The American Revolution changed the world. By elevating the inherent rights of Man above hereditary authority, it made the world politically modern. America became synonymous with political freedom, personal liberty, and the Rights of Man. But in spite of the monumental significance of the revolution that created America and made the world politically modern, many today have only a superficial understanding of this transformative event—and what it followed produced!
Most of us know something about John Adams, George Washington, and Thomas Jefferson. Many of us remember the Boston Tea Party and Washington crossing the Delaware. But the backstories about how the patriotic movement started and spread, how its members framed their arguments for rebellion and for political independence, how they gained political power, and how they orchestrated the War for American Independence, have mostly been forgotten.
One reason Americans are losing their history, author James C Thompson contents, is that its keepers are now more interested in writing about what’s wrong with America today and what it should become tomorrow. History has changed. It’s about what’s happening now, not what happened then! Thompson’s new history of America puts American history back on track.
John Adams claimed that the American Revolution was in the minds of the people and that it was over by the time the War for American Independence began. If we accept Adams’ claim, the revolution was in progress when Parliament began taxing King George III’s American subjects in the spring of 1764. It continued through the spring of 1775 when the shot was fired heard round the world. The war that ensued continued until the Treaty of Paris was signed in September of 1783.
That’s two decades of simmering conflict and social division, debate and violent resistance, and open warfare. When the war finally ended, a new generation was living in America. The nation in which they lived was new, not a settled place with established values and traditions. It was a boiling caldron in which diverse individuals and distant communities competed endlessly against each other for political advantage. The tentative nature of things in revolutionary-era America, Thompson says, has not gotten the attention it deserves.
Remember what Churchill said: if we do not learn from the past, we are “doomed to repeat it.”
Readers who delve into America’s revolutionary history are likely to read books that have proven to be popular. These books may be great, but they tend to focus on parts of the story while leaving other parts out. James Thompson’s American Revolutions Series is different. It focuses on four specific revolutions in the ongoing story of America. Thompson tells these stories by weaving a fabric from their backstories. This innovative method makes his narratives fresh, interesting, and uniquely informative.
Thompson ties the four American Revolutions (and Faux Thomas Jefferson) together in the unlikely prophecy Alexis de Tocqueville made in “Democracy in America” (1840). The land of the free and the home of the brave, Tocqueville said, would eventually become what Thompson characterizes as a “benevolent tyranny.”
The American people would, Tocqueville warned, be transformed into “a flock of timid and industrious animals of which the government is the shepherd.” In other words, the political revolutions that have been taking place in America since John Adams’ revolution in the minds of the people (1764-1775) are properly understood in terms of an Above-against-Below conflict rather than the Left-against-Right conflict we all seem to be ensnarled in.
Thompson abandons the conventional narrative and explains how Tocqueville’s two-hundred year old prophecy was fulfilled in a series of American revolutions.
The First Revolution – John Wilkes and the Birth of Civil Liberty:
Thompson begins his story in London in the early 1760s. King George III was taking his seat on the English throne, and John Wilkes was scheming to gain a place for himself in England’s closed political hierarchy.
Wilkes advanced himself using the political method of his idol, William Pitt. Pitt spoke “in the voice of the people” so Wilkes spoke in the voice of the people. In no time, Wilkes offended the King, who directed his ministers to silence the noisy political pest. Wilkes cleverly cast his efforts to save himself as defending the rights of the King’s lowliest subjects. Amazingly, the low and forgotten rallied around him. Wielding their collective power, they delivered Wilkes from the clutches of the tyrannical King. In this process, they made Wilkes a transatlantic hero and established themselves as participants in England’s tradition-bound political process. Wilkes’s biographer, Arthur Cash, calls Wilkes “the scandalous father of civil liberty.”
John Wilkes was an uncouth hustler who used wit and daring to aggravate the King and charm his neglected subjects. Prosecution by the King’s ministers only strengthened his support among London’s anonymous working classes. Their admiration inflated Wilkes into a symbol of the rights of all Englishmen. Efforts to deprive Wilkes of the seat he won in Parliament failed, and Wilkes ultimately joined England’s political establishment. But his unlikely success proved more than a personal triumph. It was also a catalyst for a popular movement that changed England’s political status quo.
