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The Lamp of Experience: Whig History and the Intellectual Origins of the American Revolution
In a landmark work, a leading scholar of the eighteenth century examines the ways in which an understanding of the nature of history influenced the thinking of the founding fathers. As Jack P. Greene has observed, “[The Whig] conception saw the past as a continual struggle between liberty and virtue on one hand and arbitrary power and corruption on the other.” Many founders found in this intellectual tradition what Josiah Quincy, Jr., called the “true old English liberty,” and it was this Whig tradition―this conception of liberty―that the champions of American independence and crafters of the new republic sought to perpetuate. Colbourn supports his thesis―that “Independence was in large measure the product of the historical concepts of the men who made it”―by documenting what books were read most widely by the founding generation. He also cites diaries, personal correspondence, newspapers, and legislative records. Trevor Colbourn is President Emeritus of the University of Central Florida.
305 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1966
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November 2, 2020
Beginning around the year 1760, American colonists were eager to lay claim to an intellectual mantle that would justify their own frustration with the increasing intrusions on colonial freedoms by the British throne. While it could be argued that the worst English offenses were still yet to come, the infringements upon personal liberties and freedoms the colonists had already experienced up to that point had already pushed them to start looking for ideological justifications to defend themselves against an encroaching George III.
It so happens that the books they read provided them with exactly what they were looking for. Eighteenth century colonial America was very much a reading culture, and one of the most popular kinds of books that colonists read was English history. A very particular kind of history was most common: radical Whig history. A representative sample of authors has names that are mostly forgotten today, with the possible exception of the famed jurist Sir Edward Coke. They include Robert Molesworth, William Atwood, and Catherine Macaulay.
In their work, each of these writers emphasizes the point that English history after the Norman Invasion (1066) was a slow series of intrusions that tried to usurp the freedoms and liberties of the Anglo and Saxons, the two tribes that ruled much of Britain in the immediate years before 1066. Whigs looked back at the Angles and Saxons and interpreted that contemporary English society should reclaim some of their principles and liberties, among them an annual representative parliament (the Witenagemot), a well-behaved militia, a trial by peers, and allodial land tenure. The contrasting school of English historiography, the Tory school, was much more friendly to the chain of monarchs beginning with William the Conqueror and denied any parliamentary claims.
After he details several popular examples of Whig history, Colbourn goes on to a series of sixteen case studies each of which examines the opinions of an influential colonist, especially in light of how these histories influenced their opinions of what American liberty should look like. Many of the libraries he looks at were of well-known colonists including Thomas Jefferson, Samuel Adams, John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, John Dickinson, James Wilson. While many of these men were from either born into or attained membership in the aristocratic planter class, Colbourn insinuates that their sway under the influence of Whig history very much resembled that of the average history-consuming colonist.
Colbourn does explicitly go out of his way to say the reading habits of the Founding Fathers did not serve as motivation for their future political actions per se, and in doing do carefully reigns himself in from overstating the importance of his thesis. However, Colbourn does allude to the Founding Fathers using some of the ideas discovered in their reading to help them formulate insights about which political actions to take. Since we know that those who supported American Revolution, those against it, and those who were indifferent were roughly equal in number, it would be fascinating to read another study that took up the possible influence of Tory historiography in the colonies.
It is worth noting that Colbourn includes a postscript to the book in which he explicitly calls this retrospective Whig reading of history a “myth.” Perhaps the most important thing to keep in mind, however, is that it was very much believed to be true at the time. Colbourn never spends too much time here trying to split hairs regarding which ideas about the “Saxon Myth” were true and which were not. Whatever the details, it is safe to say with some historical hindsight that whatever liberty looked like in pre-Norman England bears little resemblance to what the Founders intended for their nascent country.
It so happens that the books they read provided them with exactly what they were looking for. Eighteenth century colonial America was very much a reading culture, and one of the most popular kinds of books that colonists read was English history. A very particular kind of history was most common: radical Whig history. A representative sample of authors has names that are mostly forgotten today, with the possible exception of the famed jurist Sir Edward Coke. They include Robert Molesworth, William Atwood, and Catherine Macaulay.
