The American Revolution By Bernard Bailyn And John Phillip Reid

Bernard Bailyn and John Phillip Reid both engage in a definitional conversation over the concepts and origins upon which the 18th century American Revolution is founded upon, paying particular attention to the perceptions of liberty. In The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, Bernard Bailyn argues that the primary motivations and concepts of liberty of the founding fathers were not primarily economic or political, but ideological, stemming from the fear that the corruption of English politics would result in tyranny, eventually destroying liberty and freedom in the colonies.

Though he acknowledges the influence of philosophies such as classical antiquity, enlightenment thought, and English common law, he maintains that they were

not the principal concepts that spurred colonial action. According to Bailyn, these understandings originated from British politics and culture, particularly the Whig political thought.

The Americans felt that there was a constant fundamental struggle between power and liberty in the sense that the former was a natural and constant threat to the former. Bailyn argues that it is from this ideology that colonists interpreted actions. i.e. they viewed ‘oppressive’ programs such the Stamp and Tea Acts and the stationing of British troops in Boston in 1768 as evidence of a deliberate and corrupt conspiracy that attacked American liberty. It is this conspiratorial dimension of revolutionary discourse that intensified Anglo-American tension, which eventually convinced them of the necessity of a revolution-that the establishment of a checked and balanced constitution was the only way to retain power and preserve liberty.

John Phillip Reid’s The Concept of Liberty in the Age of the American Revolution however claims that the American concept of liberty was a jurisprudential, rather than political concept.

He observed that the American revolutionaries shared a common understanding of liberty and constitution not only with the radical British Whigs, but also with the ministry of Lord North. Reid refers to this understanding as common law constitutionalism with the chief principle being liberty. This liberty was claimed as a natural birth right and duty to protect, its bane was licentiousness, its opposite slavery, arbitrary power its antithesis, and law as its foundation. To Reid, the influence of British common law surpassed the impact of people such as Lock and

Trenchard.

Although both historians endeavour to define liberty and its motivational impact, Bailyn focuses more on the civic humanist political traditions whereas Reid stresses a more fundamental importance. Reid dismisses Bailyn’s argument of a colonial adoption of opposing ideology, choosing instead to support the notion that the American Revolution resulted out of a disagreement over the British Empire’s constitutional nature. Though both historians interpret the onset of the American Revolution as a ‘constitutional crisis’ rather than a socio-economic conflict, Reid’s understanding of the revolution opposes the Neo-Whig views of Bailyn who asserts that ideology was born out of 18th century Whig thought. He refutes Bailyn’s notion of natural law as a significant part of American Whig constitution as well as his tradition for intellectual history. He does so on the basis that Bailyn overlooked the importance of the legal arguments that were made in revolutionary pamphlet literature.

Almost the entirety of Bailyn’s explanation for the development of revolutionary mentality is based on printed sources, arguing that it was ‘the opposition of press, as much as any single influence that shaped the political awareness of 18th C Americans’.

However this only assumes that there is a link between print culture and the people. In this sense, Bailyn only loosely demonstrates the association between pamphlets and popular ideology. While Bailyn presents a strong case for ideology as a concept, his major drawback is that although pamphlets were central to the rebellion and the expression of classical republican theory in the colonies, they are not substantial enough to effectively explain the process of an egalitarian cultural transformation. His pamphlet examples tend to describe, rather than represent the

ideologies.

Whilst Bailyn does not forget other sources of historical information, drawing his analysis from pamphlets limits his ability to establish when an idea became prominent as opposed to merely being stated. In a way, he neglects or omits the use of formal political documents written by the revolutionaries, which tell more about the history of ideas than pamphlets. When Bailyn quotes formal colonial documents, he mostly uses them to exemplify and amplify what he finds in pamphlets rather than as sources themselves.

In the case of demonstrating the transformation of American political theory in 1776 by Whig thought, Bailyn states that: “I discovered that the configuration of ideas and attitudes I had described in the General Introduction as the Revolutionary ideology could be found intact-completely formed-as far back as the 1730's. However, the problem is, that id such an ideology existed “completely transformed in the 1730s”, it contradicts Bailyn’s justification of a revolutionary ‘transformation in the 1760s and 1770s?

Peculiarly, Reid does not address the extent to which non-revolting British colonies in North America shared the constitutional ideas of revolting colonies, particularly on the subject of chattel slavery. Strange too, is that unlike Bailyn, Reid makes no attempt to justify or explain the definition of slavery without any references to chattel slavery, but perhaps this is because he did not deem it to be necessary. Here, Reid discusses of the text of F. Nwabueze Okoye, who in 1980 wrote a controversial article in the William and Mary Quarterly insisting that when the founders used the word "slavery" to explain their predicament after 1763, they in fact had in mind the chattel black slavery then in their midst, and their outrage was heightened by a racist conviction that only blacks should be slaves. Reid quickly and succinctly dismisses this these by demonstrating that slavery referred to rule under arbitrary despotism, resulting in restriction to liberty.

Upon identifying the key arguments and examining their different approaches to define revolutionary motivation, it is the rhetoric of Reid that proves most plausible. He presents a strong case for a jurisprudential, rather than a traditional ideological constitutional history. Though still relevant, it is undeniable that Bailyn’s scholarship is dated in comparison to Reid’s. Reid does not discharge the whole of Bailyn’s argument, rather he ‘corrects’ it in favour of a more inclusive theory. Reid also does not limit his evidence to primarily pamphlet literature by also using formal constitutional documents and writings of prolific colonial and metropolitan writers. These, in combination with the concepts discussed above all contribute in the believability of Reid’s literary arrangement.