Almost all American historians begin the Revolutionary Era with the year 1763. The Treaty of Paris of that year ended the Seven Years, or French and Indian War, and Great Britain, standing "astride the globe like a colossus," turned her attention to her colonies as a means of securing her frontiers and beginning to ease the huge debt that resulted from decades of war. The tensions between the colonists and the mother country, which had always been present to some degree, began to sharpen, and twelve years later the war broke out.
The ending date of the Revolution is not so easy to ascertain. The year 1783, in which another Treaty of Paris brought official recognition of American independence, is certainly one possible date. Many historians have extended the date to 1789, the year in which the Constitution went into effect. Certainly there is logic in that, for it is clear that the newly created states could not have survived and prospered under the Articles of Confederation, so it is fair to argue that without the Constitution, the Revolution would not have been fully complete.
This author will argue that the Revolution was sealed to a great extent in the year 1800 when a Republican president and a Republican Congress replaced the Federalists, who had been in power for twelve years under presidents Washington and Adams. Thomas Jefferson recognized the significance of 1800 when he called the election of that year a "revolution"; what Jefferson meant was that for the first time in the modern world, political power at the top of a nation had changed hands without the shedding of blood. There is good reason to endorse Jefferson's claim and to say that once the democratic process had demonstrated that there could be an orderly transfer of power in United States, then the true goals of the Revolution had been achieved.
Despite the often contentious nature of our modern elections, we take it for granted that power will regularly change hands without bloody rioting. But in the 1790s that was no certainty, for the country was in perhaps the most agitated political state in which it has ever found itself, with the exception of the Civil War years. At least one noted historian has argued that had the Republicans not won the election of 1800, the country might well have broken up or resorted to violence. Although we associate secession with the Civil War era, it was openly discussed even at that earlier time, as the different areas of the country found themselves unable to agree on the proper course of the American nation under a Constitution that had, in some respects, been left deliberately vague.
For those reasons we assert that the 1790s do belong to the Revolutionary Era, for even after the Constitution was adopted, a certain time was required for the meaning of it all to begin to settle in. For good reasons strong disagreement as to what was the true meaning of the Revolution—and even of the Constitution-existed for some time. Thus we set 1800 as the end date of the Revolutionary Era. In a real sense, however, the American Revolution has never ended, for as we debate our political differences and argue over laws, courts, politicians, and administrators, we continue to define the meaning of the American Revolution and American democracy.
World History