In their work, each of these writers emphasizes the point that English history after the Norman Invasion (1066) was a slow series of intrusions that tried to usurp the freedoms and liberties of the Anglo and Saxons, the two tribes that ruled much of Britain in the immediate years before 1066. Whigs looked back at the Angles and Saxons and interpreted that contemporary English society should reclaim some of their principles and liberties, among them an annual representative parliament (the Witenagemot), a well-behaved militia, a trial by peers, and allodial land tenure. The contrasting school of English historiography, the Tory school, was much more friendly to the chain of monarchs beginning with William the Conqueror and denied any parliamentary claims.
After he details several popular examples of Whig history, Colbourn goes on to a series of sixteen case studies each of which examines the opinions of an influential colonist, especially in light of how these histories influenced their opinions of what American liberty should look like. Many of the libraries he looks at were of well-known colonists including Thomas Jefferson, Samuel Adams, John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, John Dickinson, James Wilson. While many of these men were from either born into or attained membership in the aristocratic planter class, Colbourn insinuates that their sway under the influence of Whig history very much resembled that of the average history-consuming colonist.
Colbourn does explicitly go out of his way to say the reading habits of the Founding Fathers did not serve as motivation for their future political actions per se, and in doing do carefully reigns himself in from overstating the importance of his thesis. However, Colbourn does allude to the Founding Fathers using some of the ideas discovered in their reading to help them formulate insights about which political actions to take. Since we know that those who supported American Revolution, those against it, and those who were indifferent were roughly equal in number, it would be fascinating to read another study that took up the possible influence of Tory historiography in the colonies.
It is worth noting that Colbourn includes a postscript to the book in which he explicitly calls this retrospective Whig reading of history a “myth.” Perhaps the most important thing to keep in mind, however, is that it was very much believed to be true at the time. Colbourn never spends too much time here trying to split hairs regarding which ideas about the “Saxon Myth” were true and which were not. Whatever the details, it is safe to say with some historical hindsight that whatever liberty looked like in pre-Norman England bears little resemblance to what the Founders intended for their nascent country.
August 31, 2026
This review weaves Howe’s narrative, Colbourn’s historical analysis, and the evolution of American democratic thought into a single, coherent scholarly review. This review adds and deepens the context of American intellectual history and shows how democratic ideas developed from the colonial period through the era 1815–1848.
Review: What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815–1848
With an Integrated Analysis of American Democratic Thought from Trevor Colbourn’s The Lamp of Experience
Daniel Walker Howe’s What Hath God Wrought is a masterful analysis of the United States between 1815 and 1848, an era defined by technological innovation, political realignment, and intensifying moral conflict. When read alongside Trevor Colbourn’s The Lamp of Experience, Howe’s narrative becomes part of a longer intellectual arc: the evolution of American democratic thought from its colonial origins to its antebellum transformations. Together, these works reveal how Americans used inherited historical frameworks to confront the social. Political and economic challenges of its time
I. The Intellectual Inheritance: Whig History and the Foundations of American Democracy
Colbourn’s central argument—that eighteenth‑century Americans were steeped in a Whig historical worldview—provides essential context for Howe’s story. Colonists believed history to be “the great Mistress of Prudence, and civil Knowledge” and saw political life as a continual struggle between liberty and arbitrary power. Their libraries overflowed with Tacitus, Coke, Rapin, Sidney, and the “Real Whigs,” whose writings taught that English liberty was ancient, constitutional, and perpetually under threat.
This historical consciousness shaped the first stage of American democratic thought:
• Democracy was understood as the preservation of inherited rights, not the creation of new ones.
• Political legitimacy rested on historical precedent, especially the rights of Englishmen.
• Suspicion of concentrated power—executive, ecclesiastical, or financial—was a defining feature of political reasoning.
