Revolutionary Thoughts

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Artwork by Caroline Furlong via NightCafe (please forgive the AI’s inability to spell)

A Revolution Not Made, but Prevented

An essay published in the collection Rights and Duties (Spence Publishing Company, 1997)

For rightly apprehending the purpose and the character of the written Constitution of the United States, one needs knowledge of that Revolution, or War of Independence, which had parted the original thirteen colonies from their old source of order and authority, the Crown in Parliament. For in essence the Constitution was drawn up to re-establish a civil social order.

Was the American War of Independence a revolution? In the view of Edmund Burke and the English Whig factions generally, it was not the sort of political and social overturn that the word revolu­tion has come to signify nowadays. Rather, it paralleled that alteration of government in Britain which accompanied the accession of William and Mary to the throne, and which is styled, somewhat confusingly, “The Glorious Revolution of 1688.”

Burke’s learned editor E. J. Payne summarizes Burke’s account of the events of 1688 and 1689 as (in the phrase of Sir Joseph Jekyll) “in truth and in substance, a revolution not made, but prevented.” Let us see how that theory may be applicable to North American events nine decades later.

We need first to examine definitions of that ambiguous word revolution. The signification of the word was altered greatly by the catastrophic events of the French Revolution, commencing only two years after the Constitutional Convention of the United States. Before the French explosion of 1789 and 1790, revolution commonly was em­ployed to describe a round of periodic or recurrent changes or events—that is, the process of coming full cycle, or the act of rolling back or moving back, a return to a point previously occupied.

Not until the French radicals utterly overturned the old political and social order in their country did the word revolution acquire its present general meaning of a truly radical change in social and govern­mental institutions, a tremendous convulsion in society, producing huge alterations that might never be undone. When the eighteenth-century Whigs praised the Revolution of 1688, which established their party’s domination, they did not mean that William and Mary, the Act of Settlement, and the Bill of Rights had produced a radically new English political and social order. On the contrary, they argued that the English Revolution had restored tried and true constitutional practices, pre­servative of immemorial ways. It was James II, they contended, who had been perverting the English constitution. His overthrow had been a return to the old constitutional order. The Revolution of 1688, in short, had been a healthy reaction, not a bold innovation.

But what of the events in North America from 1775 to 1781? Was the War of lndependence no revolution?

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