The American Revolution Analysis

A guillotine falls, and royal blood is spilled. Streets smolder as the citizens burn the palaces and castles to a crisp. Kings and Queen shriek in horror as their subjects drag them into the open to be beaten. This is the traditional scene of revolution. The American Revolution challenged these scenes, radically changing the paradigms of their society yet not stepping foot upon the King’s soil.

The spirit of revolution is quite challenging to clearly identify and express. Joanne Freeman, however, gets down to the essence of a revolution, “It involves some kind of a large-scale transfer of power after some kind of a struggle… there had to be some kind of a shared agreement about the nature of whatever this new regime was going to be, about what

Later on, Freeman explores the deeper context of Revolution in saying, “a real Revolution, a full revolution, involves some kind of a fundamental change in principles.” An additional concept inherent

The founders said that each man was endowed a set of rights and a voice in his own governance. The implications of this are extreme elevations of the common man, from the being ruled to ruling himself. These ideas and their ramifications resulted in extreme social change, a key indicator of a radical revolution. Wood also says, “The American Revolution was integral to the changes occurring in American society, politics, and culture at the end of the eighteenth century.” The Revolution was integral to the changes, but the ideals explored in the Revolution were in no way fully implemented in the eighteenth century. The American Revolution initially only brought power and agency to the elite and wealthy, those who already had influence. As Smith writes “Colonial America was obsessed with dependencies, premised on patriarchal authority, caught up with degrees and subordinates…committed above all to hierarchy.” Colonial America was, before the Revolution, lead by the wealthy patricians who owned land. If we contrast this with the time immediately after independence was won, we see the same wealthy patricians ruling the nation. Out of 55 Constitution writers, 48 were classified