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You need to explain to your whether you agree more with the Howard Zinn or Gordon Wood article in this week’s reading, and why.Though it occurred nearly two hundred and fifty years ago, the American Revolution’s impact reaches to the present day. “To understand America at any time,” writes historian Gordon S. Wood, “has … required coming to terms with the meaning of the Revolution.” Historian George Athan Billias adds:The Revolution remains the single most important event in all of American history. Within the short span of two decades—1763-1783—Americans rejected the British monarchial system, waged a war of independence, created states out of colonies, and set up a central government based on the principles of popular rule, republicanism, and nationalism.Billias goes on to describe one of the central questions historians face when examining the Revolution:These changes occurred with remarkable rapidity, but was the transformation itself sweeping enough to justify the term revolutionary? Did the new nation differ that much from the former colonies? Did the laws, institutions, and customs of the United States constitute a sharp break with the British heritage? Was American society radically reshaped and restructured as a result of independence? Was there a dramatic shift in the ideas, attitudes, and behavior of most Americans in the relationship between individuals and their government, the society, and with one another? Within the context of our nation’s history, such issues may be reduced to a single question: How revolutionary was our Revolution?Over the past two hundred years historians have answered that question differently. Daniel J. Boorstin, for example, argues that the American Revolution was essentially a conservative movement that sought to preserve the colonial status quo. He and other historians argue that a great deal of social change had already occurred in the century before the Revolution and that a great majority of (white, male) Americans already had political, economic, and religious freedoms and opportunities. The Revolution was fought to preserve these freedoms rather than to create new ones, Boorstin and others say. The classes of Americans that did not share in these freedoms—black slaves, women, and the very poor—were not, in this historical interpretation, much affected by the Revolution.Other historians, however, have argued that the American insurrection was truly revolutionary. Some, such as Bernard Bailyn, have argued that the true revolution took place within the minds of Americans, affecting the way they looked at themselves and their relation to the British Empire. What had once seemed American deficiencies, such as a lack of an aristocracy, a cosmopolitan culture, and a nationally established church, were transformed into American virtues, Bailyn argues, enabling Americans to envision themselves as an independent republic. Other historians have examined specific changes and reforms that the Revolution spurred in American society. The Revolution did create new constitutional governments. It popularized the ideas of liberty and equality. It did not abolish slavery, but it did inspire the growth of an antislavery movement (one that was partly led by free blacks demanding that America live up to its ideals as expressed in the Declaration of Independence). Many historians agree with Richard L. Bushman in arguing that the American Revolution brought more changes in American principles than in fact—but that such principles ultimately contributed to further revolutionary results. Bushman writes:Social and cultural change growing out of the Revolution was … halting and incomplete. It was for the most part a time of planting rather than harvest. Despite considerable agitation, slavery continued to the Civil War. Women, in another instance of blatant inequality, were not allowed to vote until 1920…. The great changes came later when the implications of revolutionary principles were more fully recognized…. The power of the idea of equality lay more in its enduring strength than in its immediate effect.The following viewpoints examine both the motives of the leaders of the American Revolution and the Revolution’s ultimate impact on American life.VIEWPOINT 1: The War for Independence Was Not a Social RevolutionHoward Zinn, “The War for Independence Was Not a Social Revolution” Howard Zinn was professor emeritus of political science at Boston University. He was also a civil rights activist and opponent of the Vietnam War. Zinn’s books include Disobedience & Democracy and Declarations of Independence: Cross-Examining American Ideology. His 1980 book A People’s History of the United States was nominated for an American Book Award. The tome surveys American history from colonial times to America’s bicentennial from the point of view of Blacks, Native Americans, women, and other minorities and disadvantaged classes. Among the events Zinn examines from this perspective is the American Revolution.Zinn argues that the American Revolution had little positive impact