Contrary to some modern, sanitized versions of the history of the American Revolution, the real Revolutionary War in the United States was a thoroughly violent affair. Proportionally, the war displaced a larger number of people than even the French Revolution, and more Americans died in that war than in any other American war. (The overall numbers are small because the population of North America was very small at the time.)
Moreover, the conflict was not a simple matter of throwing out British interlopers who wouldn’t leave the residents of the American colonies alone. About a third of the politically active American population at the time supported the British Empire against the American secessionist “Patriots.” These wee the so-called “loyalists” and their presence meant that, at times, the American Revolution took on the characteristics of a civil war as colonists fought each other over who would control local political institutions.
Not surprisingly, both sides resorted to measures that could hardly be considered respectful of the basic human right that many of the American revolutionaries claimed to be fighting for.
Yet, in spite of the internecine nature of this conflict, and the questionable methods used by both revolutionaries and loyalists alike, Murray Rothbard, in his monumental history of the American Revolution, Conceived in Liberty, concludes that the American Revolutionaries were ultimately in the right.
How does he come to this conclusion? In his assessment of the pro-revolution cause, Rothbard draws upon his earlier work on war, developed in essays such as “The Anatomy of the State” and “War, Peace, and the State.” In these essays, as in Conceived in Liberty, Rothbard notes that violence is justified and permissible when used in self-defense. It is only aggression—i.e., the initiation of violence—which Rothbard regards as always impermissible.
Moreover, Rothbard takes exception especially to the use of violence by states. This is because states are themselves founded on coercion via taxation and other illegitimate means of extracting resources form the subject population. They are, therefore, morally illegitimate in any case. Thus, Rothbard contrasts state military operations with non-state forms of warfare such as private partisan and guerrilla warfare. Rothbard also notes a marked difference in the goals of the war, as fought by the British and the Loyalists on the one hand, and the American revolutionaries on the other. The pro-revolution side explicitly supported the ideal of natural property rights while the British state sought to impose and strengthen foreign rule from a centralized state that promoted mercantilism as its central economic policy.
On balance, Rothbard concludes that while the American separatists were sometimes guilty of employing “non-libertarian” means in their conduct during the war, the British side’s methods and purposes were aggressive by design, and premised on the notion that a foreign ruling power was entitled to impose state coercion on the separatist Americans.
The Problem of the Tories/Loyalists
It is important to note that Rothbard does not attempt to unduly simplify the issue by ignoring or downplaying the presence of the Loyalists in the colonies. These “Tories,” as they were also known, were no small affair, and represented a significant portion of the population. Rothbard writes:
In their grave concern with the American Tories, the American revolutionaries were not striking at phantoms. While the idea that Tory and rebel sentiment among the people was equally matched is a historical misreading of John Adams, it remains true that the Tories constituted a real and substantial threat to the Revolution. About one-third of politically interested Americans were Tories, or “Loyalists,” while the Revolution held the allegiance of the other two-thirds.
These, of course, were just the “politically interested” Americans. A substantial portion of the population was inclined to avoid the issue and to side with whichever side appeared to be winning.
Rothbard thus correctly notes that the conflict was in many ways a civil war, and not merely a matter of a polity seceding from a distant kingdom across the sea. Many thousands of Tories were working to take control of local political institutions, often through violent means. He writes:
Civil war raged throughout the United States, and Tory terror bands abounded in North and South. An estimated 50,000 American Tories joined the British army during the course of the Revolution, and during the 1780-81 campaign 10,000 Loyalists were under arms.
Not surprisingly, many Americans responded with efforts to coerce the loyalists into silence and into giving up their efforts against the cause of the revolution. Many of the Patriots resorted to methods such as forcing the loyalists into exile—either in Britain or Canada, or otherwise away from British centers of power in the colonies. Where the Patriot cause was in control, there was often no “freedom of speech” or “Freedom of assembly” for the loyalists.
Rothbard even goes so far as to call the Revolutionaries’ campaign around Norfolk in 1775 as a “reign of terror” against the Tories.
Rothbard concludes:
In this kind of ferocious civil conflict, in which the life of the Revolution itself was at stake, it is unreasonable to expect consistently libertarian methods of handling the Tories from even the most liberal supporters of the Revolution. The nineteenth century Canadian historian Egerton Ryerson was quite right in pointing out the inconsistency of the revolutionaries: “The Declaration of Independence had been made in the name of and for the professed purposes of liberty; but the very first acts under it were to deprive a large portion of the colonists not only of liberty of action, but liberty of thought and opinion...”
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Thus, a Revolution and revolutionaries dedicated to the cause of liberty moved to suppress crucial liberties of their opposition—an ironic but not unsurprising illustration of the inherent contradiction between Liberty and Power, a conflict that can all too readily come into play even when Power is employed on behalf of Liberty.
