A People’s History of the United States: Chapter 4 Summary & Analysis

Around 1776, powerful people in the American colonies—whom we know as the Founding Fathers—discovered that, by creating the idea of a nation with its own culture and symbols, they could strengthen their own leadership and steal power from British colonial rulers. Their discovery was brilliant: they created “the most effective system of national control devised in modern times.”

In the years leading up to 1776, the local American leadership was becoming dissatisfied with British leadership. After the Seven Years’ War, AKA the French and Indian War, Britain raised taxes in the colonies, which drove up starvation and unemployment. The Founding Fathers—an upper and middle-class group—realized that they could manipulate the working classes’ resentment of Britain to strengthen their own power. Modern American politicians have followed the Founding Fathers’ example, using working-class anger for their own agenda.

Before the Revolutionary War, there had been political and economic conflict in the American colonies, but the conflict was mostly between the rich and the poor, not between America and Britain. In New Jersey, New York, and North Carolina, poor land tenants staged riots against their wealthy landlords. In North Carolina in the 1760s, a working-class movement called the Regulators, upset with excessive taxation, petitioned the local government with their grievances, and protested the “unequal chances the poor and the weak have in contentions with the rich and powerful.”

The majority of battles in the Revolutionary War took place in the Northern colonies. One reason for this is that, in the agrarian Southern colonies where poor tenants often worked alongside rich farmers, it was more difficult to redirect working-class resentment outward toward the British. In Boston, by contrast, the Stamp Act attacked the economic security of the working, middle, and upper classes; in response, the working classes staged riots and demonstrations against the British. After the Stamp Act, however, American elites faced a problem: they needed to foster resentment for Britain without allowing it to endanger their own property. Thus, leaders like Samuel Adams encouraged the working class to be moderate, rather than rioting again.

The American colonial elite faced a problem: how to fight the British without radicalizing the working classes. Patrick Henry’s famous “Give me liberty or give me death” speech, delivered in Virginia, symbolized the solution. Henry was from “the world of the gentry,” but he used the rhetoric of freedom to form a bond between upper and lower classes. Around the same time, Thomas Paine wrote his famous pamphlet, Common Sense, in which he attacked the divine right to rule. Instead of addressing the divide between rich and poor, Paine and Henry established a “safer” conflict, between the colonies and Britain.

The crowning achievement of colonial rhetoric was, without a doubt, the Declaration of Independence. In this document, Thomas Jefferson blurs any distinctions between the rich and the poor by writing that “all men are created equal.” The Declaration excluded many people from its vision of human equality: Indians, blacks, slaves, and women. In short, Jefferson’s celebrated phrase, “all men are created equal,” was not a visionary celebration of human rights so much as it was an attempt to mobilize specific groups of American society—most important, working class white men—and establish a firm bond between these groups and the colonial elites as they prepared to fight Britain.

Another famous passage from the Declaration of Independence argues that governments must protect people’s rights to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” It’s often pointed out that Jefferson’s quote is borrowed from the works of the philosopher John Locke, especially his Second Treatise on Government, in which he celebrated man’s rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of property. Locke, like Jefferson, was a wealthy man; partly as a result, Locke focused on “government and political rights, but ignored the existing inequalities in property.” Locke was useful to the Founding Fathers because he provided intellectual support for their agenda: mobilizing “enough Americans to defeat England, without disturbing too much the relations of wealth and power.”

The Declaration of Independence galvanized the American colonists, inspiring many of them to take up arms against the British army. Most of the soldiers who fought in the Revolutionary War were working-class; rich people could avoid the draft by paying money. The fact that rich people could opt out led to more rioting: the rioters chanted, “tyranny is tyranny let it come from whom it may.”