By Allen Guelzo
Monday, July 06, 2026
No one who takes up a copy of The Federalist Papers
ever forgets the way Alexander Hamilton opened the first of that remarkable
series of commentaries on the new American Constitution, published five weeks
after it was signed in 1787 in Philadelphia. “It has been frequently remarked,”
Hamilton began, “that it seems to have been reserved to the people of this
country, by their conduct and example, to decide the important question,
whether societies of men are really capable or not of establishing good
government from reflection and choice, or whether they are forever destined to
depend for their political constitutions on accident and force.” It was a
decision to which he did not hesitate to attach world significance, since “a
wrong election of the part we shall act may, in this view, deserve to be
considered as the general misfortune of mankind.”
Which, many people have been quick to say, was typical of
the future treasury secretary’s infatuation with his own eloquence. But
Hamilton was not the only voice who saw the American Revolution as what Ralph
Waldo Emerson would later call a “shot heard round the world.” Only months
after the Declaration of Independence was issued, the chief justice of South
Carolina declared, “Suddenly arisen in the World” is “a new Empire, stiled, The
United States of America.” He added, “America hails Europe, Asia and Africa!—She
proffers Peace and Plenty! This Revolution, forming one of the most important
Epoch’s in the History, not of a Nation, but, of the World; is, as it were, an
Eminence from which we may observe the Things around us.” The Marquis de
Lafayette, who dodged a ban imposed by the king of France to cross the Atlantic
and join the revolutionary army, insisted that the cause of America in its
rebellion against British rule was the cause of humanity, and to the extent
that “America is certain of her independence, humanity has gained her cause,
and liberty will never be without a place of refuge.”
The Venezuelan Francisco de Miranda, who caught the
revolutionary fever during his brief service in America as a Spanish officer,
was a convert to the American Revolution. He called it “the infallible
preliminary” to a republican and anti-colonial revolutionary movement against
Spanish imperial rule over his own native Venezuela, a movement that climaxed
in two attempts, in 1806 and 1810, to create an independent Venezuelan
republic. Miranda was, as Benjamin Rush described him to James Madison, “the
friend of liberty and a believer in the practicability of governments which
shall have for their objects the happiness of nations instead of the greatness
of individuals.”
Uneasy observers like Spain’s ambassador to France in
1783, Pedro Pablo Abarca de Bolea, the count of Aranda, were also convinced
that the American Revolution signaled the fall of aristocratic dominoes around
the Atlantic world, although that was not a result they welcomed. “The
independence of the English colonies…is for me a source of pain and fear,”
Aranda reported to Spain’s King Carlos III. The new American republic “has been
born a pygmy,” but “the day will come in which it grows and turns into a giant,
even a frightening colossus.” The ideas it represented—especially “freedom of
conscience”—will first “attract farmers and artisans from all nations,” and
then “within a few years” it will direct those energies outward to overthrow
the monarchies that had once been its allies against Britain.
The ultimate statement of the meteor-like impact of the
Revolution, however, was reserved for the British-born propagandist Thomas
Paine, who wrote in January 1776 that the Revolution offered Americans “every
opportunity and every encouragement…to form the noblest, purest constitution on
the face of the earth.” Even more, “We have in our power to begin the world
over again. A situation, similar to the present, hath not happened since the
days of Noah until now. The birthday of a new world is at hand.”
***
If this enthusiasm for the towering image of the
Revolution generates in modern American minds a certain skeptical incredulity,
a great deal of the reason for that incredulity may rest on the problems that
the Revolution did not solve—starting with slavery and extending to inequality,
social stagnation, and political violence (the worst example of which was the
American Civil War). But an equally important reason for skepticism about
attributing a worldwide influence to the American Revolution rests on the ways
in which the Revolution succeeded beyond anyone’s hopes—and thereby made its
accomplishments something to be taken for granted.
In 1776, the Western world still understood human
societies as hierarchies, enforced by authority. From classical
times, both the physical and political universe had been understood as an
orderly and logical stacking of things and people, arranged according to a kind
of moral pedigree. The solar system was diagrammed with the earth at its bottom
and then, in ascending order of perfection, the moon, the planets, the stars,
and finally the firmament, the heavens where dwelt God and the saints. Human
society followed the same pattern of hierarchy: Kings ruled over nobles, and
nobles ruled over the commons. The lower order served the next higher, and the
higher orders were responsible for preserving and protecting the lower.
