us history Reaction Paper

Topic: Myths of the American Revolution

Read Prof Carol Berkin’s article “Teaching the Revolution.” (See attachment)

Use specific examples from the source to address the following questions:

1. What myths about the American Revolution does Prof. Berkin expose in her article? Examine at least three of the myths and the arguments Prof. Berkin presents to debunk them. 

2. According to the essay, what group of people became loyalists? What group became revolutionaries, and why?

3. Does this article challenge in any way your previous understanding/knowledge of the American Revolution? Why, or why not? 

Format of the assignment:

On the top of the page, type: “Week 3-Reaction Paper.” Then type the first question, and then your answer right under it. Then, type the second question, and your answer under it. Your paper should be 12-font, single-spaced. You need to write a minimum of one page. There is no limit on maximum pages.

You need to use at least three specific examples per answer. Each topic sentence needs to be a mini-thesis statement, and the examples have to support it and be relevant to it. Use quotation marks when citing directly from the sources and include the author’s last name and page number in parenthesis next to the quotation. (This is an MLA style of citation.) You should be able to address the questions just using information from the provided readings. If you are consulting external sources, please provide a reference at the end of the paper. 

Type your paper in your text-editing program, save it on your computer, and upload your file. I will accept the following file formats: , docx,

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Teaching the Revolution

by Carol Berkin

For most Americans, young and old, the history of the American Revolution can be summed up

something like this: In 1776, all the colonists rose up in unison to rebel against a tyrannical king

and the horrible burden of unfair taxes the British had imposed upon them for over a hundred

years. During the long war that followed, citizen soldiers shivered in the cold, shared the

hardships together, admired George Washington, and won the war singlehandedly against the

most powerful army in the world. Then they created a democracy and everyone lived happily

ever after.

Except for the part about shivering in the cold, this myth is just that, a myth. But, like all good

teachers, I am resourceful, and so I would like to use this myth as a starting point for this essay.

Let me begin with the image that the Revolution was a spontaneous reaction to decades of

oppression by the British government—especially unfair taxation. The British, like the French,

Dutch, Portuguese, and Spanish, were empire builders and created imperial policy designed to

enrich and empower the hub of that empire, what Americans would rightly call the Mother

Country. The operating economic theory of the time was mercantilism and its tenets were

simple: a nation’s goal was to be as self-sufficient as possible so that no wealth, primarily gold

and silver, flowed out of its borders and to produce something other nation’s wanted so that

wealth would flow into its treasuries. Like the old 1960s joke, who ever had the most toys when

they died, won the game of life. To achieve this goal, European nations conquered lands and

created colonies—where new, marketable raw materials and precious metals might be discovered

that could be sold and where staple agricultural products could be produced that would feed the

Mother Country. From the beginning, therefore, the colonies existed for the sake of the Mother

Country—it was the logic of this imperial era.

Rules were set to ensure that the colonies served the larger goal of national glory: colonies were

forbidden to trade with the enemy—or to pay heavy import taxes if they did; they were forbidden

to ship goods or produce in enemy ships; they were forbidden to engage in manufacturing

activities that competed with citizens of the Mother Country; they were forbidden to create laws

or institutions that ran counter to the laws and institutional structures in the Mother Country. In

exchange for loyalty and obedience, the citizens of the British colonies would enjoy the

protection of the British army and navy and the Constitutional guarantees of the “rights of

Englishmen.”

England, however, tried to build its empire on the cheap. Indeed, it found a million ways to

govern in a manner Uncle Scrooge McDuck would approve. Unlike France or Spain, its Crown

was never willing to finance colonies, either in their settlement or their operating costs. They left

this to trading companies, wealthy patrons, even dissident religious groups—and by the

eighteenth century, the cost of running each colony fell squarely upon the residents who were

taxed by their local representative assemblies—assemblies made up of colonists like themselves.

From the building of roads, to the dredging of harbors, to the royal governor’s salary—the daily

costs of the colonies were paid by local taxation rather than the British treasury. So cheap was

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the British government that it failed to enforce its own trade regulations with any vigor; given a

choice between financing customs collectors to prevent smuggling and a judicial apparatus to try

offenders, the Crown preferred to look the other way at infractions in a policy humorously

dubbed “Benign or Salutary Neglect.”

