The Great Leap:

A Government Based Solely on “The People”

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BARBARA CLARK SMITH

“We have it in our power to begin the world over again.”

— THOMAS PAINE, 1776

IT MAY BE DIFFICULT TO UNDERSTAND, FROM OUR VANTAGE POINT IN THE twenty-first century, how great a leap it took for eighteenth-century colonists to declare themselves independent of Great Britain. Today, the idea that government in all its branches must arise from the consent of the governed is commonplace. We see the governed—the people—as the source of all legitimate authority. In other words, the people are sovereign. But that idea was not familiar to Britons on either side of the Atlantic in the year 1765.

During that era, the source of all authority in Britain was the “king-in-parliament,” a way of saying that it consisted of three different elements. One was the monarch, who had once claimed to be sovereign alone but who had been humbled over the centuries by repeated resistance and two outright revolutions. The second source of authority was an upper house of Parliament filled with hereditary lords and appointed bishops of the Church of England. Third was a lower house of the legislature, elected to represent the common people.

As contemporaries saw it, these authoritative institutions reflected the composition of their admittedly hierarchical society, which included the royal family; great land-holding lords of the realm; and ordinary people, or commoners. Each of these social groups had a voice, and the key to good government was to find the right balance among them. Too much royal power led to tyranny; too much power among aristocrats created oligarchy, or rule by the wealthy few; too much rule by the people, or democracy, would bring anarchy. Any of these imbalances, the theory ran, would destroy the liberties that Britons enjoyed.

In reality the supposed fit between society and government was far from perfect. True, the king was royal and the lords were lords. But the representatives who sat in the British House of Commons were in fact uncommon men. They were wealthy landowners and merchants, members of the gentry class elected by only a fraction of the people they were supposed to represent. By 1750, only about 17 percent of adult males in England owned enough property to qualify for the privilege of voting. So even voters were not average Englishmen (let alone Englishwomen).

In the nineteenth century, England would begin to reform its electoral system; in the eighteenth century, however, few Britons raised the question of whether their elected legislature was representative enough. Instead, they celebrated the fact that, compared with other monarchies such as France and Spain, Britain provided liberty through some measure of popular representation in Parliament and common law rights such as trial by jury. Besides, political authorities agreed that the representatives of the people should be superior to most of their constituents in social and economic terms. They believed that good government required education, wide experience, and the ability to take unpopular stands when necessary for the good of the nation. These were attributes that went with wealth, leisure, and social standing, so it followed that members of the social elite would best speak for the “common” man in Parliament.

In North America, authorities tried to replicate the British model. Each of the thirteen colonies on the continent had its own particular history and varied institutions, but by 1750 most were ruled by governors appointed by the British Crown, together with two-house legislatures consisting of an upper house, generally appointed, and an elected lower house, or assembly. It was all supposed to work as government did in England.

However, the societies in North America developed differently. Few hereditary aristocrats left the comforts of Britain for the less comfortable colonies. By contrast, common people—some with property, some with skills, but many with little besides their own ability to labor—came in substantial numbers. Some remained in poverty, but labor was a valuable commodity in the colonies, and land was ample by English standards, so that those who were free or could attain freedom might often gain a modicum of security. More by circumstance than intention, it developed that more men owned enough property to qualify as voters in the colonies than in England—an estimated 50 to 70 percent of adult free males in different provinces. Colonial societies were short on hereditary elites, long on middling men. So representatives in colonial assemblies, while socially superior to their constituents, were not always vastly above them in wealth or status. Judged by British theories of society and government, there seemed to be danger in the lack of hierarchy in most colonies. From one point of view, colonial societies were not unequal enough.

A land grant signed by Thomas Penn, son of William, deeding 350 acres of land—a substantial farm—in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, to Alexander McCammont. Credit 7

Yet there was another key difference between the American colonies and British society, one that would make a lasting impact on American ideas about “the people” and their freedoms. That difference was the institution of chattel slavery imposed on Africans, who were brought to North America in the hundreds of thousands to provide cheap labor for tobacco and rice planters on the continent. Slavery generated wealth for colonial merchants who traded in African captives; slave-produced tobacco, rice, or sugars; or European manufactures. In the southern colonies, slavery concentrated wealth and political power in the hands of a small group of great planters. Enslaved people constituted a class of permanently poor people—poorer and with less political sway than the poorest in Britain itself. When political observers wrote about British America’s relatively “equal” society, they were ignoring the presence and importance of slavery there.

