The Context of The American Revolutionary War from a Historical Perspective

George Bancroft, in History of the United States of America From the Discovery of the Continent, portrayed the Founding Fathers as Demigods, men who were put on this Earth to create a nation so great that it was destined by fate to be better than the rest. He assimilated the American Revolution to an act of God. Daniel Boorstin, in The Genius of American Politics, attributed the revolution to a rebellion of colonies that were being treated unfairly under the existing laws, driving them to want to create their own and have that ability. John Hope Franklin, in “The Moral Legacy of the Founding Fathers” laid out the idea that these men, held in such high regard by Bancroft, were after protection of their own economic interests, rather than the colonies, as Boorstin would imply. The men who founded this country were unscrupulously searching for the ability to form their own economic system separate from Britain’s that would favor them. This included sweeping the huge subject of slavery under the proverbial rug in order to maintain the status quo of them making the majority of the money.

“Britain was the mighty mother who bred men capable of laying the foundation of so noble an empire, and she alone could have trained them up.” Britain did an incredible job of laying the foundation of freedom within the colonies, which triggered the Founding Fathers to act out the will of a divine providence to break away from the patriarch and form a newer empire that had no choice but to be the most powerful. “The People of the continent obeyed one general impulse” George Bancroft believes. Bancroft presents the idea of the first leaders of our country being handed the keys to a new sports car that would take them wherever they wanted to go, and that they knew right where to go.

They were god-like. There was never any mention of the institution of slavery, and why would there be? Bancroft thought America was, “the crowning glory of the country of which they sprung.” When, even before the first Continental Congress, slaves were petitioning the Massachusetts legislature for their freedom in 1773 and a British Judge declared slavery illegal due to its “odious” nature in 1772. The movement to abolish slavery had legally started in Britain and had begun to be spoken about on our own continent, yet never found its way onto any Revolutionary document. This was not due to the colonists being unaware, but the choice to ignore such a topic due to the gains they would achieve by leaving the system the way it was.

“The American Revolution was no revolution but merely a colonial rebellion.” There was nothing original about the separation. The men who constructed the country following the split remained loyal to their British upbringings. The Declaration of Independence was a list of wrongdoings under British law, not a list of acts against humanity, as was the case with the rivaling French revolutionary document “Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen.” Daniel Boorstin breaks down the romanticized idea of the American Revolution being founded on the basis of the freedom of man and emphasizes the idea of the country being founded on interpretation of British history and British Constitutionalism in his book. Boorstin outlined the framers work as a mimicking of what they already knew.

Boorstin tells of the Declaration being more of an enumeration of the King’s defiance of Parliamentary law as opposed to a decree of political philosophy. He writes of Thomas Jefferson and John Adams practicing Common Law daily, and that they had been well educated in it throughout their lives. Surely them must’ve known of the informal abolition of slavery in Britain in 1772. How could they not have abolished slavery, even when there is evidence that they knew it was morally wrong? Jefferson wrote of the King treating them like slaves in the Declaration but it was struck from the document when it was brought to committee. They were aware slavery was wrong and knew it would be a problem, but chose not to act when the time to act came. They chose to split from a government that was headed in the direction of abolition in order to create their own government, which mirrored that of Britain except for the part about slavery. They skirted this issue not just by overlooking slavery in their framework, but demanding to create their own framework to be able to include this institution.

“In the effort to create an ‘instant history’ with which we could live and prosper, our early historians intentionally places our early national heroes and leaders beyond the pale of criticism.” The men who led the American economic struggle against Britain were actually leading an economic struggle for their own interests more so than for the entirety of the continental population. The claim of the struggle being for freedom could not have been righteous, claims Franklin. The claim of freedom had to have been false due to the intolerable acts of the colonies that would’ve made King George III shudder. These acts were against slaves that were ignored by the framers of the new government and leaders of the rebellion. They acknowledged the wrongdoing and allowed it to continue, even when they held no financial interest in the matter. While they were asking for better treatment from the British, they themselves were treating the slaves far worse than the British were treating them.

John Adams admitted there was something wrong with their fight for freedom. He knew it wasn’t right to fight for freedoms they personally keep from others on a daily basis. There was a group of blacks from Massachusetts that wrote that the demands of the Americans to the British were the same as the slave’s pleas for freedom times a thousand. By rebelling against the British, the colonies got to keep their slaves. By mimicking their governmental framework, they got to keep their positions in American society. The great men of early American History used the rebellion to free themselves from British rule so they could make their own. This rule that they created allowed for slavery, which would keep the economy from shifting power away from them. (1050)