AMERICAN HISTORY DBQ-College Level
American Revolution
By John A. Braithwaite
DIRECTIONS:
The following DBQ is based upon the accompanying documents and your
knowledge of the time period involved. This question tests your ability to
work with historical documents. Your answer should be derived mainly
from the documents, however, you may refer to historical facts,
materials, and developments NOT mentioned in the documents. You
should assess the reliability of the documents as historical sources
where relevant to your answer.
QUESTION FOR ANALYSIS:
To what extent was the American Revolution a political movement,
social movement, military/diplomatic movement, or an economic
movement? To what extent did democracy and republicanism
triumph over both anarchy and totalitarianism?
PROMPT:
 Formulate a thesis statement
 Use documents provided as well as your own outside knowledge of
the period.
 Deal evenly with all aspects of the questions
 Be sure to cover the time period given
TEXTBOOK RECOMMENDATIONS
Gillon & Matson
Boydston & McGerr
Murrin, et.al
Norton, et.al.
Brinkley
Bailey & Kennedy
Boyer, et.al.
Cherny & Berkin
Davidson, et.al.
The American Experiment
Making A Nation
Liberty, Equality, Power
A People & A Nation
American History
The American Pageant
Enduring Visions
The Making of a Nation
Nation of Nations
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AMERICAN HISTORY DBQ-College Level
Document A:
Source:
James M. Henretta. The Evolution of American Society, 1700-1815.
"The Seven Years War --- the last of the long series of confrontations
between England and France which had impinged directly and immediately on the
colonies --- prompted a growing militarization of society, and economic cycle of
prosperity and recession, and a cultural xenophobia produced by large scale
contracts between American 'provincials' and the arrogant and status-conscious
officers and men of the British regular army."
Document B:
Source:
Willard Wallace, An Appeal to Arms: A Military History of the
American Revolution.
.
A "military" view on why the British lost:
"The British should have won the revolution handily. The fact remains that
they did not. As a fighting machine the British army was at first infinitely
superior to anything the Americans had to offer. But the longer the war went on,
the marvel became not so much one of how the Americans did so well as how the
British did so poorly. The explanation lay in the higher echelons of command and
administration. With all due credit to the Americans and their French allies, it is
not too much to say that the British government and the British generals lost the
Revolution for England."
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AMERICAN HISTORY DBQ-College Level
Document C:
Source:
John Shy, A People Numerous and Armed: A Reflection on the
Military Struggle for American Independence. 1976
A "military-political" view focusing on why the Americans won:
"The dynamics of British intrusion produced first a change, then a hardening of
the local political situation... I has always seemed slightly implausible that the
American Republic was born out of congeries of squabbling, unstable colonies...
The Revolutionary War, considered a political education for the masses, helps to
fill the explanatory gap... The broad popular basis of military organization forced
thousands of more or less unwilling people to associate themselves openly and
actively with the cause."
.
Document D:
Source:
John Dickinson, Letter II of “Letters from a Pennsylvanian
Farmer.” From The Writings of John Dickinson. Vol. I, pp. 312322.
"Those who are taxed without their own consent... are slaves."
Here then, my dear countrymen, ROUSE yourselves, and behold the ruin
hanging over your heads. If you ONCE admit, that Great Britain may lay duties
on her exportations to us, for the purpose of levying money on us only, she then
will have nothing to do, but to lay those duties on the articles which she prohibits
us to manufacture-- and the tragedy of American Liberty is finished.
"That it is the inseparably essential to the freedom of a people, and the
undoubted right of Englishmen, that NO TAX BE IMPOSED ON THEM, but with
their own consent, given personally, or by their representatives."
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AMERICAN HISTORY DBQ-College Level
Document E:
Source:
Lyman H. Butterfield, et.al. (eds), The Book of Abigail and John.
(1975).
"Remember the ladies, and be more generous and favorable to them than to your
ancestors. Do not put such unlimited power into the hands of the husbands.
