* SPECIAL SEMIQUINCENTENNIAL ISSUE *

How should we think about the American Revolution on the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence? The American revolutionaries can help us answer this question.

John Adams, one of the chief revolutionaries, looking back more than four decades after the Declaration of Independence, recorded a memorable judgment on the Revolution in which he played such a central part. Adams lived through all the great events of the Revolution beginning well before and continuing long after July 4, 1776: the Boston Tea Party, the convening of the First Continental Congress, Paul Revere’s Ride, the Battles of Lexington and Concord, Washington’s crossing of the Delaware, the winter at Valley Forge, and the Battle of Yorktown. He understood that all the colorful circumstances, the risky and fateful choices, the acts of daring and heroism would be long remembered and would deserve and need serious study.

But Adams also thought that we couldn’t understand the heroic deeds of the American Revolution—we couldn’t recognize their most essential lesson for us—without understanding the reason they were undertaken. As he wrote to Hezekiah Niles on February 13, 1818, the American Revolution took place “in the Minds and Hearts of the People”—a “radical Change in the Principles, Opinions Sentiments and Affection of the People,” he wrote, “was the real American Revolution.”

The record of this revolution in Americans’ hearts and minds is one of our great national treasures. It provides precious knowledge of the American Revolution to all future times and all peoples everywhere, but especially to what America’s Founders called “ourselves and our Posterity.” It is the eloquent record of the conception and articulation of the American idea of political freedom in pamphlets, petitions, state papers, letters, sermons, constitutions, resolves, bills and declarations of rights, memoirs, diaries, journals, treaties, and speeches—mostly in a compressed period in the 1760s and 1770s—in which a revolutionary generation learned to think and act like the Americans they were becoming.

This “real American Revolution,” as Adams called it, culminated in the Declaration of Independence—an expression of what Thomas Jefferson called “the American Mind.” All of the revolutionary actions and documents leading to the Declaration express one dimension or another of the American idea of political freedom. Returning to them again and again is a way by which succeeding generations of Americans can continue to experience the American Revolution for themselves. 

This experience should not be seen as merely historical. To experience the real American Revolution, and not just the record of it, is to experience the idea of political freedom becoming active in our hearts, minds, and lives. It is to experience being free—not as an unhinged Supreme Court Justice explained freedom in 1992, writing that freedom means being able to “define [our] own concept of existence,” but in the active exercise of the capacities required for self-government. It is an experience that requires, as the Virginia Declaration of Rights proclaimed in 1776, “a firm adherence to justice, moderation, temperance, frugality, and virtue, and [a] frequent recurrence to fundamental principles.”

The revolutionary and founding generations did their heroic part in bequeathing to us this legacy of freedom...

Click here to read the remainder of this article

Christopher Flannery is a senior fellow of the Claremont Institute, a contributing editor of the Claremont Review of Books, and a professor emeritus of the Honors College at Azusa Pacific University, where he taught for over 30 years. He received his M.A. in International History from the London School of Economics and Political Science and his Ph.D. in Government from the Claremont Graduate School.