Review: The Lesser-Known Texts That Shaped the American Revolution

When we recall the American Revolution, we remember the hits: Common Sense, the Declaration of Independence, George Washington’s Valley Forge speech. Less remembered are the many pamphlets and sermons that shaped the worldview of the American colonists and brought them to the point of revolution in the first place.

In his 1967 book The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, Bernard Bailyn does the yeoman’s work of reintroducing these less-famous texts into our historical memory. With heavy quotations, Bailyn shows how writers before and during the Revolution denounced the corrupting legacy of Robert Walpole (Britain’s first prime minister), railed against executive usurpations of legislatures, and tried to identify when exactly tariffs became internal taxes. Bailyn’s conclusion: The ideological origins of the American Revolution were both extremely libertarian and extremely paranoid.

We now know that London passed the Stamp Act and deployed redcoats to Boston because the bumbling British government was trying to raise revenue while keeping its restive colonists in line. But the writers of the time saw every English move as part of a conspiracy to reduce the colonists to the status of mere slaves through standing armies and onerous taxation.

Their now-familiar conclusion: American liberty could be protected only by an independent revolutionary government based on popular consent and dedicated to the protection of individual rights.