To be sure, there have been rebellions throughout history. But, e.g., the German Peasants’ War of 1524 and 1525 had no ideological system, no analysis of history, and no rational or empirical program to justify or explain itself, and had little idea what it would do if it succeeded.
By contrast, the American Revolution analyzed both the past and the present, evaluating and comparing both. The independence movement based its actions on an examination of human nature and a systematic worldview, as historian Jill Lapore writes:
“I offer nothing more than simple facts, plain arguments, and common sense,” Thomas Paine, the spitfire son of an English grocer, wrote in Common Sense, in 1776. Kings have no right to reign, Paine argued, because, if we could trace hereditary monarchy back to its beginnings — “would we take off the dark covering of antiquity, and trace them to their first rise” — we’d find “the first of them nothing better than the principal ruffian of some restless gang.” James Madison explained Americans’ historical skepticism, this deep empiricism, this way: “Is it not the glory of the people of America, that, whilst they have paid a decent regard to the opinions of former times and other nations, they have not suffered a blind veneration for antiquity, for custom, or for names, to overrule the suggestions of their own good sense, the knowledge of their own situation, and the lessons of their own experience?” Evidence, for Madison, was everything.
Obviously influenced by John Locke’s political writings, the founders of the United States were also influenced by Locke’s philosophical writings, and by the not-so-obvious link between Locke’s politics and his epistemology.
The independence movement studied the past, not in order to slavishly imitate it, but rather to take only the best from it. Indeed, the American Revolution contains within itself the consciousness of major points in world history: working backward from the English Bill of Rights of 1689, to the Magna Carta 1215, to Roman law, to Greek political thought, to the historical events recorded in both the New and Old Testaments.
Rather than viewing history as simply precedent to be copied, the American Revolution saw history as a data set, a collection of evidence, and the task was to formulate conclusions based on the raw material of history.
“A new era for politics is struck, Paine wrote, his pen aflame, and “a new method of thinking hath arisen.” Declaring independence was itself an argument about the relationship between the present and the past, an argument that required evidence of a very particular kind: historical evidence. That’s why most of the Declaration of Independence is a list of historical claims. “To prove this,” Jefferson wrote, “let fact be submitted to a candid world.”
Writers have been using ‘The American Experiment’ as a phrase to capture the distinct nature of the country’s origins. This phrase has been used at least since an 1860 article in the New York Daily Tribune and perhaps since even earlier dates.
In any case, this phrase articulates the rational approach found in the writings of the independence movement. This was no rebellion of blind anger. It was a deliberate response, not only to the immediate aggression of Britain toward America, but also to the development of civilization over millennia, and the rational analysis of that development.
Facts, knowledge, experience, proof. These words come from the law. Around the seventeenth century, they moved into what was then called “natural history”: astronomy, physics, chemistry, geology. By the eighteenth century they were applied to history and to politics, too. These truths: this was language of reason, of enlightenment, of inquiry, and of history. In 1787, then, when Alexander Hamilton asked “whether societies of men are really capable or not of establishing good government from reflection and choice, or whether they are forever destined to depend for their political constitutions on accident and force,” that was the kind of question a scientist asks before beginning an experiment. Time alone would tell.
Unlike the Constitution of the United Kingdom, which is a haphazard accretion of precedents accumulated over centuries, ad hoc inventions dealing with specific situations rather than general principles, the Constitution of the United States is an expression of an axiomatic body of thought, stated in general principles so as to apply to various unforeseen situations and developments.
The intellectual foundation of the American Revolution is found in Thomas Paine’s Common Sense and The Crisis, in the speeches and writings of James Otis, Samuel Adams, and Patrick Henry. It is found in the works of John Locke, and in both the Federalist Papers and the Anti-Federalist Papers.
There was no philosophical or ideological program behind the Constitution of the United Kingdom. To be sure, the American Revolution respected and even copied certain aspects of that British Constitution. But instead of allowing a series of situational precedents to slowly accumulate into a structure of governance, the independence movement chose to begin with foundational principles which can be stated in ways which free them from a specific context and thereby capture a general truth in paradigmatic form which can then be applied to new situations as they arise. This was the rationalist bent in the creation of the United States.