Wilkes galvanized public support by publishing a weekly newspaper called “The North Briton.” Even King George III read it. Its popularity made it a platform for dissent and fostered a new political consciousness among the masses. Wilkes’s trial and subsequent imprisonment for libeling the King amplified his status as a martyr for liberty and further mobilized public support.
Sam Adams and the Revolution in the Minds of the American People:
Wilkes’s brazen campaign made him a celebrity on both sides of the Atlantic. Some of his most dedicated followers were in Boston, Massachusetts. Sam Adams and his rudis indigestaque moli were so impressed by what they read about Wilkes that they harnessed his method of speaking in the voice of the people and launched a campaign of their own. The first objective of Adams and his patriotic followers was to rouse the King’s American subjects against the English Parliament, which had begun taxing them without their consent.
Thompson points out that a great majority of the King’s American subjects were unshakably loyal to him and his economic commonwealth, and that Adams’ campaign to build opposition to them was unsuccessful. He did, however, succeed in organizing a network of patriotic insurgents. When he failed to win over the King’s loyal supporters, he directed his patriotic henchmen to silence them. Thompson explains that fear caused by public violence and intimidation caused tens of thousands of prosperous Loyalists to flee the country. Tens of thousands more left their homes and took refuge behind British lines. Thus, even though Adams failed in his bid to turn the American people against their King, his followers gained control of virtually all the American countryside.
The King’s government having been sabotaged and made inoperable, patriots established their own governments and began making laws and punishing those who opposed them. In this process, erstwhile freedom fighters became themselves oppressors. There was, Thompson explains, no public uprising against tyranny. An “energetic minority” destroyed the King’s ability to govern his American colonies, and after doing this, it replaced his governments with unelected governments of its own. The people were not part of these governments. They were managed by them.
Sam Adams was the driving force behind this insurgency. Thompson recognizes Adams’ special genius, which consisted in organizing a transcolonial network of insurgents, designing a propaganda campaign to rouse public resentment toward Parliament, English rule, and the King himself, and suppressing popular opposition to his insurgency. Once he won his insurgency to overthrow King George III’s royal colonial government, Adams drifted out of the political limelight.
Thompson’s forensic history is controversial because it pictures people and events in ways that are different from what folklore histories tell us. But Thompson documents everything he says. In other words, Thompson’s forensic history is controversial but true! Remember what Winston Churchill (supposedly) said in 1948: History is written by the victors. The histories that victors write, Thompson observes, have a home team bias. Thompson avoids this because his business is not polishing the image of the home team. It is demonstrating that exercising politics is a dangerous game, and as Tocqueville foresaw, it transfers the power of people into the hands of the few.
Sam Adams used intimidation and fear to silence his opponents. He personally assembled and directed destructive mobs, and his surrogates regularly threatened to harm those who spoke against them. These methods are morally reprehensible, but they were effective in respect to uniting the colonies against a common enemy. The home team has always been cheered for doing this. Once upon a time, the keepers of America’s history and heritage led this chorus. But this is the 21st century, and, says Thompson, the time has come to get back to reality.
The Second American Revolution: Jefferson and Madison’s Political Insurgency
The first American revolution was an insurgency by an energetic minority, which aimed to overthrow and replace an existing government. The second revolution, which Thompson reconstructs in The Second American Revolution: How Two Partisan Virginians Poisoned America’s Political System, was the insurgency of two energetic partisans who sought to sabotage an existing administration and replace it with their own. This decade-long insurgency was directed by Thomas Jefferson and managed by James Madison.
Jefferson and Madison’s revolution exploited the nation’s new majoritarian political system. Jefferson, in effect, encouraged his protégé to expand and organize their supporters in the agrarian South and in the rapidly growing American West. To do this, Madison employed an updated version of the propaganda campaigns John Wilkes and Sam Adams had used two decades before. Madison’s campaign was more sophisticated than theirs, however, because he had assembled a network of “Republican” newspapers that he used to blacken perceptions of Jefferson’s political enemies, being Alexander Hamilton and his Federalist allies.