on the everyday lives of most Americans. He writes that most of the leaders of the Revolution were members of the colonial elite who wished to preserve their wealth and power. They used the war for independence from Britain as a way “to create a consensus of popular support” for their continued rule and to prevent large-scale internal changes in America’s society. In this sense, Zinn concludes, the American Revolution was really a successful effort to preserve America’s status quo.Around 1776, certain important people in the English colonies made a discovery that would prove enormously useful for the next two hundred years. They found that by creating a nation, a symbol, a legal unity called the United States, they could take over land, profits, and political power from favorites of the British Empire. In the process, they could hold back a number of potential rebellions and create a consensus of popular support for the rule of a new, privileged leadership.When we look at the American Revolution this way, it was a work of genius, and the Founding Fathers deserve the awed tribute they have received over the centuries. They created the most effective system of national control devised in modern times, and showed future generations of leaders the advantages of combining paternalism with command.Many RebellionsStarting with Bacon’s Rebellion in Virginia, by 1760, there had been eighteen uprisings aimed at overthrowing colonial governments. There had also been six black rebellions, from South Carolina to New York, and forty riots of various origins.By this time also, there emerged, according to Jack Greene, “stable, coherent, effective and acknowledged local political and social elites.” And by the 1760s, this local leadership saw the possibility of directing much of the rebellious energy against England and her local officials. It was not a conscious conspiracy, but an accumulation of tactical responses.After 1763, with England victorious over France in the Seven Years’ War (known in America as the French and Indian War), expelling them from North America, ambitious colonial leaders were no longer threatened by the French. They now had only two rivals left: the English and the Indians. The British, wooing the Indians, had declared Indian lands beyond the Appalachians out of bounds to whites (the Proclamation of 1763). Perhaps once the British were out of the way, the Indians could be dealt with….With the French defeated, the British government could turn its attention to tightening control over the colonies. It needed revenues to pay for the war, and looked to the colonies for that. Also, the colonial trade had become more and more important to the British economy, and more profitable….So, the American leadership was less in need of English rule, the English more in need of the colonists’ wealth. The elements were there for conflict.The war had brought glory for the generals, death to the privates, wealth for the merchants, unemployment for the poor. There were 25,000 people living in New York (there had been 7,000 in 1720) when the French and Indian War ended. A newspaper editor wrote about the growing “Number of Beggers and wandering Poor” in the streets of the city. Letters in the papers questioned the distribution of wealth: “How often have our Streets been covered with Thousands of Barrels of Flour for trade, while our near Neighbors can hardly procure enough to make a Dumplin to satisfy hunger?”Gary Nash’s study of city tax lists shows that by the early 1770s, the top 5 percent of Boston’s taxpayers controlled 49 percent of the city’s taxable assets. In Philadelphia and New York too, wealth was more and more concentrated….In Boston, the lower classes began to use the town meeting to vent their grievances. The governor of Massachusetts had written that in these town meetings “the meanest Inhabitants… by their constant Attendance there generally are the majority and outvote the Gentlemen, Merchants, Substantial Traders and all the better part of the Inhabitants.”What seems to have happened in Boston is that certain lawyers, editors, and merchants of the upper classes, but excluded from the ruling circles close to England—men like James Otis and Samuel Adams—organized a “Boston Caucus” and through their oratory and their writing “molded laboring-class opinion, called the ‘mob’ into action, and shaped its behaviour.” This is Gary Nash’s description of Otis, who, he says, “keenly aware of the declining fortunes and the resentment of ordinary townspeople, was mirroring as well as molding popular opinion.”Using the Lower ClassesWe have here a forecast of the long history of American politics, the mobilization of lower-class energy by upper-class politicians, for their own purposes. This was not purely deception; it involved, in part, a genuine recognition of lower-class grievances, which helps to account for its effectiveness as a tactic over the centuries….This accumulated sense of grievance against the rich in Boston may account for the explosiveness of mob action after the Stamp Act of 1765. Through this Act, the British were