Colonists—seeing the cookie jar unguarded—did just as we might suspect. New Englanders, in

fact, built a thriving economy on a mixture of legitimate trade with British West Indian islands

and illegitimate trade with the Caribbean possessions of rival nations. Over decades, smuggling

became respectable practice; John Hancock, Boston’s richest merchant, was also its most

notorious—or admired—smuggler. And local assemblies—who had thrust into their hands what

eighteenth-century men called “the power of the purse,” that is, taxing power—were quick to see

this as a benefit not a burden. The elite colonists who dominated these assemblies shifted as

much of the tax burden to frontier farmers and the middle classes, reaped the benefits of deciding

how surpluses would be spent, and used their authority to pay—or not pay—the governor’s

salary as a wedge to secure his support on measures he was not supposed to endorse.

On occasion, the British government woke from its long imperial nap and tried to rationalize its

management of the colonies. In the seventeenth century, James II created the Dominion of New

England, merging New York and the New England colonies into one administrative unit. But

English politics was none too stable; James was driven into exile, his Dominion governor was

promptly imprisoned by the colonists, and the megacolony was dissolved. The heavy hand of the

Crown sometimes came down on particular legislation, usually involving currency or banks, but

on the whole Salutary Neglect was the preferred relationship of the eighteenth century. Small

wonder that America’s leadership toasted the glories of membership in the British Empire.

The French and Indian War changed all this, as you know. This was the first Great War for

Empire—rivaled only by the struggle against Napoleon over a half century later—and Britain

drained its every financial resource to defeat its enemy. In the end, Britain won—and found it a

pyrrhic victory. Its treasury was empty; it owed money to creditors; and its budget for the

military was growing rather than declining for it had to protect its position against a new French

challenge. On the streets of London, citizens rioted to see wartime taxes reduced. The new young

king had a crisis on his hands.

We all know what followed: salutary neglect was replaced by concerted, though clumsy efforts

to tighten control over American trade, new taxes—and the first direct tax—were imposed by

Parliament, smugglers were arrested and tried . . . and the claim of tyranny emerged.

But was there tyranny? Consider this: the Sugar Act did not increase the duty on foreign

molasses, it lowered it, slashed it in half in fact; the real shock to the New England smugglers

was that the government declared its intention to enforce the import tax and to prosecute

smugglers. What happened to those smugglers? The British government allowed local juries of

their peers to try them—and those peers promptly declare them all innocent. John Hancock,

caught red-handed, was not only found innocent but celebrated as a hero after the trial. Did the

British government retaliate? Only mildly. Frustrated after multiple trials of this sort, it created

Vice Admiralty courts, perfectly legal, to try the offenders in a less friendly environment.

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But the biggest hue and cry of tyranny arose because of the Stamp Act and the Townshend Acts.

The Stamp Act was an innovation; not an infringement of rights, but an assertion of authority

that had long lay dormant—and thus lost its potency. When Americans protested—when they

harassed stamp officials, physically attacked customs men, destroyed stamps—the British

“tyrants” responded by repealing the hated act. They chose the same path with the Townshend

Acts, which were also an innovation—and a dicier one—because they laid import taxes on

British goods. Almost no revenue was collected from these taxes—and the colonists continued to

reach into their pockets not to pay the Crown but their own local legislatures’ taxes.

How did the British handle the protests, the violence, the organized resistance led by colonial

legislators? Did they arrest the ringleaders of resistance? No. Did they close down the

newspapers that carried diatribes and learned discourses against British policies? No. Did they

restructure the colonial governments? No. Did they arrest the men who met in illegal political

bodies such as the Stamp Act Congress and the Continental Congress, or declare them ineligible

to serve in local offices? No. Their response was to ignore petitions, refuse to engage in

negotiations or discussions—and to generally display a bewilderment at the colonists’ failure to

understand how an empire worked.

Not until thousands of dollars’ worth of property was destroyed in Boston harbor did the

government (many of whose members were investors in the East India Tea Company) retaliate.

For the British, as it would be for the Founding Fathers of the United States, the sanctity of

private property was worth protecting.

