by Chap Petersen

A long time ago, I was a freshman at an elite New England college, just graduated from Fairfax High School. (“F-A-I-R-F-A-X-R-E! B-E-L-S, Oh yes! Those Rebels are best!”).

On a gorgeous fall morning in 1987, I was taking a class in Colonial American history, when the topic turned to the American Revolution. The professor asked the class whether it was truly a “revolution” or merely a reordering of the pre-Marxist power structure.

Of course, I fell for the bait. The American Revolution was different, I opined. It changed the world by basing government on democracy, not aristocracy.

The professor laughed and pulled a nickel out of his pocket. This is the home of Thomas Jefferson, he declaimed, the author of American liberty. He then passed it around the class, so everyone could examine Jefferson’s modest abode.

The point was clear: Jefferson was not a “democrat” in any modern sense. He was a gentleman planter, a slaveowner. The Revolution he spawned was a myth.

In the past five years, as I’ve done research for my upcoming book, I’ve confirmed what I had suspected that morning:

My learned Marxist professor was not just wrong — he was spectacularly wrong.

Because the American Revolution was transformational. First, it represented the first (and last) time a British colony would overthrow its master by force of arms. Second, it created the United States, the most powerful nation in the history of the world. Third, it ushered in a modern age in which merit, not birth, would determine the destiny of individuals.

Those were, and are, true revolutionary concepts that have survived long after “real revolutions” in France and Russia foundered on the crap-heap of history. To this day, the words in the Declaration of Independence (“We find these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal”) continue to inspire millions to come to the USA; indeed, our nation has been transformed by immigration in the last 50 years to be BETTER than it was before. And it was already pretty great.

Yes, the USA has had its skeptics dating back to …. July 5, 1776.

Europeans initially refused to believe that our democracy could survive. (Today, their descendants refuse to believe we can win the World Cup). Socialists and their academic sympathizers assumed that our free enterprise model would collapse.

Yet we persist.

Ironically, the greatest myth of the Revolution is that it was an effete affair between gentlemen. It was not. It was eight years of unremitting violence which spanned North America, from the fortress walls of Quebec where a ragtag army led by Benedict Arnold (!) came within a breath of conquering loyalist Canada to the Carolina Low Country, where the “Swamp Fox” Francis Marion organized a Viet Cong-like resistance.

The war with the British was paralleled by a civil war on the frontier with the Indian tribes and Tories. Pillage, rape and murder were common occurrences. Nobody was safe.

In so many ways, the revolution could have spun out of control (as happened in France) but for one man – George Washington – who held it all together. His Continental Army was originally the middle-class “Minutemen.” By the end, it was the laboring classes: Scots-Irish, German, Free Black. Regardless, they all followed Washington without question. And he, in turn, subordinated himself to the civil government.

The American Revolution truly was a revolution. It was far more important than any communist uprising, because it provided for individual FREEDOM.

And that was unique in 1776. In fact, it’s unique today.

Happy birthday, America!

Chap Petersen, a former state senator, practices law in Northern Virginia. This column has been republished from his newsletter The Virginia Attorney.