142 Chapter VII
France. It was, in truth, less revolutionary. The American Revolution was, indeed, a
movement to conserve what already existed. It was hardly, however, a “conserva-
tive” movement, and it can give limited comfort to the theorists of conservatism,
for it was the weakness of conservative forces in eighteenth- century America, not
their strength, that made the American Revolution as moderate as it was. John
Adams was not much like Edmund Burke, even after he became alarmed by the
French Revolution; and Alexander Hamilton never hoped to perpetuate an exist-
ing state of society, or to change it by gradual, cautious, and piously respectful
methods. America was different from Europe, but it was not unique. The differ-
ence lay in the fact that certain ideas of the Age of Enlightenment, found on both
sides of the Atlantic—ideas of constitutionalism, individual liberty, or legal equal-
ity—were more fully incorporated and less disputed in America than in Europe.
There was enough of a common civilization to make America very pointedly sig-
nificant to Europeans. For a century after the American Revolution, as is well
known, partisans of the revolutionary or liberal movements in Europe looked upon
the United States generally with approval, and European conservatives viewed it
with hostility or downright contempt.
It must always be remembered, also, that an important nucleus of conservatism
was permanently lost to the United States. The French émigrés returned to France.
The émigrés from the American Revolution did not return; they peopled the Ca-
nadian wilderness; only individuals, without political influence, drifted back to the
United States. Anyone who knows the significance for France of the return of the
émigrés will ponder the importance, for the United States, of this fact which is so
easily overlooked, because negative and invisible except in a comparative view.
Americans have really forgotten the loyalists. Princeton University, for example,
which invokes the memory of John Witherspoon and James Madison on all pos-
sible occasions, has been chided for burying in oblivion the name of Jonathan
Odell, of the class of 1759, prominent as a physician, clergyman, and loyalist satiri-
cal writer during the Revolution, who died in New Brunswick, Canada, in 1818.^3
The sense in which there was no conflict in the American Revolution is the sense
in which the loyalists are forgotten. The “American consensus” rests in some degree
on the elimination from the national consciousness, as well as from the country, of
a once important and relatively numerous element of dissent.
Anglo- America before the Revolution
The American Revolution may be seen as a conflict of forces some of which were
old, others brought into being by the event itself.
The oldest of these forces was a tradition of liberty, which went back to the first
settlement of the colonies. It is true that half of all immigrants into the colonies
south of New England, and two- thirds of those settling in Pennsylvania, arrived as
indentured servants; but indentured servitude was not a permanent status, still less
3 M. C. Tyler, Literary History of the American Revolution, 2 vols. (New York, 1897), II, p. 99, n. 3.