鈥� The tone of your letters had for some time given me pain, on account of the extreme warmth with which they censured the proceedings of the Jacobins¹ of France. I considered that sect as the same with the republican patriots, and the Feuillants² as the monarchical patriots, well known in the early part of the revolution, and but little distant in their views, both having in object the establishment of a free constitution and differing only on the question whether their chief executive should be hereditary or not. The Jacobins (as since called) yielded to the Feuillants and tried the experiment of retaining their hereditary executive. The experiment failed completely and would have brought on the reestablishment of despotism had it been pursued. The Jacobins saw this, and that the expunging [of] that officer was of absolute necessity,³ and the nation was with them in opinion, for however they might have been formerly for the constitution framed by the first assembly,⁴ they were come over from their hope in it, and were now generally Jacobins. In the struggle which was necessary, many guilty persons fell without the forms of trial, and with them some innocent. These I deplore as much as anybody and shall deplore some of them to the day of my death. But I deplore them as I should have done had they fallen in battle. It was necessary to use the arm of the people, a machine not quite so blind as balls and bombs, but blind to a certain degree. A few of their cordial friends met at their hands the fate of enemies. But time and truth will rescue and embalm their memories, while their posterity will be enjoying that very liberty for which they would never have hesitated to offer up their lives. The liberty of the whole earth was depending on the issue of the contest, and was ever such a prize won with so little innocent blood? My own affections have been deeply wounded by some of the martyrs to this cause, but rather than it should have failed, I would have seen half the earth desolated. Were there but an Adam and an Eve left in every country, and left free, it would be better than as it now is. I have expressed to you my sentiments, because they are really those of 99 in a hundred of our citizens鈥�.

There are in the U.S. some characters of opposite principles; some of them are high in office, others possessing great wealth, and all of them hostile to France and fondly looking to England as the staff of their hope. These I named to you on a former occasion. Their prospects have certainly not brightened. Excepting them, this country is entirely republican, friends to the constitution, anxious to preserve it and to have it administered according to its own republican principles. The little party above mentioned⁵ have espoused it only as a steppingstone to monarchy, and have endeavored to approximate it to that in its administration, in order to render its final transition more easy. The successes of republicanism in France have given the coup de grace to their prospects, and I hope to their projects. I have developed to you faithfully the sentiments of your country, that you may govern yourself accordingly. I know your republicanism to be pure, and that it is no decay of that which has embittered you against its votaries in France, but too great a sensibility at the partial evil by which its object has been accomplished there鈥�.

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Facts, numerous and unequivocal, demonstrate that the present era is among the most extraordinary which have occurred in the history of human affairs. Opinions, for a long time, have been gradually gaining ground, which threaten the foundations of religion, morality, and society. An attack was first made upon the Christian revelation; for which natural religion was offered as the substitute. The Gospel was to be discarded as a gross imposture; but the being and attributes of a God, the obligations of piety, even the doctrine of a future state of rewards and punishments were to be retained and cherished鈥�.

A league has at length been cemented between the apostles and disciples of irreligion and of anarchy. Religion and government have both been stigmatized as abuses; as unwarrantable restraints upon the freedom of man; as causes of the corruption of his nature, intrinsically good; as sources of an artificial and false morality, which tyrannically robs him of the enjoyments for which his passions fit him; and as clogs upon his progress to the perfection for which he was destined.

As a corollary from these premises, it is a favorite tenet of the sect that religious opinion of any sort is unnecessary to society; that the maxims of a genuine morality and the authority of the magistracy and the laws are a sufficient and ought to be the only security for civil rights and private happiness.

As another corollary, it is occasionally maintained by the same sect, that but a small portion of power is requisite to government; that even this portion is only temporarily necessary, in consequence of the bad habits which have been produced by the errors of ancient systems; and that as human nature shall refine and ameliorate by the operation of a more enlightened plan, government itself will become useless, and society will subsist and flourish free from its shackles.

If all the votaries of this new philosophy do not go the whole length of its frantic creed, they all go far enough to endanger the full extent of the mischiefs which are inherent in so wild and fatal a scheme, every modification of which aims a mortal blow at the vitals of human happiness.