Rothbard was under no illusions about the use of police-state tactics against the Tories. This is insufficient to impel Rothbard to condemn the Patriot cause, however, and Rothbard even regards it as “unreasonable to expect consistently libertarian methods.” Contrary to a common—and incorrect—critique of Rothbard, he was not a pie-in-the-sky purist who refused to support any political movement that might possess even a faint whiff of support for state-like governance. Rather, he supported the side that he viewed as “less bad.” Moreover, as we see in his position on the American revolution—and in countless other articles supporting other separatist movements over the past two centuries—Rothbard tended to support the side that offered a chance to decentralize and otherwise weaken political power imposed by state organizations.
Rothbard also notes that the most successful military operations employed by the revolutionaries tended to be de facto guerilla tactics, or what we might call “partisan warfare.” (The pitched European-style battles favored by Washington usually ended in failure.) This is important for two reasons. First, the military units involved in these sorts of guerrilla campaigns were often non-state military outfits in the sense that they were only loosely affiliated with the nascent state apparatus under the Continental Congress. Secondly, the fact that these non-state military units were so frequently successful shows that they enjoyed substantial support from the native, resident population. Rothbard contends—as have many scholars of guerrilla tactics—that, in order to succeed, guerrilla units require that the guerrillas receive at least tacit support from the local population. Rothbard believed that this further demonstrates that a majority in many places did indeed support the revolution.
The Philosophy of the Revolution
Rothbard also evaluated the American revolutionary cause, in part, on its stated goals. Contrary to some modern conservative claims that the Revolution was a very mild and conservative affair—devoted only to the preservation of “English liberties”—Rothbard noted that the American Patriot cause embraced highly radical notions of natural rights. This included the recognition of natural rights as beyond the reach of any sovereign no matter how old or exalted or paternal the ruling dynasty might appear.
Rothbard traces the public embrace of these ideals largely to the work of Thomas Paine, who introduced many elements of radical libertarianism into the thinking of the American revolutionaries. Among these was the idea that civil government is, by its very nature, a “necessary evil” quite separate from “society.” This distinction between “state” and “society” has been a key tenet of radical classical liberal thought since Paine. Rothbard approvingly quotes from Paine’s fabulously popular pamphlet Common Sense:
Society in every state, is a blessing, but government, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil; in its worst state an intolerable one: for when we suffer . . . the same miseries by a government, which we might expect in a country without government, our calamity is heightened by reflecting that we furnish the means by which we surfer. Government, like dress, is the badge of lost innocence; the palaces of kings are built upon the ruins of the bowers of paradise.
That was in early 1776, and by the summer of that year, Paine’s radical style of thinking had begun to motivate further statements against the idea of state power among the revolutionaries. Chief among these was the text of the Virginia Declaration of Rights. The Virginia Declaration stated that
all men are created equally free and independent, and have certain inherent natural rights, of which they cannot, by any compact, deprive or divest their posterity; among which are the enjoyment of life and liberty, with the means of acquiring and possessing property, and pursuing and attaining happiness and safety.
Rothbard concludes “Here, in a scintillating and compact form, was the essential statement of the radical libertarian theory of natural rights.” and he declares the Declaration to be “one of the great documents in American history. It set the pattern for all future state and national—and foreign—bills of rights, and stamped the libertarian doctrine of natural rights, at least in theory, upon the American Republic.”
Obviously, the Virginia Declaration of Rights was immensely influential on the authors of the Declaration of Independence, adopted less than a month after the passage of the Virginia Declaration.
This preoccupation with property was also important in the economic views of the revolutionaries. The British state embraced mercantilism with all of its government-imposed monopolies and restrictive trade policies. The Americans, on the other hand—at least in the 1770s before the Hamiltonians had a chance to undo the war’s liberal trade policy—sought to swing open the gates of trade to all nations of the world and to declare American ports open to all. Expansive trade—and by extension, the heroic smugglers to made it possible during the war—were an important component of the resistance movement against the British state.
Rothbard is thus left with a choice: there were the British on the one hand with the typical tools of empire: state-sponsored militaries, rule from the center, and a coercive bureaucratic state apparatus built on coercion.
On the other hand was an exceptionally weak state, highly decentralized, and forced into submitting to a consensus model by locals. Moreover, this new revolutionary movement explicitly endorsed radical new conceptions of private property and limitations on state power.
Yes, the revolutionaries, at times, stole Loyalist property, silenced dissent, and persecuted non-violent anti-revolutionary elements. Yet even these abuses were often small compared to the terror campaigns waged by both the British and the Tories on the pro-revolution population within the colonies.
It’s not a surprise that Rothbard comes down on the side of the revolutionaries.
