From its independence in 1776 to this day, America has maintained its reputation as the freest country in the world. This idea underpins the American dream. So robust is it that people all over the world see America as a place to prosper and find happiness.
Many believe this idea grew out of the American Revolution. But what was the American Revolution? What inspired it? Who were its masterminds? And what actually happened?
Many books have been written about episodes in this epic saga. But until now, no one has followed the American dream through its lifetime. The American Revolutions Series by author James C Thompson fills this void. In these books, Mr. Thompson re-stages the American Revolution. He discusses the majoritarian system it engendered, how this system produced political hierarchies, and the impact these hierarchies have had on the inherent right of the American people to pursue their private happiness.
In this booklet, we introduce you to four of the best books in the American Revolution collection.
Author’s Background
Who is James C Thompson? James grew up in Wilmington, Delaware. He attended the University of Virginia, where he obtained undergraduate and graduate degrees in Philosophy. As a graduate student, he lived on the farm owned by Thomas Jefferson’s daughter, Martha Jefferson Randolph. While living on Edgehill Farm, he developed an interest in Jefferson himself. Teaching courses on Philosophy, Religion, and Ethics in Western Civilization at Strayer University in Alexandria, Virginia, deepened his understanding of how Philosophy interacts with History. This perspective is reflected in the books he has written.
These histories are among them: The Birth of Virginia’s Aristocracy (2009), The Dubious Achievement of the First Continental Congress (2011), George Washington’s Mulatto Man – Who Was Billy Lee? (2015), and Thomas Jefferson’s Enlightenment – Paris 1785 (2014). The Illustrated Gallery Press of Fort Washington, Pennsylvania, published his two-volume illustrated history on the Art of Illustration, Painting America’s Portrait. Volume 1 was released in 2016. Volume 2 was released in 2017.
James is now finishing the fourth book in his American Revolutions Series. In these narratives, he merges his interests in Political Philosophy, American History, and Thomas Jefferson into a comprehensive examination of the political revolutions that have produced America as it is today.
About Writing the Series
When James C Thompson was asked about why he undertook to write this series, he responded this way:
“I wrote my Master’s thesis on Bertrand Russell’s “refutation” of Leibniz. In it, I exposed the error in Russell’s method and the corresponding falseness of his claims against the German Rationalist.
Russell was a brilliant mathematician. He was also a proud and nettlesome Englishman. By 1900, he and his celebrated colleague, G.E. Moore, had rejected Continental Rationalism (Idealism) and become Empiricists (like Isaac Newton). Though brilliant, Russell was, as I say, famously contentious. I believe this was what led him to challenge Leibniz: Russell appreciated Leibniz’s predicate calculus; but he rejected Leibniz’s Metaphysics!
The record shows clearly that Leibniz arrived at his metaphysical concept of substance in an Aristotelian analysis of the ancient idea that atoms are the fundamental building blocks of physical things. Leibniz did not, in other words, derive his concept of substance, as Russell claimed, in a deduction through his logic.
The problem that disturbed Leibniz was the fact that material objects can be infinitely sub-divided. Because there is no theoretical end to the subdivisions that can be performed on physical objects, Leibni concluded that a physical thing cannot be the ultimate building block for objects in the material world. He solved this conundrum by replacing infinitely small but still physical “atoms” with non-material “monads”. He then turned to Metaphysics, where he deduced the characteristics of monads. The physical world, he finally announced, was composed of immaterial monads not physical objects.
Being a mathematician/logician, Russell saw the usefulness of Leibniz’s predicate calculous. But as an English empiricist, he rejected Leibniz’s Metaphysics. Weaving the psychological and philosophical threads together and drawing back the scholarly veil Russell used to conceal his motives, I concluded that Russell had undertaken to commit an intellectual assassination. By claiming that Leibniz derived his concept of substance through a logical deduction then demonstrating that this deduction could not be validly performed in Leibniz’s predicate calculus. This was widely accepted by Russell’s peers, who preferred not to challenge the nettlesome logician. This agreement had the effect of discrediting Leibniz’s Metaphysics–and all of his Rationalist Philosophy. Having achieved his objective, Russell left this confrontation with Leibniz’s predicate calculus, which he applied after that as though it was his own.
Two points here
- Intellectual assassinations by “scholars” are commonplace in the supposedly peaceful Republic of Letters.
