America's Revolutionary Mind

A Moral History of the American Revolution and the Declaration That Defined It

C. Bradley Thompson

• Publisher: Encounter Books
• Year: 2022
• eBook ISBN: 9781641772617
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Early American History
• Index: History

America's Revolutionary Mind is the first major reinterpretation of the American Revolution since the publication of Bernard Bailyn's The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution and Gordon S. Wood's The Creation of the American Republic. The purpose of this book is twofold: first, to elucidate the logic, principles, and significance of the Declaration of Independence as the embodiment of the American mind; and, second, to shed light on what John Adams once called the "real American Revolution"; that is, the moral revolution that occurred in the minds of the people in the fifteen years before 1776. The Declaration is used here as an ideological road map by which to chart the intellectual and moral terrain traveled by American Revolutionaries as they searched for new moral principles to deal with the changed political circumstances of the 1760s and early 1770s. This volume identifies and analyzes the modes of reasoning, the patterns of thought, and the new moral and political principles that served American Revolutionaries first in their intellectual battle with Great Britain before 1776 and then in their attempt to create new Revolutionary societies after 1776. The book reconstructs what amounts to a near-unified system of thought—what Thomas Jefferson called an "American mind" or what I call "America's Revolutionary mind." This American mind was, I argue, united in its fealty to a common philosophy that was expressed in the Declaration and launched with the words, "We hold these truths to be self-evident."

CHAPTER 1 The Enlightenment and the Declaration of Independence

“He that would seriously set upon the search of truth, ought in the first place to prepare his mind with a love of it.… There is nobody in the commonwealth of learning, who does not profess himself a lover of truth; and there is not a rational creature that would not take it amiss to be thought otherwise of.”

—JOHN LOCKE, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (IV.xix.1)

On June 24, 1826, ten days before he died, Thomas Jefferson penned a letter in which he established the context and significance of the Declaration of Independence. “May it be to the world,” he wrote to Roger C. Weightman, “what I believe it will be, (to some parts sooner, to others later, but finally to all,) the signal of arousing men to burst the chains under which monkish ignorance and superstition had persuaded them to bind themselves, and to assume the blessings and security of self-government.”¹

The American Revolution and the Declaration that expressed it were the existential embodiment of the Enlightenment’s highest ideals. They restored to mankind, Jefferson implied, “the free right to the unbounded exercise of reason and freedom of opinion.” And with the “general spread of the light of science” in the eighteenth century, the veil of ignorance that had covered men’s eyes was lifted. The light of reason opened men’s eyes to the “rights of man” and revealed the “palpable truth, that the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately, by the grace of God.”² Understanding the Enlightenment’s core tenets is therefore a precondition for understanding the principles of the Declaration and the American Revolution.

The Enlightenment represented an era of philosophic and scientific thinking that provided a new way to see the world and man’s place in it. It stood for the ability of the reasoning mind to unlock nature’s secrets, and it inspired men to sweep aside superstition, mysticism, prejudice, and the brutalities of the past. The Enlightenment represented, in the words of the eighteenth-century Scottish philosopher Thomas Reid, the “dawn of light”; it “opened the way to future discoveries”; and it “removed an infinite deal of rust and rubbish, collected in the ages of scholastic sophistry, which had obstructed the way.”³ The new learning generated by the Enlightenment was potentially available to all men—not just to philosophers, priests, and kings—if only each would use the proper method of acquiring and using knowledge: the method of right reason. As a result, there was an explosion of new knowledge with discoveries in physics, astronomy, mathematics, biology, geology, botany, medicine, navigation, mechanics, architecture, morality, and politics.⁴ With the light of reason illuminating the world, nature’s secrets could be revealed to man, and then mastered and conquered in order to eliminate prejudice, poverty, sickness, and oppression.

