Freedom and the American Revolution

The most curious fact about the American Revolution is that it happened at all. Historian Gordon Wood says that in the traditional sense, "Americans were not an oppressed people; they had no crushing imperial shackles to throw off. In fact, the Americans knew they were probably freer and less burdened with cumbersome feudal and monarchical restraints than any part of mankind in the eighteenth century." Even to many of its international observers, the revolution seemed a rebellion with little cause.

Perhaps, though, the cause of revolution ought not present itself as such a mystery, for it would appear that what brought about the American Revolution had to do with the conditions of the New World. The New World had given Americans the experience of what it was like to have to forge ahead in free circumstances. The Americans therefore "revolted not to create but to maintain their freedom," Wood says. "While the speculative philosophers of Europe were laboriously searching their minds in an effort to decide the first principles of liberty, the Americans had come to experience vividly that liberty in their everyday lives."

Along with freedom's thrill, Americans had to experience its burdens. The European immigrants did not know the lay of the land. They therefore had to reckon with it. They did not know how to make peace with the native population. Unfortunately, they never did, and in the minds of some Americans of non-indigenous ancestry, the indigenous population remains a set of second-class citizens. Federal and state laws have not done much to disabuse people of this idea, and early American history has been in large part a record of dire consequences for the indigenous peoples.

Looked at carefully, one sees this pattern appear and reappear again. American experience is American history, and it has always been an experiment in reckoning with freedom in new places. For better and worse.