Lexington and Concord: A Marxist Appraisal

Daniel Lazare 

A quarter of a millennium ago, “embattled farmers stood and fired the shot heard round the world” at Lexington and Concord.  What are Marxists to make of a battle that occurred in a pre-industrial era on the edge of what is commonly referred to as the civilized world? 

A good place to start is Lenin’s “Letter to American Workers,” published in Pravda in August 1918: 

The history of modern, civilized America opened with one of those great, really liberating, really revolutionary wars of which there have been so few compared to the vast number of wars of conquest which, like the present imperialist war, were caused by squabbles among kings, landowners or capitalists over the division of usurped lands or ill-gotten gains.  That was the war the American people waged against the British robbers who oppressed America and held her in colonial slavery, in the same way as these ‘civilized’ bloodsuckers are still oppressing and holding in colonial slavery hundreds of millions of people in India, Egypt, and all parts of the world. 

Plainly, Lenin wanted to draw upon America’s revolutionary traditions in order to persuade workers to oppose US intervention in the Russian Civil War.  But what stands out about his letter is how much it got wrong. 

Lenin’s ostensible colonial slaves not only held some 460,000 people – 21 percent of the population as of 1770 – in real slavery, but were otherwise some of the happiest and freest people on earth.  Thanks to widespread property ownership, 60 percent of white males had the vote, three or four times the figure in England and Wales.  White Americans consumed three or four times as much meat as British laborers, twice as much milk, and a third more butter, with the result that Americans who enlisted in the Revolutionary War were more than two inches taller than their British opponents.[1]  This is why some 20 percent of Hessian troops deserted upon landing in the New World.  Why risk your life for George III when you can melt into a countryside that was far freer and more abundant than anything at home? 

Oppressed is therefore the last word to describe colonial Americans.  To be sure, social tensions were rising as economic acceleration from the 1760s on led to a growing gap between rich and poor.  But the process was still in its infancy and hardly compared to Paris where a few years later thousands of desperate poor people would riot over the price of bread.  

An 1842 newspaper interview with a certain Captain Preston, a 91-year-old veteran of the battle of Concord, summed the problem up.  Why, his questioner wanted to know, did he go to war? 

“Did you take up arms against intolerable oppressions?”

“Oppressions?  I didn’t feel them.”

“What, were you not oppressed by the Stamp Act?”

“I never saw one of those stamps.  I certainly never paid a penny for one of them.”

“Well, what then about the tea tax?”

“I never drank a drop of the stuff; the boys threw it all overboard.”

“Then I suppose you had been reading Harrington or Sidney and Locke about the eternal principles of liberty?”

“Never heard of ’em.  We read only the Bible, the Catechism, Watts’ Psalms and Hymns, and the Almanac.”

“Well, then, what was the matter?  And what did you mean in going to the fight?”

“Young man, what we meant in going for those redcoats was this: we always had governed ourselves, and we always meant to.  They didn’t mean we should.”[2] 

Colonists fought not for change but for a return to the status quo ante.  Rather than revolutionaries hoping for a great leap forward, they were restorationists seeking to turn the clock back prior to 1763 when Britain had begun tightening up imperial controls after decades of benign neglect.  

Any number of historians have wrestled with the problem of American restorationism.  They range from the Prussian-Austrian diplomat and writer Friedrich von Gentz, who argued in 1800 that the American Revolution was no revolution at all, to Alexis de Tocqueville, who wrote in 1833 that Americans were born into a natural state of liberty, and Louis Hartz, whose classic 1955 study, The Liberal Tradition in America, said that Americans had little to rebel against because they lived in a country in which feudal oppression had never taken root.  But the most outstanding is Robert R. Palmer (1909-2002).  Best known on the left for his 1941 study, Twelve Who Ruled: The Year of Terror in the French Revolution, his real masterpiece is a two-volume work published in 1959-64 whose aim was to get to the bottom of “American exceptionalism” by probing political developments elsewhere in the world from 1760 to 1800.  

