The work of one founder in particular, James Wilson, illustrates how marrying these new historiographical strands can shape the way we approach the American Revolution. Wilson was born and educated in Scotland and signed the Declaration of Independence, helped draft critical sections of the Constitution as a delegate to the Federal Convention, and served as a Supreme Court Justice in the 1790s. As a thinker, he uniquely devoted himself to happiness as a philosophical ideal –– he reiterated numerous times throughout his career that “the promotion of publick happiness [was] the end originally proposed by the people for government.” Wilson’s treatment of the term “happiness” as a philosophic concept mirrors enlightened devotion to improvement. His definition joined together both moral concerns regarding virtue and material concerns of wealth and prosperity with a fierce philosophic optimism and belief that the human condition trended towards improvement. To be “happy,” in Wilson’s mind, was to be constantly striving to better oneself, to be more virtuous, more prosperous, more moral, more enlightened.
This belief strongly influenced his work as a revolutionary and constitution-maker during the 1770s and 1780s. Throughout the imperial crisis, he advanced a doctrine of revolution built around joining consent of the governed with government policy designed to meet citizens’ needs and interests. Because British colonial policy denied American colonists a voice in government and did not benefit their needs, Wilson believed revolution to be justified. Later, as he helped craft constitutions in both Pennsylvania and at the Federal Convention in 1787, he fought for a centralized government imbued with enough power to act decisively in favor of supporting citizens’ material and moral development. The main contributions he made to the Federal constitution –– a fierce argument in favor of popular sovereignty and the “necessary and proper clause” –– provide an example of government-for-happiness in practice. The “necessary and proper clause” in particular dramatically expanded the latitude given to Congress to legislate on a variety of issues and represented the fulfillment of critiques launched against British policy during the imperial crisis. By the 1790s, Wilson possessed an expansive view of what government could or should do to support citizens that was fundamentally shaped by his devotion to happiness as a political and philosophic concept.
Historians have long struggled to assess Wilson as an individual. In different works that address his career, he has been characterized as variously “nationalist or conservative or democrat…radical, moderate, liberal, aristocrat, pragmatist, realist, optimist, and combinations thereof.” I would argue that the difficulty historians have in labeling Wilson’s thought is a reflection of the limiting language which historians have previously adopted when approaching the Revolution. By considering politics in positive moral terms, and by being open to a more expansive set of purposes both for revolutionary political thought, it could be possible to conceptualize the whole of Wilson’s intellectual career across the 1770s and 1780s.
This seeming discord also mirrors wider issues which persist in the intellectual history of the American Revolution. Historians have long argued over whether a disconnect exists between the beginnings of revolutionary ideology in the 1760s and the creation of the modern American nation-state through the Constitution in 1787. This is largely the consequence of the disconnect between the strong centralized government favored at the convention with a revolution supposedly fought in the name of limited government. If we adopt new ways of looking at the Revolution, and instead consider it as part of a wider Enlightenment discourse regarding improvement and happiness, it is much easier for us to cast a cohesive narrative across the Revolutionary period. The American present is itself a reflection of the American past. For too long, that understanding has been hampered by a reductive understanding of the American Revolution focused on limited government and an overemphasized elevation of the role of liberty in our political canon. Re-centering our discussion of the Revolution around new approaches to studying the Enlightenment and to considering the active role colonial thinkers ascribed for government rather than just the way they believed government should be limited to protect freedom will help us broaden our understanding of the Revolution. In doing so, we will expand the intellectual language needed to understand both American thought and the American nation in a more inclusive and fulfilling way.