- Individuals develop deep interests and broad understandings of subjects when they study them carefully.
The first point has remained in my mind since I wrote my thesis in 1974. The second point describes the process I have followed in writing my series and the books I wrote leading up to this project. While living on Edgehill Farm, I began learning about Thomas Jefferson. This evolved into an investigation in which I examined Jefferson’s (and others) ideas about Man in Society. In a sense, I merged the study of History with the study of Philosophy.
I call my works “forensic” history because I find and highlight so many malfeasances in the accepted accounts of what once happened.
After I completed my Master’s degree, I took a job in NYC trading commodities for Merrill Lynch. (My office looked out on the World Trade Center.) Several years later, I resumed my historical/philosophical investigations and began writing forensic histories that have coalesced into the American Revolutions Series.
What I say about what once happened and the agents who caused it to happen is accurate, original, and backed by extensive research. The facts I have assembled show that the American Revolution was the work of an “energetic minority,” that it was orchestrated with public violence and intimidation, that the Thomas Jefferson people know today is a caricature and that this caricature was invented by historians with political motives in the early and mid-20th century. Revealing these things is one of my objectives in writing the series.
As I considered the project’s scope, I realized that it tied into what Alexis de Tocqueville said in Democracy in America (1840). Because his prophesy provides a convenient and interesting way to summarize my series, I introduce each book with his quote. I think people today should be familiar with what he said and understand how his prophecy has been fulfilled.”
About the Series
Author James C Thompson calls his four-book set the American Revolutions Series. Taken together, the series explains how the prophecy Alexis de Tocqueville made in 1840 was fulfilled. By interpreting what once happened in America to reflect this untreated consideration, Mr. Thompson has produced a new American history, an American history for the 21st century! This qualifies it to be in the collection of the best books on the American Revolution.
Here are brief summaries of the four books:
1. The First Revolutions in the Minds of the People
In The First Revolutions in the Minds of the People, James C Thompson reconstructs the first steps in the fulfillment of Tocqueville’s amazing prophesy. He credits John Wilkes, “the Scandalout Father of Civil Liberty,” for taking the first step, which he did when he roused London’s working class by speaking to them “in the voice of the people” during the first years of King George III’s reign. Sam Adams took the next several steps. He organized a network of “patriots”, which he used to undermine the colonial government of King George III. He then applied his method of public violence and intimidation to subjugate the King’s loyal American subjects. Adams disguised his insurrection, Mr. Thompson explains, with “rights rhetoric” that he appropriated from John Wilkes.
The author supports the observations he makes about the insurgency that led to the American Revolution with detailed research and documentation. By relying on facts, he eliminates the politics that distorted the histories that were written about it in the 20th century.
2. The Second American Revolution: How Two Partisan Virginians Poisoned America’s Political System
In this book, James C Thompson provides an overdue analysis of insurgency known today as the Second American Revolution. This revolution took place between 1791 and 1801.
During its first years, James Madison expanded and organized Thomas Jefferson’s supporters into a majority political party. He did this with enthusiastic support from Jefferson, who was careful to remain out of sight in his mansion atop Monticello Mountain. One of the consequences of this “party revolution,” the author explains, was the division the American people against themselves. Large majorities of Southerners and Westerners supported Jefferson’s Republican Party. Large majorities of Northerners and Easterners supported Hamilton’s Federalist Party. During the Second American Revolution, these two groups became mutually hostile.
Mr. Thompson explains that the Second American Revolution differed from Sam Adams’s insurgency in the sense that Jefferson and Madison did not aim to overthrow the country’s new republican government. Rather, they wanted to drive out the wrongheaded Federalists who controlled it and take control of it themselves.
The author details Jefferson’s conflict with Alexander Hamilton and explains how it poisoned the American political system. Jefferson won this conflict after the death of Hamilton’s greatest supporter. (George Washington died on December 14, 1799.)
Mr. Thompson turns then to the presidential election of 1800, which, he explains, Jefferson was determined to win. To assure victory, Mr. Thompson contends, Jefferson made a devil’s bargain with charismatic New York Republican Aaron Burr: Jefferson agreed to endorse Burr as his successor if Burr would deliver the electoral votes of New York to the Republic ticket. Neither man trusted the other. Burr delivered on his promise but forced Jefferson into a run-off in the House of Representatives. Jefferson simply abandoned his pledge. After squeaking past Burr in the House of Representative, he used his power as President to destroy his dangerous rival.
