The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution

In the foreword, Bailyn utilizes literary devices, such as metaphor, as well as historical argumentation to persuade the reader to accept the validity of his conclusions. Bailyn traces the inception of the book to an invitation he received from Harvard University Press to select a collection of Revolutionary-era pamphlets (Bailyn, Bernard, ed. Pamphlets of the American Revolution, 1750-1776, Volume I: 1750–1765. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1965). Bailyn engages the reader by recreating his own process of discovery during his examination of the pamphlets and sharing his surprise at acquiring unexpected, new understandings. Bailyn thereby encourages a fresh viewing of the unpredictable reality of the American Revolution instead of merely seeing the event as inevitable in hindsight. Bailyn uses the metaphor of a bomb to vividly dramatize the impact of Revolutionary thought as “an explosive amalgam of politics and ideology” (xi) that would eventually detonate as the American Revolution.

Bailyn also positions his book’s thesis within the previous historiographical debate. By declaring his view that the American Revolution “was not primarily a controversy between social groups undertaken to force changes in the organization or the economy” (vi), Bailyn rejects the neo-Marxist view of earlier Progressive Era historians, such as Charles Beard, who held that class interests had fueled the Revolution. Bailyn’s assertion that 18th-century Commonwealthmen ideas had enabled the colonists to fashion a coherent political ideology generating the Revolution also distinguishes his view from a number of 1950s “Consensus” historians who had severed colonial American politics from political thought. Bailyn acknowledges the research done by British historians, such as Caroline Robbins, on the Commonwealthmen system of ideas but points out that their academic work had not so far been used to interpret the origins of the American Revolution.

In addition, Bailyn argues against part of the interpretations of historians Perry Miller and Alan Heimert, who are quoted but not named in the foreword. Bailyn dismisses Miller’s denouncement of “obtuse secularism” (Miller, Perry. “From the Covenant to the Revival,” The Shaping of American Religion, edited by James Ward Smith and A. Leland Jamison. Princeton U. Press, 1961). Miller argued that the Revolutionary fervor above all reflected Americans’ continuing Calvinist religious belief in original sin and that only the respect for world opinion led the Founders to put their case in Enlightenment terms. Bailyn rejects Miller’s argument as a product of “reading the sermons of the time with acute sensitivity” (vii). Bailyn also dismisses Alan Heimert’s Religion and the American Mind: From the Great Awakening to the Revolution (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1966), which controversially asserted that evangelical religion was a major factor in the coming of the American Revolution. Bailyn rejects Heimert’s argument by summarizing it as revolutionary ideas “fobbed off on an unsuspecting populace” in sermons by clergy “for reasons unexplained” (vii). Bailyn does acknowledge that the Revolutionary pamphlets revealed some influence of religious beliefs, Enlightenment thought, common law, and classical literature, but that the most significant influence was the Commonwealthmen tradition.