Colbourn shows that the American Revolution was not merely a political rupture but a radical change in principles and sentiments, effected before bloodshed. Howe’s narrative picks up where Colbourn leaves off: after independence, Americans continued to interpret political crises through these inherited frameworks.
II. Howe’s Era: The Communications Revolution and the Democratization of Opinion
Howe argues that the most transformative development of 1815–1848 was the communications revolution—cheap printing, mass newspapers, expanded postal networks, and ultimately the telegraph. This revolution democratized political participation by making information widely accessible.
Here, Howe’s analysis intersects directly with Colbourn’s:
• Colbourn describes a world where “virtuous and enlightened citizens” guided public opinion because literacy and access to books were limited.
• Howe describes a world where mass literacy and mass media created a new kind of democratic politics—one driven by newspapers, party networks, and national debates.
In short, American democracy shifted from elite persuasion to mass mobilization.
The Associated Press, founded during the Mexican War, exemplifies Howe’s claim that political life had become nationalized and mediated. The “radical change in principles” that Adams described in the 1760s now occurred through newspapers, pamphlets, and telegraph lines rather than through colonial libraries and town meetings.
III. Competing Democratic Visions: Jacksonian Populism vs. Whig Constitutionalism
Colbourn’s work helps explain the ideological fault lines Howe identifies in the early nineteenth century. The Whig historical tradition—rooted in suspicion of executive power and reverence for constitutionalism—reappears in Howe’s portrayal of the Whig Party, which championed:
• internal improvements,
• economic modernization,
• institutional checks on executive authority,
• and a moral critique of slavery.
Jacksonian Democrats, by contrast, claimed to speak for “the people” but often acted in ways that contradicted the older Whig understanding of liberty. Howe argues that Jacksonian politics entrenched racial hierarchy, weakened institutional safeguards, and embraced a populist hostility to governance.
Colbourn’s insight that Americans saw themselves as “inheritors of the privileges of Englishmen” helps explain why Jacksonian attacks on the Bank, the Supreme Court, and federal authority provoked such alarm among Whigs. To Whig thinkers, Jacksonianism resembled the arbitrary power against which their intellectual ancestors had struggled.
Thus, American democratic thought bifurcated:
• Whig democracy emphasized constitutionalism, institutional balance, and moral reform.
• Jacksonian democracy emphasized popular sovereignty, racial exclusion, and executive activism.
IV. Economic Modernization and the Democratic Imagination
Howe’s treatment of economic development—Hamilton’s Atlanticist vision versus Madison and Clay’s continentalist American System—reveals another dimension of democratic evolution. Colbourn shows that colonial Americans feared dependence on foreign power; Howe shows how this fear persisted in debates over tariffs, banking, and internal improvements.
The War of 1812 and the Panic of 1819 revived classic Whig concerns:
• foreign financial manipulation,
• corruption,
• and the fragility of republican virtue.
Democratic thought evolved as Americans confronted a modern market economy. Farmers embraced commercial opportunity, but they also demanded political structures that protected them from distant financial interests. This tension—between opportunity and vulnerability—became a defining feature of nineteenth‑century democratic politics.
V. Slavery, Sectionalism, and the Moral Crisis of Democracy
Colbourn demonstrates that Revolutionary leaders believed they were defending inherited liberties. Howe shows how this historical self‑understanding collided with the expanding slave system. The Richmond Junto, the Tallmadge Amendment debates, and John Quincy Adams’s prophetic warning that slavery would “cut the country in two” reveal how deeply the crisis of slavery was intertwined with democratic ideology.
American democratic thought evolved in contradictory ways:
• White male democracy expanded, especially in the Jacksonian era.
• Black Americans, Indigenous peoples, and women were excluded, often more aggressively than before.
• Moral reform movements—abolitionism, temperance, women’s rights—emerged from the same intellectual traditions Colbourn describes: liberty, virtue, and historical precedent.
Howe’s narrative shows that the unresolved contradictions of American democracy—liberty versus slavery, equality versus exclusion—were already visible decades before the Civil War.