The author points out that as President, Jefferson used the party Madison created during the early 1790s to strengthen his hold on the presidency and to perpetuate his party’s control of the government. Mr. Thompson notes that politicians since Jefferson’s time have used the adversarial party system Jefferson and Madison created to win their own elections and maintain themselves in office. Mr. Thompson concludes that by setting Southerners against Northerners, the adversarial party system fueled the conflicts that caused the union of states to dissolve in 1861.
3. Faux Thomas Jefferson: A 20th Century Fiction
Author James C Thompson begins the third book in his series with an in depth examination of the three legacies Thomas Jefferson had inscribed on his tombstone. Marking them with yellow flags, he offers two others that he contends better reflect the contributions Jefferson made to the American people.
Having examined and commented on how Faux Thomas Jefferson wanted to be remembered, the author explains that before becoming President in 1801, the real 18th century man was a relentless opponent of “hierarchical tyranny” and that he rebelled against it four times: 1) he rebelled against the monarchy of King George III of England; 2) he rebelled against the “pseudo-aristocracy” of his colony, Virginia; 3) he joined a small circle of reformers who wanted to replace the bankrupt monarchy of France with a constitutional government; and 4) he rebelled against the hierarchy of wealth he expected Alexander Hamilton to create as the first Treasury Secretary of the United States of America.
Mr. Thompson explains that Jefferson changed after be became President. To preserve his government against the kind of sabotage he had conducted against John Adams’s administration, he transformed trustworthy members of his party into an internal force, which he used both to implement his policies and to win elections. The consequence of Jefferson’s “spoils system,” Mr. Thompson argues, was to transform the government into a party tool and to make Jefferson “the head of his own hierarchical tyranny,” which he applied, for example, to destroy Aaron Burr.
Mr. Thompson then turns to the construction project in which “faux” Thomas Jefferson was created.
Why don’t people today know that Thomas Jefferson was a fierce partisan and politically ambitious? Because, the author answers, scholars have removed these characteristics from their narratives about him. During the 1930s, Mr. Thompson explains, Jefferson scholars began working with administrators in Franklin Roosevelt’s “benevolent government” to build public trust in FDR’s New Deal. As this work proceeded, Jeffersonians led their scholarly peers into a partnership that Mr. Thompson characterizes as the “Political-Historical Complex.” Its first objective, the author contends, was to transform Jefferson, who President Roosevelt admired, into a “bellwether” to guide the American people to “the pasture their Tocquevillean shepherds were creating for them.” The real 18th century man did not have the characteristic needed to do this, so the P-HC replaced him with Faux Thomas Jefferson.
Kirkus Reviews confirms that the old guard will not endorse Mr. Thompson’s “new” history. Its reviewer’s sour comments show that questioning the 20th century’s ideological history is not permissible. The author’s facts are not challenged. It is his unwillingness to accept the false and failed ideology that underpins faux Thomas Jefferson that offends. Kirkus’s reviewer put it this way: “the author tries to reconcile two essentially contradictory tasks: writing a meticulous work of academic research and participating in political polemics. Regretfully, as expected, this book’s tone and tenor are dominated by the latter. To his credit, Thompson never hides his partisanship; he makes it very obvious that he despises the political left in the US and what he perceives to be its ambition to create a “shepherd-flock system.” Notice that there is nothing here about the facts that underpin Mr. Thompson’s conclusion.
Complaints like this elevate James C Thompson’s American Revolutions Series and place it among the best books on American Revolution. If you want to read an UN politicized history of the American Revolution and understand what it produced, these well-written books are for you. The picture he paints is not just surprising, it is also exciting and entertaining.
4. The Third American Revolution: The Rise and Fall of America’s Imperial Hierarchy
The third American Revolution began, says author James C Thompson, in the third decade of the 20th century and continued into the 1980s. His forthcoming book is the first detailed treatment of it.