The practical development of this pernicious system has been seen in France. It has served as an engine to subvert all her ancient institutions civil and religious, with all the checks that served to mitigate the rigor of authority; it has hurried her headlong through a rapid succession of dreadful revolutions, which have laid waste property, made havoc among the arts, overthrown cities, desolated provinces, unpeopled regions, crimsoned her soil with blood, and deluged it in crime poverty and wretchedness; and all this as yet for no better purpose than to erect on the ruins of former things a despotism unlimited and uncontrolled; leaving to a deluded, an abused, a plundered, a scourged, and an oppressed people not even the shadow of liberty to console them for a long train of substantial misfortunes, of bitter sufferings.

This horrid system seemed awhile to threaten the subversion of civilized society and the introduction of general disorder among mankind. And though the frightful evils, which have been its first and only fruits, have given a check to its progress, it is to be feared that the poison has spread too widely and penetrated too deeply, to be as yet eradicated. Its activity has indeed been suspended, but the elements remain concocting for new eruptions as occasion shall permit. It is greatly to be apprehended, that mankind is not near the end of the misfortunes, which it is calculated to produce, and that it still portends a long train of convulsion, revolution, carnage, devastation, and misery.

Symptoms of the too great prevalence of this system in the United States are alarmingly visible. It was by its influence that efforts were made to embark this country in a common cause with France in the early period of the present war; to induce our government to sanction and promote her odious principles and views with the blood and treasure of our citizens. It is by its influence, that every succeeding revolution has been approved or excused鈥攁ll the horrors that have been committed justified or extenuated鈥攖hat even the last usurpation, which contradicts all the ostensible principles of the Revolution, has been regarded with complacency; and the despotic constitution engendered by it slyly held up as a model not unworthy of our imitation.
In the progress of this system, impiety and infidelity have advanced with gigantic strides. Prodigious crimes heretofore unknown among us are seen鈥�.

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鈥� And now, friends and countrymen, if the wise and learned philosophers of the elder world, the first observers of nutation and aberration,¹ the discoverers of maddening ether and invisible planets, the inventors of Congreve rockets and Shrapnel shells,² should find their hearts disposed to inquire what has America done for the benefit of mankind? Let our answer be this: America, with the same voice which spoke herself into existence as a nation, proclaimed to mankind the inextinguishable rights of human nature, and the only lawful foundations of government. America, in the assembly of nations, since her admission among them, has invariably, though often fruitlessly, held forth to them the hand of honest friendship, of equal freedom, of generous reciprocity. She has uniformly spoken among them, though often to heedless and often to disdainful ears, the language of equal liberty, of equal justice, and of equal rights. She has, in the lapse of nearly half a century, without a single exception, respected the independence of other nations while asserting and maintaining her own. She has abstained from interference in the concerns of others, even when conflict has been for principles to which she clings, as to the last vital drop that visits the heart. She has seen that probably for centuries to come, all the contests of that Aceldama³ the European world, will be contests of inveterate power, and emerging right. Wherever the standard of freedom and independence has been or shall be unfurled, there will her heart, her benedictions, and her prayers be. But she goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own. She will commend the general cause by the countenance of her voice, and the benignant sympathy of her example. She well knows that by once enlisting under other banners than her own, were they even the banners of foreign independence, she would involve herself beyond the power of extrication, in all the wars of interest and intrigue, of individual avarice, envy, and ambition, which assume the colors and usurp the standard of freedom. The fundamental maxims of her policy would insensibly change from liberty to force 鈥� She might become the dictatress of the world. She would be no longer the ruler of her own spirit鈥�.
鈥� [America鈥檚] glory is not dominion, but liberty. Her march is the march of the mind. She has a spear and a shield; but the motto upon her shield is, Freedom, Independence, Peace. This has been her Declaration: this has been, as far as her necessary intercourse with the rest of mankind would permit, her practice鈥�.

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No one knows who first pulled a trigger, but no one disputes that eight of the nearly eighty Lexington militiamen鈥攙astly outnumbered by several hundred British regulars鈥攍ost their lives that morning. Conflict at Concord a few hours later yielded a different outcome. The king鈥檚 soldiers found few of the military supplies that had been their objective. Forced into retreat at the Old North Bridge, they began a perilous seventeen-mile journey back to Boston. As thousands of Massachusetts militiamen descended on their route, British casualties mounted. At Menotomy, Massachusetts, 80-year-old Samuel Whittemore stood ready to avenge British aggression with a musket, a pair of pistols, and a sword. As Redcoats marched along the road near his home, he took aim. He downed one British soldier and then another. Dropping his musket, he drew his pistols. He had shot a third Redcoat by the time a detachment of the regulars descended upon him, stabbing him thirteen times with their bayonets and shooting him in the face. As he flailed about with his sword they left him for dead. But Whittemore didn鈥檛 die. He lived鈥攆or another 18 years. In 1793, he took his last breath as a 98-year-old citizen of the free and independent United States.