Remember all men would be tyrants if they could. If particular care and attention
is not paid to the ladies, we are determined to foment a rebellion, and will not hold
ourselves bound by any laws in which we have not had voice or representation."
(Letter to John Adams at the Second Continental Congress, 1776.)
Document F:
Source:
From the Providence Gazette, May 11, 1765
Representative Government: An American view.
To infer, my lord, that the British members (of Parliament) actually represent the
colonies, who are not permitted to do the least act towards their appointment, because
Britain is unequally represented, although every man in the kingdom, who hath certain
legal qualifications can vote for someone to represent him, is such a piece of sophistry that I
had half a mind to pass by the cobweb without blowing it to pieces. Is there no difference
between a country's having a privilege to choose 558 members to represent them in
parliament, though in unequal proportions to the several districts, which cannot be
avoided, and not having liberty to choose any? To turn the tables,-- if the Americans only
had leave to send members to parliament, could such sophistry ever persuade the people
of Britain that were represented and had a share in the national councils?... Suppose none
of the 558 members were chosen by the people, but enjoyed the right of sitting in
parliament by hereditary descent; could the common people be said to share in the
national councils? How trifling is the supposition, that we in America virtually have such
share in national councils, by those members whom we never chose? If we are not their
constituents, they are not our representatives... It is really a piece of mockery to tell us that a
country, detached from Britain, by an ocean of immense breadth, and which is so
expansive and populous, should be represented by the British members, or that we can
have any interest in the house of commons.
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AMERICAN HISTORY DBQ-College Level
Document G:
Source:
Richard R. Beeman. Patrick Henry. (1974)
"It is now confessed that this is a national government.... The means, says
the gentleman, must be commensurate to the end. How does this apply? All
things in common are left with this government. There being an infinitude in the
government, there must be an infinitude of means to carry it out." (Virginia
debate on the Constitution, 1788)
Document H:
Source:
Irving Brant. The Fourth President: A Life of James Madison
(1970)
"Hearken not to the unnatural voice which tells you that the people of
America, knit together as they are by so many cords of affection, can no longer ...
be fellow-citizens of one great, respectable, and flourishing empire. Hearken not
to the voice which petulantly tells you that the form of government recommended
for your adoption is a novelty in the political world.... If novelties are to be
shunned, believe me, the most alarming of all novelties, the most wild of all
projects, the most rash of all attempts, is that of rending us in pieces, in order to
preserve our liberties and promote our happiness." (Federalist No. 14, 1788)
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AMERICAN HISTORY DBQ-College Level
Document I:
Source:
Marion L. Starkey. A Little Rebellion, (1950)
“The people assembled in arms…return for answer that, however unjustifiable the
measure may be which the people have adopted in recourse to arms, various
circumstances have induced them thereto… That virtue which is truly characterizes
citizens of a republican government hath hitherto marked our plans with a degree of
innocence, and we wish and trust it will still be the case.” (Reply to Gen. Benjamin
Lincoln’s demand for surrender, 1787)
Document J:
Source:

Notes from Gordon Wood’s Lecture - Summer of 2000, SLC
To base a society on the commonplace behavior of ordinary people may be
obvious and understandable to us today, but it was momentously radical in the
long sweep of world history up to that time. My book attempts to explain this
momentous radicalism of the American Revolution. The Revolution did not merely
create a political and legal environment conducive to economic expansion; it also
released powerful popular entrepreneurial and commercial energies that few
realized existed and transformed the economic landscape of the country. In
short, the Revolution was the most radical and most far-reaching event in
American History.
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AMERICAN HISTORY DBQ-College Level
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AMERICAN HISTORY DBQ-College Level
Document K:
Source:
Gordon Wood, The Creation of the American Republic 1776-1787.
Does the proposed Constitution protect the people's liberty?
YES: Federalist Alexander Hamilton: "Here, in strictness, the people surrender nothing; and as they retain
everything they have no need of particular reservations.... Bills of rights, in the sense and to the extent in which
they are contended for, are not only unnecessary in the proposed Constitution, but would even be dangerous....
