The Revolution as A Grand Mistake?

Even more provocative than yesterday’s title is The American Revolution: A Grand Mistake, by Leland G. Stauber, a retired professor of political science at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale.

Stauber recognizes four great advantages to America of how it became independent through the Revolutionary War of 1775-83:

• The “Great Declaration,” including its prefatory statement of equality and natural rights.
• Rejection of titled nobility and monarchy, in contrast to Latin America.
• Early economic independence from Britain.
• “Early democratization to universal white manhood suffrage.”

But then he contrasts the U.S. of A.’s political path with Canada’s route to what’s basically the same level of freedom and self-government, and asks:

Were there, however, with the advantage of hindsight, also major disadvantages to the train of events that led to the total independence of the United States, as distinct from enlarged autonomy and partial independence, at the early date of 1783 and in the context of armed conflict?

Stauber lists four major areas of disadvantage for America:

• The dilemma of slavery. That of course led to a bloody civil war and decades of official discrimination based on race.
• “Legislative union v. Purely voluntary federation.” On this point, Stauber misses the fact that the Articles of Confederation attempted to settle that question by declaring the colonies’ union to be “perpetual.” The Continental Congress actually tried to settle that question; during the early republic’s political battles, some Founders reopened it.
• The American system’s checks and balances, separate legislative and executive branches, and overlapping national and state governments. “It inherently stacked the cards in favor of conservative interests, including a powerful business community, concerned to block governmental actions. It also ranks low, in international comparison, in capacity for coherent decision making.” [You think?] Most democracies now have parliamentary governments, in which the majority of the larger house also determines the executive branch, so there’s no divided government to gridlock. In addition, Stauber notes that it’s relatively difficult to amend the U.S. Constitution—though producing a comprehensive written national constitution was a valuable innovation at the time.
• Underlying American mind-sets about the role of government, projecting the specific concerns about the British government’s expansion in the 1760s onto all centralized government.

Stauber discusses the influence of the American Revolution on Britain, the rest of Europe, Canada, and South America. Curiously, however, there’s only one, negative mention of Haiti, whose first revolution was directly inspired by the American example and led in part by veterans of the American war.

I grant Stauber his argument that having a war of independence wasn’t a necessary prerequisite for entering the 20th century as a large democratic republic in North America. And today there are many more examples of such republics with all sorts of different histories. However, his calculations of how things might have been different don’t factor in the inspirational aspect of U.S. independence by 1783. The American republic offered an example to the rest of the world.

If we think about how the U.S. might have developed differently without the Revolution, we should also think about how the world might have developed differently in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries without the U.S. Only then should it be possible to conclude that there was “a grand mistake.”