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The American Revolution unleashed what one prominent historian has called a “contagion of liberty.” Ideas for change went viral, as revolutionaries saw independence as an opportunity to establish a truly different sort of nation. Some even saw the possibility of creating a more equitable society.
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While many reformist proposals involved institutional changes, such as empowering more men to vote and hold political office, others were more fundamental. At a time when women lost their legal identities — and their legal rights — when they married, Abigail Adams playfully posited the following in March 1776 to her congressman husband:
“In the new code of laws which I suppose it will be necessary for you to make I desire you would remember the ladies and be more generous and favorable to them than your ancestors. Do not put such unlimited power into the hands of the husbands. Remember all men would be tyrants if they could. If particular care and attention is not paid to the ladies we are determined to foment a rebellion and will not hold ourselves bound by any laws in which we have no voice, or representation.... Why then, not put it out of the power of the vicious and the lawless to use us with cruelty and indignity with impunity?”
Remember the generations of Americans who decided to honor the founding’s accomplishments through improvement rather than veneration.
Efforts of enslaved people to attain freedom, often by allying with the British who promised emancipation, drew attention to the hypocrisy of the revolutionaries’ stated commitment to the idea that all humans had certain natural rights. As some enslaved people in Massachusetts asserted in their 1777 freedom petition (using the conventional petitioner’s third person):
“They have in common with all other men a natural and unalienable right to that freedom which the Great Parent of the Universe has bestowed equally on all mankind and which they have never forfeited by any compact or agreement whatever & but they were unjustly dragged by the hand of cruel power from their dearest friends and some of them even torn from the embraces of their tender parents & from a populous, pleasant, and plentiful country, and in violation of laws of nature and of nations and in defiance of all the tender feelings of humanity brought here to be sold like beasts of burden and like them condemned to slavery for life & among a people professing the mild religion of Jesus, a people not insensible of the secrets of rational being nor without spirit to resent the unjust endeavors of others to reduce them to a state of bondage and subjection.... They cannot but express their astonishment that it has never been considered that every principle from which America has acted in the course of their unhappy difficulties with Great Britain pleads stronger than a thousand arguments in favor of your petitioners.”
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Thomas Jefferson, the Virginian who wrote so eloquently in the Declaration of Independence about the “unalienable rights” to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” made religious freedom — or “liberty of conscience” — one of his top priorities. In 1779, he drafted a document that was enacted by Virginia’s legislature seven years later as “An Act for Establishing Religious Freedom,” a law that included this bold assertion, which motioned in the direction of our modern right to privacy and became the basis of the American notion of the separation of church and state:
“Our civil rights have no dependance on our religious opinions, any more than on our opinions in physics or geometry; that therefore the proscribing any citizen as unworthy the public confidence by laying upon him an incapacity of being called to offices of trust and emolument, unless he profess or renounce this or that religious opinion, is depriving him injuriously of those privileges and advantages to which, in common with his fellow citizens, he has a natural right.”
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Although they chose the winning side in the revolution and its War for Independence, neither Jefferson nor Adams nor the Massachusetts petitioners really got what they wanted.
Jefferson’s bill passed and his friend James Madison penned the 1st Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which codified religious liberty at the federal level, though church and state were never as completely separate as purists like Jefferson would have wanted.
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The revolution produced no changes in the legal status of women, except for a brief period, between 1776 and 1807, when New Jersey’s constitution enfranchised property-owning widows and single women — but not wives, who were still legally subservient to their husbands.
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Slavery was abolished in Massachusetts and the other northern states eventually followed suit, but fortified by certain obliquely stated constitutional protections and the rise of King Cotton, slavery spread across the South and gained political clout in the post-revolutionary era.
It’s also worth noting that the lines between radical and more cautious revolutionaries shifted from issue to issue. Jefferson enslaved hundreds at Monticello, his mountaintop estate in central Virginia. Abigail Adams and her husband, John, were were at best ambivalent about government by the people. As John cautioned in a letter to a friend, “Remember democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes exhausts and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet, that did not commit suicide.”
In honor of the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, we asked Los Angeles Times readers to highlight American heroes who don’t get enough credit in the history books.