The third American Revolution was rooted in a reform movement that coalesced during the last decade of the 19th century. The so-called progressive movement became a dominating political force during the first two decades of the 20th century. The insurgents who carried it, Mr. Thompson explains, were reform-minded activists who were inspired to act by the corruptions of American capitalism and the injuries it was inflicting on the nation’s working-class citizens. While laboring to repair the cumulative damage caused by nation-building events including the civil war, the conquest of the West, industrialization, and corporatization, the 20th century’s reformers abandoned the conceptual father of American society, being English empiricist John Locke, and embraced the social theorist who conceived the societal reconstruction that produced the Soviet Union. This was, of course, German-born communist Karl Marx (1818–1883).
The society Marx envisioned, Mr. Thompson observes, was nothing like Locke’s. Marx’s society was a dictatorship in which there was no consent, no private property, no personal liberty, and no pursuit of private happiness. Since everyone would, in theory, be equal and since no one would own anything, the author says repeating Marx, individuals in Marx’s system were rhetorically “free” and had no need to pursue their private happiness. In their analyses, Marx and his colleague Friedrich Engels (1820–1895) argued that communism serves the interests of the working class because the revolution it engenders will ultimately “overthrow the bourgeois supremacy,” eliminate social classes, and abolish private property. This was not all. “There are eternal truths,” Marx observed, “such as Freedom, Justice, etc., that are common to all states of society. But Communism abolishes eternal truths, it abolishes all religion, and all morality, instead of constituting them on a new basis; it therefore acts in contradiction to all past historical experience.”
Mr. Thompson identifies the reason that American intellectuals dismissed the danger posed by Marx’s power-grabbing, oppression-generating dogma: the First World War changed the way they saw themselves and the world. During the Great War, engaged intellectuals came to see it as their dury to solve the problems facing Men and Society. As this frame of mind was crystalizing, respected public thinkers told them that the common man could not understand these problems and that he was not qualified to design or manage their solutions.
Therefore, after the Great War, leadership individuals in America began organizing networks to analyze the problems facing society and formulate solutions. This expanding network of like-minded elitists planted its members in positions of power, took charge of the state and its people, and did everything that was practicable to restrain the corruptions of capitalism in their effort to care for the less fortunate. According to Mr. Thompson, few members of this network were concerned that they would create the barren, hopeless world Marx described in the Communist Manifesto. Instead, they were satisfied to think that whatever they did would be better than what the incompetent masses might do for themselves. Alexis de Tocqueville warned against this in 1840. He called this ruling class “shepherds”. Mr. Thompson calls it the Imperial Hierarchy.
Mr. Thompson contents that the Imperial Hierarchy was produced by the merging of these three elite communities: 1) the bureaucrats who administered the nation’s benevolent government; 2) scholars who maintained its history and heritage; and 3) moguls and personalities who controlled the nation’s emerging mass media. He notes that by the late-1950s, televisions had become standard furniture in American households and that their screens transformed the American people into a mass audience. It became possible then, the author points out, to create public opinion by embedding messages in television programming and repeating it over and over again to America’s docile, cooperative viewing public. It became possible, in other words, to shape the way Americans saw themselves and everything else—without them even realizing it! This power to create public opinion made the governing hierarchy, which already had the power to create public support for government policies and programs, imperial.
Mr. Thompson contends that the fate of the Imperial Hierarchy was decided in August of 1969. That was when Woodstock Nation was born. Its birth occurred during a three-day orgy on Max Yasgur’s dairy farm in Woodstock, New York. As mostly white middle class college students and other wayfarers smoked dope and screwed each other in Mr. Yasgur’s muddy fields, the Counterculture Rebellion of the 1960s transformed into the Liberation Movement of the 1970s. Woodstock Nation left Mr. Yasgur’s trash-strewn farm with the intention of freeing themselves and everyone else from the nation’s gross materialism, from its asphyxiating orthodoxies, and from the cream-swilling hierarchs who managed them. The hairy chorus of Godspell (1976) cast it as building a new city—”yes, we can, we can build a beautiful city, not a city of angels, but we can build a city of man!”
The administrators of the nation’s benevolent government, the keepers of its faux history and heritage, and the media moguls and personalities who quietly created public opinion, suddenly became targets! The Third American Revolution ended, Mr. Thompson contends, as their collective authority withered away. Oddly enough, Woodstock Nation did not eliminate the Imperial Hierarchy. It transformed itself into a new governing class! In the book’s final chapter, Mr. Thompson comments on what happened after the new people of Woodstock Nation completed their great deconstruction.
Grab your copy today and find out what’s coming.