Parker鈥檚 famous words鈥斺�渋f they mean to have a war, let it begin here鈥濃�攈elped mark the start of what eventually came to be known as the War for Independence. But people have long taken pains to distinguish this war, which concluded with the signing of the 1783 Treaty of Paris, from the less well-defined and potentially farther-reaching American Revolution. As John Adams wrote to Thomas Jefferson in 1815, 鈥淲hat do we mean by the Revolution? The war? That was no part of the Revolution. It was only an effect and consequence of it. The Revolution was in the minds of the people, and this,鈥� Adams insisted, took place 鈥渇rom 1760 to 1775, in the course of fifteen years before a drop of blood was drawn at Lexington.鈥� Although Adams believed that the real revolution had taken place before the war, Philadelphia physician Benjamin Rush, a fellow member of the Continental Congress, insisted that it would continue for years after the fighting had ended. 鈥淭here is nothing more common,鈥� Rush wrote in 1787, 鈥渢han to confound the terms of American Revolution with those of the late American war.鈥� But the war and the Revolution were not the same thing. 鈥淚t remains yet to establish and perfect our new forms of government,鈥� Rush observed, 鈥渁nd to prepare the principles, morals, and manners of our citizens, for those forms of government after they are established and brought to perfection.鈥� This, the real revolution, had only just begun.

This volume features a selection of primary sources spanning 1760 to 1783. Some of these documents give voice to the sometimes competing philosophies of the Revolutionary generation. Others exemplify them. All originate from either the years of the war or the crucial period preceding the conflict, when 鈥渢he minds of the people,鈥� as Adams wrote, took a decisive turn. Whittemore, a veteran of King George鈥檚 War (1744鈥�48) and the French and Indian War (1754鈥�63), before taking aim at Redcoats had risked his life fighting alongside them. Similarly, the vast majority of Americans prior to 1760 felt proud of their British heritage. In the minds of American colonists, what made Britain the richest and most powerful of the world鈥檚 nations was the fact that it was also the freest. This, for them, endured as the source of their British patriotism. As philosopher John Locke had explained when justifying the Glorious Revolution of 1688鈥�89, only a government that protected the people鈥檚 rights to life, liberty, and property could consider itself legitimate. Soon after the French and Indian War, however, Parliament approved a series of measures that jeopardized colonists鈥� rights. Americans who resisted Britain鈥檚 鈥渓ong train of abuses and usurpations,鈥� as Jefferson鈥檚 Declaration of Independence described it, had struggled to hold their government true to its own avowed principles. Only gradually and reluctantly did the belief that Britain had no intention of keeping its promises push Americans to secure these commitments independent of the British government鈥檚 interference. In this sense the American revolutionaries were better Englishmen than their cousins across the Atlantic.

The conflict that commenced when Parker and his men stood their ground at Lexington tested the principles valued most by these once-loyal Britons. How to deal with those who remained loyal to the king? How best to bear the monetary costs? How to recruit and retain for the army men willing not only to defend, at a minute鈥檚 notice, their homes and hometowns but also, for multiple years, distant parts of the new United States? Given their love of liberty and the revulsion they felt toward acts of coercion, the War for Independence posed a significant problem. Wars, which necessitate the concentration of force, require the centralization of power. How to defeat (or at least outlast) the world鈥檚 most formidable military without creating an army posing a threat to the freedom it aimed to defend?

