- [Instructor] During the American Revolution,
everyone became a little bit of a philosopher.
Walking down the street in Boston
past coffee houses and taverns,
you might hear ordinary people debating equality
and natural rights.
Before it was even a political revolution,
the American Revolution was a revolution of ideas.
You see these ideas all over the literature
of the time period,
perhaps most famously in Thomas Jefferson's language
in the Declaration that all men are created equal,
endowed with certain unalienable rights,
the idea that everyone has the natural right
to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
You would see it in the most famous slogan
of the revolution, no taxation without representation,
the idea that the people would have a say
in the laws that affect them.
The revolution even went so far
as to criticize the idea of monarchy,
which pamphleteer Thomas Paine called absurd.
These ideas criticized long-standing social norms
about who deserved to rule
versus who deserved to be ruled.
It's likely that most of the founders
thought these ideas primarily applied
to the political struggle
between the colonies and Great Britain,
but it wasn't just elite white men
who considered these radical notions
and thought about how to apply them to their own lives.
These revolutionary ideals increased the awareness
of inequalities in society more broadly
and caused some people to call for changes
in voting rights, in the institution of slavery,
and the status of women.
One major change that the revolutionary ideals caused
was an expansion of political democracy
in state governments.
So after the revolution,
all the states wrote new constitutions.
And every one of them
instituted a representative government
through an elected legislature.
And almost all of them also reduced
the property requirements for voting and office-holding,
which previously had limited the franchise
to wealthier white men.
After the revolution,
a majority of white men had the right to vote.
And voting rights would continue to expand
until all white men had the right to vote by the 1830s.
In fact, some state constitutions, like New Jersey's,
didn't specify who could vote,
so long as they met the new lower property requirements.
So between the revolution and 1807
when they changed the law,
property-owning women and free people of color could vote.
Another social change that was brought on
by these revolutionary ideals was the emergence
of the abolition movement to end the practice of slavery.
So almost all of the founders were slave owners,
and they didn't seem to notice any contradiction
between the idea that all men are created equal
and keeping Africans in perpetual bondage.
But that did not mean that others missed the connection.
During the revolution itself,
many enslaved people escaped,
filed petitions for freedom,
or they joined the military to gain freedom
on the side of the Americans,
but more frequently on the side of the British
who offered freedom in exchange for serving in the army.
After the revolution,
northern states either abolished slavery,
or they began a process of gradual emancipation,
so saying that enslaved people
who were children might remain in slavery
until they were in their mid to late 20s
and then would be free, and their children would be free,
so that over the course of the late 1800s
and early 1900s, in most northern states,
slavery was either entirely eliminated
or phased out to the point
that there was a very small enslaved population.
Southern states did not abolish slavery
in response to the revolution,
and this would continue to expand sectional tensions
between the north and the south until the Civil War.
The last change in social values
that I wanna discuss relates to women's role in the war.
Women played a pretty crucial role
in supporting the independence movement,
and they also drew on the rhetoric
of revolutionary ideas
to support their claims for an improvement in status.
Abigail Adams, who was the wife of John Adams,
wrote to him while he was in Philadelphia working
on the draft of the Declaration of Independence
with Thomas Jefferson and others.
She wrote, in the new Code of Laws
which I suppose it will be necessary for you to make,
I desire you would remember the ladies
and be more generous and favorable
to them than your ancestors.
If particular care and attention is not paid
to the ladies, we are determined to foment a rebellion
and will not hold ourselves bound
by any laws in which we have no voice or representation.
In general, the revolution didn't result
in a huge change of status for white women
and none at all for enslaved women,
but one idea did emerge that would foment social change
farther down the line,
and that was the idea of republican motherhood.
So republican motherhood was the notion
that for this new democratic American nation to work,
the country was going to need virtuous citizens.
And who taught men how to be virtuous citizens?
Their mothers.
So thinkers of the time period,
particularly a Philadelphia physician
and singer of the Declaration of Independence
named Benjamin Rush,
argued that women should receive more robust education
in order to better educate their sons.
So instead of only learning household skills or etiquette,
women should learn philosophy and mathematics.
Now, while this concept was mainly in the service
of improving the education and virtue of men,
it did result in the expansion of women's education
and the founding of new schools and colleges for girls.
And many of the girls who attended those schools would go on
to be major reformers and activists
in the women's rights and abolitionist movements
in the 19th century.
I wanna finish by just briefly taking a look
at John Adams' response to his wife's letter
encouraging hin to remember the ladies,
which is not nearly as famous as her letter,
but I think still tells us a lot
about the ideas of the time period.
He said, as to your extraordinary Code of Laws,
I cannot but laugh.
We have been told that our struggle has loosened the bands
of government everywhere,
that children and apprentices were disobedient,
that schools and colleges were grown turbulent,
that Indians slighted their guardians
and Negroes grew insolent to their masters,
but your letter was the first intimation
that another tribe more numerous and powerful
than all the rest were grown discontented.
And there at the end he's referring to women.
You can tell that John kinda takes this as a joke.
He can't imagine that the ideas
that he and the other founders used so persuasively
in the American Revolution would lead women
and African-Americans
and working class people like apprentices
to apply those same notions to themselves.
But perhaps the joke was on John Adams after all,
because that is exactly what they did.