The American Revolution Wasn't.

This was written in response to the following question my history teacher posed to us this past week.

"How can the American Revolution be described as a conservative revolution?"

To answer the question one must first understand the question and its parts. The term revolution as defined by the Oxford English Dictionary: “1. a forcible overthrow of a government or social order, in favour of a new system. 2. a dramatic and far-reaching change”. Now juxtapose that against the definition for conservative: 1. averse to change and holding traditional values. 2. (in a political context) favouring free enterprise, private ownership, and socially conservative ideas”.

To use the adjective conservative to describe a revolution seems like a contradiction and they should counteract each other yet with the American Revolution it seems to fit. There was no true change of power and the people with the money kept their money. The legislatures of the colonies kept doing business as usual and the land owners still had their land and slaves. No new freedoms were granted and no truly new system was put in place. The only real difference was that the colonies cut ties with Britain. A connection that was really only maintained through taxes and a name. For all intensive purposes the colonies had become independent states long before the first volley was ever fired.

A good example of things stayed the same is a quote a reference Zinn made to Beards work. “Beard applied this general idea to the Constitution, by studying the economic backgrounds and political ideas of the fifty-five men who gathered in Philadelphia in 1787 to draw up the Constitution. He found that a majority of them were lawyers by profession, that most of them were men of wealth, in land, slaves, manufacturing, or shipping, that half of them had money loaned out at interest, and that forty of the fifty- five held government bonds, according to the records of the Treasury Department.” The founding fathers “new” system was based on the English system and was neither far reaching or dramatic but it was conservative.

In truth you could say they didn’t have a revolution but instead they had the “American Conservation”. The ruling class kept their power intact and even to some degree increased their power. By removing the acceptance of the monarchy as their ultimate ruler and the British Parliament from their chain of command they moved upwards in the power scheme.

The “American Revolution” was only a revolution in the most limited use of the term. Their form of government largely remained intact they simply exchanged a monarch for a president; many argued for a monarchy but luckily they were in the minority.

If you look at the definition from Merriam-Webster’s dictionary the concept of the American Revolution is even less accurate: “1. an overthrow or repudiation and the thorough replacement of an established government or political system by the people governed. 2. Sociology. a radical and pervasive change in society and the social structure, esp. one made suddenly and often accompanied by violence. 3. a sudden, complete or marked change in something: the present revolution in church architecture”. By this definition one can not even call what happened in colonial America a revolution. There was no establishment of a new system by the people, no radical sociological change or a “marked” change in really anything they did. It really does fit the definition by Merriam-Webster of conservative: “1. disposed to preserve existing conditions, institutions, etc., or to restore traditional ones, and to limit change. 2. cautiously moderate or purposefully low: a conservative estimate. 3. traditional in style or manner; avoiding novelty or showiness: conservative suit”.

When I looked at the accepted definition of what a revolution is it becomes very clear that the “American Revolution” was not. The founding fathers put forth an “American Conservation” and they kept the people who had power in power and that scheme has changed very little in the 234 years since they declared their independence from England.