taxing the colonial population to pay for the French war, in which colonists had suffered to expand the British Empire. That summer, a shoemaker named Ebenezer MacIntosh led a mob in destroying the house of a rich Boston merchant named Andrew Oliver. Two weeks later, the crowd turned to the home of Thomas Hutchinson, symbol of the rich elite who ruled the colonies in the name of England. They smashed up his house with axes, drank the wine in his wine cellar, and looted the house of its furniture and other objects. A report by colony officials to England said that this was part of a larger scheme in which the houses of fifteen rich people were to be destroyed, as part of “a War of Plunder, of general levelling and taking away the Distinction of rich and poor.”It was one of those moments in which fury against the rich went further than leaders like Otis wanted. Could class hatred be focused against the pro-British elite, and deflected from the nationalist elite? In New York, that same year of the Boston house attacks, someone wrote to the New York Gazette, “Is it equitable that 99, rather 999, should 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?” The leaders of the Revolution would worry about keeping such sentiments within limits….In the countryside, where most people lived, there was a similar conflict of poor against rich, one which political leaders would use to mobilize the population against England, granting some benefits for the rebellious poor, and many more for themselves in the process….In North Carolina, a powerful movement of white farmers was organized against wealthy and corrupt officials in the period from 1766 to 1771, exactly those years when, in the cities of the Northeast, agitation was growing against the British, crowding out class issues. The movement in North Carolina was called the Regulator movement, and it consisted, says Marvin L. Michael Kay, a specialist in the history of that movement, of “class-conscious white farmers in the west who attempted to democratize local government in their respective counties.” The Regulators referred to themselves as “poor Industrious peasants,” as “labourers,” “the wretched poor,” “oppressed” by “rich and powerful…designing Monsters.”…A contemporary account of the Regulator movement in Orange County [N.C.] describes the situation: Thus were the people of Orange insulted by the sheriff, robbed and plundered… neglected and condemned by the Representatives and abused by the Magistracy; obliged to pay Fees regulated only by the Avarice of the officer; obliged to pay a Tax which they believed went to inrich and agrandise a few, who lorded it over them continually; and from all these Evils they saw no way to escape; for the Men in Power, and Legislation, were the Men whose interest it was to oppress, and make gain of the Labourer. In that county in the 1760s, the Regulators organized to prevent the collection of taxes, or the confiscation of the property of tax delinquents. Officials said “an absolute Insurrection of a dangerous tendency has broke out in Orange County,” and made military plans to suppress it. At one point seven hundred armed farmers forced the release of two arrested Regulator leaders. The Regulators petitioned the government on their grievances in 1768, citing “the unequal chances the poor and the weak have in contentions with the rich and powerful.”…The result of all this was that the assembly passed some mild reform legislation, but also an act “to prevent riots and tumults,” and the governor prepared to crush them militarily. In May of 1771 there was a decisive battle in which several thousand Regulators were defeated by a disciplined army using cannon. Six Regulators were hanged. Kay says that in the three western counties of Orange, Anson, and Rowan, where the Regulator movement was concentrated, it had the support of six thousand to seven thousand men out of a total white taxable population of about eight thousand.One consequence of this bitter conflict is that only a minority of the people in the Regulator counties seem to have participated as patriots in the Revolutionary War. Most of them probably remained neutral.Fortunately for the Revolutionary movement, the key battles were being fought in the North, and here in the cities, the colonial leaders had a divided white population; they could win over the mechanics, who were a kind of middle class, who had a stake in the fight against England, who faced competition from English manufacturers. The biggest problem was to keep the propertyless people, who were unemployed and hungry in the crisis following the French war, under control….In Virginia, it seemed clear to the educated gentry that something needed to be done to persuade the lower orders to join the revolutionary cause, to deflect their anger against England. One Virginian wrote in his diary in the spring of 1774: “The lower Class of People here are in tumult on account of Reports from Boston, many of them expect to be press’d & compell’d to go and fight the Britains!” Around the time of the Stamp Act, a Virginia orator addressed the poor: “Are not the gentlemen made of the same materials as the lowest and poorest among you?