Week 8

WAS THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION A CIVIL WAR?

Oftentimes, we, as Americans see ourselves as fundamentally distinct from the British people. Related, perhaps, but different in some essential manner. This assumption, while true today, can be problematic when we read it back into our early history. In the beginning, we were one people with a shared culture under the rule of one monarchy. Thus we need to reread our early, pre-Revolutionary past as unified with that of Great Britain's. This leads us to an important realization: the American War of Independence was a successful Civil War. We began as one nation and ended as two. 

People in both America and Britain understood this at the time. Historian David Ramsay wrote that the Revolution was “originally a civil war in the estimation of both parties.” Mercy Otis Warren wrote that "the fires of civil war were kindled as early as the Boston massacre." But in the narratives of these historians, the moment the United States declared independence was the moment the conflict stopped being a civil war. It was no longer being fought within a single imperial political system. Now it was a war between two nations.

The assumptions upon which this narrative is based are worth challenging. Did Americans really emerge as a fully formed nation at the moment of the Declaration of Independence? Of course, that’s the story early American historians told. It was a story that projected backward the unity and sovereignty they wanted to foster in the new nation. That picture may have looked accurate for Massachusetts but in much of America along the coast of Rhode Island, in the Hudson Valley, and all across the South, things were quite different. The Revolution was a story of the decline of sovereignty and the rise of lawless violence after the overthrow of the British government. 

Once we consider the American Revolution as a civil war, it’s easier to integrate the broader world of violence and division that often gets left out of the Revolutionary narrative: the Regulator movements of South and North Carolina, the march of the Paxton boys, land riots in Maine and New York, separatist movements in Vermont, and the rural insurrections that swept the west up to the all-out-war of the Whiskey Rebels in 1794. As imperial sovereignty broke down, first in the borderlands and then in the heart of the colonies themselves, it left a disparate set of ex-colonists to construct new forms of government. They did so in overlapping and piecemeal ways, creating struggles in the process that would continue for decades and centuries between the different systems that emerged in the post-British chaos. 

If we stop thinking of the Revolution as a War for Independence, in which the United States freed itself from the British empire, we can better see it as a process in which the United States, and American identity, was gradually, painfully, imperfectly constructed in the midst of imperial collapse. If we saw this more accurately, we might better understand the way the modern world was born in and determined by violence.

Important Terms: 

Civil War: A war between citizens of the same country.

Boston Massacre: A street fight that occurred on March 5, 1770, between a "patriot" mob, throwing snowballs, stones, and sticks, and a squad of British soldiers. Several colonists were killed and this led to a campaign by speech-writers to rouse the ire of the citizenry.

Sovereignty: A term meaning authority, rule, supremacy of power or rank; Began to take on the meaning: existence as an independent state around the year 1715.

Let tyrants shake their iron rod,

And Slavery clank her galling chains,

We fear them not, we trust in God,

New England's God forever reigns.

Howe and Burgoyne and Clinton too,

With Prescot and Cornwallis joined,

Together plot our Overthrow,

In one Infernal league combined.

When God inspired us for the fight,

Their ranks were broke, their lines were forced,

Their ships were Shattered in our sight,

Or swiftly driven from our Coast.

The Foe comes on with haughty Stride;

Our troops advance with martial noise,

Their Veterans flee before our Youth,

And Generals yield to beardless Boys.

What grateful Offering shall we bring?

What shall we render to the Lord?

Loud Halleluiahs let us Sing,

And praise his name on every Chord.