Bernard Bailyn

He just wanted to talk about Jefferson and tell stories about Jefferson or tell stories about others, you know.

And just wasn't interested in, you know, Gordon Wood versus Bernard Bailyn or, you know, and such.

So it, it was very [chuckles] it was funny 'cause, you know, especially the younger scholars would, "All right, well, I have you here.

I wanna know about such and such." And he just didn't want any of that.

Yeah, that's it.

The American Revolution and the New Moral History.

So that essay is my critique of Bailyn and Wood, um, with regard to the issue of methodology.

I have lots of substantive disagreements, um, particularly with Wood and, and even more specifically with regard to his emphasis on the role of classical republicanism in the American Revolution.

Yeah

... is, uh, Professor Bernard Bailyn.

Yeah.

Mm.

And then it shifts just at the Declaration because by then the king has – basically said the colonists are in revolt, they are out of my protection.

And this shift that Bernard Bailyn so brilliantly traced in his ideological origins of the American Revolution to this idea of this grand conspiracy that was centered on the king and his ministers and then Secondarily, Parliament.

But I really think it was, you know, it was, you know, obviously Lexington and Concord and the unwillingness of the British to respond to any of the American appeals for reconciliation, including after.

Lexington and Concord, the famous olive branch petition, which I think and I think that's the one where really when the king ignores it, doesn't even respond to it.

Now, putting all of this together, in the end this was a transition period in political theory.

Bernard Bailyn states that, quote, "...the discussion of these crucial questions, questions upon which the future character of public life in America would depend, began when the burning public issue was still the colony's relation to England." and ended a decade or more later in the revisions of the first state constitutions.

Between the two points was a continuous, unbroken line of intellectual development and political experience.

It bridged two intellectual worlds, the mid-18th century world still vitally concerned with the set of ideas derived ultimately from classical antiquity, from Aristotelian, Polybian, and Machiavellian and 17th century English sources, and the quite different world of Madison and Tocqueville." And the debate expanded as well beyond just the triad of the monarchy, nobility, and commons.

And kind of a, there's still, like, a strong kind of school of thought among, uh, academics, kind of the people that are more celebratory.

Um, the late Gordon Wood, for example, kind of credits the American Revolution with inspiring anti-slavery because of, um, again, the contagion of liberty, Bernard Bailyn's term.

Um, but this idea of natural rights and that, and that, yeah, after the revolution it shifts.

It's secular natural rights enlightenment ideas rather than religion that are more important.