… Listen to no doctrines which may tend to divide us, but let us go hand in hand, as brothers…. “It was a problem for which the rhetorical talents of Patrick Henry were superbly fitted. He was, as Rhys Isaac puts it, “firmly attached to the world of the gentry,” but he spoke in words that the poorer whites of Virginia could understand….Patrick Henry’s oratory in Virginia pointed a way to relieve class tension between upper and lower classes and form a bond against the British. This was to find language inspiring to all classes, specific enough in its listing of grievances to charge people with anger against the British, vague enough to avoid class conflict among the rebels, and stirring enough to build patriotic feeling for the resistance movement.Common SenseTom Paine’s Common Sense, which appeared in early 1776 and became the most popular pamphlet in the American colonies, did this. It made the first bold argument for independence, in words that any fairly literate person could understand: “Society in every state is a blessing, but Government even in its best state is but a necessary evil…. “Common Sense went through twenty-five editions in 1776 and sold hundreds of thousands of copies. It is probable that almost every literate colonist either read it or knew about its contents….Paine’s pamphlet appealed to a wide range of colonial opinion angered by England. But it caused some tremors in aristocrats like John Adams, who were with the patriot cause but wanted to make sure it didn’t go too far in the direction of democracy. Paine had denounced the so-called balanced government of Lords and Commons as a deception, and called for single-chamber representative bodies where the people could be represented. Adams denounced Paine’s plan as “so democratical, without any restraint or even an attempt at any equilibrium or counter-poise, that it must produce confusion and every evil work.” Popular assemblies needed to be checked, Adams thought, because they were “productive of hasty results and absurd judgements.”Paine himself came out of “the lower orders” of England—a staymaker, tax official, teacher, poor emigrant to America. He arrived in Philadelphia in 1774, when agitation against England was already strong in the colonies. The artisan mechanics of Philadelphia, along with journeymen, apprentices, and ordinary laborers, were forming into a politically conscious militia, “in general damn’d riff-raff-dirty, mutinous, and disaffected,” as local aristocrats described them. By speaking plainly and strongly, he could represent those politically conscious lower-class people (he opposed property qualifications for voting in Pennsylvania). But his great concern seems to have been to speak for a middle group. “There is an extent of riches, as well as an extreme of poverty, which, by narrowing the circles of a man’s acquaintance, lessens his opportunities of general knowledge.”Once the Revolution was under way, Paine more and more made it clear that he was not for the crowd action of lower-class people—like those militia who in 1779 attacked the house of James Wilson. Wilson was a Revolutionary leader who opposed price controls and wanted a more conservative government than was given by the Pennsylvania Constitution of 1776. Paine became an associate of one of the wealthiest men in Pennsylvania, Robert Morris, and a supporter of Morris’s creation, the Bank of North America.Later, during the controversy over adopting the Constitution, Paine would once again represent urban artisans, who favored a strong central government. He seemed to believe that such a government could represent some great common interest. In this sense, he lent himself perfectly to the myth of the Revolution—that it was on behalf of a united people.The Declaration of IndependenceThe Declaration of Independence brought that myth to its peak of eloquence. Each harsher measure of British control—the Proclamation of 1763 not allowing colonists to settle beyond the Appalachians, the Stamp Tax, the Townshend taxes, including the one on tea, the stationing of troops and the Boston Massacre, the closing of the port of Boston and the dissolution of the Massachusetts legislature—escalated colonial rebellion to the point of revolution. The colonists had responded with the Stamp Act Congress, the Sons of Liberty, the Committees of Correspondence, the Boston Tea Party, and finally, in 1774, the setting up of a Continental Congress—an illegal body, forerunner of a future independent government. It was after the military clash at Lexington and Concord in April 1775, between colonial Minutemen and British troops, that the Continental Congress decided on separation. They organized a small committee to draw up the Declaration of Independence, which Thomas Jefferson wrote. It was adopted by the Congress on July 2, and officially proclaimed July 4, 1776.By this time there was already a powerful sentiment for independence. Resolutions adopted in North Carolina in May of 1776, and sent to the Continental