By the middle of the eighteenth century, enslaved Africans made up roughly 18 percent of the colony of New York’s population, some 40 percent of Virginia’s population, and a slight majority of the population of South Carolina. Some Europeans questioned the morality of slavery, but it was hard then, as now, for people to think deeply about institutions that provided them great benefits. Besides, British colonists already accepted the idea that social hierarchy was normal, and the poorer among them commonly served as “indentures,” legally bound to labor for a particular master for a set term of years. In this context, chattel slavery had a plausible place. Only later would most European Americans begin to grapple with an institution that permanently consigned so many people into bondage.

In the meantime, other sources of social and economic inequality also created divisions among the growing colonial population. Wars with Britain’s rivals—the French and their Indian allies—made fortunes for colonial dealers who supplied the Royal Army and Navy, while they left impoverished widows and orphans, especially in New England towns. And great landholders in many colonies pushed to collect rents on their lands. Over time, people could see the growth of elite classes in the appearance of fine houses, fashionable dress, and a growing consumption of imported luxury goods. As elites adopted the manners and fashions of Britain, colonists could congratulate themselves on becoming more like England. In 1764, one royal governor, Sir Francis Bernard, thought the time was ripe to establish a class of American aristocrats to help rule the colonies. “A Nobility appointed by the King for life and made independent,” he wrote, “would probably give strength and stability to the American governments, as effectually as an hereditary Nobility does to that of Great Britain.” It was a reasonable prediction of the direction that the colonies might take. But things were about to move in an unexpected direction.

Rhode Island silversmith Samuel Casey made this teapot and decorated it with the Robinson family crest around 1752, when Abigail Robinson married John Wanton, son of the colonial governor.

Paul Revere created this image of “the Bloody Massacre” in Boston in 1770 to fuel American outrage at British policies. Print made from Revere’s plate in 1832.

Defending Representative Government

When colonists began to argue with the British government in the mid-1760s, no one intended to question the very basis of the empire or the first principles of sovereignty. Instead, the rift started with an issue of taxes. Colonists were accustomed to taxes, which typically originated in the provincial assemblies that were supposed to represent the common people of the colonies. A royal governor could request revenues, but it was the assembly that had to pass such a law. After the French and Indian War (1754–63), however, the British Treasury faced a substantial debt. Convincing thirteen legislatures to help with funds would be inefficient if not impossible. So Parliament took a new approach. It passed laws—the Sugar Act and Stamp Act—to raise revenue directly, bypassing the legislative assemblies elected by colonial voters in each province.

Americans objected that Parliament lacked legislative authority over them. They insisted that those who enacted colonial laws and taxes needed to be chosen by colonial voters and share basic interests with their constituents and neighbors. Legislatures were authoritative only when they actually represented the people governed by their laws. A gathering of delegates from nine colonial legislatures, called the Stamp Act Congress, explained the principle in 1765: “The only Representatives of the People of these Colonies, are Persons chosen therein by themselves.” This was not opposition to government or to taxes, but rather a defense of the representative governments to which colonists were long accustomed.

“Patriots” in America also defended other familiar colonial institutions, including common law juries, locally chosen officials, and popular crowds (or “mobs”). Parliament saw colonists use these institutions to prevent the execution of the Stamp Act. In response, British leaders appointed their own officials in the colonies, provided them with broad authority to search private stores, and established courts with appointed judges (and no juries) to try disputed cases. Again colonists felt aggrieved. Now Parliament was bypassing colonial juries and local officials to make law enforcement less accountable to colonial public opinion. Britain went so far as to send troops to Boston in 1768 in order to defend royal officials and enforce the laws. For their part, patriots viewed the military occupation of a colonial city as an unconstitutional effort to suppress the voice of “the people” there. They saw evidence that British policymakers considered inhabitants of the colonies as having fewer rights and freedoms than Britons at home.

Maryland lawyer Daniel Dulany disputed the claim that Parliament “virtually” represented American colonists in this influential pamphlet (1766) opposing the Stamp Act.

