America's Revolutionary Mind: A Moral History of the American Revolution and the Declaration That Defined It.

• Author: Meany, Paul
• Position: Book review

America's Revolutionary Mind: A Moral History of the American Revolution and the Declaration That Defined It C. Bradley Thompson New York: Encounter, 2019, 584 pp.

The Founding Fathers of America eloquently expressed the high-minded ideals "all men are created equal." At the same time, however, many of the Founders engaged in the brutally cruel practice of slavery. This disconnect between principles and practice has caused historians to investigate what the Founders truly believed as opposed to what they said. In 1980, Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States argued that the Founders' buzzwords of equality and liberty were just that. Their lofty language of revolution was merely a cloak for the aristocratic elite's nefarious goals of increasing and securing their grip on power and wealth. Zinn's approach was to peel back the Founders' rhetoric and see what they were really after behind their slogans. In more recent times, authors of the New York Times's "1619 Project" claim American elites declared independence as a means to protect the institution of slavery.

Thankfully, C. Bradley Thompson's newest book, America's Revolutionary Mind: A Moral History of the American Revolution and the Declaration That Defined It, takes an entirely different approach: viewing the Founders' expressions of their ideas, sentiments, and aspirations not as carefully crafted rhetoric, but instead as genuine expressions of their sense of morality. Thompson is offering more than just an antidote to the more cynical tone of authors such as Zinn. In America's Revolutionary Mind, Thompson aims and succeeds in applying a new methodology of history, one which focuses on the connection between principles and practice. Thompson dubs this methodology "the new moral history." This new moral history explains the development of ideas akin to intellectual history, but its primary goal is to investigate "the intersection between moral thought and moral action, between what people say and what they do." Using this methodology, Thompson aims to show that motives explain actions better than large-scale processes of change and that, by examining the motivation of individual actors, we can come to more fruitful and accurate conclusions on historical events.

Spokesmen of the revolution such as John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine, and the lesser-known Joel Barlow all expressed a similar sentiment, that the major cause of the revolution was a new mode of moral...