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  "path": "/2026/07/did-the-world-turn-upside-down",
  "publishedAt": "2026-07-03T12:50:00.000Z",
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  "textContent": "A popular anecdote maintains that, upon their defeat at Yorktown, Lord Charles Cornwallis’s British fife-and-drum regiment was instructed by General George Washington to perform the Royalist anthem “The World Turned Upside Down.” As appealing as the story is, it’s almost certainly apocryphal.Traditionally, the losing army would have played a melody associated with the winning side, in this case either an American or French tune. But Washington, supposedly denying the British the honors of war, instructed them to perform a song of their own country. And so Cornwallis’s men supposedly played the 1646 anthem that protested Parliament’s abolition of Advent in the years after an earlier civil war had riven the English-speaking world. The first mention of this story was in the elderly veteran Alexander Garden’s 1828 Anecdotes of the American Revolution, though the author himself admitted he wasn’t present at Yorktown. Historian Henry Phelps Johnston included the claim in his 1881 book, The Yorktown Campaign and the Surrender of Cornwallis, which would later be cited by musicologist John Tasker Howard in 1931’s The Music of George Washington’s Time.From there, it was only a short hagiographical jump to Lin-Manuel Miranda naming a particularly maudlin track from the musical Hamilton in honor of this mythical performance. It’s an engaging tale all the same, for the implications are clear. Performing this song functioned as an admission by the British that one age was passing and another beginning, that the world had indeed been turned upside down. As the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence rapidly approaches under the second Donald Trump administration, the larger myth isn’t about any playlist at Yorktown. It’s the suggestion that there was never any radicalism in the American Revolution at all — that whether or not “The World Turned Upside Down” was played, the conclusion of a war whose victors promised a novus ordo seclorum (a new order of the ages) had left the world steadfastly upright.Claims of the exceptionality of the American Revolution have largely been the domain of Ken Burns documentaries and David McCullough biographies, while most scholars of the eighteenth century have traditionally seen it as an internecine squabble between the British and American elite. The conventional wisdom, at least among many academic historians, philosophers, and political scientists, was that the main event wasn’t 1776 but rather 1789: that modernity wasn’t ushered in by the Americans but rather by the far more radical French Revolution. Historian Daniel J. Boorstin, an embodiment of this “consensus school” and a political conservative himself, wrote in 1953’s The Genius of American Politics that the “American Revolution was no revolution but merely a colonial rebellion.” Six years later, liberal historian Carl N. Degler would describe it as fundamentally “conservative,” while a 1985 essay by right-wing philosopher Russell Kirk dubbed the years following 1776 a “revolution not made, but prevented.” More recently, Marxist historian Gerald Horne argued that the Founding Fathers were in fact fighting because of increasing abolitionist sentiment in London, a perspective that received widespread popularization in New York Times journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones’s 1619 Project. Though there are obviously variations in interpretation, the overall thrust of these arguments is that there was little revolutionary in the revolution; that the conflict is better understood as a civil war between rival aristocrats on either side of the Atlantic.Whatever Fourth of July mythologizing might accomplish, such interpretations have long been common among academic historians, from abject reactionaries who saw the American Revolution as a triumph to Marxists who saw it as a farce. Even in the eighteenth century, British critics like Samuel Johnson (“How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?”) were well aware of what was cankered in the revolutionary cause, while the veritable founder of philosophical conservatism, Edmund Burke, would contrast the Americans and their 1776 favorably with the French and their 1789. Even in public discourse today, there is an awareness of the galling hypocrisy of revolutionaries like Washington and especially Thomas Jefferson, who penned odes to equality while claiming ownership of more than six hundred people. In such a context, playing “The World Turned Upside Down” appears less as a prophecy of the future than a form of ironic mocking.There are, however, some notable dissenters among historians, even on the Left. Gordon S. Wood, in his Pulitzer Prize–winning 1991 book The Radicalism of the American Revolution, writes that the “republican revolution was the greatest utopian movement in American history. The revolutionaries aimed at nothing less than a reconstruction of American society.” Contra the consensus historians, Wood, who has recently sparred publicly with the authors of the 1619 Project, gave a full-throated defense of the American Revolution as the revolution of the eighteenth century — not mere prologue to France’s main event but the ur-revolution that set the template for future attempts to radically reorient society along emancipatory lines. For Wood, a direct line links 1776 to 1789 as well as to 1848 and even 1917. Oftentimes identified as a neo-Whig historian, Wood focuses on the intellectual substance and cultural shifts of the period more than on the failings and hypocrisies of the Founders themselves. He emphasizes the promise and potential of the Declaration of Independence, seeing it as a thoroughly radical document with attendant material implications. “Equality was in fact the most radical and most powerful ideological force let loose in the Revolution,” argues Wood. “Its appeal was far more potent than any of the revolutionaries realized.” In other