America, 1776: Motivations for Revolution

18th century America was, like most Western societies at the time, a highly inequitable place, and through the latter part of the century, the American poor became increasingly dissatisfied with this fact. Poor in America through the 1760s and 70s were best described as choleric; they were poignantly dissatisfied with their economic situation, to the point of violent revolt against those they saw as their oppressors. When it became clear that colonial America’s violently inflamed populace would not be pacified, colonial elites attempted to deflect the lower classes’ outrage away from themselves and towards the British government. The American Revolution was a consequence of this diversion tactic.

Prior to the revolution, wealth in the colonies was highly concentrated in the hands of a select few aristocrats and had been for an entire century preceding the revolution. In 1680 the top one percent of American colonists possessed 39% of America’s total wealth. By the early 1700s, the top 5% of taxpayers in Boston controlled 49% of the city’s taxable assets. The majority of the American population, on the other hand, lived in a state of general destitution. Those who had once been indentured servants found themselves first supplanted by slave labor, then forced westward onto frontier lands. Rarely would a former indentured servant rise through the socioeconomic classes into financial comfort, and since indentured servants comprised between half and two thirds of America’s immigrant population through the 1600s, the majority of America’s population through the 1700s were poor vagrants and beggars. These poor were generally dissatisfied with their economic situation, not only because of their poverty but because of their belief that their poverty was inflicted upon them by the upper classes. It was believed among the lower classes that “…poor men were always oppressed by the rich.” In 1765, someone wrote to the New York Gazette: “Is it equitable that 99, rather 999, would suffer for the extravagance or grandeur of one, especially when it is considered that men frequently owe their wealth to the impoverishment of their neighbors?”

This general bitterness among American poor would accumulate in explosive mob action throughout the latter part of the 18th century. Bacon’s Rebellion in 1676 marked the first organized revolt by American lower classes against British governmental powers. One hundred years later, sentiments of uprising were once again promulgated among the lower classes. Throughout the 1750s and 1760s, tenants rebelled against their wealthy landlords in northeastern New York; their rioting eventually led to the carving of Vermont out of New York State. The Regulator movement in North Carolina set farmers and small landowners against authorities and tax collectors, and in 1770, resulted in a large riot in Hillsborough, North Carolina. In the riots, a group of 100 irate farmers disrupted a court, forced the judge to flee, beat three lawyers and two merchants, and looted several stores. In the summer of 1765 in Boston, a shoemaker named Ebenezer Macintosh led a mob in destroying the house of Boston merchant Andrew Oliver. Two weeks later, the same mob looted and defaced the property of English political representative Tom Hutchinson. It is important to note that at this time, the fury of the lower classes was indiscriminant; the rich in general, not specifically wealthy English policy makers, were targeted by the riots and revolts throughout the mid-1700s.

The rich denounced these drastic actions, but this did little to prevent violent outbreaks among the lower classes. Unable to subdue the violently inflamed poor, the colonial aristocracy tried focusing the mob’s anger towards the tax laws Britain had been passing to pay for the French and Indian War. In 1765, a group of wealthy Boston aristocrats known as the Loyal Nine organized a procession through the streets of Boston protesting the Stamp Act. This was one of the first examples of colonial aristocrats organizing anti-British activities among the lower classes. Through the next decade, anti-British movements started gaining momentum in the colonies (particularly the northern ones), with Britain’s tax laws at the focal point of the protesters’ rationale. In 1766 Boston policy makers decried British tax policies as “taxation without representation”; the phrase quickly caught on as a rallying cry among American colonists. In 1770, a scuffle between riotous Bostonians and British troops resulted in the inadvertent killing of 5 civilians, in an incident later dubbed the Boston Massacre. Boston merchants arranged a funeral procession for those killed. Ten thousand people, out of the sixteen thousand that lived in Boston, marched in this procession. By the mid-1770s, angst among the colonial lower class was directed almost solely towards the British government. Then, in early 1776, American writer Thomas Paine published his famous pamphlet Common Sense, which epitomized the efforts of the American rich to divert the anger of the poor. In it, Paine called for Americans to secede from the British monarchy and establish its own autonomous government. This revolution would give American leaders the chance to restructure their government so that the emergent society would appear as more economically equitable. This would have effectively allowed the rich to continue living in opulence while placating the boisterous poor.

The American government achieved just this; though its result was a new and independent nation, not much in this new nation was actually new. In 18th century America, “six out of every seven” urban citizens were “poor, indebted, [and] discontented…” according to Virginia governor William Berkeley. By his estimate, 84% of Americans lived in poverty prior to the Revolution, which would correspond roughly to a Gini coefficient of 0.7 (the Gini coefficient is a measurement of inequality in wealth distribution). In 1800, 20 years into America’s independence, America’s Gini coefficient was 0.643, and when censuses were again taken in 1850 this statistic remained virtually unchanged. Even today, America’s Gini coefficient has only just lowered to 0.5, which means that the top 20% of Americans own 85% of America’s total wealth. The American Revolution did not improve economic equality as was commonly perceived. Instead, economic inequality was masked under a veil of propagandist rhetoric. Colonists were chided into abandoning “cowardly Toryism” (Paine, The Crisis No. 1), guaranteed the “right” to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” (Jefferson, The Declaration of Independence), and convinced that, “armed in the holy cause of liberty, …we are invincible by any force which our enemy can send against us” (Patrick Henry, Speech to the Virginia Convention, March 23, 1775). These words, of course, were empty, but they served in convincing the colonists that they had a “national identity” as an “American,” and prevented the lower classes from rioting any further. America has remained a coherent nation ever since the revolution despite persistent economic inequity because of these insidious rhetorical strategies.

The American Revolution was merely a consequence of the American rich looking out for their class interests. They wanted to remain wealthy and privileged, and they did not want their property or their persons harmed by rebellious poor. Their actions were logical, if a bit near sighted, and have influenced the way American’s view themselves and their world for the entirety of America’s existence.