It is amazing to me how patient and tolerant British officials remained over the turbulent 1760s

and 1770s. It was not until 1775, when British troops marched toward Lexington and Concord,

that orders were given to arrest the two men considered to be prime ringleaders of rebellion,

Samuel Adams and John Hancock. Patrick Henry was not arrested for declaring “give me liberty

or give me death”; Common Sense was not confiscated nor was the press that printed it shut

down. Arrogant, foolish, self-interested the members of Parliament and the king might have

been—but they were victims of their own commitment to the British constitution and its

guarantee of rights. In the end, the tyranny revolutionaries decried was the imperial system itself;

that is, the notion that colonies existed for the welfare of the Mother Country.

The second element of the myth is the unanimity of support for the Revolution. Did all

Americans—north and south; white, red, and black; female and male; rich and poor—greet the

Declaration of Independence with uniform enthusiasm? After the divisive experiences of the

Vietnam war and the current divisions over the war in Iraq, it is appealing to think that there was

an overwhelming consensus for independence. But it was not so. John Adams famously said that

“one third supported the war, one third opposed it, and one third had no opinion.” But here, as in

many cases, Adams exaggerated. It is far more likely that, at the beginning of the struggle, many

more than one third of the colonists hoped desperately to remain neutral in a battle between

Mother Country and rebellious Americans. Their assumption was that, no matter who was in

power, they would have to pay taxes—why risk their lives over who that would be? Many a

farmer equipped his home with two flags, the British and the American, and prepared to raise the

appropriate one as an army marched by. As the war progressed many of these neutral colonists

did join the American cause, but this, as John Shy and Charles Royster have shown, was not an

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ideological or political choice: the British army behaved so badly everywhere it went, looting,

raping, destroying, that it literally drove colonists into the revolutionary camp.

But let us take a closer look at those who supported, and those who opposed, the movement for

independence. To do this, I would like you to imagine the Revolution as a prism with many

sides, and I would like to focus on what we would call “self-interested” motives. This is not to

say that men and women chose their sides in the war solely for economic reasons or to satisfy

ambitions. Ideas also influenced Americans—and ideas shaped how Americans articulated their

choice for rebellion or loyalty and how they understood that choice to reflect their values and

ethics. Bernard Bailyn has shown us that by 1776, most of the Revolution’s leadership believed

that the British government had sunk deeply into decadence and tyranny and had broken the

contract between governors and the governed that John Locke had so eloquently described as the

only basis for legitimate government. And we also know that leading loyalists, who opposed

independence, believed the Revolution was the creation of demagogues and men with thwarted

ambitions; to them, the renunciation of the Crown and “the greatest constitutional government

the world had ever known” was wholly unjustified. But the critical choice to rebel or remain

loyal depended greatly upon where one stood in relation to others within the society, upon the

material realities that shaped one’s perspective.

Who then were more likely to become revolutionaries? Let me suggest four broad groups:

smugglers and urban workers; planters; legislators; and African Americans, both slave and free.

Let’s start with the most obvious: smugglers. As you know, British policies after 1763 struck

hardest at the New England colonies. With little of value to trade directly to England—no rice,

no wheat, little tobacco—New England’s leading citizens made their profits by competing with

the Mother Country in the shipping trade. The post-1763 policies like the Sugar Act of 1764

carried the threat of more regulation, more restrictions, and eventual economic disaster.

Merchants like Hancock found ready allies in those urban workers, distillers, lumber jacks, and

shipbuilders whose livelihoods also depended upon the smuggling made possible by salutary

neglect. Not surprisingly, Boston became the center of protest, of reprisals, and of rebellion.

What about planters? Again, legend has it that tidewater planters led the way in calling for

independence. Yet, current historiography suggests that, in Virginia at least, the Virginians we

think of as founding fathers were reluctant rather than eager revolutionaries. Three things

propelled them into the revolutionary camp: first, the great burden of debt they owed English and

Scottish merchants who provided credit for the purchase of land, slaves, and especially luxury

goods that men like Jefferson craved. Second, pressure from ordinary farmers and backcountry

settlers who wanted the right to move onto Indian lands—a right denied by the Proclamation

Line of 1763. As the protest against Great Britain grew during the 1770s, as the tension mounted,

wealthy tidewater planters feared that a war was inevitable and, as they put it in letters to one

another, they could either lead it or be trampled under the feet of patriots in the western counties.