As we mark the semiquincentennial of the American Revolution, we should celebrate what its leaders achieved — and be mindful of what they did not. Many who fought for independence successfully opposed internal changes that would have made the United States more democratic and its citizens more equal, leaving reform-minded ideas that originated in the revolutionary era as an agenda for the future.
Cynthia A. Kierner, a professor of history at George Mason University, is the author, most recently, of “The Tory’s Wife: A Woman and Her Family in Revolutionary America.”
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Ideas expressed in the piece
- The article argues that the American Revolution unleashed a “contagion of liberty,” spreading radical ideas about rights and reform well beyond the formal struggle for independence and inspiring challenges to entrenched hierarchies in politics, religion, gender, and slavery.
- The article contends that figures such as Abigail Adams used the revolutionary moment to question women’s legal subordination, warning that women might “foment a rebellion” if excluded from lawmaking and insisting that marriage should not give husbands unlimited power, thereby linking the rhetoric of liberty to demands for female representation.
- The piece highlights how enslaved people, including petitioners in Massachusetts and those who sought freedom by aligning with the British, exposed the inconsistency between revolutionary claims about natural rights and the continued practice of human bondage, insisting that the principles driving resistance to Britain more strongly supported their own claims to emancipation.
- The article emphasizes Thomas Jefferson’s push for religious liberty through the Virginia statute on religious freedom and notes that James Madison’s First Amendment extended this protection nationally, yet it stresses that church and state were never separated as fully as Jefferson envisioned, suggesting that even celebrated constitutional achievements fell short of more expansive revolutionary aspirations[2][3].
- The piece stresses that, despite revolutionary talk of equality, the legal status of women remained largely unchanged, aside from a brief experiment with female property-based suffrage in New Jersey, and that slavery, though abolished in some northern states, expanded and gained political clout in the South, aided by constitutional compromises and the rise of cotton.
- The article underscores the personal contradictions of leading revolutionaries, pointing out that Jefferson enslaved hundreds at Monticello and that John Adams expressed deep skepticism about democracy, warning that it “never lasts long” and tends to destroy itself, which complicates heroic narratives of the founding generation.
- The piece suggests that the semiquincentennial should be a time both to celebrate independence and institutional innovations and to acknowledge that many revolutionaries opposed deeper democratizing reforms, leaving an unfinished agenda for greater equality and broader participation that later generations have had to take up[2][4].
- The article ultimately frames the Revolution as a road map rather than a destination, arguing that its most transformative ideas—about gender equality, racial justice, and fuller democracy—were only partially implemented and continue to challenge Americans to realize the promises first articulated in the 18th century[2][4].
Different views on the topic
- In contrast, some recent commemorations of the 250th anniversary present the American Revolution primarily as a completed founding achievement, celebrating the Declaration of Independence as one of history’s most beautiful and important political documents and portraying its assertion of natural rights and equality as the enduring cornerstone of the republic, with less emphasis on unresolved inequalities[3].
- Other op-eds marking the semiquincentennial focus on the idea that the United States was founded on a written creed rather than ethnicity or religion, arguing that this framework already created a uniquely inclusive nation and emphasizing the success of the founding design, which implicitly treats the Revolution more as a destination than an unfinished project[1].
- Civic commentaries linked to the 250th anniversary describe the founding era as a period of bold innovation and improvisation, highlighting the rapid creation of new governments, the adoption of the Bill of Rights, and later amendments that abolished slavery and extended suffrage as evidence that the constitutional system has largely fulfilled revolutionary ideals, thereby downplaying the extent to which key aspirations remain unrealized[2][4].
- Educational narratives and public-history projects commemorating America at 250 often spotlight heroic figures such as Thomas Paine, George Washington, and later leaders like Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King Jr., framing the Revolution as an inspiring origin story that successfully launched a tradition of liberty and self-government, while giving less attention to the persistent exclusion and suffering of women and enslaved people in the founding period[3][4].
- Some reflections on the semiquincentennial stress the Revolution’s role in establishing decentralized, restrained government and warn against contemporary authoritarian tendencies, using the founding moment chiefly as a model to defend existing institutions rather than as a call to pursue further structural reforms toward equality and broader democratic participation[1][2].
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