The Enlightenment and the Americas: Revolution, Republic, and the New World

The American encounter with the Enlightenment is one of the most consequential stories in the history of the modern world, and one of the most consistently misread. The conventional account is that the thinkers and political leaders of the Americas — North, Central, South, and Caribbean — drew on European ideas to imagine new forms of government, to declare independence from European empires, and to construct republican institutions in a hemisphere that had been colonized for three centuries. The conventional account is true, in outline. The conventional account also stops, almost always, before it gets to the hard parts. The American Enlightenment, on closer inspection, is the case in which the gap between the universalist theory and the actual practice is most visible, and most damaging.

This article explores the complex relationship between the Enlightenment and the Americas. It examines the American Revolution, the framing of the United States Constitution, the Haitian Revolution, the independence movements of Latin America, and the long legacy of Enlightenment ideas in the political and intellectual life of the New World.

The Colonial Background

The European colonization of the Americas began in the late fifteenth century and continued through the eighteenth. By the eighteenth century, the major European powers — Spain, Portugal, France, Britain, and the Netherlands — had established colonial empires in the Western Hemisphere, each with its own distinctive political and cultural character. The British North American colonies were unusual among colonial settlements: they had a comparatively high degree of self-government, a relatively open press, and a comparatively well-developed tradition of political debate. The Spanish and Portuguese colonies, by contrast, were governed by a much more elaborate apparatus of imperial control, and the peninsulares — the Spaniards and Portuguese born in Europe — were a clearly distinct caste from the criollos (people of European descent born in the Americas) and the mestizos, indios, and negros who made up the bulk of the population. The racial hierarchy was, in fact, the basic structure of the colonial system, and any serious account of the Enlightenment in the Americas has to begin with it.

The Enlightenment reached the Americas through several channels. Books, periodicals, and pamphlets circulated in the colonial ports and cities. The great European thinkers — Locke, Montesquieu, Voltaire, Rousseau, Hume — were read and discussed in the colonial coffeehouses and drawing rooms. Educated Americans traveled to Europe for their education, returning home with a thorough grounding in the new philosophy. The transatlantic correspondence network that connected Americans with their European counterparts carried ideas as well as goods. Worth pausing on: the circulation was not just from Europe to America. Creole intellectuals, especially in the Spanish American case, sent their own works back to the peninsula, and the long eighteenth century saw the development of a genuinely transatlantic conversation in which Americans were not merely passive recipients of European ideas.

By the middle of the eighteenth century, the intellectual culture of the American colonies had been deeply transformed by the Enlightenment. The colonial colleges — Harvard (1636), Yale (1701), Princeton (1746), Columbia (1754, as King’s College), the College of William and Mary (1693), and the College of Philadelphia (later the University of Pennsylvania, 1740) — taught the new philosophy alongside the old. The colonial press published not only sermons and political tracts but also scientific articles, literary essays, and translations of the European philosophes. Franklin’s Poor Richard’s Almanack sold more copies, in the 1750s, than any other book in British North America. The newspaper culture of the colonial cities was, by the standards of the eighteenth century, astonishingly vibrant.

The American Revolution

The American Revolution of 1775–1783 was the first great political event of the Enlightenment. It was a revolution fought in the name of universal rights, and it produced a series of founding documents that have shaped political thought ever since. It was also, and this is rarely said, a revolution whose principal leaders were quite clear that the universal rights in whose name they were fighting were not, in fact, for everyone. The original constitutional order of the United States, in operation from 1789 to 1865, was a slaveholders’ republic, in which the people who did the actual work of the new nation — the enslaved African Americans, the free Black northerners, the indigenous peoples, the women of all races — were excluded from the formal political life of the country in ways that the Declaration of Independence had, in principle, ruled out.

The Crisis of the British Empire

The immediate cause of the American Revolution was the crisis of the British Empire. The Seven Years’ War (1756–1763), known in America as the French and Indian War, had left Britain with a vast new empire in North America but also with a massive national debt. To pay for the cost of imperial defense, the British government imposed a series of taxes and regulations on the American colonies — the Sugar Act of 1764, the Stamp Act of 1765, the Townshend Acts of 1767 — that the colonists had not previously been required to pay.

The colonial response drew heavily on Enlightenment political philosophy. The colonists argued, in language drawn from Locke and the British constitutional tradition, that the new taxes violated their rights as Englishmen. The slogan “no taxation without representation” became a rallying cry of the resistance. The argument was genuinely Lockean; the problem was that the colonists extended it only to themselves. The principle of no taxation without representation was, in fact, a principle of considerable force, but its force was diminished by the fact that the colonists who used it most loudly refused to extend it to the Africans and Indians within their own borders.

The Declaration of Independence

The Declaration of Independence, adopted on July 4, 1776, was the founding document of the new American nation. Drafted primarily by Thomas Jefferson (with edits by Franklin and Adams, and a final committee of the Continental Congress), the Declaration was a model of Enlightenment political rhetoric. Its famous preamble — “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness” — drew directly on the natural-rights tradition of the Enlightenment, and its claim that “all men are created equal” was a radical appeal to universal principles that transcended the particular circumstances of the American colonies. For a detailed account, see The American Revolution.

The famous preamble is, in its literary quality, the equal of any political document in the modern period. It is also, in its practical effect, a manifesto written by a slaveholder. The fact that the document is what it is, and the fact that its principal author was what he was, are not contradictions to be resolved; they are facts to be held together. The Declaration of Independence is, perhaps, the central example of the Enlightenment’s claim to universalism and of the Enlightenment’s failure to live up to it. To read it well, in the twenty-first century, is to read it as both.