VI. Conclusion: A Unified Intellectual Arc
Read together, The Lamp of Experience and What Hath God Wrought reveal a continuous intellectual arc:
1. Colonial Americans grounded their political identity in history, seeing themselves as heirs to ancient liberties.
2. The Revolution transformed these historical principles into democratic ideology.
3. The early republic expanded democratic participation through communication, markets, and political parties.
4. The antebellum era exposed the contradictions of democracy, especially around slavery and executive power.
Howe’s narrative shows how a nation steeped in historical consciousness confronted the challenges of modernity. Colbourn explains why Americans interpreted those challenges through the lens of liberty, corruption, and constitutionalism. Together, they illuminate the evolution of American democratic thought from inherited English rights to the contested, expansive, and morally fraught democracy of the nineteenth century.
Review: What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815–1848
With an Integrated Analysis of American Democratic Thought from Trevor Colbourn’s The Lamp of Experience
Daniel Walker Howe’s What Hath God Wrought is a masterful analysis of the United States between 1815 and 1848, an era defined by technological innovation, political realignment, and intensifying moral conflict. When read alongside Trevor Colbourn’s The Lamp of Experience, Howe’s narrative becomes part of a longer intellectual arc: the evolution of American democratic thought from its colonial origins to its antebellum transformations. Together, these works reveal how Americans used inherited historical frameworks to confront the social. Political and economic challenges of its time
I. The Intellectual Inheritance: Whig History and the Foundations of American Democracy
Colbourn’s central argument—that eighteenth‑century Americans were steeped in a Whig historical worldview—provides essential context for Howe’s story. Colonists believed history to be “the great Mistress of Prudence, and civil Knowledge” and saw political life as a continual struggle between liberty and arbitrary power. Their libraries overflowed with Tacitus, Coke, Rapin, Sidney, and the “Real Whigs,” whose writings taught that English liberty was ancient, constitutional, and perpetually under threat.
This historical consciousness shaped the first stage of American democratic thought:
• Democracy was understood as the preservation of inherited rights, not the creation of new ones.
• Political legitimacy rested on historical precedent, especially the rights of Englishmen.
• Suspicion of concentrated power—executive, ecclesiastical, or financial—was a defining feature of political reasoning.
Colbourn shows that the American Revolution was not merely a political rupture but a radical change in principles and sentiments, effected before bloodshed. Howe’s narrative picks up where Colbourn leaves off: after independence, Americans continued to interpret political crises through these inherited frameworks.
II. Howe’s Era: The Communications Revolution and the Democratization of Opinion
Howe argues that the most transformative development of 1815–1848 was the communications revolution—cheap printing, mass newspapers, expanded postal networks, and ultimately the telegraph. This revolution democratized political participation by making information widely accessible.
Here, Howe’s analysis intersects directly with Colbourn’s:
• Colbourn describes a world where “virtuous and enlightened citizens” guided public opinion because literacy and access to books were limited.
• Howe describes a world where mass literacy and mass media created a new kind of democratic politics—one driven by newspapers, party networks, and national debates.
In short, American democracy shifted from elite persuasion to mass mobilization.
The Associated Press, founded during the Mexican War, exemplifies Howe’s claim that political life had become nationalized and mediated. The “radical change in principles” that Adams described in the 1760s now occurred through newspapers, pamphlets, and telegraph lines rather than through colonial libraries and town meetings.
III. Competing Democratic Visions: Jacksonian Populism vs. Whig Constitutionalism
Colbourn’s work helps explain the ideological fault lines Howe identifies in the early nineteenth century. The Whig historical tradition—rooted in suspicion of executive power and reverence for constitutionalism—reappears in Howe’s portrayal of the Whig Party, which championed:
• internal improvements,
• economic modernization,
• institutional checks on executive authority,
• and a moral critique of slavery.
Jacksonian Democrats, by contrast, claimed to speak for “the people” but often acted in ways that contradicted the older Whig understanding of liberty. Howe argues that Jacksonian politics entrenched racial hierarchy, weakened institutional safeguards, and embraced a populist hostility to governance.
