No matter how hard you work, it’s likely that academics work even harder at not thinking.
That’s one of the lessons of David Lefer’s superb new history of the American Revolution and the early Republic, The Founding Conservatives: How a Group of Unsung Heroes Saved the American Revolution.
For decades, leading academic historians of the Revolution like Gordon Wood and Bernard Bailyn have been emphasizing its radicalism, focusing on the ways in which it broke down traditional class distinctions in American society, opening politics up to people of lower social backgrounds. In this way, this school of history projects a continuity between the Revolution and the Jacksonian period half a century later.
University historians have then asked why it is that the Constitutional Convention represented a Conservative reaction, presenting this as a mystery. But is it one? Or is it simply that their focus has distorted their understanding?
By emphasizing the most democratic and anti-capitalist figures of the Revolution, they implicitly promote their own Left-wing beliefs. Thus, we inevitably read about the unwillingness of tenant farmers during the war to pay rents they owed to the owners of landed estates. Or we read about extension of the franchise or the activities of associations of working men.
Necessarily, this view celebrates the radical egalitarians of the Revolution, men like Thomas Paine and Samuel Adams. So Paine is, of course, a part of our regular high school curriculum, and Adams lends his name to
