A distinguished historian of the Revolution restores some of its
luster. Presenting his own essays from 1947 to 1975 as a sort of
historian's progress, Edmund Morgan challenges the Revolution's
various detractors - or, as he might put it, invokes the
Revolutionary record as challenge. Against the contention that
colonial opposition to Parliamentary taxation was shifty
opportunism, he cites consistent objections to taxation without
representation. To those, led by Charles Beard, who see economic
self-interest as the revolutionists' motivation, he points out that
property was deemed synonymous with liberty (the very reason for
opposition to externally-imposed taxation). Taking the
revolutionists at their words, moreover, he traces the 18th-century
shift from preoccupation with saving individual souls to saving
governments from corruption - by asserting three cardinal political
principles: that one people ought not to rule another, that a
people can act independently of a government, that a large
(national) republic is the best safeguard against tyranny of the
majority. Still another strand is the role of the Puritan Ethic,
which caused the Revolution to be regarded as "a defense of
industry and frugality, whether in rulers or people, from the
assaults of British vice." The question of attitudes toward work
leads to the problem of slavery and "the central paradox of
American history: the simultaneous growth of slavery and of the
devotion to freedom that animated the leaders of the Revolution."
By curtailing the growth of a discontented white laboring class,
black slavery, he finds, nourished white representative government.
Ultimately the yoke was broken - via the Northwest Ordinance, under
which the rebellious western states entered the union on equal
terms with existing states, thus paving the way for reducing other
inequities. Closely argued and extensively documented, Morgan's
multiple theses gain interest and force in juxtaposition. A
substantial contribution to the ongoing Revolutionary reappraisal.
(Kirkus Reviews)
Essays written over the past thirty years assess the American
Revolution's abstract and specifically contemporary importance and
study factors and events seen as contributing directly to American
independence and a national consciousness.
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