5fish
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IT can be said our American Revolution was a civil war just like the one that happen 70 years later...
“Every great revolution is a civil war,” as David Armitage has recently remarked. That insight could change the way we think about the American Revolution.
David Ramsay, the first patriot historian of the war, held that the Revolution was “originally a civil war in the estimation of both parties.”
Mercy Otis Warren wrote that the fires of civil war were kindled as early as the Boston massacre. But in the narratives of these historians, the moment the United States declared independence was the moment the conflict stopped being a civil war.
What we tell ourselves...
The assumptions that underpin that story are worth challenging: that the division between British and American became absolute at the moment of the Declaration, that a new nation was born in that instant, and that the only distinction that mattered was the one between the United States and its enemies. Of course that’s the story early patriot historians told. It was a story that projected backwards the unity and sovereignty they wanted to foster in the new nation.
WE were fight ourselves...
That picture may have looked accurate for Massachusetts, at least until disorder in the western country overtook the state in the 1780s, but on the coast of Rhode Island, in the Hudson Valley and the New Jersey “Neutral Zone”, on the Delmarva peninsula, and all across the South, things were quite different.[2] The Revolution was a story of dissolving sovereignty and contested authority, lawless violence and the search for security. Its true theorist was not John Locke, but Thomas Hobbes
WE fighting ourselves...
Once we consider the American Revolution as a civil war, it’s easier to integrate the broader world of violence and division that often gets left out of the Revolutionary narrative: the Regulator movements of South and North Carolina, the march of the Paxton boys, land riots in Maine and New York, separatist movements in Vermont and Franklin, and the rural insurrections that swept the west up to the conquest of the Whiskey Rebels in 1794.
We were looking for protection...
As imperial sovereignty broke down, first in the borderlands and then in the heart of the colonies themselves, it left a disparate set of ex-colonists to construct new forms of authority. They did so in overlapping and piecemeal ways, creating struggles in the process that would continue for decades and centuries. New authorities won the allegiance of anxious Americans by offering protection for persons and property: in doing so, they promised to crush Indians and open new land for white ownership; in the south, they fought to restore the slave regime and reverse the effects of the slaves’ own “revolution within a revolution.”[4] Among themselves, they struggled to allocate power—and to locate sovereignty—within the federal union.
LINK: https://earlyamericanists.com/2014/02/18/was-the-american-revolution-a-civil-war/
But if you view the Revolution as another civil war, the religious histories of the two conflicts look more alike. In the Revolution, Americans fought against Americans as the Patriots seceded from the British Empire. Many American Loyalists hoped that God was on their side against the Patriot rebels, and after the final battle at Yorktown, Virginia, in 1781, they experienced the same dark disappointment as Confederates did eighty-four years later.
It seems we had internal struggles before the war... It was a failing of British rule that led to our revolution. The failure to protect the colonist in a wild land...
“Every great revolution is a civil war,” as David Armitage has recently remarked. That insight could change the way we think about the American Revolution.
David Ramsay, the first patriot historian of the war, held that the Revolution was “originally a civil war in the estimation of both parties.”
Mercy Otis Warren wrote that the fires of civil war were kindled as early as the Boston massacre. But in the narratives of these historians, the moment the United States declared independence was the moment the conflict stopped being a civil war.
What we tell ourselves...
The assumptions that underpin that story are worth challenging: that the division between British and American became absolute at the moment of the Declaration, that a new nation was born in that instant, and that the only distinction that mattered was the one between the United States and its enemies. Of course that’s the story early patriot historians told. It was a story that projected backwards the unity and sovereignty they wanted to foster in the new nation.
WE were fight ourselves...
That picture may have looked accurate for Massachusetts, at least until disorder in the western country overtook the state in the 1780s, but on the coast of Rhode Island, in the Hudson Valley and the New Jersey “Neutral Zone”, on the Delmarva peninsula, and all across the South, things were quite different.[2] The Revolution was a story of dissolving sovereignty and contested authority, lawless violence and the search for security. Its true theorist was not John Locke, but Thomas Hobbes
WE fighting ourselves...
Once we consider the American Revolution as a civil war, it’s easier to integrate the broader world of violence and division that often gets left out of the Revolutionary narrative: the Regulator movements of South and North Carolina, the march of the Paxton boys, land riots in Maine and New York, separatist movements in Vermont and Franklin, and the rural insurrections that swept the west up to the conquest of the Whiskey Rebels in 1794.
We were looking for protection...
As imperial sovereignty broke down, first in the borderlands and then in the heart of the colonies themselves, it left a disparate set of ex-colonists to construct new forms of authority. They did so in overlapping and piecemeal ways, creating struggles in the process that would continue for decades and centuries. New authorities won the allegiance of anxious Americans by offering protection for persons and property: in doing so, they promised to crush Indians and open new land for white ownership; in the south, they fought to restore the slave regime and reverse the effects of the slaves’ own “revolution within a revolution.”[4] Among themselves, they struggled to allocate power—and to locate sovereignty—within the federal union.
LINK: https://earlyamericanists.com/2014/02/18/was-the-american-revolution-a-civil-war/
But if you view the Revolution as another civil war, the religious histories of the two conflicts look more alike. In the Revolution, Americans fought against Americans as the Patriots seceded from the British Empire. Many American Loyalists hoped that God was on their side against the Patriot rebels, and after the final battle at Yorktown, Virginia, in 1781, they experienced the same dark disappointment as Confederates did eighty-four years later.
It seems we had internal struggles before the war... It was a failing of British rule that led to our revolution. The failure to protect the colonist in a wild land...