Entitled The Age of the Democratic Revolution, it examines, among other things, an aristocratic revolt that broke out in France in 1787, two years prior to the storming of the Bastille, and another revolution that broke out two years later in Brussels.  The first was the culmination of trends underway since the death of Louis XIV in 1715 in which aristocrats tried to claw back privileges that an increasingly powerful and centralized monarchy had taken away.  By the 1780s, wrote Eric Hobsbawm, the aristocratic counter-offensive had reached the point where “four quarterings of nobility were needed even to buy a commission in the army,” meaning that one had to prove that all four grandparents were aristocrats before landing a spot in the officer corps.  Hobsbawm went on: 

[A]ll bishops were nobles, and even the keystone of royal administration, the intendancies [i.e. provincial governorships], had been largely captured by them.  Consequently, the nobility ... undermined the state itself by an increasing tendency to take over provincial and central administration.[3] 

A breaking point occurred in 1787 when Louis XVI, the Sun King’s great-great-grandson, tried to impose taxes on the nobility in a last-ditch effort to stave off bankruptcy.  But aristocratic law courts known as parlements refused to go along on the grounds that no one could tax the nobility other than the nobility itself.  In invoking what it said were ancient constitutional principles, the nobility’s ultimate goal according to Palmer was to return France to a bygone era “in which the King ruled over a confederation of provinces, each guarding its own liberties and exemptions in taxes and administration, and each carrying on its own affairs through its own churchmen, its own nobles and gentry, and its own opulent dignitaries....”[4] 

The upshot was a restorationist revolt not unlike that of Massachusetts a dozen years earlier.  The revolt was serious business.  In June 1788, it led to “the day of the tiles” in the alpine city of Grenoble, an outbreak of fighting in which townsfolk shouting, “Vive le parlement,” showered rooftiles on royal troops below.  But what is perhaps most remarkable about the revolt is the attitude of the Third Estate, which was entirely in favor.  Observes Palmer: 

It is one of the puzzles of the Revolution that class animosity, or antagonism between noble and non-noble, should have been so little in evidence in 1787 and much of 1788.  The Parlement of Paris, despite all that could be known of it from its own published remonstrances, enjoyed a wide popularity with both Third Estate and nobility at this time.  There were of course exceptions ... [but] most politically conscious persons of the moment were concerned mainly with absolutism, and would admire any group of men that stood up against arbitrary and non-responsible government.[5] 

La Journée des tuiles en 1788 à Grenoble, 1890 painting by Alexandre Debelle (Musée de la Révolution française)

French sans-culottes lined up in support of the nobility in much the same way that America’s embattled farmers lined up in support of Virginia grandees like Washington and Jefferson.  

The other event that Palmer scrutinizes is the so-called Brabant Revolution of 1789.  The Austrian Netherlands, as Belgium was known, was “a European China,” in the words of one historian,[6] a country that had been in a state of near-suspended animation ever since a local duke had pledged to respect local traditions and institutions in return for a grant of power over the country as a whole.  Known as the “Joyous Entry” of 1356, the result more than four centuries later was an assemblage of provincial assemblies, guilds, churches, monasteries, and whatnot little changed from the high Middle Ages.  Now under the control of the Habsburgs, it was a prize possession that Joseph II of Austria, the very model of an “enlightened despot,” set out to modernize.  Joseph expected his subjects to be grateful; after all, who could say no to efficiency and reform?  Instead, peasants, artisans, and nobles joined forces against an unprecedented assertion of imperial authority that threatened to overturn everything they knew and understood. 

Once again, to paraphrase Captain Preston, local people had always governed themselves and always meant to, yet distant imperial authorities in Vienna didn’t mean they should.  Self-government was again understood as loyalty to ancient institutions and opposition to interference from abroad. 

But then came Act II.  In Brussels, conservative opponents of Habsburg interference parted ways with modern-minded reformers like the lawyers Jan Baptiste Verlooy and Jan Francois Vonck, both of whom supported Joseph II’s reforms even while opposing the royal absolutism behind them.  Soon, traditionalists were denouncing Verlooy, Vonck, and others as radical intellectuals seeking to lead the people astray with “detestable philosophe-ism.”[7]  “Vonckists” were soon forced into exile. 

