In his publicity tour to promote his documentary, The American Revolution, Ken Burns calls it “the most important event since the birth of Christ.” Since most of recorded history predates the birth of Christ by about 3,500 years, and since events like “development of agriculture” and “taming fire” happened long before recorded history, I’m inclined to let Burns have that one. But what exactly was the “event,” and what did it mean?
Americans are known around the world for being proud of their “freedom” without being nearly as interested in understanding what they are “free” of, what life was like before the Revolution, and what, exactly, the American Revolution changed that hadn’t changed during the various Reformations that preceded it.
As Americans celebrated the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, you may hear many of them repeat Burns’s claim, so I thought it might be worth exploring what the “event” was, and what was important about it.
Who Owns What
The Atlantic recently published “The Moral Foundation of America” by historian and professor Elaine Pagels, with the slug, “The idea that everyone has intrinsic rights to life and liberty was a radical break with millennia of human history. It’s worth preserving.” I think that is the fundamental difference between “before the American Revolution” and “after” that Burns and most Americans are thinking about when they talk about how important that event was. But I also think something deeper and more fundamental is going on, and it isn’t easy to identify unless you take an extremely long view of human history.
Academically speaking, of course, there was never just ‘one way’ of doing things. But if you consider what we know about human societies and how they organized themselves over time, and if you choose to over-simplify those organizations, there is an almost universal tension between “people who stay in one place” and “people who do not stay in one place” throughout recorded history.
According to the Wikipedia article on “History of agriculture“:
The development of agriculture about 12,000 years ago changed the way humans lived. They switched from nomadic hunter-gatherer lifestyles to permanent settlements and farming.
Wild grains were collected and eaten from at least 104,000 years ago.[2] However, domestication did not occur until much later. The earliest evidence of small-scale cultivation of edible grasses is from around 21,000 BC…
I do not claim that there is a clearly defined boundary between people who settled down in one place to raise crops and people who continued to wander to find resources; rather, I claim that the tension between those two general practices drove the development of what modern humans think of as ownership of land and the accumulation of what we call “wealth”.
Once human beings developed agriculture, the need to defend static crops or herds from invaders (including other humans, but also pests) and to expand trade markets became central to what defined a given society. How a society produced crops, defended its farms, and traded for other goods with its neighbors came to define the different cultures that we talk about today – and the development of different cultures was not unique to any particular group of people.
The Entitlement Mindset
If you have ever maintained a garden, you know how much work goes into it: building and preparing the ground, planting, weeding, tending, culling out unhealthy plants, scaring off birds and combating insects. And if you put in the work, you probably feel that you should benefit from the crop. That is what you are “entitled” to have as your reward for the effort. You made it; it is yours.
But what if someone who did none of that work comes along and demands the crop? Are they entitled to it? What if they have weapons? Are they entitled to take the food you grew, just because they are armed? What if they are armed because they own the land, and allowed you to do the work in exchange for protecting you from other, less deserving outsiders? Are they entitled to your crops, now?
Over several millennia, that is a scenario that played out thousands of times, evolving over generations and across continents. Who owned the land started out as a question of who had the most power, and as that power accumulated with certain families, it changed. If you read that Pagels article, you can see where the dynamics of power stood in ancient Babylon:
The anonymous Babylonian scribes who wrote the legal code of Hammurabi some 4,000 years ago seem to have regarded human value as a quality that the king could grant to certain people and deny to others. This code assigned privileges, and what we call “rights,” according to a strictly hierarchical view of social power.
The archaeologists who discovered Hammurabi’s code must have been surprised, at first, to see that it offered certain protections from mutilation, torture, and execution. But it became clear that these were dependent on one’s social rank. The king—who authorized the code—assigned punishments based on the social status of the offender and the victim.
These social ranks have taken different forms and been described in different ways, but it’s not hard to see how easily power and wealth were drawn up from the people doing the labor for the benefit of those at the “top” wielding the power. And those at the top needed to justify why they deserved to be at the top, deciding who got to eat, who got mutilated, or who got rewarded.
Divine Rights
In England, in the 1600s and 1700s, the King owned all of the land, and parceled it out to the landed gentry. These gentlemen would take their income from the people working the land, and they owed their power and a portion of the wealth they held to the King. Their tenants owned nothing and owed everything.
The North American colonies were not intended to be an experiment in overthrowing that order. In fact, most of the people who came from Europe intended to make kings of themselves, carving territory out of the “untamed wilderness,” and making their fortune and their name.
(Do I need to back that claim up, or is this an audience of genealogists who know exactly what their ancestors wanted?)
Of course, there were already people here, living in that “untamed wilderness.” They had tamed it for their purposes quite nicely, actually, and if their populations hadn’t been rapidly depleted by the diseases coming from Europe, they might have been more successful in their attempt to resist the incoming waves of settlers.
My personal theory is that over the two hundred years of colonial development, Europeans in North America absorbed quite a lot of ideas from their indigenous neighbors. I suspect the reason the American Revolution that led to the grand experiment of a democratically elected government owes as much to the ideas of individual liberty learned from the various Native tribes as it does to the Enlightenment philosophers we usually credit.
After all, democracy is not a “top-down” sort of concept; by its nature, it has to flow from the bottom-up… and most of those on the “bottom” had little time for intellectual pursuits. But they would have been highly motivated to understand their neighbors, and those who were most successful at doing that would have survived to impress their understanding on their children.
No More Kings
In case you weren’t aware, the idea of abandoning monarchy and primogeniture was not universally accepted, even by the Founders. If you don’t believe me, you should go read Pauline Maier’s excellent “Ratification: The People Debate the Constitution, 1787-1788,” which captures the arguments made for and against the Constitution in debates, pamphlets, and newspapers.
It is astounding how many people living in the America of the late 1780s considered our new form of government to be a violation of their faith, an atheist nightmare, and a doomed and dangerous abandonment of “our way of life.” Many of their intellectual descendants still want us to go back to that old way, but these days, they claim to be defending the Constitution as “our way of life,” even as they seek to concentrate power in the hands of wealthy landowners and deprive citizens of their right to vote.
But for now, we still have a say in how we are governed, and after the last two years, I hope it is clear who wishes to behave like a king, doling out favors and deciding on a whim who lives, who gets rewarded, and whose rights are stripped away. I hope I don’t need to hammer the point home.
And I hope you’ll help keep this experiment going on Election Day.
Go Vote, Cousins!
Say hello, cousin!