Colbourn’s insight that Americans saw themselves as “inheritors of the privileges of Englishmen” helps explain why Jacksonian attacks on the Bank, the Supreme Court, and federal authority provoked such alarm among Whigs. To Whig thinkers, Jacksonianism resembled the arbitrary power against which their intellectual ancestors had struggled.
Thus, American democratic thought bifurcated:
• Whig democracy emphasized constitutionalism, institutional balance, and moral reform.
• Jacksonian democracy emphasized popular sovereignty, racial exclusion, and executive activism.
IV. Economic Modernization and the Democratic Imagination
Howe’s treatment of economic development—Hamilton’s Atlanticist vision versus Madison and Clay’s continentalist American System—reveals another dimension of democratic evolution. Colbourn shows that colonial Americans feared dependence on foreign power; Howe shows how this fear persisted in debates over tariffs, banking, and internal improvements.
The War of 1812 and the Panic of 1819 revived classic Whig concerns:
• foreign financial manipulation,
• corruption,
• and the fragility of republican virtue.
Democratic thought evolved as Americans confronted a modern market economy. Farmers embraced commercial opportunity, but they also demanded political structures that protected them from distant financial interests. This tension—between opportunity and vulnerability—became a defining feature of nineteenth‑century democratic politics.
V. Slavery, Sectionalism, and the Moral Crisis of Democracy
Colbourn demonstrates that Revolutionary leaders believed they were defending inherited liberties. Howe shows how this historical self‑understanding collided with the expanding slave system. The Richmond Junto, the Tallmadge Amendment debates, and John Quincy Adams’s prophetic warning that slavery would “cut the country in two” reveal how deeply the crisis of slavery was intertwined with democratic ideology.
American democratic thought evolved in contradictory ways:
• White male democracy expanded, especially in the Jacksonian era.
• Black Americans, Indigenous peoples, and women were excluded, often more aggressively than before.
• Moral reform movements—abolitionism, temperance, women’s rights—emerged from the same intellectual traditions Colbourn describes: liberty, virtue, and historical precedent.
Howe’s narrative shows that the unresolved contradictions of American democracy—liberty versus slavery, equality versus exclusion—were already visible decades before the Civil War.
VI. Conclusion: A Unified Intellectual Arc
Read together, The Lamp of Experience and What Hath God Wrought reveal a continuous intellectual arc:
1. Colonial Americans grounded their political identity in history, seeing themselves as heirs to ancient liberties.
2. The Revolution transformed these historical principles into democratic ideology.
3. The early republic expanded democratic participation through communication, markets, and political parties.
4. The antebellum era exposed the contradictions of democracy, especially around slavery and executive power.
Howe’s narrative shows how a nation steeped in historical consciousness confronted the challenges of modernity. Colbourn explains why Americans interpreted those challenges through the lens of liberty, corruption, and constitutionalism. Together, they illuminate the evolution of American democratic thought from inherited English rights to the contested, expansive, and morally fraught democracy of the nineteenth century.
June 4, 2013
After a time, one begins to feel as if the founders read themselves into a peculiar echo chamber. Not only were they influenced by a century's worth of partisan bickering over English history, they found themselves recapitulating and refashioning old arguments for new contexts. Despite the valuable work it does in recovering much of what the founders read (and they seem to have read many of the same things and derived very similar lessons from their reading), Colbourn's text is now dated in a number of respects. Some of Colbourn's views, for example, of Jefferson's politics, have been largely repudiated by more recent scholarship. If there is a methodological defect in the work, it has to do with the reliance on a relatively small set of authors, their correspondence (mostly with each other) and their library catalogs. This dependence on published monographs tends to overlook the vast one-way correspondence of newsprint polemic, from England to America. One can find Boston and Philadelphia papers, for instance, regurgitating editorials and claims that are a decade old or more. That these views were disseminated widely among a less illustrious and educated readership perhaps suggests that the masses were to some extent ready and fertile ground for the ideas of the founders, developed through more sustained and systematic engagement with English thinking. To that extent, Colbourn's work is unable to tap a quieter but still recoverable stream of ideological formation for the early colonists. Nevertheless, this book is to go to source for who read what among the generation of the signers.