The Virginia Gazette, published in Williamsburg, declared itself “Open to All Parties but Influenced by None.” Newspaper publication and readership skyrocketed during the dispute with Britain.

As colonial legislatures opposed British policies, many governors simply dissolved those assemblies. So leadership in the resistance fell to unofficial groups, such as local committees, often called “Sons of Liberty.” Patriots organized locally and used the public press to share their views with one another. Widespread literacy, especially among men, made possible the effective circulation of ideas through pamphlets, newspapers, and other print products. Even illiterate people could listen to and debate current events when someone read aloud in a tavern or a private household. Growing numbers of colonists discussed republican ideas of the common good, Enlightenment ideas of human rights, and liberal ideas of individual freedom.

The most inclusive arena of patriot politics involved ordinary free colonists and put their ideas at the heart of the movement. From 1765 to 1776, patriots created new economic networks by forming nonimportation and nonconsumption agreements. Merchants agreed not to import expensive British goods, and consumers agreed not to purchase such imports as fine fabrics, furnishings, or tea. Colonists hoped that the loss of revenue would convince British merchants and manufacturers to lobby Parliament for change.

Equally important, these associations helped bridge social divisions among Americans. Colonists who rarely participated in politics could sign such agreements and help to enforce them. Ordinary artisans and farmers contributed as patriotic producers of goods, and they insisted on serving alongside traders and professional men on the local committees that enforced the trade agreements. Women did not serve on formal patriot committees, but they could produce homespun fabrics to replace imports and sacrifice imported tea to show their political loyalties. The boycotts required the wealthy to put aside imported styles to buy plainer products from their neighbors—linen spun by colonial women and woven by colonial weavers; gloves made by colonial glovers, tanners, and farmers; and herbal brews sold by country people to replace tea. Elites renounced fine British clothing and donned homespun to show that they did not aspire to look or live like wealthy gentlemen or aristocrats. The movement thus promoted the idea that there were patriotic and unpatriotic economic choices. Patriots should put aside self-interest for the good of the whole community.

Not everyone readily embraced these values. Although the trade agreements were supposedly voluntary, dissenters faced social ostracism and economic boycott. Localities throughout the colonies set up committees to police these associations. The committees spoke privately with individuals who hesitated to join, and they published the names of the most recalcitrant in local newspapers, labeling them as “unfriendly” to American liberties. That was a signal to all “true patriots” to end their social and economic dealings with these individuals. In some places, flagrant violators of the pacts faced unruly crowds that destroyed property or even attacked their persons. There were dramatic acts of “tarring and feathering” to punish dissenters; more often, the mere threat of such treatment intimidated people into compliance. Perhaps the most famous event—a destruction of private property later called the Boston Tea Party—was an act to enforce a boycott of tea in 1773. Parliament had put a tax on tea and granted a monopoly on the tea trade to the East India Company and its influential stockholders. When they boycotted, seized, or even destroyed East India Company tea, patriots defied the most powerful corporation of the day. They asserted that the people of the British colonies—and not the Parliament across the Atlantic—would exercise jurisdiction over economic and political affairs vital to Americans.

This cream pitcher, from the era of tea boycotts, reminded colonists not to indulge. Tea and other imports would drain the colonies of money, creating lives of debt and dependence, or “slavery.”

The Idea of an American People

In the process of organizing to resist Parliament, colonists underwent two key changes in identity: First, people who had not thought of themselves as political actors now saw that they could have a collective impact on governmental affairs. The inclusive nature of the movement generated new ideas about the ability of ordinary free people to take part in public decisions. People began to question the idea that politics should be reserved for elites. Second, as British authorities ignored colonial grievances, growing numbers slowly disconnected from Britain and their own Loyalist neighbors. They built new connections around shared commitments with one another. Patrick Henry, a delegate to the First Continental Congress, expressed the new identity powerfully in 1774: “I am not a Virginian, but an American.”

Other colonists were reluctant to embrace such a new identity, but events made it difficult to avoid taking sides. In the spring of 1775 fighting broke out between the king’s troops and local militias at Lexington and Concord. When George III sent foreign mercenaries to fight the rebellious colonists, the decision shattered colonial hopes for reconciliation. Then, in early 1776, radical pamphleteer Thomas Paine published a scathing attack on the very principles of monarchy and hereditary aristocracy. Paine argued that the common people were capable of establishing good governments of their own, on the basis of what he called “Common Sense.” His extraordinary pamphlet reached more American readers than any tract published before.

