Wikidworld (#132) / Is the United States on the Brink of Civil War? The American Revolution Provides the Closest Analogy.
The American Revolution was an extraordinarily violent struggle, with most fighting close at hand and with death rates higher than in any other American war besides the Civil War.
I’ve just finished reading Stacy Schiff’s page-turning (and extremely witty) biography of Samuel Adams, The Revolutionary, which has me thinking about analogies between our current national crisis and other significant and challenging moments in history. While the American Civil War has provided the most commonly invoked historical comparison to our present situation, the American Revolution – imagined as both an anti-imperial rebellion and as a civil war – may prove the better and more interesting analogy.
This is not a straight shot. More of a bank shot. One might assume some correspondence between radical revolutionaries such as Patrick Henry, Thomas Paine, or Samuel Adams and progressive radicals such as Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez aligned today with the Democratic Party. And there is, of course, a bit of truth in an imagined genetic thread between the egalitarian, media savvy radicalism of a Sam Adams and the brand of radicalism practiced today by a politician such as AOC.
In all honesty, however, the Democratic Party version of establishment liberalism today often more closely resembles the inert, reactive movements of a tired regime. Indeed, one of the appealing ironies of this comparison is that it aligns the Democratic Party and the Biden Administration closer to the British Crown government and to the Loyalist (or Tory) factions within the colonies themselves. Certainly in the public mind, the Biden Administration’s style more closely resembles the plodding, arhythmic, tone-deaf stumbles of the British imperial government under George III than to the nimble, syncopated, confident dance moves of the colonial rebels (captured in the musical Hamilton).
To illustrate, consider how liberal surprise and outrage about the (undeniably skilled) perfidy of right-wing media today echoes the Loyalist and British response to Samuel Adams, who was in many respects an Andrew Breitbart or Steve Bannon of his era. One of the more intriguing back-to-the-future insights from the Schiff biography is that Samuel Adams was demonstrably the first American to appreciate the value and pleasure of “owning the Libs.”
No one better mastered the art of provocation and propaganda in the service of the colonial cause against the British empire. According to one account, Adams seemed “to govern absolutely, publishing endless falsehoods, making use of various artifices to influence or terrify.” He single-handedly invented what we would today term the misinformation industry. His disinterest in and scorn for facts astounded, appalled, and drove to distraction his Loyalist and British crown adversaries, notably Massachusetts royal governors, Thomas Hutchinson and British general Thomas Gage.
From this perspective, it is the Republican Party in its current form that features in our contemporary drama as an insurgency with more than a passing resemblance to the revolutionaries themselves — disruptors of the status quo and challengers of an imperial order on behalf of provincial economic interests and cultural values. Indeed, conservative, Christian Republicans are already more than happy to promote this narrative.
Consider the many current right-wing “patriot” movements, most of which evince a Christian evangelical flavor (when they’re not evincing paramilitary, survivalist leanings and participating in “patriotic” assaults on the Capitol). These patriot movements align closely in our current culture war with well-funded right-wing educational initiatives such of Hillsdale College or the 1776 Project, which elevate the Patriots of the American Revolution as paragons of virtue, righteousness, and steely fortitude. They sip from the same fount as the more high-brow proponents of a “post-liberal” future that one encounters in the National Conservative movement.
I don’t propose these historical parallels in any pejorative sense. Studying the Revolution closely, one appreciates that the outcome of the struggle had little to do with the inherent virtue or moral superiority of the Patriot forces. Indeed, recent revisionist historiography from the left, such as that associated with the 1619 Project, has deconstructed the American Revolution in similar ways, with special focus on the commitment of the revolutionaries to a slave economy.
The parallels clearly make sense if one considers the federal government of the United States today as an imperial enterprise — which it is, both externally and internally. It also makes sense if one appreciates that those seeking to uproot the current order are, like the instigators of Revolution itself, largely white males fighting to preserve local prerogatives that are extractive and agrarian, and that include at their foundations racial subordination. Once you get out of New England, this is essentially the profile of the patriots of the American Revolution.
At the time of the Revolution, nearly three million people inhabited America east of the Mississippi River. These numbers included 2.2 million European settlers, 550,000 African slaves, and 150,000 Native Americans. New England and the Middle Atlantic colonies each contained about 700,000 residents, about 3-4 percent of whom were slaves (with enslaved percentage highest in New York).
The population of the Southern colonies exceeded 1.3 million, which included a high percentage of Scots-Irish immigrants and nearly 500,000 African slaves. Virginia and South Carolina were among the largest colonies, with slave populations in each exceeding 35 percent of the population. More than 90 percent of the enslaved population of the American colonies lived in the South. Significant populations of Native Americans, notably the Cherokees, also resided in the Southern territories.
The Patriot cause did not have unanimous popular support. An estimated 20 percent of white colonists remained loyal to the British crown during the Revolution, representing an influential counter-revolutionary element within the colonies that wished to remain part of Britain, particularly in the southern tier of the nation. Loyalists included political officials, Anglican clergy, and merchants with trade ties to Britain. Approximately 20,0000 Loyalists served in British regular and militia units during the war.
In Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville wrote "The War of Independence was a civil war among kinsmen. But in truth such a gentle and restrained civil war has hardly any parallel in the annals of the human race." This gauzy, romantic image of the war — largely reinforced by the bad history of the 1776 Project — belies reality. The American Revolution was an extraordinarily violent struggle, with most fighting close at hand and with death rates higher than in any other American war besides the Civil War.
Total casualties probably approached 35,000, well in excess of one percent of the entire population of the 13 colonies and possibly closer to four percent of the adult male population. Between 25,000 and 30,000 American Patriots died from battle wounds or disease over the course of the war. Estimates of the number of Loyalists who died from battle or disease approach 5,000 (for a vivid illustration of the violence, watch some of the early episodes of Turn, the streaming television series about the first spies of the Revolution).
Levels of violence between Patriots and Loyalists during the American Revolution varied across colonies and regions. Loyalists were a minority in strongly Patriot New England, so clashes there were limited. The Middle Colonies witnessed Loyalist harassment but less widespread fighting. The war between factions was most brutal in the Southern colonies, where Loyalist numbers were highest, fueling reprisals as areas changed hands. The presence of slaves, along with British efforts to arm them, also intensified the violence.
Fighting was especially ribald in Virginia, the Carolinas and Georgia, where close to 2,000 Loyalists were likely killed. The largest massacre of Loyalists occurred after the Battle of Kings Mountain in 1780 in present-day South Carolina, where nearly 600 surrendering soldiers were killed. Almost all recorded Loyalist deaths were in the South and in New York.
This demographic complexity allows us to free ourselves from the notion that there was “one American Revolution.” Colonists in different regions of the continent experienced — and therefore remembered — the Revolution in different ways. In New England, for example, in which relatively few Loyalists lived during the Revolution, the struggle was specifically anti-colonial and anti-imperial.
By contrast, in South Carolina, a bitter conflict between Patriots and Loyalists ensued and endured. Communities and families pursued each other “with as much relentless fury as beasts of prey.” The Southern experience far more closely resembled a genuine civil war. The concentration within the South of Patriots, Loyalists, black slaves, and indigenous tribes made for a toxic and volatile stew.
To be continued.