words, whatever motivations the Founders may have had, they unleashed a righteous fury by signing the Declaration that could not be contained, even by themselves. “Once invoked, the idea of equality could not be stopped, and it tore through American society and culture with awesome power.”It may be true that the American Revolution was a largely, but not entirely, bourgeois rebellion that economically benefited an American elite; after all, Washington was the richest man in the United States. But it is also true that the egalitarian ideals promulgated by the Declaration of Independence were a novel summation of radical thought leading up to 1776 — a document that soon became a North Star to subsequent struggles for liberation, justice, equality, and freedom.There has often seemed to be a gap between the American revolutionary ideal and the way it was carried out. Wood shows how the first republican generation experimented with radical social and economic arrangements, and how later historical outcomes — including the United States’ reputation for capitalist excess — were decisively not predetermined by the revolution itself. Wood was hardly the first historian on the Left to make this intellectual and rhetorical separation. While Karl Marx admitted that capitalism developed in the United States “as in a greenhouse,” he also understood the bourgeois revolution as a necessary stage in struggle for later, genuine working-class liberation. In his remarkable 1864 letter to Abraham Lincoln, written to the sixteenth US president on the occasion of his reelection, Marx described how, since the revolution, the “workingmen of Europe felt instinctively that the star-spangled banner carried the destiny of their class.” Prairie populist firebrand Eugene Debs told a Chicago crowd in 1901, “I like the Fourth of July. It breathes a spirit of revolution.” Seventeen years later, in Vladimir Lenin’s “Letter to American Workers,” the Soviet leader enthused that the history of “America opened with one of those great, really liberating, really revolutionary wars of which there have been so few,” describing it as the “war the American people waged against the British robbers.” When Ho Chi Minh ascended a dais in Hanoi’s Ba Dinh Square to deliver Vietnam’s Declaration of Independence in 1945, the language was purposefully familiar: “All men are created equal. They are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights; among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.”There is a telling subtlety in Lenin describing the American Revolution as a war waged by the American people. Any consideration of the genuine radicalism of the American Revolution is obviously incomplete if it focuses primarily on the Founders. Any event as varied and complicated as that which inaugurated the American republic will have contradictory factions of reactionaries and conservatives, liberals and radicals. Yet Lenin’s point is crucial, for the revolution wasn’t fought just by Washington but by his men at Valley Forge, Trenton, and Yorktown, and by the women at home in Boston and Philadelphia who were central to the promulgation of revolutionary ideals and often the source of its most radical proposals. Rather than providing yet another Founding Father hagiography, the historians Alfred F. Young, Gary B. Nash, and Ray Raphael’s indispensable anthology, Revolutionary Founders: Rebels, Radicals, and Reformers in the Making of the Nation, turns the scholarly focus toward the proletarian soldiers and advocates who marched under the red, white, and blue banner. While the editors admit that the particulars of the consensus history as regards Washington, Jefferson, and John Adams are largely correct, they nonetheless make clear that “many of their contemporaries wanted to strike at the heart of existing inequalities and radicalize governmental structures.” In other words, it’s less about any inherent radicalism of the American Revolution and far more about the radicalism within the American Revolution.Beyond those who have monuments in Washington, DC, or their faces on currency, Revolutionary Founders describes influential working-class figures such as the Boston shoemaker and Stamp Act rioter Ebenezer Mackintosh, the radical blacksmith and veteran of Lexington and Concord Timothy Bigelow, and Edward Wright and James Cleveland, who fought brutal insurgencies against the British in Virginia while calling upon the same language that the radical Levellers of the English Civil War had used more than a century before. Revolutionary Founders further complicates the lily-white and patriarchal nature of the American Revolution with considerations of black revolutionaries like Prince Hall and Richard Allen as well as proto-suffragettes including Judith Sargent Murray and Abigail Adams. “We will never grasp the full scope of the American Revolution,” note the editors, “until we take seriously its most progressive participants and incorporate them into our national narrative.”Particularly interesting in that regard is the case of somebody like Jedediah Peck. Peck, a committed republican and Anti-Federalist, was a working-class veteran who labored as a millwright; ran for office in New York state, where he was instrumental in the reform of the school system; and agitated against the Alien and Sedition Acts. Prosecuted by the very strictures of the Sedition Act that he protested, Peck was an insurgent politician cut from the same cloth as those who led post-Constitutional insurrections like Shays’s Rebellion and the Whiskey Rebellion. As Peck was known to declare: “Let us all shout with one voice the sovereignty of the people.”What Revolutionary Founders underscores is that the meaning of 1776 was contested by those who fought in the revolution even during the revolution itself. There were, to be sure, both conservative and radical currents, and it becomes necessary to disentangle those two strands. The visionary urban theorist Marshall Berman advocated for just that in Adventures in Marxism, imagining a distinctly American revolutionary politics of “Jeffersonian Marxism.” He described how, “Like