The True History of the American Revolution

The Declaration of Independence: A Radical Experiment in Liberty, by Bradley J. Birzer (Stone House Press, 278 pp., $24.95)

The Making of the American Mind: The Story of our Declaration of Independence, by Matthew Spalding (Encounter Books, 344 pp., $32.99)

At the end of his life, John Adams, the “Atlas of Independence,” took a surprisingly bleak view of the fate of the Revolution that he had helped to spark. When a Baltimore journalist named Hezekiah Niles, for instance, began a correspondence with the former president in the late 1810s, Adams wrote that he “hazarded an opinion that the true history of the American revolution could not be recovered.” The problem was not just fading memories and the passing of the Founding generation; Adams feared that the American people had abandoned the principles of 1776 in a partisan frenzy that threatened the health of the infant republic.

What would Adams make of the flood of books marking this year’s semiquincentennial? Adams was convinced not only that future generations would overlook his own contributions to the “glorious cause” but also that they would politicize or forget the actual motivations behind the independence movement. Sadly, though Adams is somewhat more celebrated than he prophesied, too many recent books present facile, over-simplified narratives that lean hard on patriotic fervor and ideological intensity to the detriment of scholarly rigor.

Fortunately, that is not true of at least two books about the making of the Declaration of Independence published earlier this year, both by Hillsdale College professors. Historian Bradley J. Birzer’s The Declaration of Independence: A Radical Experiment in Liberty masterfully reconstructs the history of the document that freed the American states from the British Empire. Political theorist Matthew Spalding’s The Making of the American Mind: The Story of Our Declaration of Independence rearticulates the republican theory at the heart of the document. Taken together, these books illustrate not just how the American Revolution came to be, but perhaps also why the patriots of 1776 fought for their liberties—and what it may take to recover their principles in our own time.

Following his intellectual hero Russell Kirk, Birzer believes the Founders were not “radical”—they did not seek an extreme break with the past—but were instead concerned with the deep roots of their civilization. He begins with the settlement of the American colonies, long before the height of the Imperial Crisis in 1774. The people who braved the stormy Atlantic in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries were motivated by a deep civilizational impulse. They wanted to take what was best about Europe and use it to build new societies out of the wilderness. As such, it makes sense that Parliament adopted a policy of “salutary neglect,” as the great conservative Edmund Burke called it. Drawing on another of his lodestars, Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek, Birzer emphasizes how the British Empire’s decentralization ensured that a “spontaneous order” would emerge.

Birzer argues strongly against the quasi-Marxian “economic interpretation” of the Revolution advanced by historians such as Charles Beard and his progressive successors. “It should be noted that America’s resistance to British rule was not merely a tax revolt,” he writes, but rather “a revolt against government control of the economic realm, British interference with colonial institutions of government, as well as the formation of courts outside of the common law tradition.” Patriots across the colonies set aside their genuine differences because they saw in parliamentary policies a tendency toward centralizing tyranny. They were contending for the traditional liberties they and their forerunners had always enjoyed. Birzer takes special note of the ways the Founders drew on ancient sources, from the Anglo-Saxons to the Romans, to make the case against imperial policy.

From this intellectual foundation, Birzer turns to narrating the actual events leading up to the Declaration of Independence. Drawing on a vast trove of primary-source documents too often ignored or misunderstood, he illustrates the Patriots’ grievances in their own words. He goes beyond simply chronicling these grievances, helping readers and students understand the spirit of liberty that animated the Revolution. The Declaration of Independence, he concludes, represents nothing less than the “wisdom of the ages” and the American republic’s particular inheritance of the Western tradition.

Whereas Birzer begins his story with the long drama of colonization, Spalding starts his book in medias res, with the Continental Congress already in session. His goal is less to identify every historical force behind the Revolution as to delve into the minds of the men who led it. Spalding rejects the approach of earlier scholars of the Founding like Carl Becker, who infamously thought that asking “whether the natural rights philosophy of the Declaration of Independence is true or false is essentially a meaningless question.” While he is not heedless of context, he is also careful not to slip into the historicist fallacy that denies the actors of our great national drama any agency.

For Spalding, the question of what is right by nature is at the heart of the Revolution—and ought to be our principal object of study as well. “Man’s distinguishing characteristic, which makes his nature not like that of the animals,” he writes, channeling Aristotle, “is the unique capacity to think and reason, to discern the nature of things, and to make choices and act in accordance with his own nature” and in pursuit of excellence. The highest political virtue, according to Spalding, is prudence—the quality he admires most in the statesmanship of the Founding. “It is significant that the intellectual virtue appealed to in the Declaration is prudence rather than wisdom,” he observes; wisdom is concerned “with certainty and absolute knowledge of unchanging things,” whereas prudence is a kind of practicality “that deals with contingency and changing things.” By acting prudently, the Founders were attempting to identify the worthiest choices.

What emerges from Spalding’s commentary on the Declaration, then, is a vision of ordered liberty that guided the Founders and can guide us today. Spalding agrees with his teacher Harry Jaffa that the “metaphysical freedom of the mind” is “the ground of all moral freedom” and the source of the Founders’ inspiration. From their conception of a free human nature as universal equality under God, the authors of the document derived a sense that all just government requires the consent of the governed. That principle, above all, is what inspired the limits on power as well as the checks and balances of the U.S. Constitution. “The American mind wasn’t revolutionary, but it was radical—meaning, literally, going to the root of things,” Spalding writes. “As a result, one people, in a particular place, founded a particular nation” on truths that prove nonetheless universal.

By drawing our attention to history and nature rightly understood, Birzer and Spalding jointly illuminate what John Adams might have called the truth of the American Revolution. In an August 24, 1815, letter, Adams wrote to Thomas Jefferson that he held “peculiar, perhaps Singular” ideas about the meaning of the Revolution. “What do We mean by the Revolution? The War?” he went on to ask. “That was no part of the Revolution. It was only an Effect and Consequence of it. The Revolution was in the Minds of the People.” Drawing on tradition and philosophy alike, the heroes of that day persuaded Americans to adopt a certain view of ordered liberty and a policy of independence to defend it.

It remains to be seen what Americans have learned from this year’s momentous national anniversary. Clichés and platitudes dominated the politicians’ speeches in Washington. Resentment and ideology fueled the commentary of our intellectual class. Little of the public memory of the Revolution, at least in 2026, paid much attention to the substance of the American mind as our Founders understood it. Nonetheless, Birzer’s and Spalding’s impressive efforts should give us hope. The fireworks may have faded from the skies of our semi-quincentennial, but the ideas—and truths—of the Founding endure.