Commmunalism And The Yeoman Freeholder Summary

The American Revolution is central to this process because it reversed a counter-modernization trend by opening up huge regions for westward settlement. Unlike Wood who focuses on the ideological effects of the revolution on the common man through the rhetoric of equality, Brown argues the post-war development was fundamentally economic, with land being the great equalizer.
In Feudalism, Communalism, and the Yeoman Freeholder (1973), John M. Murrin vacillates on the importance of the American Revolution to later social development in the United States. He is willing to concede an argument which is similar to Wood’s monarchy/democracy theory, while skipping over the republicanism phase. Murrin writes that the revolution “summarily put an end to one archaic element of eighteenth-century society, the feudal revival, and inadvertently turned away from a no less ancient communalism while beginning to exalt a third traditional figure, the virtuous yeoman freeholder.” (Murrin, 276) Murrin describes the feudal revival of the first half of the eighteenth century as an attempt by proprietors to re-establish their manorial rights over colonial lands and to establish a more rigid social hierarchy. He describes the virtuous yeoman freeholder as an idolized independent land owning frontiersman, which is certainly similar to
This new ideology replaced the royal authority of the colonial period as a means of binding the citizens of the new United States together. Murrin disagrees, writing “the Revolution created a national government, but not a national community. The imperatives which that government survived may even have weakened the sense of community within each of its member societies without providing a convincing substitute.” (Murrin,