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The American Revolution’s Long Tail

Throughout US history, social movements—from reformist to radical—have returned to the language and ideals of 1776.

The American Revolution was not conceived as an egalitarian undertaking. It helped secure a society committed to the dispossession of Indigenous peoples and, for many participants, the preservation and expansion of Black slavery. These were not incidental blemishes. They were embedded in the nation at its founding.

And yet the Revolution also advanced claims that went beyond the intentions of its leading figures. Independence was accomplished through ordinary men and women gathering in the streets and discovering a sense of themselves as political actors. Whatever its limits, the Revolution marked a step toward universal liberty and equality—often despite, and sometimes directly against, the preferences of the founders themselves.

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What is striking, over the long sweep of US history, is how often later social movements—from reformist to radical to revolutionary—drew inspiration from the Revolution. Abolitionists and suffragists, socialists and labor organizers, civil-rights leaders and LGBTQ activists, all cited the language and ideals of 1776. Today, when the stakes are so high, we can, and should, draw inspiration from it as well.

Despite all the smarmy flag-waving and President Donald Trump’s perverse invocation of a revolt against monarchy to justify the imposition of one-man rule, the true legacy of the Revolution remains a resource for those of us who have not given up on the idea that our mongrel, messed-up nation might yet be made a means, as Thomas Paine put it, to “begin the world over again.”

“See your declaration, Americans!!! Do you understand your own language?”  —DAVID WALKER, antislavery activist, Appeal to the Colored   Citizens of the World (1829)

In 1776, shortly after signing the Declaration of Independence, a 23-year-old mixed-race former indentured servant from New England spied a glaring contradiction. In a country founded on the idea that all men were created equal, how could slavery continue to exist? “A Negro,” wrote Lemuel Haynes, “has an undeniable right to his Liberty. Consequently, the practice of Slave-keeping, which so much abounds in this land, is illicit.”

If white Americans wanted freedom from Britain, they could not deny it to the enslaved.

“Jefferson, of course, had meant no such thing,” Thomas Richards Jr. writes in his new book, The Unfinished Business of 1776. “But the power of the written word is that it can always be torn away from its author’s original meaning. In this way, the Declaration of Independence became used as an antislavery document within months of its publication.”

For all its flaws, the American Revolution called into question the morality of the institution of slavery. Northern states would begin to abolish the practice precisely because even many white citizens came to believe, with Haynes, that it was inconsistent with the principles of the Revolution.

Abolitionists argued that “all men are created equal” was not just high-flown rhetoric cooked up to justify independence from Britain; it was a binding moral commitment. The first Colored Convention, held in Philadelphia in 1830, called the Declaration “that inestimable and invaluable instrument,” a tool for ending human bondage.

“What, to the American slave, is your Fourth of July?” Frederick Douglass famously asked in Rochester on July 5, 1852. Throughout the antebellum period, many Black Americans postponed their Independence Day celebrations by a day to protest the nation’s refusal to live up to the Declaration’s ideals. For an enslaved person, or one who, like Douglass, had been born in bondage before finding his way to a tenuous form of freedom in the North, the national holiday exposed “the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim.”

Douglass told the assembled notables: “This Fourth of July is yours, not mine. You may rejoice, I must mourn.”

Yet Douglass did not reject the Revolution. The founders’ ideals were “saving principles,” he said, and enslaved people, not slaveholders, were their truest custodians. Historians have often called the Civil War a “second American Revolution.” By ending slavery in the United States, it continued, even if it did not complete, the unfinished business of the first. 

“It was we, the people; not we, the white male citizens…”  —SUSAN B. ANTHONY, suffragist, in an 1873 speech after she  was arrested and fined for voting in a presidential election

In July 1848, at the women’s-rights convention in Seneca Falls, New York, Elizabeth Cady Stanton read aloud a text announcing the principles of the movement. “We hold these truths to be self-evident,” it began, “that all men and women are created equal.”

King George III was long gone; man, qua man, had taken his place as the tyrant that needed to be overthrown.“He has made her, if married, in the eye of the law, civilly dead,” the document charged. “He has........

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