The Radicalism of the American Revolution vs. the French Rev
"It is indeed true that our Revolution was strikingly unlike that of France, and that most of those who originated it had no other than political programme." The American and French Revolutions were both bourgeois revolutions fought under the banner of the "rights of man"-individual liberty, equality before the law, opposition to tyrannical government. Yet these upheavals were very different from one another. The Great French Revolution of 1789-1793 was the most radical of the bourgeois revolutions. What happened in France was a radical social revolution. What happened in the America of Washington and Jefferson was not because of the hypocrisy of the chattel slavery system that remained intact after the American Revolution. France underwent a massive downward redistribution of wealth and a radical change in class structure. Not so in America. How is it that the democratic principles inscribed in the Declaration of Independence were written by a slaveholder? The basic underlying cause of the War of Independence was the increasing conflict of economic interests between the propertied classes in the American colonies-Southern plantation owners and Northern merchant-traders-and Britain's ruling circles. In order to mobiliz
The landed nobility, most of who fled the country in fear for their lives, ceased to exist as a ruling class. But since the overwhelming majority of Southern planters (including Jefferson) were not willing to give up their valuable "property," he postponed this liberating act to a future generation. Jefferson and the other founding fathers were not simply cynics and hypocrites who outwardly professed principles in which they did not believe. Never yet could I find that a black had uttered a thought above the level of plain narration. In France, the revolutionary turmoil enabled the peasants to seize the land from the feudal-derived aristocracy. The American War of Independence was a conflict within the English derived propertied classes on the two sides of the Atlantic, although a sizable section of the upper classes in the colonies remanin3ed loyal to Britain. " Jefferson did not even free his slaves when he was dying, as Washington did. The American Revolution was led throughout by the propertied classes-- Washington and Jefferson representing the Southern plantation owners, the Adams family in Massachusetts representing Northern mercantile capital. Ellis, a critical student of Jefferson's thought, commented: "He thereby kept his principles pure and intact by placing them in a time capsule; there they could stay until that appropriate moment in the future when the world was ready for them. This doctrine, in this country, and in every country cannot fail of producing either a general insurrection, or general emancipation. In America, as Washington and Jefferson regarded slavery as a temporary evil, the subsequent generation of Southern plantation owners declared slavery to be the economic basis of a superior civilization, namely their own. One political opponent, the Federalist Timothy Pickering, baited Jefferson that he refused to support the black rebels on Saint-Domingue [Haiti] because they were "guilty" of having a "skin not colored like our own. Jefferson's positions and apparent hypocrisy with regard to slavery and black oppression were subject to sharp attacks in his own lifetime.
Common topics in this essay:
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Saint-Domingue Haiti,
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Acceptance Essays