That summer, many Americans made a great leap to a new idea: maybe they could do without monarchy, aristocracy, and even the British nation. If they could unite with one another, “the people” of the colonies might form their own, more equal, society and government. Maybe “the people” were enough. The second Continental Congress adopted a declaration of independence. They resolved that “all men were created equal,” born with rights of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” They stated that governments were created “by the consent of the governed.” On July 4, American patriots published that radical idea to the world and began to put it to the test.

For most of the next decade, Revolutionaries sought to implement their new ideas about government in the midst of a grueling war for independence. The new states scrambled to replace their now rejected colonial regimes with institutions consistent with the principle of popular sovereignty. The states’ revolutionary governments varied—some more directly reliant on ordinary voters, others more careful to entrust power to propertied gentlemen. Meanwhile, Congress conducted the war as best it could under an agreement called the Articles of Confederation.

Under these circumstances, the unity and patriotic sacrifice that the Revolution required were sometimes elusive. The states did not always cooperate with one another or raise their share of taxes to support the Continental Army in the field. Even with the coming of peace, the system of government seemed unsatisfactory to some. Critics complained that individual states placed restrictions on trade that crossed their borders. Congress was sometimes too weak to negotiate effectively with foreign powers or to settle conflicts within or between states. Moreover, some state governments were dominated by “new men,” without substantial property and social standing, and their measures to relieve debtors worried many among the well-to-do. Distressed by what they saw as disunity and disorder, some Americans declared the need for a new, stable, central government to “secure the blessings of liberty” to the nation.

To form such a government, twelve states (Rhode Island stood out) sent delegates to a constitutional convention in Philadelphia in 1787. Presided over by General George Washington, the convention decided to shift power from the states to the central government both to strengthen the nation and to lodge power more firmly in the hands of elite men such as themselves. At the same time they maintained the revolutionary commitment to popular sovereignty as the great principle of government. They provided that all branches of the federal government arise from the voters, either directly or indirectly. They established a “republic,” in which the people’s representatives would govern, checked by recurring elections from abusing the powers entrusted to them.

THE DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE DESK

Congress entrusted a delegate from Virginia, Thomas Jefferson, with drafting a declaration of independence. Jefferson composed his draft on this little mahogany desk, made by Philadelphia cabinetmaker Benjamin Randolph. Based on Jefferson’s own design, the desk has a drawer with compartments for paper and writing utensils as well as a hinged writing board. Sized for traveling, the desk accompanied Jefferson through many years of public service, private reflection, and writing. In 1825, Jefferson gave the desk to his granddaughter’s husband, Joseph Coolidge, Jr., “as a memorial of affection” to the couple. Jefferson predicted that Americans would come to venerate the little desk. He wrote: “Politics as well as Religion has its superstitions. These, gaining strength with time, may, one day, give imaginary value to this relic, for its association with the birth of the Great Charter of our Independence.”

The desk focuses our attention on the individual act of Jefferson’s authorship, although the final document reflected careful edits by others in Congress. Equally important, Jefferson’s draft introduced few new ideas. Instead, it eloquently articulated political principles that were widely accepted in the colonies. By July 1776, scores of town meetings, other local gatherings, and provincial bodies had concluded that the moment for independence had come. Jefferson himself agreed that the greatness of the Congressional declaration lay in its expression of a broad sentiment. The document did not aim at “new principles, or new arguments, never thought of before,” he later wrote (Jefferson to Henry Lee, May 8, 1825). “It was intended to be an expression of the American mind.”

Over the following months, a contest over ratification of the proposed constitution sharply divided the nation. Americans were about to test, wrote Alexander Hamilton, “whether societies of men are really capable or not of establishing good government from reflection and choice, or whether they are forever destined to depend for their political constitutions on accident and force.” In newspapers, public debates, and private discussions, people offered their reflections on the convention’s plan. Many worried that it concentrated too much power in federal institutions; others worried that the nation was too expansive to sustain a truly representative government. Despite these and other concerns, the requisite three-quarters of the states approved the plan, and the U.S. Constitution went into operation in June 1788. The debate itself had shown widespread belief that the Constitution still needed amending. The first Congress passed the Bill of Rights in 1789. These ten amendments protected institutions that many Americans considered essential to a free people, including a free press, free institutions of worship, armed militias, public assemblies, trial by jury, and freedom from unlawful searches and seizures. With their passage, some who had opposed the Constitution became willing to give the new government their support.