A similar rupture occurred in France.  After siding with the aristocracy against the crown in 1787-88, the Third Estate – otherwise known as sans-culottes, people too poor to afford fancy knee britches – reversed course in mid-1789 and sided with the crown against the aristocracy.  As nobles fled abroad by the hundreds, Louis XVI was re-dubbed the “citizen king .... the father, the brother, the friend of all the French” after donning the tricolor revolutionary cockade and leaving his palace at Versailles so he could be with “his” people in Paris.  It was a fiction that all sides maintained until June 1791 when the royal family tried to escape to Austrian lines.[8]  The flight to Varennes, the town a hundred miles or so from the German border where Louis was arrested, profoundly discredited the moderate faction known as the Girondins and left the sans-culottes no choice but to turn against the monarchy as well.  With the revolution now as anti-royalist as it was anti-aristocratic, Louis’s execution in January 1793 marked the start of its most radical stage. 

Louis XVI wearing the tricolor hat of the revolution

Rather than a continuation of the aristocratic revolt of 1787, the radical stage that the Jacobins ultimately ushered in was its antithesis.  As for America, an Act II arrived there as well, although the process took a bit longer.  Washington’s victory at the Battle of Yorktown in 1781 clinched the power of the Virginia ascendancy.  Six years later, a new constitution strengthened the neo-aristocratic “plantocracy” all the more by granting slaveowners a broad range of privileges such as extra representation in the House and the Electoral College, veto power in the Senate, and indirect control over the White House and the Supreme Court.  As a result, nine of America’s first 15 presidents were slaveholders while the rest lined up in support.  When an abolitionist avant-garde went on the offensive in the 1820s, planters used their constitutional advantages to push the Fugitive Slave Act through Congress and the Dred Scott decision through the Supreme Court, both of whose purposes was to wipe out opposition and establish a pro-slavery dictatorship over the nation as a whole.  

The strange rhythms of American political development thus served to prolong the revolution’s Girondin phase by some “four score and seven years.”  When the dam finally broke, Radical Republicans used their control of a rump Congress to ram through legislation that pro-slavery forces had bottled up for years.  In addition to a military draft, these included a national bank (the slaveowner Andrew Jackson had overthrown an earlier version in 1832), tariffs (which the export-oriented plantocracy had also opposed), and land grants and loans to build the first transcontinental railroad, another project that the anti-industrial South had fought to a standstill.  Comparisons with the Jacobins were duly noted.  A British journalist described the Radical Republican leader Thaddeus Stevens as “the Robespierre, Danton, and Marat of America, all rolled into one,” while a northern newspaper compared the abolitionists to “the ‘Committee of Twelve’ of the days of the Reign of Terror.”  Congressman Clement Vallandigham of Ohio, leader of the antiwar Democratic Party faction known as the “Copperheads,” warned in 1863 that the war would produce “universal and social revolution, anarchy and bloodshed, compared with which the Reign of Terror in France was a merciful visitation.”[9]  

Engraving by Jean-Joseph-François Tassaert, c. 1800. Musée Carnavalet, Paris. The scene depicts the Insurrection of 2 June 1793, when over 80,000 armed Parisians and National Guardsmen besieged the National Convention, demanding the arrest of 22 Girondins.

Indeed, Republicans and Jacobins were clearly on the same track.  Faced with widespread domestic insurrection, they responded in broadly similar ways, i.e. by centralizing political power, taking control of national finances, and mobilizing industrial production, particularly that of armaments.  The Americans even imposed an income tax just as the French had in 1790.  Republicans emulated the Jacobins in ideological terms as well.  Previously, Jefferson had been seen as the great champion of American democracy while Hamilton was seen as an economic royalist who was hostile to the people and to the French Revolution too.  “All honor to Jefferson,” Lincoln wrote in 1859.  But now attitudes began to shift.  As Palmer notes, French revolutionaries were suspicious of Jefferson, whose famous statement that “mobs of great cities add just so much to the support of pure government as sores do to the strength of the human body” marked him as an enemy of the sans-culotte urban masses.[10]  His friendship with the Marquis de Lafayette also rendered him suspect since Lafayette, a defender of the monarchy, had gone over to the counter-revolution just a few days earlier. 