Congress, declared independence of England, asserted that all British law was null and void, and urged military preparations. About the same time, the town of Malden, Massachusetts, responding to a request from the Massachusetts House of Representatives that all towns in the state declare their views on independence, had met in town meeting and unanimously called for independence:“…we therefore renounce with disdain our connexion with a kingdom of slaves; we bid a final adieu to Britain.””When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands…they should declare the causes…. ” This was the opening of the Declaration of Independence. Then, in its second paragraph, came the powerful philosophical statement: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. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, that whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government….It then went on to list grievances against the king, “a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States.” The list accused the king of dissolving colonial governments, controlling judges, sending “swarms of Officers to harass our people,” sending in armies of occupation, cutting off colonial trade with other parts of the world, taxing the colonists without their consent, and waging war against them, “transporting large Armies of foreign Mercenaries to compleat the works of death, desolation and tyranny.”All this, the language of popular control over governments, the right of rebellion and revolution, indignation at political tyranny, economic burdens, and military attacks, was language well suited to unite large numbers of colonists, and persuade even those who had grievances against one another to turn against England.Some Americans were clearly omitted from this circle of united interest drawn by the Declaration of Independence: Indians, black slaves, women….To say that the Declaration of Independence, even by its own language, was limited to life, liberty, and happiness for white males is not to denounce the makers and signers of the Declaration for holding the ideas expected of privileged males of the eighteenth century. Reformers and radicals, looking discontentedly at history, are often accused of expecting too much from a past political epoch—and sometimes they do. But the point of noting those outside the arc of human rights in the Declaration is not, centuries late and pointlessly, to lay impossible moral burdens on that time. It is to try to understand the way in which the Declaration functioned to mobilize certain groups of Americans, ignoring others. Surely, inspirational language to create a secure consensus is still used, in our time, to cover up serious conflicts of interest in that consensus, and to cover up, also, the omission of large parts of the human race…. When the Declaration of Independence was read, with all its flaming radical language, from the town hall balcony in Boston, it was read by Thomas Crafts, a member of the Loyal Nine group, conservatives who had opposed militant action against the British. Four days after the reading, the Boston Committee of Correspondence ordered the townsmen to show up on the Common for a military draft. The rich, it turned out, could avoid the draft by paying for substitutes; the poor had to serve. This led to rioting, and shouting: “Tyranny is Tyranny let it come from whom It may.'”… Victory over BritainThe American victory over the British army was made possible by the existence of an already-armed people. Just about every white male had a gun, and could shoot. The Revolutionary leadership distrusted the mobs of poor. But they knew the Revolution had no appeal to slaves and Indians. They would have to woo the armed white population.This was not easy. Yes, mechanics and sailors, some others, were incensed against the British. But general enthusiasm for the war was not strong. While much of the white male population went into military service at one time or another during the war, only a small fraction stayed. John Shy, in his study of the Revolutionary army (A People Numerous and Armed), says they “grew weary of being bullied by local committees of safety, by corrupt deputy assistant commissaries of supply, and by bands of ragged strangers with guns in their hands calling themselves soldiers of the Revolution.” Shy estimates that perhaps a fifth of the population was actively treasonous. John Adams had estimated a third opposed, a third in support, a third neutral….The Americans lost the first battles of the war: Bunker Hill, Brooklyn Heights, Harlem Heights, the Deep South; they won small battles at Trenton and Princeton, and then in a turning point, a big battle at Saratoga, New York, in 1777. Washington’s frozen army hung on at Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, while Benjamin Franklin negotiated an alliance with the French monarchy, which was anxious for revenge on England. The war turned to the South, where the British won victory after victory, until the Americans, aided by a large French army, with the French navy blocking off the British from