THE CONSTITUTIONAL CONVENTION

Just over a decade after the Declaration of Independence, the young United States stood on the verge of another leap of faith. Would they change fundamental institutions of government by ratifying the new constitution? Over the summer of 1787, delegates to a Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia worked in private to create a new frame of government. Shielded from the eyes of the public, members of the political elite from twelve states reconciled their differences as best they could.

The constitution they created was the product of compromises—between populous states and small ones, slaveholding states and free ones, states with claims to western lands and states without. Delegates also compromised with the anticipated views of the common Americans who would ultimately either accept or reject their plan. Although some delegates favored installing an elected executive who would serve for life, for example, they decided that the public would not accept a president who so closely resembled a king. Similarly, delegates who advocated property-owning requirements for voting in the new nation decided to leave suffrage where it was, in the hand of the states. They realized that no new plan would be ratified if it deprived men already voting of the ballot.

These and other issues became public in September 1787, when newspapers such as the Providence Gazette published the convention’s proposals for the first time. There followed what Alexander Hamilton called a “Great National Discussion” over the merits and dangers of the plan (Hamilton, Federalist Papers, no. 1).

Continuing Debates

In the following decades, the nation faced challenges both new and old. The Revolution had changed but not solved the challenge of how to deal with the Native American population on the continent. It did not resolve the contradictions and instabilities implicit in Americans’ system of chattel slavery. Seismic events in other parts of the Atlantic World—some, such as the French Revolution, themselves influenced by American independence—also presented difficult choices for the new United States. Americans faced a host of domestic disagreements as well, and the bitterness of partisan debate made many fear for their young and fragile union.

During much of the period, the United States remained at war, for the 1783 treaty that ended hostilities with Britain did not settle conflict with Native Americans. In the Ohio country, Shawnee, Miami, and other Native groups built confederacies to resist U.S. incursions onto their lands. Overall, the new government assumed much the same position as European empires in the Americas. It viewed Indian nations as potential allies and buffers against Spanish, French, and British powers on the continent, but it also presumed the right to displace Native peoples when possible. The peace unleashed a land rush onto Iroquois lands in New York and elsewhere, as speculators sought profit, the nation allotted lands to military veterans, and European Americans continued to rely on extensive land use for economic growth and social stability.

Founded by about a dozen men in Philadelphia in 1775, Pennsylvania’s growing antislavery society reorganized in the 1780s, when it adopted this constitution.

Political theorists adopted rationales for displacing the indigenous population. Thomas Jefferson cast Native peoples as living in an earlier stage of “savagery” that must naturally yield to European “civilization.” Equally significant, European-Americans would adopt racial categories that posited irrevocable differences between themselves and Native peoples. Prior to this, Europeans had described and understood the differences they saw between groups in a variety of ways. Early in the nineteenth century, they began to adopt a belief in fixed racial characteristics that set human populations irretrievably apart. As a result of such beliefs, even Native American groups that remained within U.S boundaries and adopted European practices would eventually face loss of property and removal. Racial categories contradicted the Revolutionary impulse toward equality by emphasizing supposedly unalterable differences rather than universal human rights. With broad acceptance of those categories, the United States would limit the peoples, ways of life, and cultural possibilities that it would accept within its borders.

These developments also affected the lives of African Americans. During the Revolution, many had claimed liberty by enlisting in the British or Continental Armies, running away, petitioning for freedom, or rebelling. Their actions challenged the idea that enslavement was natural or acceptable to them. African Americans seeking freedom found allies among some members of the white community, especially Quakers, evangelicals, and those inspired by Enlightenment ideas of human rights. Most northern states passed laws of gradual emancipation, and private manumissions became more common in Virginia in the South. Many freed people moved to urban centers for economic opportunity and to build their own supportive communities. By 1800, they had established free African churches and mutual aid societies in Philadelphia, Boston, New York, and Baltimore.