The Age of Enlightenment produced several generations of world-class scientists and philosophers, but in a well-known 1789 letter Thomas Jefferson identified the “three greatest men that have ever lived, without any exception” as Francis Bacon, Isaac Newton, and John Locke. These three intellectual giants were, in Jefferson’s mind, the embodiment of the Enlightenment. Bacon was best known for his Novum Organum (1620), Newton for his Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica (1687), and Locke for two philosophic treatises, the Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689) and the Second Treatise of Government (1689). Jefferson credited this philosophic holy trinity with “having laid the foundation of those superstructures which have been raised in the Physical and Moral sciences.”⁵

John Adams similarly identified Bacon, Newton, and Locke as the three thinkers most important to his intellectual development. Their importance lay in providing him with a proper method for thinking. During his undergraduate days at Harvard, the young man was introduced to the new philosophic rationalism associated with the modern revolution in the natural sciences by John Winthrop, the Hollis Professor of Mathematics and Natural Philosophy. Winthrop’s lectures in “Experimental Phylosophy” explained the law-like regularity of the Newtonian conception of nature. On April 9, 1754, Adams recorded in his diary that “Sir Isaac Newtons three laws of nature” and their application to planetary motion were “proved and illustrated” in Winthrop’s lecture. Years later, he would say that his training in the sciences gave him a “degree of Patience of Investigation, which I might not otherwise have obtained.”⁶ Adams soon realized that he could apply the new scientific method to the study of man and society. The concrete and detailed observations of human nature, the sharp and vivid descriptions of those around him, the acute dissection of motives and actions, and the painstaking accumulation and cataloguing of historical actors that fill the diary attest to the importance of Winthrop’s method for Adams’s intellectual development.

In at least four places in his early diary and in one important letter from 1760, Adams copied or paraphrased long passages from Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding.⁷ These passages and others of the period show him embracing a Baconian-Newtonian conception of nature as understood by Lockean epistemology. “In Metaphysics,” he wrote, “Mr. Locke, directed by my Lord Bacon, has steered his Course into the unenlightened Regions of the human Mind.” Dramatically, Adams compared Locke to Columbus: he had discovered a “new World.” This newfound epistemological continent was full of dangers and possibilities: it had “unwholsome Weeds,” “unprofitable Brambles,” and “motly Savages,” but it also had “wholsome fruits and flowers,” “useful Trees,” and “civilized Inhabitants.” Locke, Adams wrote, taught mankind how to excise the weeds and to cultivate the fruits of the human mind. And just as Locke cleared man’s field of vision, so too had discoveries by natural philosophers such as Bacon and Newton “done Honour to the human Understanding.”⁸ Thus the modern world had advanced far beyond the high culture of the classical world in fields such as philosophy, mathematics, and astronomy.

James Wilson, a signer of the Declaration of Independence and the United States Constitution, likewise rated Bacon, Newton, and Locke as the three great minds who ushered in the Age of Enlightenment. In his Lectures on Law, which he delivered while serving as an associate justice of the United States Supreme Court, Wilson identified the substance of the great discoveries made by Bacon and Newton:

Till within these two hundred years, natural philosophy was in the same fluctuating state with the other sciences. Every new system pulled up the old one by the roots. The great Lord Bacon first marked out the only foundation, on which natural philosophy could be built. His celebrated successour, Sir Isaac Newton, gave the first and noblest examples of that chaste induction, of which his guide in the principles of science could only delineate the theory. He reduced the principles of Lord Bacon into a few axioms, which he calls “regulæ philosophandi,”—rules of philosophising. From these, together with the phenomena observed by the senses, which he likewise assumes as first principles, he deduces, by strict reasoning, the propositions of his philosophy; and, in this manner, has erected an edifice, which stands immovable upon the basis of first and self-evident principles. This edifice has been enlarged by the accession of new discoveries, made since his time; but it has not been subjected to alterations in the plan.

Wilson wrote no less enthusiastically about Locke and his connection to Newton, which means to Bacon as well: “The doctrines of Mr. Locke have been received, not only in England, but in many other parts of Europe, with unbounded applause; and to his theory of the human understanding the same kind of respect and deference has been paid, as to the discoveries of Sir Isaac Newton in the natural world.”⁹

Jefferson’s, Adams’s, and Wilson’s ranking of the world’s greatest minds is our entry point into the Age of Enlightenment. The core ideas that grew out of the Enlightenment launched by Bacon, Newton, and Locke can be summed up in three words: nature, reason, and rights. These three concepts provide a systemic philosophic framework (i.e., a metaphysics, an epistemology, and an ethics) by which to examine the Enlightenment and its relationship to the formation of the American revolutionary mind. These organizing concepts also map directly onto the structure of the Declaration.