George Washington probably never wrote that government, 鈥渓ike fire, is a dangerous servant, and a fearsome master,鈥� but the fact that so many have never questioned this quotation鈥檚 frequent attribution to him helps to explain his selection as commander of the Continental Army. The members of the Continental Congress recognized in him a multitude of qualifications. He had gained experience as a colonel in the French and Indian War. He possessed relative youth as well as social and physical stature. As a Virginian, he seemed well positioned to transform an army of New Englanders into a truly continental force. Maybe most important, since 1758 he had served in the House of Burgesses. Like them, he was a civilian legislator who understood the importance of civilian control of military power, which, if not properly directed, possessed the greatest potential to consume the people鈥檚 liberty. He demonstrated respect for civilian leaders and urged his army鈥檚 restraint when dealing with common citizens. Throughout the war, Washington addressed Congress in the most deferential terms. Near the end, he extinguished his officers鈥� threatened insubordination against this legislative body and the states on whose authority it acted. After the conclusion of peace, Washington鈥檚 decision to relinquish power, resign as commander-in-chief, and return to Mount Vernon as a private citizen reportedly prompted even George III to describe him as 鈥渢he most distinguished of any man living鈥� and 鈥渢he greatest character of the age.鈥�

It was not just Washington鈥檚 willingness to give up power that made the American Revolution a successful struggle for liberty. In addition to exhausting the will of Great Britain to wage war against them, the American revolutionaries transitioned from monarchy and aristocracy to republican government and an emerging spirit of democracy. Embracing representative governments within and among the states, they coalesced around the principles that the people are sovereign and that popular consent is a precondition of political legitimacy. They had also internalized the rich lexicon of individual rights that had formed the basis of both their opposition to British imperial policy and their claim on independence. Yet if the 鈥渟elf-evident鈥� 鈥渢ruths鈥� that 鈥渁ll men are created equal, with certain unalienable rights鈥� bolstered their confidence, at the same time, they troubled their collective conscience. What about women, African Americans, members of religious minorities, and other individuals denied their natural rights to life, liberty, and property? What about people denied civil rights bestowing equality under the law?

It is no coincidence that during the years of the War for Independence, people began to question why rights that were said to belong to all mankind were not recognized as the inheritance of all Americans. But it is also no surprise that the Founders鈥� generation鈥攖he first to notice the conflict between their newly-expanded principles and their practices reflecting deeply-entrenched prejudices鈥攚as not the last to struggle to keep the promises of the Declaration of Independence. Even before the war鈥檚 conclusion, northern states began either to abolish slavery or to enact plans for gradual emancipation. Soon after, Congress halted the expansion of slavery to parts of the West, and Jefferson, as president in 1807, championed and signed a bill outlawing US participation in the international slave trade.

In the decades to follow, the issue of slavery became even more central. So did the rights of women, and the voting rights of men who did not own land. Even today, in the United States and around the world, oppressed groups and individuals invoke the philosophies of the American Revolution. As Benjamin Rush predicted in 1787, 鈥渢he American war is over, but this is far from being the case with the American Revolution. On the contrary, nothing but the first act of the great drama is closed.鈥�

In some ways the Revolution would extend far beyond the conclusion of the War for Independence. A few days prior to the fiftieth anniversary of the adoption of his Declaration, Thomas Jefferson observed that 鈥渁ll eyes are opened, or opening, to the rights of man.鈥� He expressed his faith that the decision of the Continental Congress to separate from Great Britain would continue to inspire people 鈥渢o 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.鈥� Awakening the world to the proposition that 鈥渢he 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,鈥� the ideas of the American Revolution could eventually bring liberty to everyone, everywhere, not only in the United States but also around the globe. The freedom for which Americans had stood their ground would come 鈥渢o some parts sooner鈥� and 鈥渢o others later.鈥� But eventually, Jefferson predicted, real liberty would one day be enjoyed by all.

Acknowledgements: A number of friends either suggested documents included in this collection or tracked down information helping me to contextualize them. I am grateful for the assistance of Jeremy Bailey, Veronica Burchard, Benjamin Carp, Mickey Craig, Joe Dooley, Todd Estes, Mary-Jo Kline, Stuart Leibiger, Melanie Miller, Rob Parkinson, Richard Samuelson, and Brian Steele. Sean Sculley performed both these tasks and also reviewed all of the documents鈥� introductions. Sarah Morgan Smith, who served as series editor, lent her considerable expertise to the selection of documents and execution of the finished product. Caleb Cage helped to deepen my appreciation for people who, in the midst of war, share their stories for the benefit of others, present and future. Jefferson McDonald and Grace McDonald helped select illustrations. Christine Coalwell McDonald, a historian in her own right, offered unfailing encouragement and assisted in every way possible.

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