Defending the American Revolution

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Defending the American Revolution

Published: Thursday, August 5th, 2021 @ 12:34 am
By: John Locke Foundation ( More Entries )

Publisher's Note: This post appears here courtesy of the John Locke Foundation. The author of this post is Mitch Kokai.

Rich Lowry of National Review Online ponders "the greatest revolution the world has ever known."

It's been a hard time for the American Revolution.

It's been smeared by the New York Times's 1619 project as a fight to preserve slavery. Juneteenth, a worthy event in its own right, is considered by some as a candidate to replace July 4, marking a supposedly more palatable and less flawed Independence Day. Statues of leaders of the Revolution have been vandalized and torn down.

This is wrongheaded, ungrateful, and destructive. Ours is the greatest revolution the world has ever known. It succeeded where so many others have failed, delivered a severe blow to monarchy and aristocracy, inspired republican movements around the world, and won the independence of a country whose power and ideals have influenced the course of history for the better.

We shouldn't underestimate the violence and, at times, the brutality of a multidimensional, yearslong struggle that killed more Americans per capita than any conflict besides the Civil War.

But there was nothing like the Vendée, the bloodbath when royalist resistance to the French Revolution in a western region of the country was put down in a spasm of all-consuming savagery in 1793, let alone the terrors that characterized 20th-century communist revolutions.

The Revolution's military leader, George Washington, had no ambitions to rule on his own and tamped down a potential military coup by restive soldiers at Newburgh in 1783.

The Revolution didn't devour its own. Its leaders died in their beds. At the end of long lives, sworn political enemies John Adams and Thomas Jefferson struck up a respectful correspondence, and both died on July 4, 1826, still honored 50 years after the Revolution.

When the country's politics factionalized after the war, no one was guillotined or exiled for his beliefs. Instead, the profound disagreements between the two sides played out in battles in the newspapers and at the ballot box.