ENLIGHTENMENT METAPHYSICS: NATURE

Enlightenment philosophers and scientists reconceptualized the way modern man thought about nature.¹⁰ They discarded the traditional Platonic-medieval viewpoint that treated nature as a shadowy, imperfect reflection of a transcendent dimension, which was said to reflect true reality. They also rejected the Aristotelian-Christian view that saw nature teleologically—that is, as guided by a divine purpose and naturally striving to achieve a hierarchy of preordained ends. By contrast, the new science launched by Copernicus, Tycho Brahe, Kepler, Leonardo da Vinci, and Galileo in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries viewed nature as an autonomous realm defined by the laws of identity, noncontradiction, and causality. All inanimate entities and animate beings were subject to the same mechanical laws of nature—laws that could be understood and expressed mathematically. Nature was seen less and less as a realm open to miracles caused by an omniscient deity. Instead, nature follows scientific laws that are universal, eternal, and absolute.

Sir Isaac Newton’s genius showed mankind, scientifically and mathematically, how to unlock nature’s laws. His discovery of gravity and the uniform laws of planetary motion demonstrated scientifically how the laws of identity and causality work. Nature’s laws display themselves by the way in which each effect follows a particular cause. Newton expressed this fundamental principle in one of his famous rules of reasoning: “to the same natural effects we must, as far as possible, assign the same causes.”¹¹ Following Newton, enlightened thinkers now saw the universe as an essentially ordered machine (something like a well-tuned clock) that could be understood rationally.

Newton’s discoveries brought light where there had been only darkness. To extend the metaphor, Newton and the other Enlightenment philosophers and scientists represent the dawning of a new age, in which the truth of nature could now be known to man. The universality and timelessness of nature’s laws could be discovered through the application of a proper method of reasoning. That method, Locke wrote in the Essay Concerning Human Understanding, challenged men as “rational creatures, to employ those faculties we have about what they are most adapted to, and follow the direction of nature where it seems to point us out the way.”¹² This was also the intellectual process by which the moral laws and rights of nature were revealed to man.

ENLIGHTENMENT EPISTEMOLOGY: REASON

The Enlightenment was the Age of Reason. Now, with unaided reason, man could gain knowledge of the world. If Enlightenment philosophers referred to nature metaphorically as a book, then the obvious question was this: How shall the Book of Nature be read?

One thing was certain during the Enlightenment: faith, revelation, mystic insight, innate ideas, and a priori speculation were rejected. The Newtonian cosmos had to be discovered, and in order to discover it Enlightenment thinkers needed a new way to study and access nature. The search for a method that would give objective and certain knowledge was the paramount philosophic problem of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The two great treatises advocating the “new method” of reasoning were Bacon’s Novum Organum and Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding.

In Novum Organum, Bacon developed a new method for discovering the truth about nature’s secrets. He rejected the Scholastics’ syllogistic reasoning that began from abstract, a priori first principles and then deduced conclusions that bore little relationship to concrete reality. Bacon’s method proceeded by examining experience, collecting and organizing data, experimenting on nature’s operations, inducing causes from effects, and then discerning patterns and law-like principles. Nothing could be accounted as real in nature that was not an observed fact or relation among facts. Experience and experiment for Bacon represented the only road to truth. The Scottish philosopher Thomas Reid, considered by some to have been a primary influence on Jefferson’s philosophic development, said this of Bacon: “The rules of inductive reasoning, or of a just interpretation of nature,” were “delineated by the great genius of Lord Bacon,” whose “Novum Organum may justly be called a grammar of the language of nature.”¹³ The book’s rules of inductive reasoning were, according to Reid, subsequently developed and perfected by Newton in his Principia.

Virtually all Enlightenment thinkers supported the idea that reason was efficacious and that it was man’s only means of acquiring knowledge. By confidently promoting the unaided reason of each and every man,...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface to the Paperback Edition
• Preface
• Introduction
• Chapter 1. The Enlightenment and the Declaration of Independence
• Chapter 2. Declaring the Laws of Nature
• Chapter 3. Self-Evident Truths
• Chapter 4. Equality
• Chapter 5. Equality and Slavery
• Chapter 6. The Nature of Rights
• Chapter 7. Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness
• Chapter 8. The Consent of the Governed
• Chapter 9. Consent and the Just Powers of Government
• Chapter 10. Revolution
• Chapter 11. Rebels with a Cause
• Conclusion
• Epilogue Has America Lost Its American Mind?
• Notes
• Index