It seems to me that Bailyn is an intellectual historian, explaining as he does the written and published sources that move the colonies to declare independence and fight a war against the greatest military power on the planet.
We are reminded of something important in his preface. History is never preordained. It could have always have proceeded in a different manner.
This collection of essays brings out the unending complexity of understanding the Revolution and the founding our country.
There was nothing inevitable about about the American Revolution. It did not need to happen, and as late as 1772 and 1773 the best informed people of the time (Benjamin Franklin, for example) thought it could be deflected. The fact that the eventual break was violent and revolutionary means that it was a product of human decision and that ideas and human personalities had great impact.
The people involved on both sides mattered, what they believed and what motivated them mattered, and their perceptions and views of the world mattered.
Preface, P. X
About John Adams:
He was, from his earliest recorded years, a driven and uneasy man. Born forty years before the Revolution into a family of very modest means (his father was a farmer and a shoemaker), he was impelled by a frantic desire for affluence and fame.” P. 3
He was born naive. P. 8
1776 was a magical year.
By 1776 economic growth was everywhere.
P. 164
In some sense the Constitution might have embodied natural rights philosophy, though there is no evidence or way of connecting natural rights to the debates of substance of the Constitution. P. 201
The Revolution as a great forensic controversy over abstract governmental rights will not bear close scrutiny. P. 202
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