The American Revolution: Radical Or Radical?

On the morning of April 19, 1775, a ragtag army of colonial Minutemen surged the Lexington Green against the British militia, marking the first battle of the eight-year-long American Revolution, the first successful war of national liberation against western imperialism. It was a people’s war, waged by common colonists with the courage and the zeal to rise up against the more heavily armed and better trained British royal army, promoting a radical notion of equality. However, the extent to which the American revolution can be deemed “radical” is debatable because in the aftermath of the revolution, benefits of this radical notion of equality was exclusive to white males, demonstrated by the continual oppression of black slaves in the South,
During the Revolution, Abigail Adams asked her husband John to “remember the Ladies and be more generous and favourable to them… [and] not put such unlimited power into the hands of the Husbands.” Yet even after the revolution, married women were still unable to own property or exercise basic legal rights, as they could not sue, make wills or contracts, or buy and sell property. All wages earned and property brought into marriage were transferred to their husbands. According to historian James Davidson, despite the rise of female education and literacy in the 1790s, male revolutionaries gave no thought to the role of women in the new nation, assuming them the “weaker sex,” incapable of making informed political decisions. With women confined to their traditional domestic sphere, the American Revolution failed to provoke any significant transformative change in conservative gender relations or gender
During the 1790s, Hamilton believed political leverage should be granted to a single chosen group in order to check the masses. “Give therefore to the first class a distinct, permanent share in the government,” he said. “Nothing but a permanent body can check the imprudence of democracy.” Hamilton’s post-Revolution concept of a small, permanent group of administrators renders a colonial governance vulnerable to reverting back to pre-revolution monarchy. Additionally, Hamilton’s economic program promoted the commercial sector at the expense of semi-subsistence farmers, with potential to rekindle pre-revolution privileged and powerful financial aristocracy. To some Americans, especially Anti-Federalist farmers, Hamilton’s immediate Federalist protocols jeopardized the egalitarian economic and political aptitude that revolutionaries had fought