By then, too, antislavery Americans were part of an international movement. Opposition to the slave trade grew in Britain. In France, revolutionaries promoted the universal “Rights of Man.” Beginning in 1791, a slave revolt in the sugar colony of San Domingue led to the emancipation of nearly a half million people and, in 1804, to the founding of the free nation of Haiti. Inspiring to some Americans, these events were anathema to others. The stark danger of rebellion reached home in 1800, when a Richmond man named Gabriel organized an uprising for freedom there. The slave states responded by limiting manumissions and creating harsh codes that pushed free African Americans to leave. Within a very few generations, a growing defense of slavery and widespread belief in supposed racial difference would tear the republic apart. During the years of the early republic, in the face of discrimination, African Americans worked to demonstrate their capacities as citizens.

Some of the same backlash against ideals of equality had an impact on the status of women in the early republic. Active in the Revolution, many free women considered themselves capable of a vital political role. During the 1790s and early 1800s, women attended speeches and parades, took sides in partisan disputes, and sometimes published opinions in the press. New Jersey’s state constitution, adopted in 1776, provided for women who fulfilled the property requirements for voting to cast their ballot alongside qualified men. Since married women had few property rights, in practice only well-to-do widows and some wealthy single women could vote, but New Jersey showed where the era’s ideas of equality and participation might reasonably lead. At the same time, women still had to combat social custom and widespread belief in female inferiority. As Revolutionary ideals began to wane in the United States, women—along with free black men—were disenfranchised in New Jersey. Many political theorists argued that women should avoid the partisan world of political affairs. Pushed out of party politics, some women turned to promoting female education as a means to prepare girls for valuable roles in American society. They worked to develop schools in which girls could learn the same subjects as boys did.

Education was also a focus of free white men with little property who nonetheless desired a political voice. Such men had sacrificed much by fighting in the Revolution. The Revolution inspired some states to lower their property requirements for voting, and to attract settlers, the new states that formed in the western territories generally allowed all taxpaying white men to vote. But most of the existing states retained property requirements for the suffrage. Over time, those requirements came to seem more restrictive, as the spread of wage work changed the prospects for ordinary men’s work lives. Rather than become independent masters of their crafts, industrial workers might spend their lives working for a wage. They might never accumulate much property, and the percentage of free white men with voting rights might decline. Workingmen would press for expansion of the vote, for “free suffrage” for white men, well into the nineteenth century. They also created mutual aid organizations, joined “combinations” to negotiate to improve working conditions, and pressed for public education to insure that their children could become informed and active citizens.

Beyond debates over who should have a voice in the political nation, Americans found themselves sharply divided over a host of other policy questions in the 1790s. Two distinct political groups disputed the future of the republic with one another. As their name suggests, the Democratic Republicans generally favored broad public engagement, at least by white men. Centered on the leadership of Thomas Jefferson, these Americans took inspiration from the universal values—liberty, equality, fraternity—of the Revolution in France. They feared that building an American military and incurring national debt would create a more hierarchical society, like that of Great Britain. They opposed the establishment of banks that would channel capital largely to merchants and manufacturers rather than to farmers or small producers.

For their part, Federalists, led by President George Washington and his secretary of the treasury, Alexander Hamilton, viewed matters through a different lens. They admired the stability of the British system. They favored a strong military and a debt to sustain it as necessary to the nation’s international standing. When workingmen, middling farmers, and small shopkeepers formed Democratic-Republican societies—gatherings to discuss government affairs—Federalists attacked them as dangerously radical. And when printers published partisan newspapers that criticized Federalist policies, Federalists worried about the threat of misinformation and disunity. Might the same free press that had unsettled American loyalty to George III now undermine loyalty to the new constitutional government?

These debates were particularly bitter because neither group believed that organized political opposition was legitimate in a republican government. Each condemned “parties” for pursuing the narrow interest of only a minority of the people. Each saw the other as a dangerous and illegitimate faction threatening the survival of the republic. The divisive presidential campaign of 1800 pitted Thomas Jefferson against Washington’s Federalist vice president, John Adams. The peaceful transfer of power to a new, Jeffersonian administration was a hard-won achievement. It helped to establish the principle that organized opposition to a governing party was a fully legitimate element of a system of popular sovereignty. It showed that an administration of one party, holding the reins of government power, would peacefully yield that power to its opposition, deferring to the decision of the people made at the ballot box and under the terms of the Constitution.

