Revolution and the Political Integration of the Enslaved and Disenfranchised

Affiliation: Professor of history at Brown University

Venue: House of Representatives’ chamber, Kentucky State Capitol, Frankfort, KY

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Excerpt:

The radical character of the American Revolution is a subject of some historical controversy. Yet in one important respect there can be no denying its radicalism. The Revolution transformed the American colonies into republics, which meant that ordinary people were no longer to be considered “subjects” to be ruled as they were under a monarchy. They were thereafter to be citizens-participants themselves in the ruling process. This is what democracy has come to mean for us.

The profoundest revolution of the past 200 years has been this introduction of ordinary people into the political process. For America and the rest of the Western world, this Revolution was most dramatically expressed at the end of the eighteenth century­ “the age of the democratic revolution,” as it has been called. This bringing of the people into politics extended through the next fifty years in the United States, while in Western Europe it took much longer, requiring at least the greater part of the nineteenth century. And of course for the rest of the world the process is still going on. In fact since 1945 with the emergence of new nations and the Third World, we have been witnessing what has been called a “participation explosion,” the rapid incorporation into the political process of peoples who had hitherto been outside of politics, in a hurried, even a desperate, effort by underdeveloped nations to catch up with the modern democratic states.

More than anything else this incorporation of common ordinary people into politics is what sets the modern world apart from what went on before. Americans were in the vanguard of this development. Our assumption of the leadership of the democratic nations is not simply based on our preponderance of power since 1945. Ever since the American Revolution we have claimed the leadership of the Free World, even when we were an underdeveloped nation ourselves and our claims were treated with bemused contempt by Europe. Our assertions of leadership were based on our priority in time: we were the first modern nation to have a democratic revolution and to establish a republic in which citizenship and political participation belong to the whole community. The French Revolution and all the other European revolutions of the nineteenth century were in our eyes merely examples or species of the revolutionary genus that we had created. Part of the explanation for the intensity of the ideological confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union since the Communist Revolution of 1917 comes from the Soviet Union’s claim that it has created a new revolutionary tradition, a new revolutionary genus, one which threatens to usurp our position in the vanguard of history.

We Americans have never been able to figure out why the rest of the world has had such a hard time catching up with us. Because the process of creating a republican citizenry seemed so simple for us, we have believed it ought to be simple for others. It seems to us to be merely a matter of allowing the people to vote. Because voting is the most obvious means by which the people participate in politics, we have tended to emphasize the right to vote as the necessary and sufficient criterion of democratic politics. But this is a mistake. The suffrage is clearly a prerequisite for democratic politics, but it is hardly all there is to it. It is important for us in our bicentennial celebrations to examine our Revolution and its heritage and to seek to understand the sources of our political practice and values. Only with knowledge of the conditions that underlie the principle of consent in our polity can we confront the world and the future. Voting is in fact only the exposed tip of an incredibly complicated political and social process. How this process came about and how the people became involved in politics are questions that lie at the heart of the American Revolution.  

The American Revolution was both a consequence and a cause of democracy. It came to mark a decisive change in the way political activity was carried on in America. It gave new legitimacy to the involvement of common people in politics. It was not, however, simply a matter of enfranchising new voters. Although the franchise in colonial America was confined by property qualifications as it was in eighteenth century England, property owning was so widespread that the colonists enjoyed the broadest suffrage of any people in the world: perhaps 80 percent of white adult males could vote. Yet the fact remains that most of those enfranchised did not exercise the right. The social structure and social values were such that colonial politics, at least when compared to politics in post-revolutionary America, were remarkably stable, and the percentage of the people actually voting and participating in politics remained small-much smaller even than today. In the eighteenth century the legal exclusion of the propertyless from the franchise was based not on the fear that the poor might confiscate the wealth of the aristocratic few, but on the opposite fear: that the aristocratic few might manipulate and corrupt the poor for their own ends. Established social leaders expected deference from those below them, and generally got it and were habitually reelected to political office. There were no organized political parties and no professional politicians in today’s sense of those words. Established merchants, wealthy lawyers, and large planters held the major offices and ran political affairs as part of the responsibility of their elevated social positions. It was rare for a tavern keeper or small farmer to gain a political office of any consequence. Men were granted political authority in accord not with their seniority or experience in politics but with their established economic and social superiority. Thus Thomas Hutchinson, son of a distinguished Boston mercantile family, was elected to the Massachusetts House of Representatives at the age of twenty-six and almost immediately became its speaker. Social and political authority was indivisible and men moved horizontally into politics from the society, rather than (as is common today) moving up vertically through an exclusively political hierarchy.

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