Words Worth Remembering: Bancroft’s Revolution
In the fourth volume of his masterfully classic History of the United States, the great 19-century historian George Bancroft digressed into an insightful explanation of what the colonial patriots, by 1776, called “The Cause.”
“The American Revolution did not proceed from precarious intentions,” he wrote, briefly pausing his narrative of the fateful moments of Lexington and Concord in April 1775. “It grew out of the soul of the people, and was an inevitable result of a living affection for freedom, which actuated harmonious effort as certainly as the beating of the heart sends warmth and color and beauty through the system.”
Bancroft’s idealistic, romantic, and almost mythical phrasing places the Revolution in a light not often found or seen. The Revolution described above is not something whose beginning was so definite as to be easily marked on the calendar and celebrated as if those engaged in the struggle stopped and decided, with unaffected intent and with an exact eye to the legacy of the future, that one date would be as good as any other to start a revolution. “It grew out of the soul of the people,” Bancroft says, and was thus something altogether different than the American Revolution schoolchildren are taught.
Sitting as we do from a vantage point that, to the naked eye, clearly displays a providential-like sequence of events all progressing toward a good end, we often fail to understand that the events of the past unfolded just as events unfold today. A magnificent degree of uncertainty, unpredictability, and variability marked the past, just as it does today.
We also forget that if George III had answered the colonies’ repeated pleas for his intercession in the struggle against parliamentary overreach, American independence may never have occurred. Bancroft reminds us that necessity compelled the colonists to act; things did not proceed according to any human plan.
As with us, the revolutionary soul was a mixture of good and bad, a combination of promise and prejudice, a picture of our better and worse instincts. There was an innate and fiery desire for liberty and self-rule. But there was also a prejudiced sense that America was a white man’s country and the principles of the Declaration of Independence a white man’s manifesto.
Ultimately, we know that the ideals of the Revolution bore good fruit, but in time. In two-and-a-half centuries, slavery was abolished, the vote extended, and equal justice expanded and respected. The Constitution has endured and proven its worth.
Bancroft believed the Revolution was the “inevitable result of a living affection for freedom.” It therefore had good effects, if only because it grew out of a desire to preserve a certain kind of liberty, which stood in clear contrast to any form of oppression.
Because the soul of any revolution determines the quality of the fruits it produces, it is the present task to ensure that our collective soul—the source and center of our American Revolution—is ever guided by the best in us. There is no other way to ensure the success of the American experiment.