158 Chapter VII
answer the question. A country gaining independence in this way would not have
been the country that emerged in 1783. The winners of the American war were not
guerrilla chieftains. They were not obscure and hunted men out of contact with
civilization. They not only made government impossible for the British; they es-
tablished governments of their own. They did not represent the triumph of anar-
chy. America was divided, but it was not altogether, as Burke said in 1779, in a
“state of dreadful confusion.”^35 The Americans made a clean break with England.
They came into the circle of nations as a recognized power. And they presented to
the view of Europe a set of organized republican states, constituted and fashioned
in a new way, of enormous interest to Europe.
The intervention of France, it may therefore appear, was one of the indispens-
able elements in the founding of the United States. In this sense, too, as well as in
its ideological repercussions, the American Revolution was an event within an At-
lantic civilization as a whole. And the Bourbon monarchy, when it helped to call
the American republic into being, added another force to the forces of change in
Europe.
35 Letter of June 12, 1779 to Dr. John Erskine, in the Wentworth- Woodhouse manuscripts at
the Sheffield Central Library.