As the country approaches the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, I’ve been asking myself a question that might seem odd for a professional historian to ponder: What was the American Revolution? Was it, for instance, a rejection of monarchy and embrace of popular sovereignty? The birth of a nation? Or yet another in a series of global imperial wars?
When I teach my course on the Revolution, I pose this query on the first day. The answers I hear vary widely among the students. We spend the whole semester considering it, and usually their answers will still be multiple at the end of the course.
I am struck by the Revolution’s complexity both as a historical event and as a national origin story. At this intensely polarized moment in our country, this history feels highly political, but that is precisely why thinking historically about the clash that led to the creation of the United States is so important. Doing so helps us to see that its history has always been political, while allowing us to grasp the kaleidoscope of perspectives and possibilities within that revolutionary moment.
Asking what the Revolution was entails myriad matters of historical interpretation, which makes the event especially fruitful as an opportunity to teach the historical method — the way historians analyze the past and evaluate evidence with an eye for contingency and specific context in order to advance our understanding of what happened and why.
The first matter to settle may be chronological: When did the Revolution start, and when did it end? In celebrating the 250th anniversary this year, we’re marking the beginning as the moment the 13 colonies declared their independence, severing ties with the British Empire and officially launching a war to make that independence a reality. You could just as well push the starting point back deeper into the history of the colonies; I’ve had students suggest it began as soon as English settlement started in North America in the early 17th century.
Depending on when you start the story of the Revolution, your view of what caused it will shift. Like changing the lens on a camera, different details come to the forefront with each adjustment. If you pinpoint the battles of Lexington and Concord in the spring of 1775 as the origin of revolution, you might note the centrality of rumors and fear to the outbreak of the war. Going further back to the British victory in the Seven Years’ War, also known as the French and Indian War, you might determine that struggles over westward expansion or imperial taxes were what caused many colonists to revolt.
Defining the end of the American Revolution is even trickier. Was it when the British surrendered at Yorktown in 1781? Or perhaps when they recognized American independence in signing the Treaty of Paris in 1783? Cases may be made that the Revolution didn’t truly end until the states ratified the federal Constitution in 1788, becoming the United States of America; or even until they tested their sovereignty by fighting the British again in the War of 1812. In my course, I bring the story all the way up to the Civil War, which I suggest is when many of the unresolved tensions of the Revolution came to a head.
Chronological framing, I remind my students, is one of the primary ways historians build their interpretations of the past. I urge them to think about how the end point you choose suggests a great deal about what you think the Revolution was and what its outcomes were. Focusing on the end of the war and the signing of the peace treaty highlights independence as the primary motivation for and outcome of the Revolution. Choosing the ratification of the Constitution suggests the Revolution was about the creation of a new nation, the founding of a republic. Going even further into the 19th century highlights some of the Revolution’s deeper social, economic and cultural stakes and outcomes — intended or otherwise.
We may also ask what we as Americans want the Revolution to be and to mean. Though this is not inherently a historical question, it is useful to ask because it allows us to consider how responses vary based on who is answering and when they are answering, given how the country itself has evolved. Every time I teach the subject, Notre Dame students respond in new ways.
Despite the frequent projection of contemporary political divides onto our past, the truth is that modern allegiances and convictions do not map neatly onto the realities of the revolutionary era. Though it is important to be aware of the political uses to which this history is being put at present — the celebration of founders as heroes, for example, or the attempted erasure of the persistence of slavery and other paradoxes of American liberty — approaching the past historically is in itself liberating. When we realize the world was not always as it is now, that the United States was not always or even inevitably a country, it’s possible to step outside the present, to be aware of our place in it, and to think beyond its strictures.
The value in investigating the past using different methods of historical inquiry is the appreciation one gains for the complexity and contingency of how things unfolded.
Inspiration may be found around all corners, if you lead with curiosity and humility: in the men who signed their names to the Declaration of Independence; in those who picked up guns to fight the redcoats; even in those who wore the red coats and the policymakers in London who ran the empire that broke down; in the women who spun their own yarn to uphold boycotts; in the enslaved people who ran toward British lines in pursuit of freedom; in the Native American negotiators who struggled to maintain their own sovereignty through the imperial struggle. Any serious effort to understand the American Revolution necessarily involves considering them all.
The truth is that the Revolution meant something different to all these people. It can mean something different to all of us today. And yet it unifies us, because the place where we live was shaped in fundamental ways during the revolutionary moment. Recognizing that fact does not require critiquing or celebrating, settling whether the Revolution was good or bad; historians, after all, don’t ask those kinds of judgment questions. But thinking historically about the Revolution can, I believe, help us better understand our past, navigate our present and imagine possible futures.
Katlyn Carter is an associate professor of history at Notre Dame and the author of Democracy in Darkness: Secrecy and Transparency in the Age of Revolutions.