THE AMERICAN REVOLUTIONS

Independence Day is the day we Americans celebrate our national independence from Great Britain. It came in the midst of what we call the American Revolution, as if we had only one revolution. Actually, we Americans have had a series of revolutions. We are in one now; and this review should help us understand what is going on in our country and in the schism in South Carolina.

I see four revolutions in American history. These follow how President Lincoln famously called the American experience: "...government of the people, by the people, for the people..."

Of the people.

The Declaration of Independence established the principle of government of the people

For centuries before this, the almost universal system of power in western civilization rested on monarchy. The monarchs of Europe proclaimed their power came from God. They were anointed and crowned by the bishops of the church. This was a vertical system: God bestowed power to the monarchs; the monarchs reigned over their subjects. The kings and queens insisted they answered only to God. The people had no rights. The notable exception to this was in Britain where the monarchs grudgingly accepted rights of the people albeit limited.

The American Revolution was a radical departure from the norm of the day. It turned the prevailing system upside down. Power did not come from God (vertical); it came from the people (horizontal).  The Declaration of Independence proclaimed:

---all men are created equal

---men have rights as life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness

---the government draws its power from the consent of the governed

So, the first revolution in American history was to declare a government of the people.

This was an ideal in a country where there were so many glaring examples where reality was different. These rights were not recognized for women, Native Americans, or African slaves. Nevertheless, the country set itself in a course moving toward the ideals.

By the people.

The second revolution was to set up a government by the people. The first attempt to make a national government failed. The Articles of Confederation created a highly decentralized nation where essential powers, except for foreign policy, resided in the individual states. This proved unsatisfactory.

In 1787 a convention met to draw up a new government to balance the powers of the nation and the local states. It created a three-branch government of checks and balances. It can be best described as a representative republic since "the people" at the time meant propertied white men. Nevertheless, as with the Declaration, the seeds of democracy were planted, a government by the people.

For the people.

Having set up a horizontal nation-state where power derived from the people and the people elected their representatives, the next step was to apply this for the welfare of the whole of society. In a truly democratic republic, rights cannot be reserved only for some of the people. The Declaration had proclaimed that all men were equal and all should enjoy the same rights.

The third revolution came in the Civil War and Reconstruction. Slavery flagrantly violated the principles on which the country had been founded. Either slavery or the constitutional republic would have to go. The War decided that slavery would have to go. A series of amendments guaranteed equal rights to the former slaves.

This third revolution came to an abrupt end in 1876 as southern states began rolling back rights for the ex-slaves. Through violence and revised state constitutions, African American were systemically deprived of most of the rights they had won. Jim Crow became the order of the day. This anti-democratic state of affairs lasted nearly a century.

The fourth revolution came in the 1950's and 60's when the unfinished third revolution returned to the stage. The fourth is actually a continuation of the third, a government for the people, after a very long hiatus. In the fourth revolution, African Americans won equal rights as Jim Crow was demolished, women asserted their equal rights, the elderly and the poor gained help from the government, as did disabled people. Finally homosexuals were liberated from discriminatory laws and then given legal same-sex marriage. The fourth revolution was so sweeping, it deserves to be called the Great Democratic Revolution. It was the long-delayed result of the first, second, and third revolutions. 

A revolution by nature produces a backlash, or counter-revolution from the elements who feel most threatened by the changes going on around them. Every one of these four revolutions had a reactionary counter-revolution. 

As for the first revolution, actually only about a third of Americans actively sought independence. Another third wanted to remain with Britain. The other third did not care. The Loyalists tried to help the Brits. An open secret is the number of families in Charleston who helped the British forces during the two-year occupation in the Revolutionary War. At the end of the war, the Loyalists had the choice of leaving the country or becoming patriotic Americans.

As for the second revolution, there were many white men who really did not believe in the principles of the Declaration or the Constitution. For instance, the white southern slaveholders, who were making fortunes from the slave system, had no intention whatsoever of extending rights to the slaves. By 1861, there were four million human beings being held in slavery and the system seemed locked in.

As for the third revolution, white southerners grudgingly accepted the end of slavery but nothing else for blacks. They strongly opposed any extension of rights to the former slaves and successfully blocked this for a very long time. This was the most effective counter-revolution in American history because the federal government turned a blind eye until the 1950's. For nearly a century, blacks suffered through lynchings, egregious violent attacks, and humiliating segregation. It was all a gross violation of the principles on which America had been founded.

We are still in the fourth revolution. This primarily brought equality for and inclusion of blacks, women, and homosexuals in American society. They were empowered for the first time. This came at just the time when white men were realizing that demographic changes would mean the end of the majority white population in America in the near future. White men formed a reactionary counter-revolution backed by white southerners and evangelical Christians. This coalition has staged a powerful and still rising attack on the new democratic revolution. It has gained control of most of the state governments, has neutralized Congress, and has gained control of the U.S. Supreme Court. The goal of the counter-revolution here is to preserve white male power structures, and so it is rolling back rights for blacks, women, and gays as it seeks to block foreign immigration.

The three most anti-democratic and destructive decisions of the U.S. Supreme Court were parts of the counter-revolutions of their times. 1-the Dred Scott decision (1857) ruled that slaves were property and were not and could not be citizens of the United States. This was in flagrant violation of the principles of the Declaration and the Constitution. 2-the Plessy decision (1896) reduced blacks to segregation in a system that was inherently unequal. It too was a glaring violation of the founding principle of equal rights. 3-the revocation of Roe (2022) rescinded the earlier grant (1973) of a woman's constitutional right to control her own body. This was the first time in history the U.S. Supreme Court revoked individual rights. 

The tide of history swept aside the first two. The Civil War destroyed the Dred Scott decision. Plessy was overridden and replaced by the Brown decision of 1954. It remains to be seen how the revocation of Roe will fare but we can be confident that it too will be swept aside by the tide of history because it violates both the basic principles on which this country was founded and the evolution of American history.

The schism in South Carolina is a local part of the fourth national revolution. Reactionaries started gaining control of the diocese of South Carolina in the 1980's. By 2003 they were thoroughly in control and vehemently opposed the affirmation of the first non-celibate homosexual as a bishop in the Episcopal Church. The arrival of a woman presiding bishop and the blessing of same-sex couples was all the diocesan leaders needed to organize the majority of the diocese to leave the Episcopal Church in 2012. Subsequently, the secessionists imposed a "Statement" on their diocese absolutely forbidding same-sex marriages and joined a new denomination explicitly created to keep non-celibate gays and women out of power. No other diocese in the southeast followed this example. So, the ongoing Episcopal diocese is following the democratic revolution as championed by the national Episcopal Church while the secessionists are following the counter-revolution.

By all means we must celebrate Independence Day even though "independence" at the time did not include the vast majority of the people. The first and second revolutions, for all their faults, did give the nation the ideals of human rights and set America on a course to move toward a more perfect union. We are not there yet. However, if history can predict the future we would have to say the fourth revolution that we are in now will eventually prevail over its enemies although it may take a long time and require a lot of hard work. For nearly two and a half centuries we Americans have been committed to the ideals of freedom, equality, and justice, even if we too often have failed to live up to them. One must be confident we will not turn away from what we know is right, not after all we have been through.