1776’s Class War Behind the Revolution

Claire Brooks

So, so July 1776, right in the middle of Boston, Thomas Crafts climbs up onto the balcony of the town hall. He opens up this fresh document and begins reading to the crowd below. And, and when the Declaration of Independence was read, with all its flaming radical language, you had this incredible moment, except right around that same time, poor men in that very crowd were literally rioting in the streets.

Oliver Hart

Wait, rioting right while the Declaration was being read?

Claire Brooks

Yes! Because the new military draft had a massive loophole. If you were a wealthy Boston merchant, you could just pay a poor guy to go take your place in the continental army and risk his life for you.

Oliver Hart

Right, so so the flaming radical language of equality is echoing off the brick walls, but the actual policy on the ground is, if you have money, you buy your way out of dying, and if you do not, you take the musket.

Claire Brooks

Precisely. And that, that brings us right back to what we started exploring when we looked at the Stamp Act, that growing tension between the colonial elites and the working poor. But by 1776, something shifted in how the elites handled that anger.

Oliver Hart

They redirected it. I mean, look at Thomas Paine's Common Sense in early 1776, or Patrick Henry back in 1775 shouting give me liberty or give me death. What Paine and Henry managed to do was take this boiling internal rage, anger directed at land speculators and wealthy merchants right in Philadelphia and Boston, and fuse it into one focused anti British nationalism.

Claire Brooks

So instead of fighting the rich guy down the street who just paid you to take his draft slot, you are told your real enemy is King George across the ocean.

Oliver Hart

Exactly. It is what Howard Zinn calls constructing an ideological consensus. Think about John Locke's famous political formula from the century before: life, liberty, and property. When Thomas Jefferson sits down to draft the Declaration, he tweaks it. He writes life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

Claire Brooks

Why make that specific swap?

Oliver Hart

Because property is concrete! Property divides people into those who own land and those who rent or work it. But the pursuit of happiness? That is abstract. It offers a promise of equal political rights without ever touching the actual economic inequality on the ground. It gives small farmers and city laborers a stake in the big idea without giving them a piece of the land.

Claire Brooks

Hmm, but wait, Oliver, I mean, is it fair to treat Paine's rhetoric as just a cynical trick? Common Sense sold over a hundred thousand copies in a matter of months. Ordinary tradesmen, artisans, sailors, they were reading it out loud in taverns. Did Paine not genuinely awaken a real radical democratic impulse in those working men?

Oliver Hart

Oh, it absolutely stirred them. But the question is who held the steering wheel. Paine's words gave poor colonists a language for their frustration, but the colonial leadership used that energy to build an army, fight Great Britain, and preserve their own power without redistributing a single acre of land.

Claire Brooks

And you see that dynamic so clearly when you look back just a few years before 1776, like, like with the Regulators in North Carolina.

Oliver Hart

Right, from 1768 to 1771.

Claire Brooks

Yeah! These were backcountry farmers who organized an armed resistance, not against the British Parliament, but against local court officials and colonial tax collectors who were seizing their farms. And it all ended in May 1771 at the Battle of Alamance, where Royal Governor Tryon used artillery against poor farmers and broke the movement.

Oliver Hart

Alamance is such a crucial piece of this puzzle because those farmers were revolting against the very same colonial gentlemen who would later frame themselves as champions of liberty in 1776. By 1770, in cities like Boston and Philadelphia, the top five percent of wealthy colonists held nearly half of all the urban wealth.

Claire Brooks

Nearly half! In just five percent of hands.

Oliver Hart

Yes! So when poor conscripts were forced into service while the wealthy stayed home, some of those laborers literally shouted a phrase that sums up this entire thesis: Tyranny is tyranny let it come from whom it may.

Claire Brooks

Man. That quote gives me chills every time I see it. Tyranny is tyranny let it come from whom it may. I was actually looking through some colonial militia recruitment logs from 1776, and seeing the margin notes where rich men literally paid draft substitutes, it just makes that phrase so real. The divide was written right into the military rolls.

Oliver Hart

It really was. And that lands us right on Zinn's core question about 1776. Did the American Revolution create a genuine revolutionary democracy, or did it perfect a system of national control, a way for a homegrown American elite to replace foreign British rulers while keeping the working class firmly in their place?

Claire Brooks

When you look at the draft riots, the Regulators, and those recruitment logs, it really feels like the language of liberty was used to unite a divided people just long enough to win a war, without ever finishing the class war underneath.

Oliver Hart

Well put. That is a good place to leave it for today.