A few months ago, dozens of LARPers in Lexington and Concord, MA, reenacted “The Shot Heard ’Round the World”—the 250th anniversary of the beginning of the first successful anticolonial revolution in world history.
The First American Revolution was the culmination of a decade of struggle that could no longer be contained within the structures of the British Empire.
Preparing for revolution
In the decade that followed the anti-Stamp Act movement of 1765, the revolution was prepared by the first revolutionary party in North America, the Sons of Liberty, led by Sam Adams in New England and Patrick Henry in Virginia. Its members combined propaganda activity through the local legislatures and town meetings with pamphleteering and street actions by masses of working people.
These efforts were coordinated through a network of Committees of Correspondence throughout the colonies, led by Mercy Otis Warren of Massachusetts, who would later write the only contemporary history of the Revolution.
Their activities, illegal under British law, were by necessity clandestine at first. But, as the movement gained numbers and momentum, the Sons developed an increasingly bold presence in the streets. They even brokered peace between clashing neighborhood groups, uniting them to harass British occupation forces.
To conduct an effective struggle, the Sons of Liberty had to conquer the right to hold public meetings and rallies without interference; to publish revolutionary propaganda without censorship; to make their fiery street speeches without threat of arrest; and, as the conflict with London reached an open break, to arm the population—the sole guarantee of a free people.
To conduct an effective struggle, the Sons of Liberty had to conquer the right to hold public meetings and rallies; to publish revolutionary propaganda; and, as the conflict with London reached an open break, to arm the population. / Image: public domain
Cross-class coalition
The revolutionary movement was a coalition of distinct social classes with differing interests, brought together by the need for unity to win freedom from autocratic rule.
The slaveholding aristocracy in the South found themselves squeezed by British monopolies over the tobacco and indigo markets, particularly after the Seven Years’ War ended in 1763.
During that war, the British Crown amassed a national debt of 130 million pounds sterling. Once they neutralized the French threat against their North American colonies, they moved to force the Americans to help pay the debt. They tightened the screws on the Southern planters through tariffs and taxes. This compelled the Southern aristocracy to fight back or face ruin.
The merchants of the North also suffered stepped-up British pressure. The Crown imposed monopoly control over shipping and restricted domestic commodity production. The nascent bourgeoisie chafed at limitations on their mercantile activity. But they proved to be unsteady partners. When they won some relief, their support for the freedom struggle waned.
The movement revived in 1773 when the Crown moved to shore up its huge, failing East India Tea Company by granting it a monopoly on the American tea market. “The Five Intolerable Acts” of Parliament finally welded the revolutionary coalition together.
But the forces of slaveowners and merchants alone could never defeat the powerful empire. They needed to mobilize ordinary working people to do the actual fighting.
The revolutionary movement was a coalition of distinct social classes with differing interests, brought together by the need for unity to win freedom from autocratic rule. / Image: public domain
Popular revolts
Once the British were defeated and a new constitution was cobbled together by the Northern merchants and Southern slaveholders, the laborers, seamen, longshoremen, artisans, and yeoman farmers who fought in the revolutionary war found themselves iced out of power and robbed of the fruits of their labor.
Popular revolts like Shays’s Rebellion in Western Massachusetts and Pennsylvania’s Whiskey Rebellion shook the stability of the new nation-state. To defuse the threat to their newfound command over America’s wealth, the capitalist rulers were compelled to grant a series of concessions, guaranteeing democratic rights that had been won in hard-fought struggle.
Thomas Jefferson, author of the Declaration of Independence, was still in Paris as ambassador to France, but secured the agreement of his political co-thinker James Madison to put these rights to ink and parchment. The result was the Bill of Rights, the first ten amendments to the Constitution.
Democratic rights under attack
Many of those rights, including freedom of speech and assembly, are now under blatant attack with the current assaults on the rights of students and workers, both native- and foreign-born.
Two and a half centuries after the First American Revolution, the system is in terminal crisis, and building a revolutionary party is once again on the agenda. Efforts to resist the inevitable attempts by the ruling class to make us pay for the degeneration of their failing order will just as inevitably push workers to organize for the overthrow of the capitalists and their system.
Our defense of the legacy of the first American revolutionaries, as laid out in the Bill of Rights, is an essential element in the struggle to complete the liberation of the working class from tyranny and oppression through the communist revolution.