent hierarchies this country was also built on. But they were not defeated by those hierarchies either. Leftists get two kinds of endings in history books: valiant defeats and complicated victories. We get to decide today what the complicated victory of the revolution means today—what part of its legacy will win out.