Business (if it could even be called that) functioned according to webs of
patronage, not by competition. Buying low and selling high was an actual felony
in 17th-century England; in France a nobleman was in danger of losing his title
if he engaged in trade. As a form of forced labor, slavery was merely the
lowest rung on this ladder, and the entire ladder was understood as the only viable
way of holding off anarchy, war, and famine.
That world of hierarchy and authority began to crack in
the 1600s, as the scientific discoveries of Galileo and Isaac Newton overthrew
the old notion of a physical universe governed by moral qualities of
superiority and inferiority. The vision of the universe as a hierarchy, with
its various parts arranged as a moral pageant from the most pure to the most
base, went out the window. Instead, it became an assortment of simple
substances, governed only by predictable and measurable physical laws and
forces.
It did not take long before European political theorists
began applying to political society the same refusal to approve authority and
hierarchy. In one of the great thought experiments of the 17th century, the
English political writer John Locke argued that every society emerges as an
organized whole only because people need to look out for their property and
their natural rights—not because some royal lawgiver imposes a divine order.
There was nothing mysterious or occult about governments, and whenever a
society decays or is diverted from that basic purpose of protecting property
and rights, the people who made that society can devise something new in its
place.
This new understanding of politics remained only a
thought experiment in European capitals. Even in Locke’s England, where the
powers of the king had been slowly but markedly circumscribed by Parliament
throughout the 17th century, Parliament itself was still top-heavy with
nobility, the landed gentry, and the senior clergy of the Church of England. In
Britain’s North American colonies, by contrast, Locke and the other great
political questioners of what later became known as the Enlightenment—Montesquieu,
Beccaria, Adam Smith—were read with very different eyes, not as the providers
of thought experiments but as men who were describing the colonies’ own
creation.
It was, therefore, not difficult for Americans to imagine
that they could do without hierarchies entirely. And when, after 1763, British
imperial planners in London began to lay burden after burden on the colonies in
the form of taxes and trade regulations that ignored the colonies’ own home
legislatures and assemblies, their conclusion was that the home government in
England had gone off its rails into corruption. They appealed first to
Parliament for redress, and then to the king, and then finally, after the clash
of arms in 1775, they resorted to a declaration of independence that disposed
of hierarchy and authority in a single eloquent sentence: We hold these
truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are
endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are
Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
***
Looked at one way, the American Revolution can appear, on
those terms, to have been a purely domestic affair, of English-speaking
dissenters ridding themselves of an overmighty monarch in order to practice the
same humdrum self-government they had always known on the faraway shores of
North America. But from the perspective of observers who had never known
anything but political hierarchy, and supposed that nothing but hierarchy
buttressed by authority could guarantee stability and peace, the American
Revolution appeared as a wonder, as the first inkling that governments without
kings and nobles, and without mandate and conformity, would not quickly descend
into chaos and self-destruction.
The unlooked-for success of a republic that disposed of
hierarchy and authority unlocked the tongues of Europeans who hoped to rewrite
their own hidebound autocracies after the new American model. The Abbé Raynal,
the French philosophe and friend of the Revolution, predicted in 1781
that the United States “cannot fail of becoming one of the most flourishing
countries upon the globe,” and he did not hesitate to wonder whether “Europe
should one day find her masters in her children.” The Marquis de Condorcet
praised the “benefits humankind as a whole should expect from America’s
example.” He went on, “The example of the equality which exists in the United
States” has doomed any belief “that nature has divided the human race, like
horses, into three or four categories, and that one of these categories is also
doomed to work much and eat little.”
Even the new American capital city under the
Constitution, Philadelphia, was a model of republican politics to the essayist
Joseph-Antoine Cerutti, “entirely populated with brothers and devoid of
tyrants, slaves, priests, and without atheists, idle men or any poor,” and
deserving “to be the capital of the world.” And in the first flush of the
French Revolution, Thomas Jefferson (the United States diplomatic
representative in Paris in 1789) was flattered to discover in France’s National
Assembly that “it is impossible to desire better dispositions towards us, than
prevail in this assembly. Our proceedings have been viewed as a model for them
on every occasion.”