By organizing voters in the South and West and getting them to the polls on election day, Jefferson and Madison quickly built a majority party that gave them control of the House of Representatives. In the process, they divided the American people against themselves and transformed the country’s enlightened new majoritarian political system into a battleground for partisan conflict.
The Second American Revolution ended with what Jefferson called the “Revolution of 1800.” He was referring to his successful campaign to become the third President of the United States of America. He finally secured his victory on 17 February 1801 when he squeaked past his running mate, Aaron Burr, on the 36th tie-breaking ballot in the House of Representatives. (In defeat, Burr became Jefferson’s Vice President.) Jefferson’s hair’s breadth victory not only made him President, it also established the adversarial party system Madison had invented (with Jefferson’s enthusiastic support) as the standard method of operation for all American politicians.
Thompson’s narrative provides a gripping account of the political intrigues Jefferson conducted as Vice President, when he devoted himself to sabotaging the re-election prospects of President John Adams. In January 1800, he made a secret deal with Aaron Burr who agreed to deliver the electoral votes of New York to Jefferson’s Republican ticket in return for Jefferson handing the presidency to him when he retired. This deal made, Jefferson settled back on his remote mountaintop and waited for the electoral votes to be counted. When they were, Jefferson was stunned to learn that Burr garnered as many votes as he did. Aaron Burr not Thomas Jefferson, says Thompson, won the election of 1800!
Jefferson’s Relationship with Aaron Burr:
Thompson concludes The Second American Revolution with a new analysis of Jefferson’s political war against Burr.
Jefferson made a devil’s bargain with Burr in the hope that Burr would win the presidential election of 1800 for him. Burr did this by delivering the electoral votes of the State of New York to the Republican ticket. (The election was held in March of 1800). After taking office, President Jefferson moved quickly to protect his administration from the kind of sabotage he had conducted against unsuspecting John Adams. Having surrounded himself with political allies whom he could trust to defend him and his administration, Jefferson planning to perpetuate his party’s control of the government.
By this time, Jefferson and Burr both knew that Burr’s usefulness to Jefferson was over. Burr therefore began to explore opportunities for launching a new political career in the rapidly growing Mississippi River Valley. Jefferson kept a close eye on Burr as he did this because he recognized the charismatic New Yorker as a potentially dangerous rival. If left to himself, Burr could still interfere with the plan Jefferson was developing to perpetuate his party’s control of the government.
This fear translated into a persecution that Jefferson waged against Aaron Burr with the help of America’ greatest political blaggard, General James Wilkinson. Relying on evidence trumped up by Wilkinson, Jefferson ordered Congress to arrest Burr for treason. Burr would probably have been found guilty and executed had Jefferson’s Federalist cousin, Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court, John Marshall, not presided at the trial and acquitted Burr on a technicality. Burr therefore survived, but his political career was over.
Demystifying the Revolutions that made America:
Throughout his series, Thompson challenges traditional narratives about America’s revolutions. The revolutions Sam Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison led, Thompson says, were ultimately about acquiring political power. While acquiring political power, these men and those who helped them shaped America’s political process and its society.
Thompson agrees with Sam Adams’ cousin John that the revolution in the minds of the people (1764-1775) was different from the War for American Independence. (1775-1783) These two events have been merged in America’s folklore history. In the oldtime folklore (pre-1950s), they are portrayed as a unifying struggle for political freedom. In the new folklore (post-1950s), they are treated as the opening events in an ongoing crusade for social justice. The facts Thompson presents show that neither of these characterizations is correct. The political men who created America were in pursuit of political power. How they got it and what they did with it is the story Thompson tells.
Thompson’s meticulous research and engaging storytelling realign events that time distorted. By linking America’s revolutions together in a continuing chain, Thompson shows his readers why America followed the trajectory Alexis de Tocqueville described in 1840. This makes Thompson’s American Revolutions Series new history—a 21st century history of America!
