American Revolution: Historic ‘shot’ or misfire?

 

American Revolution: Historic ‘shot’ or misfire?

 Revisionist history

 

Gordon L. Weil

 

            By the rude bridge that arched the flood,

                        Their flag to April’s breeze unfurled,

            Here once the embattled farmers stood,

                        And fired the shot heard round the world.

 

That’s the first verse of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s American classic poem.

 

The final words carry great meaning, but a recent New Yorker magazine article asserts that Thomas Jefferson and John Adams got it all wrong.  The poem, about the opening battle of the Revolutionary War in 1775, had almost a reverse impact, according to recent books that see that war as a British victory.

 

In their view, the American Revolution has meant little to the world.  Worries about the end of America as a model for the world, a project of the current president, are overrated.  Nothing much is lost by the abandonment of that model, the piece implies, because it never worked.

 

The Revolution was the first major expression against colonialism, a form of imperialism.   Control by a distant monarch, selected by “the grace of God,” was ended and replaced by a government responsible to the people.   Wasn’t this shot “heard round the world?”

 

We are reminded that Lord Cornwallis, whose surrender to General Washington ended the war, was transferred to the British Empire in India, using outright terror to establish control there.  India and many other places later fell to British domination.   By quitting the U.S., the article says, the Brits freed themselves for those colonial adventures, making them the real winners.

 

This view is both short-sighted and narrow minded.

 

The theory is that the American Revolution produced no further progress toward ending colonialism in the following decades.  Britain and France piled up many new colonies.  Even the U.S. was a colonial power when it came to Indians.

 

This analysis ignored an event as important as Canadian internal self-government achieved in 1867, not accidentally right after the American Civil War.   Other countries emerged in that century, but the U.S. gets no credit.  

 

Even worse, this analysis stops too soon.  In the aftermath of the Second World War, colonialism gave way to tens of new independent states.  What began in Massachusetts in 1775 has been relived in Latin America, Africa and Asia.  The North Vietnamese Declaration of Independence was modeled on the American.  The precedent mattered.

 

Even worse, the belief that nobody heard the echo of the Concord muskets is almost entirely based on a geographical analysis.  Could the American Revolution be relevant to uprisings in distant Latin America?  Simon Bolivar, who led rebellions there against the Spanish, knew it was.

 

It was not so much throwing off colonial rulers as the vision of the Founders that continues to be felt round the world.  Even if the U.S. does not achieve its ideals, the fact that it has pursued them reverberates. 

 

American power and wealth have brought it respect; American ideals have brought it admiration.  The respect is sometimes grudging; the admiration is often practical.

 

The U.S. has been the chief initiator of at least four principles:  the recognition of individual liberty based on natural rights, a working method of organizing popular democracy, federalism, and the establishment of a nationality based on a shared civic ethic rather than on royal fealty, religious belief or ethnic origin.

 

The Bill of Rights remains the leading expression of the rights of people against the power of government.   Not one other country has adopted a statement as strong as the First Amendment provisions on the freedom of speech and religion and the right to assemble.

 

The separation of powers, meant to restrain the natural trend toward rule by a single person, is an ingenious and practical application of the ideas of English philosopher John Locke.  

 

The functions of government are divided into legislative, executive and judicial, with each able to limit the others.  That concept still grows.  As recently as 2009, the U.K. finally created an independent Supreme Court.  Previously, its top judges sat as voting members of the legislative House of Lords. 

 

The U.S. was formed by 13 colonies spread over 1,000 miles and counting almost three million people.  Sovereignty is shared between the people as citizens of a nation and as citizens of each state.  New states have the same status as the original states.  The American system has become a model of federalism.

 

The Constitution unifies the nation.   Public officials pledge to “support and defend the Constitution” not the U.S. as a country.  This is the unifying civil ethic, not a narrow or forced allegiance.   This notion of a shared commitment as the unifying force has spread in the world.

 

All this is now in jeopardy.  As a political issue, it is expressed as “the survival of democracy.”  At stake is not only a political system, but the binding strength and durability of American ideals.