August 13, 2010
This 1965 monograph has only one argument - that American Revolutionary leaders based much of their ideology on their misconceptions about the Anglo-Saxons and their "ancient constitution" - but it develops that argument pretty well. Helps to explain where Cleon Skousen got some of his bizarre ideas.
July 16, 2024
Pleasant enough read on the early American tendency to believe whacky things about the past that would justify what they wanted to do politically.
Also, a rather amusing reminder of how different contemporary history is from that of Colbourn's generation. Despite the, ahem, interesting contradictions involved in all of the claims about how *all* Americans were free and had the rights of free-men and so on, you can guess what goes unmentioned.
Also, a rather amusing reminder of how different contemporary history is from that of Colbourn's generation. Despite the, ahem, interesting contradictions involved in all of the claims about how *all* Americans were free and had the rights of free-men and so on, you can guess what goes unmentioned.
July 2, 2014
One of the major theses of this book is that the Founding Fathers believed that an ideal form of government existed in England before the Norman Conquest of 1066. This Anglo-Saxon society was supposed to have consisted of an elected monarchy and parliament, had a constitution, elected judges, had trials by juries of peers, and was generally virtuous in all things.
The belief among 18th-century writers in this utopian time in history is correct. I’ve run into a number of references to it. It comes in turn from a description by the Roman historian Tacitus, and the admiration for Republican Rome by the Founding Fathers really can’t be overstated. I think it’s been relatively forgotten as part of the history of political thought for a couple of reasons. First, it later became part of racist arguments for Anglo-Saxon supremacy.
Secondly, it’s incorrect. To quote the author: “Saxon was certainly not the democratic one envisaged by Jefferson and the whigs. As a society, in fact, the Saxon was less agrarian than military, and the personal tie which bound peasant to lord involved the performance of a customary service nearly as rigid as that bought in by the Normans . . . the Saxon Councils were composed, not of all classes, but of the upper ranks of the aristocracy, along with ecclesiastics when the church became established.”
The last chapter is titled the “The Saxon Myth Dies Hard”. Indeed it does. Cleon Skousen, so admired in Utah and by Glenn Beck, believed it completely. (Even more strangely, he goes on to write that a similar democratic system existed in ancient Israel). (Pgs. 12-17).
Skousen, Cleon.. The 5000-Year Leap. National Center for Constitutional Studies. 1981, 2006 *
*It is the kind of stimulating book I should like to see being studied in all our high schools and universities - Utah Sen. Orrin Hatch.
The belief among 18th-century writers in this utopian time in history is correct. I’ve run into a number of references to it. It comes in turn from a description by the Roman historian Tacitus, and the admiration for Republican Rome by the Founding Fathers really can’t be overstated. I think it’s been relatively forgotten as part of the history of political thought for a couple of reasons. First, it later became part of racist arguments for Anglo-Saxon supremacy.
Secondly, it’s incorrect. To quote the author: “Saxon was certainly not the democratic one envisaged by Jefferson and the whigs. As a society, in fact, the Saxon was less agrarian than military, and the personal tie which bound peasant to lord involved the performance of a customary service nearly as rigid as that bought in by the Normans . . . the Saxon Councils were composed, not of all classes, but of the upper ranks of the aristocracy, along with ecclesiastics when the church became established.”
The last chapter is titled the “The Saxon Myth Dies Hard”. Indeed it does. Cleon Skousen, so admired in Utah and by Glenn Beck, believed it completely. (Even more strangely, he goes on to write that a similar democratic system existed in ancient Israel). (Pgs. 12-17).
Skousen, Cleon.. The 5000-Year Leap. National Center for Constitutional Studies. 1981, 2006 *
*It is the kind of stimulating book I should like to see being studied in all our high schools and universities - Utah Sen. Orrin Hatch.
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews