The Radicalism of the American Revolution by Gordon S. Wood

Author:Gordon S. Wood [Wood, Gordon S.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: United States, History, Revolutionary Period (1775-1800), cookie429, Kat, Extratorrents
ISBN: 9780307758965
Publisher: Vintage
Published: 1991-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

When someone as aristocratic as William Byrd could write of the natural equality of all men, even those of different nations and races, and conclude that “the principal difference between one people and another proceeds only from the differing opportunities of improvement,” then we know the force of this enlightened republicanism. So powerful were the republican tendencies in eighteenth-century Anglo-American culture that even Lord Chesterfield could say in one breath that “the herd of mankind can hardly be said to think” and yet declare in the next that “shepherds and ministers are both men; their nature and passions the same,” only their “modes” of expression were “different.” Chesterfield, after all, was enlightened. He counted himself among the new liberal breed of aristocrats who thought it was undignified to be proud of one’s birth; he considered his servants “my equals by Nature and my inferiors only by the differences of our fortunes.” Some now saw more clearly than ever before the fabricated nature of culture, and all distinctions came to seem artificial. Montesquieu said he was “human of necessity” but “French by accident.”16

Not all Americans, of course, shared fully in these enlightened assumptions about the natural equality of mankind. Some like genteel Benjamin Prat of Boston thought that the common people were beastly, superstitious, and ignorant, and ought to remain so; education would do nothing for them except make them “conceited.”17 Others balked at including Indians or blacks within the sphere of men; and when many men thought about women in these terms, it was only to emphasize women’s difference from men, not their equality. Others continued to believe that God had ordained permanent distinctions between the saved and the damned. Still others, while admitting that all men had the same senses of sight, hearing, smell, taste, and touch, argued that men of genius, the elite, might have special senses—an aesthetic sense, for example—that separated them from common people and made them more sensitive. Such a distinction justified the continued separation of gentlemen from commoners and explained the different standards of honor and shame that each group had.

Still, in the end what remains extraordinary about the views of late-eighteenth-century Americans is the extent to which most educated men shared the liberal premises of Lockean sensationalism: that all men were born equal and that only the environment working on their senses made them different. “Human nature is the same in all ages and countries,” said Benjamin Rush, who as much as Jefferson came to personify the American Enlightenment, “and all the differences we perceive in its characters in respect to virtue and vice, knowledge and ignorance, may be accounted for from climate, country, degrees of civilization, forms of government, or accidental causes.” Such beliefs were essential to the growing sense of sympathy for other human creatures felt by enlightened people in the eighteenth century. Once men came to believe that they could control their environment and educate the vulgar and lowly to become something other than what the traditional monarchical society had

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