supplies and reinforcements, won the final victory of the war at Yorktown, Virginia, in 1781. Through all this, the suppressed conflicts between rich and poor among the Americans kept reappearing. In the midst of the war, in Philadelphia, which Eric Foner describes as “a time of immense profits for some colonists and terrible hardships for others,” the inflation (prices rose in one month that year by 45 percent) led to agitation and calls for action…. In May of 1779, the First Company of Philadelphia Artillery petitioned the Assembly about the troubles of “the midling and poor” and threatened violence against “those who are avariciously intent upon amassing wealth by the destruction of the more virtuous part of the community.” That same month, there was a mass meeting, an extralegal gathering, which called for price reductions and initiated an investigation of Robert Morris, a rich Philadelphian who was accused of holding food from the market. In October came the “Fort Wilson riot,” in which a militia group marched into the city and to the house of James Wilson, a wealthy lawyer and Revolutionary official who had opposed price controls and the democratic constitution adopted in Pennsylvania in 1776. The militia were driven away by a “silk stocking brigade” of well-off Philadelphia citizens. It seemed that the majority of white colonists, who had a bit of land, or no property at all, were still better off than slaves or indentured servants or Indians, and could be wooed into the coalition of the Revolution. But when the sacrifices of war became more bitter, the privileges and safety of the rich became harder to accept. About 10 percent of the white population (an estimate of Jackson Main in The Social Structure of Revolutionary America), large landholders and merchants, held 1,000 pounds or more in personal property and 1,000 pounds in land, at the least, and these men owned nearly half the wealth of the country and held as slaves one-seventh of the country’s people.The Continental Congress, which governed the colonies through the war, was dominated by rich men, linked together in factions and compacts by business and family connections…. Ronald Hoffman says: “The Revolution plunged the states of Delaware, Maryland, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, and, to a much lesser degree, Virginia into divisive civil conflicts that persisted during the entire period of struggle.” The southern lower classes resisted being mobilized for the Revolution. They saw themselves under the rule of a political elite, win or lose against the British.Social ControlIn Maryland, for instance, by the new constitution of 1776, to run for governor one had to own 5,000 pounds of property; to run for state senator, 1,000 pounds. Thus, 90 percent of the population were excluded from holding office….With black slaves 25 percent of the population (and in some counties 50 percent), fear of slave revolts grew. George Washington had turned down the requests of blacks, seeking freedom, to fight in the Revolutionary army. So when the British military commander in Virginia, Lord Dunmore, promised freedom to Virginia slaves who joined his forces, this created consternation. A report from one Maryland county worried about poor whites encouraging slave runaways:The insolence of the Negroes in this county is come to such a height, that we are under a necessity of disarming them which we affected on Saturday last. We took about eighty guns, some bayonets, swords, etc. The malicious and imprudent speeches of some among the lower classes of whites have induced them to believe that their freedom depended on the success of the King’s troops. We cannot therefore be too vigilant nor too rigourous with those who promote and encourage this disposition in our slaves.Even more unsettling was white rioting in Maryland against leading families, supporting the Revolution, who were suspected of hoarding needed commodities. The class hatred of some of these disloyal people was expressed by one man who said “it was better for the people to lay down their arms and pay the duties and taxes laid upon them by King and Parliament than to be brought into slavery and to be commanded and ordered about as they were.” A wealthy Maryland landowner, Charles Carroll, took note of the surly mood all around him:There is a mean low dirty envy which creeps thro all ranks and cannot suffer a man a superiority of fortune, of merit, or of understanding in fellow citizens-either of these are sure to entail a general ill will and dislike upon the owners.Despite this, Maryland authorities retained control. They made concessions, taxing land and slaves more heavily, letting debtors pay in paper money. It was a sacrifice by the upper class to maintain power, and it worked….In general, throughout the states, concessions were kept to a minimum. The new constitutions that were drawn up in all states from 1776 to 1780 were not much different from the old ones. Although property qualifications for voting and holding office were lowered in some instances, in Massachusetts they were increased. On