Nor was this admiration limited to the French. Far to the
north, in Sweden, the editor of the journal Medborgaren (Citizen)
applauded the Revolution for teaching “all nationalities the meaning of the
majesty of nations: the majesty of man!” And the king of Sweden, Gustav III,
trembled at the thought of an “epidemic of popular disturbances” that would
“spread from the soil of America.” The Dutch Patriot movement, which briefly
gained power in the Netherlands in the 1780s, hailed the American Revolution as
the model for their own claims to representative power. “In America the sun of
salvation has risen which shall also shine upon us if we wish,” announced
François Adriaan Van der Kemp, the leading preacher of the anti-princely party,
in 1782. “America can teach us how to fight the degeneration of the people’s
character, to stay moral corruption, to put an end to bribery, to smother the
seeds of tyranny and to restore the health of our moribund freedom.”
Within the Western hemisphere, restless Spanish colonies
took the example of the United States as encouragement and as model. Francisco
de Miranda’s Venezuela was only one of the myriad South American republican
movements to see their future in the success of the American Revolution. The
short-lived Congress of New Granada (which included modern-day Colombia and
Panama) announced in 1811 its admiration for “the brilliance and prosperity of
the United States of North America,” to the point where one province of New
Granada adopted “the fundamental laws of Pennsylvania, another of Virginia,
another of Massachusetts, and another all of the laws of Maryland.”
Not just revolutionary ideas but the revolutionary
leadership in America generated applause. Vicente Rocafuerte, the president of
the Republic of Ecuador, created a pocket-sized anthology of documents from the
American Revolution in 1821 that could be easily smuggled past Spanish censors.
Rocafuerte’s Necessary Ideas for Every Independent American Nation That
Desires to Be Free claimed that liberty had begun as an idea in England
with Magna Carta, but the verdadero decálogo politico (the True Ten
Commandments) of revolution were the Declaration of Independence, and its
apostles were “Franklin, Hancock, Hamilton, and that series of great men, whose
wisdom the world admires and will admire forever.”
Among those “great men,” no one towered in international
esteem above George Washington. “Where may the wearied eye repose / When gazing
on the great,” asked the radical English poet Lord Byron,
Where neither guilty glory
glows,
Nor despicable state?
Yes—one—the first—the last—the best—
The Cincinnatus of the West,
Whom envy dared not hate,
Bequeath’d the name of Washington,
To make man blush there was but one!
“The memory of Washington,” added the British political
commentator Leslie Grove Jones in 1827,
“will outlive the history of all the other great captains, whether of antient
or of modern times, in the proportion that his virtues exceeded their military
deeds.” And why? Because “every act of his was for the benefit of his
fellow-citizens; he lived but for his country and the advantage of mankind.”
***
The Revolution also generated some serious domino effects
that were technically, but not entirely, apart from the Revolution’s ideas.
England, to start with, was far from being of one mind about suppressing the
Revolution. The same taxes that had exasperated the colonies before 1775 stoked
a rise in smuggling and contraband in England. By 1783, as many as 20,000
people—in a population in Britain of just 8 million—were involved full-time in
smuggling tea, tobacco, silk, and alcohol; one Royal Navy sloop caught 300
smugglers trying to unload 120,000 gallons of brandy and 25 tons of tea on a
single beach on the English Channel.
But nowhere in the British Isles was the American example
more direct, or directly cited, than in Ireland, which was ruled by Britain but
still retained its own parliament. As early as October 1775, members of the
Irish Parliament drew immediate parallels between “the subjugation of America”
and the “dependence of Ireland,” and one member announced that Ireland’s best
hope “to obtain her own constitutional rights” was in the “complete success and
triumph” of the American revolutionaries. The Irish Volunteer movement, which
was originally created to raise recruits to resist a French invasion, soon
became a platform for Irish independence, with the Americans as its
inspiration, and Horace Walpole feared in 1779 that “Ireland has much the air
of Americanising.”
It certainly did. “See America,” declared Henry Grattan,
the leading Irish parliamentarian. “America is not only free, but she thinks
like a free country.” Beware of attacking American liberty: “What you trample
on in Europe will sting you in America.” The imperial government in London
temporarily backed down, granting the Irish Parliament considerable latitude
for self-determination—but only until the American war was over. A desperate
revolutionary movement was launched in 1798, only to fail, and to see Ireland
officially subjugated to British rule and its parliament disbanded.
