The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution draws upon writings and speeches you might not have heard of.
When people think about the American Revolution, they tend to recall the well-known works: Common Sense, the Declaration of Independence, and George Washington’s Valley Forge message. What often goes overlooked are the numerous pamphlets and sermons that shaped the colonists’ worldview and pushed them toward revolution in the first place.
In his 1967 work The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, Bernard Bailyn undertakes the substantial task of reviving these less celebrated texts for our historical memory. Through extensive quotations, Bailyn demonstrates how writers before and during the Revolution condemned the corrosive influence of Robert Walpole (Britain’s first prime minister), protested executive encroachment on legislatures, and sought to pinpoint the moment when tariffs began to count as internal taxes. Bailyn’s takeaway is clear: the ideological roots of the American Revolution were simultaneously deeply libertarian and intensely paranoid.
We now understand that London enacted the Stamp Act and sent soldiers to Boston because the clumsy British administration was attempting to raise revenue while keeping its unruly colonies in line. Yet the authors of the era viewed every English move as part of a conspiracy to reduce the colonists to a state of servitude through standing armies and burdensome taxation.
Their familiar conclusion, then as now: true American liberty could be safeguarded only by an autonomous revolutionary government grounded in the consent of the governed and dedicated to protecting individual rights.
