The True History of the American Revolution
At the end of his life, John Adams, the “Atlas of Independence,” took a surprisingly bleak view of the fate of the Revolution that he had helped to spark. When a Baltimore journalist named Hezekiah Niles, for instance, began a correspondence with the former president in the late 1810s, Adams wrote that he “hazarded an opinion that the true history of the American revolution could not be recovered.” The problem was not just fading memories and the passing of the Founding generation; Adams feared that the American people had abandoned the principles of 1776 in a partisan frenzy that threatened the health of the infant republic.
What would Adams make of the flood of books marking this year’s semiquincentennial? Adams was convinced not only that future generations would overlook his own contributions to the “glorious cause” but also that they would politicize or forget the actual motivations behind the independence movement. Sadly, though Adams is somewhat more celebrated than he prophesied, too many recent books present facile, over-simplified narratives that lean hard on patriotic fervor and ideological intensity to the detriment of scholarly rigor.
Fortunately, that is not true of at least two books about the making of the Declaration of Independence published earlier this year, both by Hillsdale College professors. Historian Bradley J. Birzer’s The Declaration of Independence: A Radical Experiment in Liberty masterfully reconstructs the history of the document that freed the American states from the British Empire. Political theorist Matthew Spalding’s The Making of the American Mind: The Story of Our Declaration of Independence rearticulates the republican theory at the heart of the document. Taken together, these books illustrate not just how the American Revolution came to be, but perhaps also why the patriots of 1776 fought for their liberties—and what it may take to recover their principles in our own time.
Following his intellectual hero Russell Kirk, Birzer believes the Founders were not “radical”—they did not seek an extreme break with the past—but were instead concerned with the deep roots of their civilization. He begins with the settlement of the American colonies, long before the height of the Imperial Crisis in 1774. The people who braved the stormy Atlantic in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries were motivated by a deep civilizational impulse. They wanted to take what was best about Europe and use it to build new societies out of the wilderness. As such, it makes sense that Parliament adopted a policy of “salutary neglect,” as the great conservative Edmund Burke called it. Drawing on another of his lodestars, Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek, Birzer emphasizes how the British Empire’s decentralization ensured that a “spontaneous order” would emerge.
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