The Philosophy that Underpinned the First American Revolution
The revolutionaries who created American were not philosophers, but the Enlightenment did influence their thinking. Its political concepts and social ideals are things James Thompson studied while earning his degrees in Philosophy and teaching it to college students. God, Natural Law, Rights, Liberty, and Justice were subjects of the patriotic works that electrified Sam Adams’ propaganda campaign.
Some scholarly patriots, notably Sam and John Adams, had access to libraries and could read the works of Aristotle, Thomas Hobbs, John Locke, David Hume, and the Commonwealth Men. Most did not. They merely repeated to what their more learned compatriots said as they hashed out their rights and grievances during the decade that preceded the War for American Independence.
Of all the patriotic penmen, John Adams was undoubtedly the most scholarly and best read. His writings and letters reflect his broad knowledge. The author of the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson, had one of the largest private libraries and gained a reputation as a “philosopher”. But he wrote very little about political rights. His most memorable words on the subject are in the preamble to the Declaration of Independence, which he copied from a declaration George Mason produced a few weeks before Jefferson drafted his. Jefferson also borrowed political ideas from his philosophical cousin, Richard Bland, and he took possession of Bland’s library when he died in 1776.
Thompson evaluates the final patriotic declaration of their rights and grievances in Chapter 9 of The First Revolutions in the Minds of the People. Careful analysis leads Thompson to conclude that John Adams and Charles Thomson patched together the (mysterious) Declaration of Rights and Grievances after the 1st Continental Congress adjourned on 26 October 1774. The Bill of Rights it contains, which was essential to the independence party, was never approved by the people’s representatives!
One might suppose that Jefferson and Madison’s revolution was connected to the enlightened social philosophy of John Locke. But according to Thompson, the connection is weak. In his Second Treatise of Government (1689), Locke argued that majoritarianism is the only legitimate form of government. Jefferson and his protégé were majoritarians, but only to the extent that they planned to create a political majority and use it to gain control of the Congress. Once in charge of the new American republic, they would protect their countrymen from being enslaved by Alexander Hamilton.
Thompson thinks it is more accurate to characterize Jefferson as a republican than a Lockean. As for Madison, he was more interested in organizing a majority political party than he was in Locke’s political theory.
The evolution of American Society
In addition to demystifying four American revolutions, Thompson traces American society through two hundred years of growth and development.
When Sam Adams launched the patriotic movement and began organizing his faction into a political force, America was populated by individuals who were (by necessity) self-reliant. As subjects of England’s monarch, they left it to King George III to govern and defend them while they made their way through life. Being Englishmen in America, they had the common law rights that formed the foundation of England’s unwritten constitution. King George III proved his worth by spending a fortune to defeat France and their Indian allies in the French and Indian War!
The American victory in the War for American Independence changed this. After four years of economic hardship, Alexander Hamilton and James Madison led what Thompson calls a “nation revolution” to replace the failing nation’s confederation system with a constitution and a strong central government. The new constitution was debated and ratified while Jefferson was in France. George Washington was unanimously elected the nation’s first President. But unity transformed into discord and division soon after Jefferson returned home.
In 1801, Jefferson won his Second American Revolution and became the nation’s third President. President Jefferson changed the nation’s new political system by concentrating the power of its republic government in the hands of reliable members of his party. Jefferson, in other words, transformed a government “of, by, and for the people” into government by political party. During Jefferson’s tenure as President, Americans learned to hate each other! Thirty-five years after his death, the union dissolved, and a bloody civil war began.
The third book in Thompson’s four-book American Revolutions Series is the story of faux Thomas Jefferson. Faux Thomas Jefferson – A 20th Century Fiction will be released in the fall of 2024. In it, Thompson explains how “reformers” erased the real 18th century man and replacement him with a progressive caricature to lead the people to a more perfect future. This unheralded substitution marked the beginning of Tocquevillean society in America. Instead of helping Americans understand what once happened, historians focused on shaping public opinion and preparing Americans to be obedient to the “shepherds” who would henceforth manage them.
The American Revolutions Series
In his American Revolutions Series, author James C Thompson scraps old, tired folklore history and reconstructs the four revolutions shaped America’s politics system and society. Grab your copy today or visit the author’s website for more information.