Third, the provocative policies of Virginia’s royal governor, Lord Dunmore, whose proclamation

offering freedom to the slaves of “traitors” raised the specter of slave revolt and race war.

Legislators—those men who ran the assemblies in each colony—had good reason to join the

Revolution by 1775. There were two routes to power and status in the colonial political world:

appointment to office by the king or his representative, the governor, and election to office in the

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colonial assembly by the white male property owners who enjoyed the right to vote. Historians

know that the same wealthy families dominated these assemblies, with fathers passing down to

sons the duty—and privilege—of serving. Many were lawyers or had legal training; most had an

education far superior to the ordinary colonist; and, through marriage, many were part of

interlocking families. By mid-century the assembly was the de facto supreme power in most

colonies; British policy trends after 1763 threatened this supremacy. As Britain realized that the

assemblies had evolved into mini-parliaments, assuming extensive rights, efforts were made to

reassert the authority and sovereignty of the English Parliament. In the end—and far too late—

the king authorized independent salaries for governors and judges, removing the bargaining

power that the assembly had used effectively to force the governors to bend to their will. Each

effort on Britain’s part—independent salaries and especially the reorganization of the

Massachusetts government as part of the Coercive Acts—threatened the position of this colonial

political elite. And it drove many of them into rebellion.

Finally, many enslaved and free blacks supported the Revolution. The rhetoric of the

Revolution—“liberty and equality”—gave hope to free African Americans that they might

receive better treatment within their communities. For the enslaved, rhetoric mattered less than

the fact that service in the military, offered late and unenthusiastically by the revolutionaries,

provided a route to freedom for many.

Who opposed the war for independence? Loyalists might be considered in five groups: royal

office holders, merchants who traded directly with England, slaves, backcountry farmers of the

Lower South, and Native Americans.

Let’s begin with office holders. Winning appointment to a royal office was the second route to

political power. These posts included governors, lieutenant governors, attorney generals, and

judges of the vice admiralty courts. Salaries were generous; status was high; and one did not

have to stand for office and woo voters. Most royal officers remained loyal, not simply because

of their pocketbooks but because their positions gave them a different perspective on Britain’s

problems and policies. And because in the eighteenth century taking an oath of loyalty, as they

did for their offices, meant something almost sacred.

Then, while many New England merchants depended upon the Caribbean trade, there were

others, in New York and Philadelphia as well as New England, who made their livings from the

sale of British manufactured goods. Family connections, religious ties, or simple good fortune

made these men able to establish credit with major British manufacturers or middle men. Their

warehouses were stocked with everything from carriages to panes of glass to iron tools and bolts

of cloth. These men would be bankrupt if the trade were cut off by war or disrupted by

independence.

Enslaved African Americans appear in both categories, patriot and loyalist. And their presence

on both sides of the war reminds us dramatically that the Revolution was not one revolution but

many. While Patrick Henry declared that he would prefer death to slavery, his own slaves shared

his sentiment. But their war was not against unfair taxation or royal tyranny; it was against the

more immediate tyranny of the lash. For slaves, the old Arab proverb surely applied: the enemy

of my enemy is my friend. The formula was usually reasonably simple: if a master was a loyalist,

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the slave was a revolutionary; if the master was a patriot, the slave made his or her way

whenever possible to the welcoming arms of the British army.

The Revolution was different for Indians, or Native Americans, as well. Most understood that the

colonists were land hungry and would not honor tribal claims if they stood in the way of

westward settlement. The British had shown their willingness to search for diplomatic

resolutions to territorial disputes; the Proclamation Line was, in fact, one of the few truly

statesmanlike decisions of the post–French and Indian War era. Given a choice between the two,

Cherokees and Mohawks, and most of the Iroquois confederation, threw in their lot with the

British. Thus they were fighting their own war for independence—a war far different from that

of Jefferson, Adams, and Franklin.

