1st-Revolution

In the letter he wrote to Thomas Jefferson on 24 August 1815, John Adams claimed that "the revolution was in the minds of the people, and this was effected from 1760–1775, in the course of fifteen years, before a drop of blood was shed at Lexington." Adams's claim has become doctrine among interpreters of this fascinating chapter in America's History. In his new book, James Thompson corrects the record by showing that “the people” Adams counted did not include the loyalists who made themselves invisible in the years preceding the War for American Independence to avoid becoming victims of patriotic violence.

Thompson contends that had they not been silenced by a systematic campaign of public violence, loyalists would be known today as a substantial majority of the people in British America on the eve of American Revo- lution. Loyalty to the king did not prevent members of this silent majority from being offended by Parliament’s efforts to tax them without their consent. Thompson contends that had they not been silenced by a systematic campaign of public violence, loyalists would be known today as a substantial maj- ority of the people in British America on the eve of Am- erican Revolution.

Loyalty to the king did not prevent members of this silent maj-ority from being offended by Parliament’s efforts to tax them without their consent. As a group, however, they were more con-cerned with the danger posed by “government by the people,” which had by the summer of 1774 become the patriotic objective. Loyalists recognized the potential for tyranny in this form of government because they were victims of it. Experience taught them that republican government was the rule of mobs directed by despots—liberty, equality under the law, and the rights of man remained outside closed-doors when patriots met to create policy. Whatever its faults, loyalists agreed that the constitution-al monarchy of England, longstanding and time-tested, would be a more reliable defender of their rights and liberty.

The state of affairs when the shot was fired heard round the world was so different from our understanding of it today that it is hard to fathom. It is to be expected that people who love their country would focus on the virtuous and admirable parts of its founding. The author suggests that patriotism is not the reason Americans do not understand their history. He contends that over the last ninety years, its interpreters have changed it. The patriotic move-ment has been recast as a reform movement. The small circle of malcontents that undermined a government supported by a solid

majority of its citizens has been expanded to include virtually everyone. The members of this chimerical legion have been transformed into champions of social equality not just for their own society, but everyone everywhere. To encourage the idea that the American people suddenly awakened to a “morally regenerate” social vision that continues to this day, expositors of America’s new past have largely eliminated the abuse inflicted upon loyalists and their belated counter-insurgency against John Adams’s “revolution in the minds of the people”. The author characterizes this new account as an episode in the “progressive model” of man in society.

In the final sections of the book, the author considers the problem that confronted America’s patriotic leaders after they declared political independence: now responsible for a family of new states, they had to preserve them. Not only did they have to withstand the assault of King George’s armies, they had to resist the same kind of insurgency they had used to topple his colonial governments. They had, in other words, to solve the problem of politics. The author notes that this perennial threat to social stability was introduced into the newly independent American states by the two most famous patriotic theorists—John Adams and Thomas Jefferson.

The author concludes his discussion by contrasting the progressive model of man in society embedded in the ideology of Professor Bernard Bailyn with the model of societal decay set out by Plato in the Republic. He leaves it to the reader to decide whether a great march of human progress is leading to the perfection of man in society that France's enlightened philosophes envisioned or whether the degenerative forces of politics are leading the anarchy Plato forecast.