That did not prevent other revolutionary movements still
farther afield in place and time from appealing to the American example. In
India, Britain’s distraction with America gave an opportunity to Haider Ali,
the sultan of Mysore, to strike back at creeping British colonialism on the
subcontinent, and his success prompted one American general in 1777 to propose
sending a contingent of American volunteers to aid him. (Ironically, it would
be the British general who surrendered his army to Washington at Yorktown,
Charles Cornwallis, who would be sent to India in 1786 to make sure that India
did not follow the same anti-imperial path as America.)
And it could be said with some justice that both
Australia and Sierra Leone are the offspring of the American Revolution. In the
case of Australia, Britain no longer had American colonies to which it could
deport its convicts and chose instead to begin dispatching them to Botany Bay
in 1788. As for Sierra Leone, it was the black refugees who fled from American
plantations to British garrisons in America who were eventually relocated,
first in Nova Scotia, and then on the coast of West Africa.
The echoes of the American Revolution kept on coming,
even 50 years later. In 1820, after British cavalry killed 11 protesters and
injured over 400 more at St. Peter’s Field outside Manchester, Percy Bysshe
Shelley angrily contrasted Britain with the American republic as “a highly
civilized community” that “has no king…no officer to whom wealth and from whom
corruption flows…no order of men privileged to cheat and insult the rest of the
members of the state and who inherit a right of legislating and judging which
the principles of human nature compel them to exercise to their own profit and
to the detriment of those not included within their peculiar class.” Above all,
“it has no established church…defended by prosecutions and sanctioned by
enormous bounties.”
A year later, as Greece rose in revolt against the rule
of the Ottoman Turks, the Greek classical scholar and revolutionary sympathizer
Adamantios Korais appealed for American sympathy by connecting the Greek
struggle with the American revolt of 1776: “Though separated from you,
Americans, by mighty oceans, we are driven near to you by your virtues. We feel
you to be nearer to us than the nations on our frontiers, and we regard you as
friends, fellow-citizens and brethren, because you are just, benevolent and
generous.”
It was the conviction of Leslie Grove Jones that “the
United States of North America” was “founded upon the true and just rights of
man,” and its “resistance…against the mother country…should serve as a model
for future ages.” The American Revolution “was not an insurrection of factious
agitators…. It was a brave and virtuous people struggling for the maintenance
of their lawful rights; a people whose struggle was conducted by the wisest,
most moderate, most disinterested, and most upright men.”
***
Americans of the revolutionary generation clearly did not
mind the adulation offered them by the Old World. “It is one of the Sweetest
Consolations I have found in Life,” wrote John Adams in 1783, “to see that
while We have been contending for our own Liberties, We have…Set an Example of
political Liberty, religious Liberty, and Commercial Liberty before the Eyes of
the present age, and that Mankind in general have shewn so good a Disposition
to favour and to follow it…. May every Part of America and Europe, take care,
not to loose, the Ground they have gained.” In a pithier way, Thomas Jefferson
told Caesar Rodney in 1820 that “we are the world’s last hope,” and 42 years
later, Abraham Lincoln still subscribed to the same faith when he reminded
Congress that America was “the last best hope of earth.”
There were more than a few pious hopes that the Americans
would take some part in evangelizing other peoples for liberty. “We cannot but
feel deeply interested in their happiness, and wish for their success, in all virtuous
measures, to advance a cause dear to mankind,” insisted the New England
geographer Jedidiah Morse. “It becomes us…not to confine our benevolent regards
to the narrow circle of our particular friends, to our town, our state, or even
to our country; but to feel a glow of affectionate good will for all men of
every nation, religion and character, on earth.”
Alas, the first nation to undertake a successful
political revolution after the American one was France, and American onlookers
were appalled by its descent into the dictatorship of Bonaparte. Jedidiah Morse
wished success to other revolutionaries but only “in all virtuous measures,”
and the Reign of Terror that followed on the overthrow of the French monarchy
was anything but virtuous. Morse was sickened by “the great impropriety and
absurdity of approving and justifying…the conduct of…the French nation” in
making a “havock of literature and the arts” and promoting the “barbarous and
shocking executions of the innocent.” And when the French Revolution’s
diplomatic representative, Edmond-Charles Genêt, tried to appeal to Americans
in 1793 over the head of President George Washington, the soldier of the
Revolution erupted in fury: “Is the Minister of the French Republic to set the
Acts of this Government at defiance, with impunity? And then
threaten the executive with an appeal to the People?”
