American Revolution

American Revolution

Was the American Revolution Inevitable

The American Revolution (1775-83) was a crucial moment in the history of American masculinity. It not only severed the political relationship between the American colonies and Great Britain, but it also grounded the new nation in a set of principles that became fundamental to American understandings of manhood. Yet the Revolution's impact on constructions of masculinity was complex, both reinforcing and challenging the patriarchal social and political relations that had arrived with the earliest European colonists (Bailyn, 2008).

The notions of manhood that informed the Revolution were grounded primarily in a social and political ideology called republicanism and had long historic roots. The ancient Greeks and Romans, to whom American patriots looked for inspiration, had defined political participation and the rights of democratic citizenship as the purview of free men. The expansion of the early Roman republic into the Roman Empire, the American revolutionaries believed, had undermined its citizens' manliness as its republican government decayed under the influence of imperial luxury and corruption (Fliegelman, 2006).

Such events as the Boston Massacre (1770); the British government's response to the Boston Tea Party (1773); and the outbreak of hostilities (1775) prompted growing charges that King George III was a tyrannical patriarch whose unchecked authority and corrupt government had to be cast off. In Common Sense (1776), Thomas Paine called the king the “pretended …FATHER OF HIS PEOPLE,” and, in the first of his “Crisis” papers (1776), denounced him as “a sottish, stupid, stubborn, worthless, brutish man” (Norton, 2006).

Many colonists further questioned the manhood of George III by noting his relative youth and inexperience—having assumed the crown in 1760 at age twenty, he was charged with lacking the maturity to govern effectively and being easily swayed by his advisers. Thomas Jefferson made George III the primary target of American ...