And it's worth noting as we get underway, that the war, the Revolutionary war had been going on for 15 months before we had this declaration. That would never again happen in world history. That people finally, after 15 months say, you know what we're really doing? We're breaking away from the empire. That 15 month interval between the start of the war at Lexington and Concord and the enactment of the Declaration. That is a testimonial to the reluctance of the American people, if there were such a people, to endorse this idea of breaking with Britain. Now, what was the American Revolution all about? What we learn in school is of course, that liberty loving Americans enjoying security in their rights were suddenly assaulted by British Tax policies that threatened to take their property away, subvert their independence, even reduce them to a condition of slavery. No taxation without representation. It's an inspiring story, and it's predicated on the notion that we all have this political consciousness. This rights consciousness, this awareness of who we are, and what are claims are. And what finally drives Americans to revolution. Is the notion that they were being treated unequally by the British. They weren't being recognized in their rights as Englishmen, and ultimately their rights as men. Well, let me tell you a different story which I think is more accurate. The American Revolution begins when provincial elites, the ruling classes in the various colonies or provinces react defensively against encroachments on their rights as they see them. On their liberty, on their freedoms. It's the concerns of these assemblies, of these provincial legislatures. It's the concerns of people we might now call aristocrats. Dominant people. Oligarchs. In some places, like Virginia, they're pretty impressive. They own vast acres. They're people like Jefferson. Of course, Jefferson's not the biggest of the landholders. Great slaveholders, landholders, or great merchants to the north. And these people see that the new policies that the British are enacting after the French and Indian War, the 7 Years War, are going to be dangerous for their traditional way of life. It's a very conservative reaction. But where it comes from is this, and this is an important point to keep in mind, if there is a collective identity in America that transcends provincial limits it's the sense that these Americans as we now call them were Britains. Everybody in the civilized world agreed that the British Empire was the greatest empire in modern world history perhaps greater than the classical empires. It was an empire that combined great force and power with liberty, with enlightenment, with an expansive commerce that spread British trade across the globe. Americans exalted in the greatness of the British empire. They were imperial patriots. This sense of identification with the empire was extreme. In fact, you could say that Americans thought about empire, and thought about their place in it well before anybody bothered to think about the empire in Britain itself. Now, I don't mean to say that the British policy makers had no awareness of what we call the empire. That they didn't have the colonial administration. That there weren't occasional acts of parliament and more regular supervision, more regular supervision by the board of trade. Certainly, all this is true. There's in fact a new minister for the southern department who's, who's remit is to look after the colonies. There's an imperial policy but the idea of an empire as this entity, a greater Britain that includes Americans, British English speaking people everywhere, people who enjoy a tradition of liberty and the greatest claim that Britain's made. What made them proud to be British is that they had a constitution. You can't find it anywhere. It's not written down. It has, of course, many texts that contribute to this idea of a constitution. But Americans felt they shared in that tradition. Their local courts were common law courts. They were very much part of a greater British world. The question though is what was their status in this world. What drove Americans to break away from the Empire was the unwillingness of metropolitan Britains to recognize them as equal members of an empire. You could say that the beginnings of American nationalism are a peculiarly provincial perspective on the imperial constitution on the empire, a claim that Americans make to be, on the leading edge of the Empire. In 1751, Benjamin Franklin wrote his famous essay on population, in which he suggested that the population here was doubling every 25 years. And that before long, do the math, there would be more Britain's in America, than there are, Britain's in the Metropolis. You can even fantasize about the movement of the capital from London across the oceans. Say, a swamp on the Potomac River, or some other place, if you're really into the fantasy as the American founders were. And say that, one day this great empire, it's frontier, it's moving westward. Bishop Barkley had promised the course of empire is moving westward This is the West. This is the future. This vaulting sense of a providential mission, what we later call manifest destiny, is very much a part of British thinking in the 18th century. This is the core of American patriotism. It's a combination of identification with the empire, loyalty to King George the third, after he ascended in 1760, with of course an obsessive concern and pride in provincial institutions. Because what made Americans free British people is that they had local institutions of law and governance under their control. And think of the advantages of empire for just a minute. The greatest challenge for producers, consumers, for merchants, for agriculturalists. In the 18th century in a trans-Atlantic world, the great challenge is to trade freely with protection and security. This is what the British Empire offers as the strongest government on Earth. It offers Americans security. This gets to the core of the question of loyalty because a king's authority is based on what we can call the protection covenant. You exchange your loyalty, your allegiance, for my protection. That doesn't sound quite like a group of individuals getting together and forming a social contract and consenting to be governed by themselves. No, the protection covenant suggests something more fundamental. It's more Hobbes than Locke. It's more the need we all have for a powerful government to give us the security that enables us to enjoy any rights at all. Americans aren't foolish. They don't want to live in a state of nature. In fact, nature was probably pretty much a dirty word in the 18th century. Not the thing that romantics would later celebrate. Nature is dangerous, and dark place. The word that comes to mind in the absence of law, and order is anarchy, lawlessness. This is the great danger of a state of war. A state of war is the state of nature Provincial resistance to crown and Parliamentary policy had led to a state of war. It had left Americans in an