GREAT LEAPS THAT BRING REVOLUTIONARY CHANGE are difficult and rare. Many Americans remain fascinated by their nation’s founding era as a time of daring new possibilities and the articulation of still resonant ideals. Equally important, however, even great leaps are bounded, and there are contradictions built into every revolution.

European colonists in British North America had known a relative social and economic equality there, and that experience encouraged them to apply an ideal of political consent more broadly than Britons did across the Atlantic. What British theorists saw as a problem—the absence of great lords in America and the presence of so many commoners accustomed to a voice—American revolutionaries came to see as a source of strength. They decided that a relatively equal people might unite around shared goals and common principles—“republican” principles that put the community at large before the private ambitions of individuals, and “democratic” principles of broad inclusion. Might such a people be effectively and responsibly sovereign?

Against that possibility stood the persistent appeal of hierarchy, the strength of people’s ambition for social superiority. The nation could and did outlaw the institution of political aristocracy, but it could not always effectively guard against some individuals’ desire to amass great property and power. Revolutionaries could urge successful men—their society’s so-called natural aristocrats—to a spirit of patriotic fellowship. They hoped that an active, educated citizenry, informed by a free and responsible press, would choose their leaders wisely. But imbalances of money and power could limit and overwhelm the people’s choices. It remained to be seen how far an ambitious few might reduce the hopes of revolutionaries to a merely manufactured “popular consent.”

Moreover, the revolutionary notion of an equal and unified people was compromised from the outset. How fully this was so became apparent as the many excluded from the ranks of “the people” laid claim to a voice. Men with no property, African Americans, and women soon brought into the open a difficult truth: Americans’ relatively equal society was in fact dependent on profound inequalities. There were inequities the Revolutionaries had not seen or wished to see, inequalities that, once evident, many still hesitated to remedy. It was not merely that many people were left out of the promise of the political nation. It was that hopes for equality among the supposedly “common” people of the United States seemed to many to be dependent on the removal of native peoples, enslavement of Africans, and limits to rights of women. Was it necessary to deny the opportunity to consent to some, in order to secure an arena of meaningful consent to others? This question, too, would shape the lives of generations who followed the Revolution.

We can trace some of the contradictions of America’s founding in the different ways that different citizens would remember the nation’s origin. The very story of the American Revolution manifested the conflicting commitments present at the beginning. Should Americans see the founding as a complete, perfect, sacred event led by a great patriot who, as American children would learn, never told a lie? Or was it part of a wider, unfinished movement for liberty—deeply imperfect but with sacred aspirations open to all people? As early as the 1790s, these different emphases were expressed in the symbols that Americans chose for household furnishings, political banners, clothing, and other cultural artifacts. Images of George Washington and images of “Liberty” both appealed to many in the early republic. Washington was clearly associated with liberty, defined as independence and the establishment of the Constitution. Many honored him for his patriotic self-sacrifice, a refusal to amass power for personal gain or glory, a virtue that placed the good of the nation ahead of his own ambition. Yet he had been a divisive figure as well as a unifying one, sometimes representing a form of politics less democratic than some Americans wished. The glorification of Washington could express a partisan point of view.

Ralph Wood’s factory in Staffordshire, England, produced this relatively affordable bust of George Washington primarily for the American market.

Contrasting with the “the father of his country” was Liberty, often a female figure that represented an abstract ideal. As such, Liberty was susceptible to a wide array of aspirations, available to a wide array of people who might loyally follow her banner. Liberty became associated with revolutionary French and Haitian notions of citizenship, with inclusive and democratic aspirations. Over time, too, the image of Liberty became increasingly controversial, as the term and its female personification became associated with antislavery and a broader extension of rights than some of the founding generation envisioned. No single figure would fully represent the colonists’ great leap, just as no single ideal would guide the direction taken by the nation that emerged from that leap. Like Americans of the early republic, following generations continued to debate the Revolution and its implications for their lives. The nature of the United States and its ultimate commitments remained for future Americans to contest in their own time.

Photograph of the Selma March, 1965, by Matt Herron. Credit 22