Why declare that things not be done which there is no power to do? ... The truth is ... that the Constitution is
itself, in every rational sense, and to every useful purpose, a BILL OF RIGHTS."
NO:
Anti federalist George Mason of Virginia: "There is no declaration of rights: and the laws of the
general government being paramount to the laws and constitutions of the several states, the declarations of
rights, in the separate states, are no security. Nor are the people secured even in the enjoyment of the benefit of
the common law, which stands here upon no other foundations than its having been adopted by the respective
acts forming the constitutions of the several states."
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AMERICAN HISTORY DBQ-College Level
Document L:
Source:
Declaration and Resolves of the First Continental Congress.
October 14, 1774.
Resolved...That the foundation of English liberty, and of all free governments, is a
right in the people to participate in their legislative council: and as the English
colonists are not represented, and from their local and other circumstances,
cannot properly be represented in the British parliament, they are entitled to a
free and exclusive power of legislation in their several provincial legislatures,
where their right of representation can alone be preserved, in all cases of taxation
and internal polity ... But, from the necessity of the case, and a regard to the
mutual interest of both countries, we cheerfully consent to the operation of such
acts of the British parliament, as are bona fide, restrained to the regulation of our
external commerce, for the purpose of securing the commercial advantages of the
whole empire to the mother country, and the commercial benefits of its respective
members; excluding every idea of taxation, internal or external, for raising
revenue on the subjects in America, without their consent.
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AMERICAN HISTORY DBQ-College Level
Document M:
Source:
Map of the American Revolution. Robert B. Grant. (D.C.Heath, 1991),
p. 35.
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AMERICAN HISTORY DBQ-College Level
Document N:
Source:
“Cession of Western Lands After American Revolution. (D.C. Heath,
1991), p. 38
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AMERICAN HISTORY DBQ-College Level
Document O:
Source:
Map—The Old Northwest. (D.C. Heath, 1991), p.42
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AMERICAN HISTORY DBQ-College Level
Document P:
Source:
James Wilson, Considerations on the Nature of the Legislative
Authority of the British Parliament. (1774)
According to this theory, all men possessed the same natural rights;
governments had be established through social contracts to safeguard these
rights.
All men are, by nature, equal and free: all lawful government is founded on
the consent of those who are subject to it: Such consent was given with a view to
ensure and to increase the happiness of the governed, above what they could
enjoy in an independent and unconnected state of nature...
Document Q:
Source: Peter Odegard, “Revolutionary Ideas, Ideals, and Propaganda” in
Phillip Davidsons Propaganda and the American Revolution. (1942)
...our own revolutionary fathers were master of the science and art of propaganda.
At the outset of the revolution a small minority, finally transformed an apathetic
and somewhat reluctant majority into a united people and lunched a great nation
upon its dynamic and imperial course...
They used symbols and slogans which they used carried conviction
because they were fortified by facts and events within the experience of nearly
every colonist. There was widespread discontent with the Trade and Navigation
Acts, the Grenville and Townshend Acts, the Stamp Act, and the unnumerable
stupidities of a merchantilist policy applied to a colonial economy lush for laissez
faire. There was the Boston Port Bill, the Quartering Act, and the incredible folly
of the Boston Massacre. All of these were grist for the propagandists' mill and
they took full advantage of them.
But there was more than economic frustration to give substance to their
symbols. There was a tradition of freedom reaching back to Magna Carta, the
inalienable rights of Englishmen under the English Constitution, and the rapidly
rising sun of
eighteenth century liberalism and enlightenment. The propagandists took their
ideological weapons from the arsenal of the enemy himself, from the writings of
Coke and Blackstone, Bentham and John Locke. The American Revolution is but
another illustration of the fact that there is nothing more irresistable than an idea
whose time has come.
