Substack and the Spirit of 1776

The American Revolution was written into existence via self-published pamphlets like this one

As elder statesmen, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson exchanged letters. They had played leading roles in the American Revolution, including following George Washington as the second and third U.S. presidents, respectively. But even into their late seventies, they were still pondering and vigorously debating the significance of those days.

In one letter, Adams asked: What do we even mean when we talk about “the Revolution?”

Did this refer to the war itself, the American War of Independence against Britain?

No, said Adams, answering his own question. That war was simply one of the Revolution’s many consequences:

“The Revolution was in the minds of the people, and this was effected, from 1760 to 1775, in the course of fifteen years[,] before a drop of blood was shed at Lexington.”

Adams said historians should investigate this Revolution of the Mind, and he advised them to consult three primary sources: the newspapers; the records of the 13 colonial legislatures; and “the pamphlets.”

The pamphlets?

Yes. They were key.

“Above all, there were pamphlets,” writes historian Bernard Bailyn, a Harvard University Professor who more than a century later took up the Adams challenge. Pamphlets were “booklets consisting of a few printer’s sheets, folded in various ways to make various sizes and numbers of pages, and sold — the pages stitched together loosely, unbound and uncovered — usually for a shilling or two.”

Bailyn’s “The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution,” published in 1967, remains the classic work on how the first Americans hashed out a mental Revolution across “every medium of written expression,” from newspapers to church sermons to essays in odd corners of Almanacs.

But as Adams had said, so Bailyn found: much of the most important writing of the American Revolution appeared in pamphlet form.

“For the Revolutionary generation,” Bailyn wrote, “The pamphlet had peculiar virtues as a medium of communication. Then, as now, it was seen that the pamphlet allowed one to do things that were not possible in any other form.”

To discuss those virtues, Bailyn offers a wonderful paean to the pamphlet written by, of all people, the essayist and novelist George Orwell. Bailyn calls Orwell “a modern pamphleteer”, and quotes him at length:

“The pamphlet [Orwell wrote] is a one-man show. One has complete freedom of expression, including, if one chooses, the freedom to be scurrilous, abusive, and seditions; or, on the other hand, to be more detailed, serious and ‘high-brow’ than is ever possible in a newspaper or in most kinds of periodicals. At the same time, since the pamphlet is always short and unbound, it can be produced much more quickly than a book, and in principle, at any rate, can reach a bigger public. Above all, the pamphlet does not have to follow any prescribed pattern. It can be in prose or in verse, it can consist largely of maps or statistics or quotations, it can take the form of a story, a fable, a letter, an essay, a dialogue, or a piece of ‘reportage.’ All that is required of it is that it shall be topical, polemical, and short.”

Why was Orwell excited about pamphlets? For the same reason that I am: He thought the modern press was narrow-minded and stifling. “At any given moment there is a sort of all-prevailing orthodoxy, a general tacit agreement not to discuss some large and uncomfortable fact,” he complained. Orwell was nostalgic for the Revolutionary era’s vigorous and individualistic pamphleteering, and hoped that people “would once again become aware of the possibilities of the pamphlet as a method of influencing opinion, and as a literary form.”

Good news, George! We have!

Declarations of Independence

Bailyn’s book predates the computer, so it’s almost eerie how his discussion of pamphlets (like Orwell’s) evokes the spirit of Substack and similar social media.

“The pamphlet’s greatest asset was perhaps its flexibility in size, for while it could contain only a very few pages and hence be used for publishing short squibs and sharp, quick rebuttals, it could also accommodate much longer, more serious and permanent writing as well. Some pamphlets of the Revolutionary period contain sixty or even eighty pages, on which are printed technical, magisterial treatises …”

I have a full-time job as an ER doctor, but about five years ago I was so provoked by the Russiagate story — which seemed to be such utter and obvious nonsense — that I returned to my journalistic roots. I started posting on Medium, and then on Substack.

