Though it seems somewhat extreme to declare, as one contemporary political philosopher has The republican experiment launched so boldly by the revolutionary generation in America encountered entrenched opposition in the two centuries that followed, but it thoroughly vanquished the monarchicalĭynasties of the nineteenth century and then the totalitarian despotisms of the twentieth, just as Jefferson predicted it would. Throughout Asia, Africa, and Latin America, former colonies of European powers have won their independence with such predictable regularity that colonial status has become an exotic vestige of bygone days, a mere way stationįor emerging nations. These early premonitions of American destiny have been reinforced and locked into our collective memory by the subsequent triumph of the political ideals the American Revolution first announced, as Jefferson so nicely put it, 'to a candid world.' Of course we tend to remember only the prophets who turn out to be right, but there does seem to have been a broadly shared sense within the revolutionary generation that they were 'present at the creation.' Then in June ofġ776, he purchased 'a Folio Book' to preserve copies of his entire correspondence in order to record, as he put it, 'the great Events which are passed, and those greater which are rapidly advancing.' Was a child, that their next leap would be over the Atlantic into America.' Adams instructed his beloved Abigail to start saving all his letters even before the outbreak of the war for independence. And in conversation it was always added, since I

more ancient in my memory,' he wrote in 1807, 'than the observation that arts, sciences, and empire had always travelled westward. In his old age, John Adams recalled his youthful intimations of the providential forces at work: Several other prominent American revolutionaries also talked as if they were actors in a historical drama whose script had already been written by the gods. And Thomas Jefferson's lyrical rendering of the reasonsįor the entire revolutionary enterprise emphasized the self-evident character of the principles at stake. Tom Paine, for example, claimed that it was simply a matter of common sense that an island could not rule a continent.

On the inevitability side, it is true there were voices back then urging prospective patriots to regard American independenceĪs an early version of manifest destiny. No event in American history which was so improbable at the time has seemed so inevitable in retrospect as the American Revolution.

Founding brothers ellis