untenable situation where they were suffering, forgive the modern psychological jargon, cognitive dissidence. They were rebels. They were making war against their lawful sovereign and they were doing it for a long time and it was a bad thing. They knew it was dangerous because if they're rebels, they're common criminals. And if the king can kill you, you deserve to die. This is the immediate context for the Declaration of Independence. This understanding that the situation Americans were in, violently resisting their lawful sovereign. Of course they were convinced that he, and their Parliament, had violated the Constitution, had betrayed the protection covenant. That in fact, as Jefferson tells us in The Declaration, George the third was making war against his loyal subjects. We had surely, right on our side, but did we? Were we really convinced? I'm imagining that we're all Americans now and that we're back at that moment. What a situation to be in. In something like a state of nature. Do you have the right to kill your father? Now I don't want you to share your Oedipal situation with me. It's not an appropriate context for that. But rage against fathers is not unknown in world history, which is why I'm delighted to only have daughters. Sons are deeply threatening, but of course we sons need to break away from our fathers. But revolution, the idea of killing the father. It begins with this journey secret, its a, it's overthrowing the legitimate and even natural authority of the father. We think now that monarchy is so incredibly absurd and ridiculous. How could any one dynasty, one family produce people worthy to rule us? It seems absurd. But if you asked people in the 18th century before the American Revolution what the common sense of the thing was, they would tell you this. They'd say, all men are created unequal. Some are born to rule. Some are born to vast acres. Some are born to toil. It's the nature of the thing. And it's not just the satisfied complacency of the status quo. It's the fact that everyone believes that social order is a hierarchy. Order implies connection, across class and status lines that create a larger whole. But depends on that differentiation. Think of your body for a minute. We've already been through your Oedipal conflicts but think of your body. All parts of your body are not created equal. They do different things, it's a division of labor. The body works precisely because of that differentiation. How can you imagine a social whole, an organism in which every element is identical? That's not commonsensical. That's something truly revolutionary. And this is what people like Jefferson thought. They said, this is going to be a radical reorientation, the very nature of social order. There is, I'm saying, something profoundly unnatural about rebellion against legitimate authority. And monarchical authority is legitimate in the 18th century. Well, there's a lot of resistance to the Revolution then, even among Americans. John Adams offered the idea that one third of the American people were in fact patriots. That's not everybody, is it, that's not everybody rising up and saying we believe in free government, we believe in government by consent. One third of the people, he thought, maybe they were loyalists, and we know that many of them fled to what became The Maritime Provinces of Canada, and they fled all over the world. It's a great Loyalist Diaspora. And one thrid can't make their minds up. That one third of the middle is probably bigger than that, and there's a fourth category that Thomas Payne identified for us which is the sunshine patriot. Who's winning? I'm on that side. Take these four ambiguous categories, put them in motion, and you have a picture of the confused loyalties of Americans in 1776. And those people who for conscientious and principled reasons said I can't make war against my monarch, my sovereign. Well, who's supporting the high principle, here? Or would it be the rebel? Well, no rebel wants to be known as a rebel. No father killer wants to go down in history as a father killer. You've got a big job of justification before you. Let's talk for a few minutes about what needs to be done in 1776 and I think it will be clearer why this cognitive dissonance is untenable, intolerable. On one hand, if Americans are no longer protected by George the Third, and that protection is a very real thing, regardless of what Jefferson tells us in the Declaration about all those horrible things the king is doing to us. Nonetheless, Americans have been and are continuing to be protected by George the Third up until the outbreak of war. They know that's an important thing. If you are going to forswear monarchical protection, you need a substitute. The substitute is in the balance of power. It's in alliances with other foreign powers. For the British it was clear that if the colonies broke away they must be looking for another mother country. Now we, patriotic Americans would never say that that other mother country was France. But that's exactly what the British thought. It's got to be one or the other. You can't go it alone. And the fact is, we couldn't. You had to exploit the resources of the balance of power, to create an offset to British power, now your enemies, because this is what the Declaration does, is to o fficially codify the status of the British as your enemies. That means you need friends, you need to be able to be able to call upon the resources of the balance of power. Because at the end of the day 1776 doesn't mean anything if you don't win the war. It's not a declaration of a fact, it's a hope, it's a prayer and that prayer will only be fulfilled on the battlefield. Or at sea. You need an effective alliance. It's not just in sheer power terms. It's as long as you are re, rebels against a legitimate domestic authority. Nobody can help you, and you can't claim the status of a belligerent under the law of nations. The law of nations applies to nations. How do you get to be a nation? You have to be recognized as a nation. You have to act like one. You have to be able to mobilize your resources, present a common front, send armies into the field, diplomats overseas. You have to be able to tax your people. Your people have to be willing to die for you. That's what it means to be a nation. Think for just a minute. Americans are now trying to achieve the status of a recognized power among the powers of the earth. And just a few years ago they just wanted to be treated as equals under the British Empire. They were proud to be British, they were anglophiles, and in a moment because it was declared from on high they became anglophobes. The British were their enemies. This sudden conversion experience from old to new, to enable Americans to make effective war. To complete the work they had begun. Without a clear intention. They didn't want to be independent. They had no choice but to be independent. And what independence meant, in fact, was interdependence, to be able to establish a workable alliance and win the war. [MUSIC]