It was fulfilling to be writing again. But I also felt like a poser. This “wasn’t my job” anymore. What right did I have to demand anyone’s attention? Bailyn gratifyingly reminded me that both Jefferson and Adams were amateur pamphleteers. But even so, I found I was producing — somewhat defensively and defiantly — long, long articles. These were treatises, maybe not 60 or 80 pages, but with pretensions to the magisterial. My wife’s supportive response to most everything I wrote: “Great job! Make the next one shorter.”

Like all of her advice, I took too long to heed it, and when I finally did, I found she was correct. It’s been a relief to realize I can also write something short — a squib, to use the 1960s jargon of Professor Bailyn. (If you are wondering in despair, “Good Lord, does he consider this a squib?” — well, no, this is a little longer.)

Perhaps you don’t think social media needs more frivolous squibs and petty squabbles?

Well, this is America, my friend, and when Bailyn describes the pamphlets — which, remember, provided the ideological origins of the American Revolution — he could easily be describing the future blogosphere:

“[I]f the writing of … pamphlets had been only a response to … overt public events, their numbers would have been far smaller … [Pamphlets] resulted also, and to a considerable extent, from what might be called chain-reacting personal polemics: strings of individual exchanges — arguments, replies, rebuttals and counter-rebuttals — in which may be found heated personifications of the larger conflict. … Any number of people could join in such proliferating polemics, and rebuttals could come from all sides.”

Fine, ‘Substack is a Pamphlet.’ We get it. So what?

It’s worth remembering the American Revolution was peaceful. That Revolution of the mind, brought about by citizens passionately exchanging views, happened gradually over many years. Ordinary people simply slipped away from the stifling European orthodoxies — of church, state, and other oligarchical bureaucracies. And this happened naturally, and gradually, through countless, freely occurring conversations and citizen-to-citizen interactions, under the sunlight, open spaces and far distances of America.

It’s also worth remembering how much of the original thought was radical. You and I hazily remember it was about Washington, Jefferson, Adams, James Madison, Alexander Hamilton and Ben Franklin, who built it all for us after consulting Plato, Cicero, John Locke and Montesquieu. That’s what we’re taught in school.

But go back to the pamphlets, and a much more sprawling and vigorous argument is carried on across early America. There are multiple competing schools of thought. Bailyn concludes that the most important and influential, perhaps surprisingly, were the intellectual heirs of the English Civil Wars. So, now we’re talking about true radicals from the 1600s. They include Levelers — populists who believed in religious tolerance, in widely expanded voting, and in the “natural rights” of every person — and Diggers, a break-off sect of proto-socialists, who believed in communal ownership of land.

Yet the only one of those important writers and thinkers you’ve ever heard of is John Milton, and you only know of his extended verse poem “Paradise Lost” — not his radical works like “The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates,” which argued the people can chop off the king’s head if it seems appropriate to the circumstances.

Otherwise, have you heard of writers and thinkers like Henry Neville, Algernon Sydney, John Trenchard, Thomas Gordon, Benjamin Hoadly? Of course not!

They have “faded subsequently into obscurity and are little known today,” writes Bailyn. “But more than any other single group of writers they shaped the mind of the American Revolutionary generation.” These forgotten “heroes of liberty,” these “coffeehouse radicals,” were the authors of our worldview. Later, elites like Madison and Hamilton who mostly agreed with them would come along to moderate the most radical views, to systemize things and make them workable, to write the key legal documents and take all of the credit. Jefferson would even distill the Leveler-Digger philosophy into the preamble of a declaration we celebrate every July 4, asserting as self-evident truth “that all men are created equal,” and that they have natural rights from “their Creator,” including the rights to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”

It was the passionate pamphleteers — some famous, others long-forgotten and thus anonymous to us — who laid the groundwork for what we enjoy today. So, it’s a pleasure and a privilege to continue pamphleteering on Substack, in furtherance of, one hopes, a continually better, more peaceful, and healthier world. Thanks for reading!