By far the largest group of active loyalists was the white colonists of the Carolina and Georgia

backcountry. It is this group that gives the Revolution yet another dimension: civil war. And it

adds irony as well. The tidewater patriots took up arms against the British claiming “no taxation

without representation” and yet, for decades they had refused to allow backcountry farmers to

organize counties, and thus denied them representation in the colonial assembly. Having no

political voice, these farmers found themselves denied any benefits of tax revenues: no decent

roads were built linking them with the coast; no courthouses were constructed. The only colonial

official they saw regularly was the tax collector! After years of petitioning, these frustrated

citizens took matters into their own hands and in 1775—the same year as Lexington and

Concord—North Carolina farmers armed themselves and marched on the tidewater government.

This Regulator Movement was easily defeated—but the following year, as news of independence

spread, the farmers armed themselves again and signed up to fight for the British. The war that

ensued in the lower South was violent and brutal; colonist killed colonist, sparing neither women

nor children.

So, the unanimous uprising of colonists against a tyrannical Britain proves to be a myth. In its

place, a complex event, a multitude of wars for independence and liberty rather than a single one.

This is a more interesting story—and one that acknowledges the way in which race and class

complicated colonial society even as it complicates American society today.

But there is more to deconstruct in the myth that began this talk. Did Americans win the war on

their own—did grit, determination, patriotism, and a righteous cause prove enough? Of course,

the answer is no. Americans armed themselves and outfitted their troops with money borrowed

from France, Holland, and Spain. The recognition of the United States by France transformed a

rebellion into a war of national liberation, and the entrance of France into the war forced the

English to fight on two fronts rather than one. Finally, it was the French navy that provided the

vital strategic and tactical support for the American effort. Yorktown would not have played out

as it did without French ships blocking Cornwallis’s retreat to safety.

The reliance on European allies does not diminish the American victory. It does add a global

dimension to the struggle, and it requires us—and our students—to remember the imperial

context in which the Revolution took place.

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The last element of the myth is that the revolutionaries promptly created a democracy. Such a

political system would have appalled all but the most radical of the revolutionary leadership. To

men like John Adams, George Washington, and Thomas Jefferson, democracy equated to “mob

rule”; they had joined a revolution to create a republic, that is, a government based on the

sovereignty of the people, whose laws were made by an elected representative legislature. This in

itself was enough to mark them as radicals; but they were men of the eighteenth century, not the

twenty-first. They believed that an active political voice was a privilege not a right; it belonged

only to adult white males who had “a stake in society”—that stake was property. The logic of

their restriction made perfect sense to them: only a citizen who had something to lose could be

counted on to vote for candidates, make or administer laws, or adjudicate disputes responsibly

and without destructive whim or passions. For the Founding Fathers, democracy was one of the

three great threats to the survival of a republic, one of three paths to tyranny: the tyranny of the

one (a king or dictator), the tyranny of the few (an oligarchy), and the tyranny of the many

(democracy). It would be almost fifty years before the credo of egalitarianism developed a firm

foothold in American culture, producing universal white male suffrage, the abolition movement,

and a host of humanitarian reforms.

Why is this such an important element of the myth to debunk? Because it leaves the struggles,

defeats, and victories of ordinary white men, of African Americans, and of women during the

over two hundred years since the Constitution was written without historical context. If indeed

the nation began as a democracy, how do we explain to our students the necessity of the abolition

movement, a war to end to slavery, and the twentieth-century granting of the franchise to

women? By accepting the revolutionary leaders and the framers of the Constitution as men of

their time we can lay the groundwork for teaching the struggle to create democracy that is the

engine of so much of our national history.

All nations have birth myths; the United States is not alone in this. But in most cases, as in this

one, the reality of the birth of that nation is far more interesting, and indeed more powerful than

the myth. As historians and teachers of American history, we have the enviable duty of

presenting our students with that reality. Who could ask for a better job?

Carol Berkin is Presidential Professor of History Emeritus at Baruch College and The Graduate

Center, City University of New York. She is the author of several books including Jonathan

Sewall: Odyssey of an American Conservative, First Generations: Women in Colonial America,

A Brilliant Solution: Inventing the American Constitution, and Revolutionary Mothers: Women

in the Struggle for America’s Independence.

Source: http://www.gilderlehrman.org/history-by-era/war-for-independence/resources/teaching-

revolution

http://www.gilderlehrman.org/history-by-era/war-for-independence/resources/teaching-revolution

http://www.gilderlehrman.org/history-by-era/war-for-independence/resources/teaching-revolution