Alexander Hamilton

Hamilton, on the other hand, was a familiar social type as far as bourgeois French revolutionaries were concerned, a progressive banker and industrialist much like the Belgian-Dutch bankers Édouard de Walckiers, Balthazar-Élie Abbema, and Jean-Conrad de Kock, who were in France at that moment lobbying to extend the revolution to their home countries.[11]  Even though Hamilton was less than comfortable with the prospect, Jacobins thus saw him as one of their own.  This was a view that Republicans now adopted since Jefferson viewed states’ rights as a check on federal power while Hamilton stood for centralization and the martialing of national resources.  Since that was what the Union most needed, his star rose while Jefferson’s fell.  

Thaddeus Stevens

Which brings us back to Lexington and Concord.  Given the convoluted nature of subsequent events, what are we to make of embattled farmers who set the process off?  Were they progressive, reactionary, or what? 

The answer is complex.  Even in Virginia, America had never had a European-style hereditary aristocracy, although planter dynasties like the Randolph and Lee families came close.  But the concept was utterly alien to a Puritan New England dominated by tradesmen, laborers, farmers, and a budding merchant class.  Consequently, social revolution was almost completely absent, which is why New Englanders found it so easy to place themselves under the control of lofty Virginia planters.  Rather than undermining American conservatism, the constitutional arrangements that crystallized in the 1780s reflected and reinforced it.  Palmer is worth quoting at length on how American “revolutionaries” tried to keep change to a minimum: 

Pennsylvania and Georgia gave themselves one-chamber legislatures, but both had had one-chamber legislatures before the Revolution.  All states set up weak governors; they had been undermining the authority of royal governors for generations.  South Carolina remained a planter oligarchy before and after independence, but even in South Carolina fifty-acre freeholders had a vote.  New York set up one of the most conservative of the state constitutions, but this was the first constitution under which Jews received equality of civil rights – not a very revolutionary departure, since Jews had been prospering in New York since 1654.  The Anglican Church was disestablished, but it had had few roots in the colonies anyway.  In New England the sects obtained a little more recognition, but Congregationalism remained favored by law.  The American revolutionaries made no change in the laws of indentured servitude.  They deplored, but avoided, the matter of Negro slavery.[12]  

The contrast with France could not be more striking.  The very opposite of restorationist, the revolution was an attempt to make society anew.  When informed of the fall of the Bastille, Louis XVI asked: “It is then a revolt?”  To which the Duke de Liancourt replied: “No, sire, it is a revolution.”  In other words, it was not a revolution in the old sense of revolving back to some pre-existing golden age, but a new kind of revolution seeking to advance into a bold bright future.  The French Revolution, Palmer wrote in a subsequent work, entailed: 

...the ‘invention’ of revolution itself, the launching of the belief – or, as some would say, ‘myth’ – that human problems would be solved by a vast phenomenon in world history known as ‘the revolution.’  No one had made any such supposition before 1789, not even those Frenchmen who, in the curse of events, became revolutionaries.[13] 

The French Revolution was so revolutionary that it revolutionized revolution itself.  If 1789-94 marks the start of the modern political world, then “the shot heard round the world” was a final expression of the ancien régime, one that left the old order exhausted – and the French monarchy in particular burdened with debt from its intervention on the American side – but made no attempt to overthrow it.  It was progressive to the degree that it created a national arena for northern bourgeois development.  But it simultaneously strengthened the southern plantocracy by showering it with constitutional privileges and protections.  Civil war became inevitable the moment the Constitution was ratified in 1788. 

