Politics > American Revolution

USA 250: Setting The Stage For Revolution

America, Great Britain, and the Western world on the eve of the Revolution.

S. David Sultzer | April 16, 2026

What do we mean by the Revolution? The war? That was no part of the revolution; it was only an effect and consequence of it. The revolution was in the minds of the people, and this was effected from 1760–1775, in the course of fifteen years, before a drop of blood was shed at Lexington. — John Adams, Letter to Thomas Jefferson, August 24, 1815

As the year 1760 dawned, England and its perennial enemy, France, were at war for global dominance, fighting on five continents. It would later be known as the Seven Years War, with its theaters in North America labeled the French and Indian War and the 1st Anglo-Cherokee War.

By 1760, great, wind-driven ships traversed the world’s oceans. The Age of Sail, which began in the 15th century, and its companion, the Age of Discovery, had transformed the world through trade. Before 1600, in every developed society across the world, a tiny minority of royalty and their associates were wealthy, while all about them, the vast majority lived in subsistence-level poverty. That changed only with the advent of world trade, mercantilism, and capitalism, which together lifted the majority out of poverty and created a middle class.

Image by Our World In Data. CC BY 0.

By 1760, about 1.5 million people lived in the North American colonies, and the population growth rate was set to double in 20 years. The colonies had benefited from nearly 150 years of the British government’s “benign neglect.” As the Privy Council told South Carolina’s new governor in 1722, that policy was intended to make colonial governments as “Easy and Mild as possible to invite people to Settle under it.”

By 1760, a prosperous middle class had developed in the colonies. It was a society unburdened by Europe’s ultra-wealthy, permanent noble class. When Lord Wortley Montague died in London in 1761, his estate was worth over £1.3 million. When the wealthiest merchant in Boston, Thomas Hancock (John’s uncle), died near the same time, his estate was valued at only £70,000.

The colonies were also unburdened by Europe’s permanently impoverished underclass, for they had great economic mobility and opportunity. As one British visitor, Nicholas Cresswell, wrote in contrasting the colonies with Europe, “here there are no fears [of poverty] and with the least spark of industry, a man may support a family...”

In 1760, religious issues were of central concern, although the nature of the battle had changed.

For a thousand years, Islamic wars of conquest had demanded Europe’s energy. By 1760, the Muslim attacks against Europe had ended. Barbary pirates, who enslaved some 1.25 million Europeans, including American colonists, were still a problem (indeed, two of America’s first wars, the First (1801-1805) and Second (1815) Barbary Wars, were against the pirates), but they were not what led to America’s Revolution.

What mattered in the colonies were Christian schisms. Christianity had always been the indispensable beating heart of Western civilization, but the Reformation of 1517 splintered the universal Catholic Church, leading to numerous Protestant sects. Europe was riven by internecine religious wars and religious persecution, pitting Christian against Christian.

For two centuries, Protestant minorities in Europe were persecuted. This was as true for the Huguenot Protestants in Catholic France as it was for the Puritans and all others who dissented from the state religion of England, Anglicanism. Many European and British Protestants fled to the North American colonies.

In the mid-17th century, Great Britain was in the midst of revolutionary turmoil. It had been convulsed by a bloody civil war pitting Protestant sects against Anglicans (the British version of Catholicism) and against Catholics. In Scotland, the Jacobite rebellions saw the Scots fight for Europe’s Catholic monarchs and against the Protestant English.

Other than the Jacobite rebellions, these conflicts were all about the ancient “rights of Englishmen,” which are detailed here. These rights, which began with the Magna Carta and included no taxation without representation and the right to due process of law, were mostly spelled out in the English Bill of Rights of 1689, to which the monarch agreed after England’s Glorious Revolution of 1688.

By 1760, roughly 80% of colonists in North America were members of persecuted Protestant sects, including Congregationalists (Puritans), Baptists, Quakers, Scots Presbyterians, French Huguenots, and German Lutherans. By 1760, English Anglicans made up only about 15% of the colonial population. Jews were about 1% of the colonial population, as were Catholics, despite their religion being proscribed in all but Maryland’s colony.

In 1760, there was bad blood between Massachusetts’ mostly Congregationalist population and the royally appointed Anglican government. Already a decade earlier, the Congregationalist minister Rev. Jonathan Mayhew had given a sermon justifying the prior century’s English Civil War, when Puritans beheaded the Anglican king.

Rev. Mayhew combined the Bible (Romans 13:1-7) and John Locke’s 2nd Treatise of Government to reach a religious justification for rebellion and revolution against a tyrannical king. His sermon deeply affected a young John Adams, then sitting in the pews. As historian J. Wingate Thornton has described it, this sermon was “The morning gun of the American Revolution.”

The (mostly Protestant) British colonists in North America during this time of civil strife had the words ‘British liberty’ on their lips. They knew their history well and were immensely proud to be British. They knew the Magna Carta and were proud to live in a land where they could speak freely and, in theory at least, be free from tyrannical government.

When Patrick Henry, in 1765, wrote in the Virginia Resolves that the colonists had all the Liberties and Privileges of Englishmen, including the right to be taxed only by their democratically elected governing body, he was not innovating. He was treading a path already blazed in England for half a millennium.

Finally, to this mix of economic and traditional liberty, the year 1760 added one more thing: the Enlightenment. It was a period of rationalism and reason—a search for objective truth in all aspects of life. It would lead to great advances in science, economics, and political theory. Societally, it would lead to the First Great Awakening, a religious revolution in the American colonies and the UK. That, in turn, would lead to the abolitionist movement. For the first time in human history, people argued that slavery was morally wrong. By 1760, Quakers formed the colonies’ first abolitionist society had formed among the Quakers. Ben Franklin eventually became its President.

In the UK, with its long history of both individual rights and Christianity, the Enlightenment led to classical liberalism. As John Locke wrote in his 2nd Treatise of Government, God gave man the right to life, liberty, and property. No man could give away those rights, nor could a government infringe upon them except for war and law enforcement. Other rights, such as freedom of speech and the right to democratically elect a representative of one’s choice, were derived from and were necessary to enjoy these God-given rights.

It’s noteworthy that the Anglo Enlightenment reached its apogee in the United States in 1776, when Thomas Jefferson wrote the preamble to The Declaration of Independence:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

Those words came from numerous inspirations, not least John Locke.

But even as the new United States was busy creating a constitutional framework for this new, classically liberal nation, the Enlightenment was reaching a different, bloody conclusion in France. In the crucible of the French Revolution, all of the modern ills of Western civilization were being born: socialism, the police state, state terrorism, state-sponsored atheism, and a war on Christianity as a first step to destroying Western Civilization, then for socialists to rule over the ruins.

All of history since 1792 has been a competition to see whether the French or the American Revolution will win in the West. Let us hope, on this, the 250th year of our nation’s birth, that it is the latter.

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