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AMERICAN HISTORY DBQ-College Level
Document R:
Source:
J. Franklin Jameson, The American Revolution Considered As A
Social Movement. (1926)
The men of our Revolution... were neither levellers nor theorists. Their
aims were strickly political, not social. They fought for their own concrete rights
as Englishmen, not for the abstract rights of man, nor for liberty, equality, and
fraternity...[the American] had no wish to destroy or recast his social system. He
sought for political freedom, but he had no mind to allow revolution to extend
itself beyond that limited sphere.
It is indeed true that our Revolution was strikingly unlike that of France,
and that most of those who had originated it had no other than a political
programme, and would have considered its work done when political
independence of Great Britain had been secured. But who can say to the waves of
revolution: Thus far shall we go and no farther? The various fibres of a nation's
life are knit together in great complexity. It is impossible to sever some without
loosening others and setting them free to combine anew in widely differing forms...
The stream of revolution, once started, could not be confined within narrow
banks, but spread abroad upon the land. Many economic desires, many social
aspirations were set free by the political struggle, many aspects of colonial society
profoundly altered by the forces let loose. The relations of social classes to each
other, the institution of slavery, the system of land-holding the course of business,
the forms and spirit of intellectual and religious life, all felt the transforming hand
of revolution, all emerged from under it in shapes advanced many degrees nearer
to those we know.
...There are... some political changes that almost invariably bring social
changes in their wake.
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AMERICAN HISTORY DBQ-College Level
Document S:
Source:
Louis M. Hacker, “The First American Revolution.”
Quarterly, XXXVII, No.3, Part I, Sept. 1935.
Columbia
To see the Revolution simply as a struggle for democratic rights in the
political sphere: to build the whole theory of the Revolution around the slogan
"No Taxation Without Representation," and to consider it merely as a continuation
of "the Englishman's long struggle for political liberty, is to make confusion worse
confounded.
... The events of 1763-1775 can have no meaning unless we understand ...
that the purpose of the general program was to protect the English capitalist
interests which now were being jeopardized as a result of the intensification of
colonial capitalist competition. If in the raising of a colonial revenue lay the heart
of the difficulty, how are we to account for the quick repeal of the Stamp Tax and
the Townshend Acts and the lowering of the molasses duty? And, on the other
hand, how are we to account for the tightening of enforcement of the Acts of Trade
and Navigation, ... the passage of the Currency Act, the placing of iron on the
enumerated list, English seizure of the wine trade, and the attempt to give the
East India Company a monopoly over the colonial tea business? The struggle was
not over high-sounding political and constitutional concepts: over the power of
taxation and, in the final analysis, over natural rights: but over colonial
manufacturing, wild lands and furs, sugar, wine, tea and currency, all of which
meant, simply, the survival or collapse of English merchant capitalism within the
imperial-colonial framework of the mercantilist system.
But it was exactly this new Tea Act which clearly revealed the intention of
London: that not only was the economic vassalage of the American colonies to be
continued but the interest of colonial enterprises was to be subordinated to every
British capitalist group that could gain the ear of Parliament. For, to save the
East India Company from collapse, that powerful financial organization was to be
permitted to ship in its own vessels and dispose of, through its own
merchandising agencies, a surplus stock of 17,000,000 pounds of tea in America
and, in this way, drive out of business those Americans who carried, imported
and sold in retail channels British tea (and indeed, foreign tea, for the British tea
could be sold cheaper even than the smuggled Holland article)...
By 1773, therefore, it was plain that America was to be sacrificed: colonial
merchant capitalists were compelled to strike back ...
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AMERICAN HISTORY DBQ-College Level
Document T:
Source:
Thomas Paine, Common Sense (1776)
But Britain is the parent country, say some. Then more shame upon her
conduct. Even brutes do not devour their young, nor savages make war upon
their families; wherefore the assertion, if true, turns to her reproach; but it
happens not to be true, or only partly so, and the phrase parent or mother
country hat been jesuitically adopted by the - and his parasites, with the low
papistical design of gaining an unfair bias on the credulous weakness of our
minds. Europe, and not England, is the parent country of America. This new
world hath been the asylum for the persecuted lovers of civil and religious liberty
from every part of Europe. Hither have they fled, not from the tender embraces of
the mother, but from the cruelty of the monster; and it is so far true of England,
that the same tyranny which drove the first emigrants from home, pursues their
descendants still.... Not one-third of the inhabitants, even of this province
[Pennsylvania], are of English descent. Wherefore I reprobate the phrase of parent
or mother country applied to England only, as being false, selfish, narrow and
ungenerous....
