Was the American War of Independence a revolution? In the view of Edmund Burke and of the Whigs generally, it was not the sort of political and social overturn that the word “revolution” has come to signify nowadays. Rather, it paralleled that alteration of government in Britain which accompanied the accession of William and Mary to the throne, and which is styled, somewhat confusingly, “The Glorious Revolution of 1688.”
The most learned editor of Burke’s works, E. J. Payne, summarizes Burke’s account of the events of 1688–89 as “a revolution not made but prevented.” Let us see how that theory may be applicable to North American events nine decades later.
We need first to examine definitions of that ambiguous word “revolution.” The signification of the word was altered greatly by the catastrophic events of the French Revolution, commencing only two years after the Constitutional Convention of the United States. Before the French explosion of 1789–99, “revolution” commonly was employed to describe a round of periodic or recurrent changes or events—that is, the process of coming full cycle; or the act of rolling back or moving back, a return to a point previously occupied.
Not until the French radicals utterly overturned the old political and social order in their country did the word “revolution” acquire its present general meaning of a truly radical change in social and governmental institutions, a tremendous convulsion in society, producing huge alterations that might never be undone. Thus when the eighteenth-century Whigs praised the “Glorious Revolution” of 1688, which established their party’s domination, they did not mean that William and Mary, the Act of Settlement, and the Declaration of Rights had produced a radically new English political and social order. On the contrary, they argued that the English Revolution had restored tried and true constitutional practices, preservative of immemorial ways. It was James II, they contended, who had been perverting the English constitution; his overthrow had been a return, a rolling-back, to old constitutional order; the Revolution of 1688, in short, had been a healthy reaction, not a bold innovation.
The Whigs, Burke among them, here were employing that word “revolution” in its older sense. This shift in usage tends to confuse discussion today. If we employ the word “revolution” in its common signification near the end of the twentieth century, what occurred in 1688–89 was no true revolution. In the Whig interpretation of history, at least, the overturn of James II was a revolution not made, but prevented (according to the later definition of “revolution”).
But what of the events in North America from 1775 to 1781? Was the War of Independence no revolution?