From the beginning of America’s Revolutionary Mind, Thompson admits his ambition to write not just another history of the Declaration or of the Founding, but to write an entirely new interpretation of the period, building upon and fulfilling what Bernard Bailyn and Gordon Wood began in the second half of the 1960s with their respective masterpieces, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution and The Creation of the American Republic. To be sure, Thompson has succeeded in this lofty goal, and, if nothing else, this makes this extraordinary book even more extraordinary.
The historiography of the American founding period is a fascinating and circuitous one. In the immediate or almost immediate aftermath of the Revolution, David Ramsey and Mercy Otis Warren wrote histories of the American Revolution, and James Wilson offered two semesters’ worth of lectures at what is now the University of Pennsylvania in the 1790 and 1791 academic year. One might properly label these various attempts at definition as Whiggish and Livyian. After all, as Livy wrote of the decline of the Rome from its republic to its empire: “I would then have him trace the process of our moral decline, to watch, first, the sinking of the foundations of morality as the old teaching was allowed to lapse, then the rapidly increasing disintegration, then the final collapse of the whole edifice.” When trying to identify the source of the collapse, Livy lamented, “Of late years wealth has made us greedy, and self indulgence has brought us, through every form of sensual excess, to be, if I may so put it, in love with death.”
Compare Livy’s words, written in the time of Augustus, to Mercy Otis Warren’s in 1805. America, “has in great measure lost her simplicity of manners, and those ideas of mediocrity which are generally the parent of content; the Americans are already in too many instances hankering after the sudden accumulation of wealth, and the proud distinctions of fortune and title. They have too far lost that general sense of moral obligation, formerly felt by all classes in America.”
Further, Warren wished, “If this should ever become the deplorable situation of the United States, let some unborn historian in a far distant day, detail the lapse, and hold up the contrast between a simple, virtuous, and free people, and a degenerate, servile race of beings, corrupted by wealth, effeminated by luxury, impoverished by licentiousness, and become the automatons of intoxicated ambition.” Thompson might very well be Warren’s prophesied historian.