the Mississippi . . . is fed by a thousand streams,” so is the American working class composed of the “masses of anonymous, ordinary men and women, from every occupation . . . every race and color and ethnic group, every class — except the very highest, the ones in top hats.” What consensus historians often obscure is that there is a difference between what the revolution was and what it could still mean.Wood, perceptively moving away from prosaic literalism, understood that the “real source of democratic equality” wasn’t just the product of Enlightenment salons and the tracts of philosophes but a lived and felt “equality that was far more potent than the mere Lockean belief that everyone started at birth with the same blank sheet. Jefferson and others who invoked this egalitarian moral sense, of course, had little inkling of the democratic lengths to which it would be carried.” The revolutionaries that mattered did not begin and end at Independence Hall, where the Declaration was signed, and the legacy of that event’s radicalism goes beyond and further than its leaders could have imagined.If there is a Founder included among the official canon of those who matter in the revolution and yet is fully deserving of the adjective “radical,” it’s the English pamphleteer, religious nonconformist, and committed republican and democrat Thomas Paine. Though he is sometimes claimed to be the first to coin the name “United States of America” in Common Sense, published in January 1776, there is no official Thomas Paine memorial on the National Mall, and his bemused visage appears on no currency. Yet Paine was instrumental in turning what was originally a regional tax rebellion into a revolution dedicated to Enlightenment principles of liberty and equality. Silver-tongued, quick-witted, and apt to turn a memorable phrase (“These are the times that try men’s souls”; “The harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph”; “My own mind is my own church”), Paine’s republicanism was more real than Washington’s, and his secularism more genuine than Jefferson’s.As Paine put it, with a distinct millennial fervor, “We have it in our power to begin the world over again.” If the consensus historians are correct that, for many of the men who signed the Declaration (and certainly for those who later signed the Constitution), the war was merely a way of entrenching certain privileges for themselves, in Paine there was a genuine, utopian commitment to remaking the world with blood and sweat. Whether there was a radicalism to the American Revolution is a contested question for historians, but for (and in) Paine, there very much was.As the editors of Revolutionary Founders emphasize, the visionary whom Theodore Roosevelt once called a “dirty little atheist” was in fact concerned with far more than mere independence, advocating for “social equality, popular sovereignty, and a welfare state that redistributed wealth — not just in the United States but also in Britain, France, and everywhere else.” The son of a corsetmaker who was raised in lowly Norfolk, Paine’s philosophical education wasn’t just from reading John Locke but rather from the far more radical dissenting tradition of religious nonconformists such as his parents’ own Quaker society. His wasn’t just a philosophy of working-class dignity and emancipation but a worldview with its origins in the working class itself.“Red rose the clouds from the Atlantic in vast wheels of blood / And in the red clouds rose a Wonder o’er the Atlantic sea,” wrote William Blake, a poet raised in the same radical religious environment. It was a “human fire fierce glowing, as the wedge / Of iron heated in the furnace,” declares Blake in America: A Prophecy (1793). “The king of England looking westward trembles at the vision.” Similarly inspired by the radical currents going back to the English Civil War, Blake saw the American Revolution as a means of remaking the world, even including Paine alongside Benjamin Franklin, Jefferson, and Washington as “angels” of this new world order. Of course, Franklin, Jefferson, and Washington would ultimately break Blake’s heart, but for a period, the revolutionary poet could see in America the possibility of the world being made again.Christopher Hitchens would frequently declare that, after the French Fifth Republic and the fall of the Soviet Union, the only revolution that had not yet failed was the American one. Maybe; though as the nation approaches its semiquincentennial, it feels like there were many promises long intended to be broken. However, there remains a sublime political poetry in holding certain truths to be self-evident, including that all people are created equal and endowed with inalienable rights including life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.At the time, everyone knew John Locke’s classic formulation from nearly a century earlier: “life, liberty, and estate.” But Jefferson of Monticello ironically replaced his predecessor’s dull libertarian promise with something entirely more personal and powerful. Jefferson’s own hypocrisies are irrelevant to the truth of the principle. “Like all great revolutionary thinkers,” writes philosopher Michael Hardt, “Jefferson understands well that the revolutionary event, the rupture with the past and the destruction of the old regime, is not the end of the revolution but really only a beginning.” A revolution with human happiness at its core — an ostensibly bourgeois revolution where the word “property” was erased from the founding document — has certain implications that, even if not exactly what Jefferson meant, can only be mocked if there is a refusal to follow through on its latent radicalism.There is something there that is not easily dismissed, something waiting to emerge. Perhaps, as Zhou Enlai was alleged to have said about the French Revolution, it is still too early to fully assess the radical character of the American Revolution. The conclusion of the revolution remains in the future.",
  "title": "The American Revolution Was More Radical Than the Founders Wanted",
  "updatedAt": "2026-07-03T12:49:10.278Z"
}