No matter how eloquent the appeal, there would be no
foreign interventions on behalf of the politics of liberty by the United States
until the eve of the 20th century. Until then, the rule of American diplomacy
would be the advice of John Quincy Adams, that America “stands forever, a light
of admonition to the rulers of men”—admonition, but not intervention.
The American Republic “does not go abroad, in search of monsters to destroy.”
There was another hesitation that discouraged Americans
from unfurling an overly aggressive banner on behalf of liberty, and that was
slavery. No single moral shortcoming in the new Republic matched the cost
presented by combining an appeal to natural rights to liberty with the frank
denial of those rights to an entire race of enslaved people. Samuel Johnson saw
this at once in 1775 when he demanded, “How is it that we hear the loudest
yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?” Leslie Grove Jones was struck
by the same conundrum half a century later. “It is most strange to witness in
the Free States of North America the deplorable condition of the poor Negro”
and downright “melancholy, at the very seat of Government, to see whole gangs
in chains, collected, and driven away to the South” or to have “the very door
of the President of this Free State opened to you by a slave, when you walk in
to pay your personal respects to himself and the liberties of his country.”
It was melancholy for a number of Americans, too,
starting with Thomas Jefferson, who had no decent way of explaining why a
republic that took liberty as its gospel could tolerate slavery. “What a
stupendous, what an incomprehensible machine is man!” he admitted in 1786 to
Jean-Nicolas Démeunier. A man will “endure toil, famine, stripes, imprisonment
or death itself in vindication of…liberty, and the next moment…inflict on his
fellow men a bondage, one hour of which is fraught with more misery than that…which
he rose in rebellion to oppose.”
Seventy years later, Abraham Lincoln would complain, in a
more severe vein, that slavery was “the one retrograde institution in
America…undermining the principles of progress, and fatally violating the
noblest political system the world ever saw.” Only, by that time it would be
Americans who were incredulous that American promises could be believed. “We,
the boasted pattern for the world—we cut down the banner of freedom,” exclaimed
a contributor to the Oberlin Evangelist in 1848, “and planted in its
stead the black flag of slavery!!”
But not every observer around the world thought that the
American example had lost its force. After the failure of the democratic
revolutions of 1848 in Europe, many revolutionary ears turned instead to listen
to the song of Marxist socialism. But not all. “There are gaps and shortcomings
in the national character visible at the first glance,” conceded Georges Fisch,
the eminent Swiss visitor to the United States in 1862. But observing a nation
now embroiled in a war to end slavery, Fisch was impressed by “the strength the
North derived from the belief that in this struggle it was not only saving the
United States, but also the great principles it represented.”
The faith of the Revolution “has not given way,” Fisch
promised, and the abolition of slavery “will be a moral prodigy well-calculated
to rouse up the latent energies that are slumbering amongst worn-out nations.”
It was the example of the Revolution that convinced a youthful Abraham Lincoln
that “there must have been something more than common that those men struggled
for, something even more than National Independence…something that held out a
great promise to all the people of the world to all time to come.” Sixty-seven
years after that, the same impulse led Franklin Roosevelt to declare that “in
1776 we sought freedom from the tyranny of a political autocracy—from the
eighteenth century royalists who held special privileges from the crown,” and
in 1936, Americans would still “stand for democracy, not tyranny; for freedom,
not subjection; and against a dictatorship by mob rule and the over-privileged
alike.”
In this 250th anniversary year, there is still evidence
that Fisch and Lincoln and Roosevelt were not wrong, and that the example of
the American Revolution still exerts a hopeful force on the minds of people
around the world. David Armitage, in The Declaration of Independence: A
Global History, has created a list of more than 190 nations whose
declarations of independence have been in some measure based on Jefferson’s
Declaration, including Haiti in 1804, New Zealand in 1835, and Czechoslovakia
in 1918. And in the fall of 2022, during anti-government riots in Chongqing in
southwest China, a student activist was filmed shouting a slogan that many
protesters would adopt: “Give me liberty, or give me death!’” Whatever its
failings over two and a half centuries, the idea of the Revolution and the overthrow
of mindless authority and hierarchy—these live and flourish and give hope.
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