Europe is too thickly planted with kingdoms to be long at peace, and
whenever a war breaks out between England and any foreign power, the trade of
America goes to ruin because of her connection with Britain. The next war may not
turn out like the last, and should it not, the advocates for reconciliation now will
be wishing for separation then, because, neutrality in that case, would be a safer
convoy than a man of war. Every thing that is right or natural pleads for
separation. The blood of the slain, the weeping voice of nature cries, 'TIS TIME TO
PART. Even the distance at which the Almighty hath placed England and America
is strong natural proof, that the authority of the one, over the other, was never the
design of Heaven. The time likewise at which the continent was discovered, adds
weight to the argument, and the manner in which it was peopled encreases the
force of it. The reformation was preceded by the discovery of America, as if the
Almighty graciously meant to open a sanctuary to the persecuted in the future
years, when home should afford neither friendship nor safety.
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AMERICAN HISTORY DBQ-College Level
Document U:
Source:
Edmund Burke, “Conciliation with the Colonies.” March 22,
1775, Hansard’s Parliamentary Debates, Volume XVIII, 1775, pp. 507-516.
... Those who wield the thunder of the state, may have more confidence in the
efficacy of arms. But I confess, possibly for want of this knowledge, my opinion is much
more in favour of prudent management, than of force; considering force not as an odious
but a feeble instrument, for preserving a people so numerous, so active, so growing, so
spirited as this, in a profitable and subordinate connection with us.
First, Sir, permit me to observe, that the use of force alone is but temporary. It
may subdue for a moment; but it does not remove the necessity of subduing again: and a
nation is not governed, which is perpetually to be conquered.
My next objection is uncertainty. Terror is not always the effect of force; and an
armament is not a victory. If you do not succeed, you are without resource; for,
conciliation failing, force remains; but, force failing, no further hope of reconciliation is
left....
A further objection to force is, that you impair the object by your very endeavours to
preserve it. The thing you fought for is not the thing which you recover; but depreciated,
sunk, wasted, and consumed in the contest. Nothing less will content me, than whole
America. I do not choose to consume its strength along with our own; because in all parts
it is the British strength that I consume
Lastly, we have no sort of experience in favour of force as an instrument in the rule
of our colonies. Their growth and their utility has been owing to methods altogether
different.... These, Sir, are my reasons for not entertaining that high opinion of untried
force, by which many gentlemen, for whose sentiments in other particulars I have great
respect, seem to be so greatly captivated. But there is still behind a third consideration
concerning this object, which serves to determine my opinion on the sort of policy which
ought to be pursued in the management of America, even more than its population and its
commerce, - I mean its temper and character.
In this character of the Americans, a love of freedom is the predominating feature
Which marks and distinguishes the whole; ... This fierce spirit of liberty is stronger
in the English colonies probably than in any other people of the earth; and this
from a great variety of powerful causes;...
... I only wish you to recognize, for the theory, the ancient constitutional policy of
this kingdom with regard to representation, as that policy has been declared in acts of
parliament; and, as to the practice, to return to that mode which an uniform experience
has marked out to you as best; and in which you walked with security, advantage, and
honour, until the year 1763.
My resolutions therefore mean to establish the equity and justice of a taxation of
America, by grant and not by imposition. To mark the legal competency of the colony
assemblies for the support of their government in peace, and for public aids in time of war.
To acknowledge that this legal competency has had a dutiful and beneficial exercise; and
that experience has shown the benefit of their grants, and the futility of parliamentary
taxation as a method of supply.
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