the american revolution by gordon s wood

Land fever infected all levels of society. A total of 264 new towns were established in northern New England during the years between 17. In the same period migrants from Massachusetts streamed into Main and founded 94 towns. What began as a colonist rebellion on the very edges of the civilized world was transformed into an earth- shaking event- an event that promised, as one clergyman declared, to create out if the “perishing World… a new world, a young world, a world of countless millions, all in the fair Bloom of Piety.”īetween 17 some 20,000 people from southern New England moved up the Connecticut River into New Hampshire and into what would later become Vermont. The Revolution shattered what remained of these traditional patterns of life and prepared the way for the more fluid, bustling individualistic world that followed.

It was also an integral part of the real transforming that carried America into the liberal democratic society of the modern world. The revolution was not simply an intellectual endorsement of a previously existing social reality. In this sense, as John Adams later said “the revolution was effected before the war commenced” it was a change “in the minds and hearts of the people.” Americans Resistance turned into rebellion: but as the colonists groped to make sense of the peculiarities of their society, this rebellion became a justification and idealized of American life as it had gradually and unintentionally developed over the previous century and a half. A century and a half of dynamic development in the British continental colonies of the New World had fundamentally transformed inherited European institutions and customary patterns of life and had left many colonists believing that they were seriously deviating from the cultivated norms of European life. The origins of the Revolution necessarily lie deep in America’s past. The emergence of this rambunctious middling democracy was the most significant consequence of the American Revolution.

The american revolution by gordon s wood