A SIMPLE VINDICATION OF OUR RIGHTS AS ENGLISHMEN:

Early in Bailyn's career, the reigning academic orthodoxy--inspired by Progressive Era historians like Charles Beard--held that the American Revolution was hardly revolutionary and that the complaints of tyranny coming from the patriots were really propaganda to disguise and defend their economic self-interest. Bailyn disagreed: He had spent years studying the pamphlet literature produced by the colonists, and saw in their writings genuine conviction.

Bailyn noticed in these texts deep discourses on the nature of power, fear or even paranoia about liberty and tyranny, and any number of conspiracy theories. He traced the pedigree of these modes of writing and thinking back nearly a century. The Whig radicals and the "country" opposition literature that could be found in English pamphlets during the days of the Glorious Revolution created the ideological and rhetorical lenses through which the American colonists would interpret the crises with Britain in the 1760s, like the clash over the Stamp Act and the stationing of British troops in Boston.

As Bailyn put it in the foreword to his most acclaimed work, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (1967), "Study of the pamphlets confirmed my rather old-fashioned view that the American Revolution was above all else an ideological, constitutional, political struggle." At its core, the American Revolution was formed, fueled, and fought with ideas; ideas that would have implications for and effects on the American people and the republic they would establish. Through what Bailyn imaginatively called the "contagion of liberty," these ideas would spread and allow other ideas concerning the abolition of slavery, the disestablishment of religion, and the expansion of democratic rights, to take root and grow.

Tweet   @brothersjudd