What followed in 1861-65 was thus a repudiation of the same sort that followed the flight to Varennes.  Where one generation of revolutionaries strengthened slavery, another overthrew it.  Where one ushered in a decentralized federation, the second consolidated control.  Whereas the Gettysburg Address echoed Jefferson’s rhetoric in the Declaration of Independence to a degree, it gave it a new twist.  It called for “a new birth of freedom,” and while vowing that “government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth,” it did so in a manner that implied a new concept of popular self-rule in which democracy would no longer be checked and divided to the point of self-nullification,  but consolidated so that ways, means, and ends – of, by, and for – would all be unified.  

A successful bourgeois revolution in the 1860s would have required a Jacobin-style clean sweep.  Instead, the minimal reforms of the 1780s led to renewed minimalism by the end of the 1860s.  “Up to now we have witnessed only the first act of the Civil War – the constitutional waging of war,” wrote Marx in August 1862.  “The second act, the revolutionary waging of war, is at hand.”  The forecast would prove tragically incorrect.  Reconstruction was cut short, the Constitution was put back on its pedestal, and southern Confederates were returned to power.  Since blacks now counted for five-fifths of a person for purposes of congressional apportionment as opposed to three-fifths before the war, the white southern ruling class wound up with more seats in the House and more votes in the Electoral College than previously while still depriving black Americans of the vote.  The conservative democracy that issued forth once national unity was assured was heaven for bankers and industrialists in that it provided for a strong legal framework, absolute guarantees for private property, a total absence of financial regulation of just about any sort, plus a rich and variegated consumer market.  But it was hell for workers and racial minorities. 

This is the same conservative democracy that is now in an abject state of collapse.  Congress has been gridlocked for a generation, corruption is rampant, and economic polarization is shooting through the roof.  Institutions like the Senate, the Electoral College, and the Supreme Court have never been more unrepresentative.  Workers’ revolution is more urgent than ever amid war, economic crisis, and a growing dictatorship.  But bland and patriotic celebrations of events like Lexington and Concord will do nothing to bring it about; instead, only the most ruthless criticism will do.  What Marx said about Germany in 1843-44 goes double for the US in the 2020s: 

Criticism dealing with this situation is criticism in hand-to-hand combat. ...  It is a question of permitting the Germans not a single moment of illusion or resignation.  The burden must be made still more oppressive by adding to it a consciousness of it, and the shame made still more shameful by making it public.  Every sphere of German society must be described as the partie honteuse [shameful portion] of German society, and these petrified conditions must be made to dance by singing to them their own melody.[14] 

All institutions and events that have contributed to this disgraceful situation must be presumed guilty until proven innocent.  Instead of restoration, America needs a real revolution to drive society forward. 

---

[1] Eric Vriesen, An Essay Examining the Living Standards of American Colonists, English Workers, and American Plains Indians in the Mid-Eighteenth Century (Kingston, Ontario: Queen’s University, 2011), 19, 26, available at https://www.econ.queensu.ca/sites/econ.queensu.ca/files/student_papers/270.pdf.

[2] Samuel Eliot Morison, The Oxford History of the American People (New York: New American Library, 1972), vol. 1, p. 284.

[3] E.J. Hobsbawm, The Age of Revolution 1789-1848 (New York: New American Library, 1962), 78-79.

[4] R.R. Palmer, The Age of the Democratic Revolution: A Political History of Europe and America, 1760-1800 (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 2014), 343.

[5] Ibid., 340.

[6] Janet L. Polasky, “Traditionalists, Democrats, and Jacobins in Revolutionary Brussels,” The Journal of Modern History 56, no. 2 (June 1984), 228.

[7] Palmer, The Age of the Democratic Revolution, 248. 

[8] E.L. Higgins, The French Revolution as Told by Contemporaries (New York: Cooper Square, 1975), 155.

[9] James M. McPherson, “Some Thoughts of the Civil War as the Second Revolution,” Hayes Historical Journal 3, no. 5 (Spring 1982).

[10] Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1954), 165.

[11] Palmer, The Age of the Democratic Revolution, 416.

[12] Ibid., 174.

[13] R.R. Palmer, The World of the French Revolution (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), 3.

[14] Karl Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s ‘Philosophy of Right’ (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1970), 133-34.

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