The War of Independence

The American War of Independence was a long, difficult, and uncertain struggle, decided ultimately by the French alliance of 1778 and the brilliant military leadership of George Washington. The war produced a new generation of American political leaders who would go on to shape the early republic. For a detailed account, see The American Revolution.

Worth noting: the French alliance was, in its origins, a transaction. The French government, facing a fiscal crisis of its own, hoped that an American victory would weaken Britain and open Atlantic commerce to French shipping. The French decision to back the Americans was also, however, a result of genuine ideological sympathy; many of the French officers who served with the American army — Lafayette is the obvious case, but he is not alone — were committed to the Enlightenment principles for which the Americans claimed to be fighting. The political history of the American Revolution is, for this reason, simultaneously a French history and an American one.

The Federal Constitution

The Constitution of the United States, drafted at the Philadelphia Convention of 1787 and ratified in 1788, was a masterpiece of Enlightenment political engineering. The framers drew on Montesquieu and Locke, established a system of three branches with checks and balances, and added a Bill of Rights in 1791. Madison’s contributions in the Federalist Papers, especially his argument that the new system would control the “violence of faction,” became foundational texts of modern constitutional thought.

The Constitution is also a document with a number of internal compromises that the framers were well aware they had to make. The three-fifths clause, which counted enslaved persons as three-fifths of a person for purposes of congressional representation, was the most notorious. The clause was, in fact, not a compromise between slavery and anti-slavery; it was a compromise between the slaveholders, who wanted enslaved persons counted fully for representation but not for taxation, and the non-slaveholders, who wanted them counted fully for taxation but not for representation. The actual text was, in the technical sense, an arithmetic mean of the two positions; the moral reality was that the new republic had built its constitutional order on a foundation of human bondage, and that the foundation would eventually have to give way.

The Haitian Revolution

The Haitian Revolution of 1791–1804 was one of the most radical and consequential political events of the Enlightenment age. It was a revolution led by enslaved people against one of the most brutal slave systems in the Western Hemisphere, and it produced the first independent state in the Caribbean and the second independent state in the Americas. Saint-Domingue, on the western third of the island of Hispaniola, was the richest colony in the French Empire, and its social structure was rigidly hierarchical, with wealthy white grands blancs at the top and enslaved Africans, who made up the great majority of the population, at the bottom. The French Revolution of 1789, with its universal language of rights, sent shock waves through the colony, and the conflict that followed — between white planters, free people of color, and the enslaved population led by Toussaint Louverture, Jean-Jacques Dessalines, and Henri Christophe — produced the first state in the Americas to be founded by formerly enslaved people. The new nation took the indigenous Taíno name Haiti, and its independence was declared on January 1, 1804. For a detailed account, see The Haitian Revolution.

Toussaint Louverture, the dominant figure of the revolution until his capture by Napoleon’s forces in 1802, was a former slave who had read the Déclaration des droits de l’homme and the Code Noir, who had absorbed the political philosophy of the philosophe Raynal, and who fought, in the early years of the revolution, on behalf of the universalist principles of the French Republic. The fact that Toussaint could read Rousseau and that Rousseau had written about slavery is one of the most striking examples of the Enlightenment’s reach. The fact that the Déclaration of 1789 was, in the French colonies, an argument for extending rights to free people of color but not, in the first instance, to the enslaved, and the fact that Toussaint and the other leaders of the Haitian Revolution had to fight for the application of the Déclaration to themselves, is one of the most striking examples of the Enlightenment’s limits. The Haitian Revolution is, in this sense, the test case of the Enlightenment’s universalist claim — and the test case that the universalist claim failed, in the first instance, but was forced, by the resistance of the enslaved, to expand.

The Latin American Revolutions

The example of the American Revolution and the ideas of the Enlightenment also inspired the independence movements of Latin America in the early nineteenth century. By the 1820s, almost all of Spain’s and Portugal’s American colonies had gained their independence. The movements were, however, profoundly shaped by the social and racial structures of the colonies; the criollo leaders of independence, with a few partial exceptions, were not interested in overturning the racial hierarchies of colonial society, and the new states they built often preserved, in different forms, the colonial structures of land tenure and labor.

The Spanish American Independence Movements

The Spanish American independence movements were led by a criollo elite — people of Spanish or mixed descent born in the Americas — who had been educated in the Enlightenment tradition and who resented the political and economic dominance of the Spanish peninsulars (Spaniards born in Spain).

The most important leaders of the Spanish American independence movements were:

Simón Bolívar (1783–1830), the “Liberator,” who led the independence movements of what are now Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia. Bolívar was deeply read in Enlightenment political philosophy, and his famous Carta de Jamaica (1815) and his Angostura Address (1819) laid out a program for the new nations that combined republican principles with a realistic awareness of the difficulties of political life in the former colonies. The Angostura Address is one of the underappreciated documents of the period: Bolívar there argued for a hereditary senate, a strong executive, and a careful balance between the claims of central authority and the centrifugal forces of regional power. He was, in his mature thought, more skeptical of pure democracy than the standard narrative suggests.

José de San Martín (1778–1850), the Argentine general who led the independence movements of Argentina, Chile, and Peru. San Martín was a more conservative figure than Bolívar, and he eventually withdrew from political life, leaving the future of the new states to others. The contrast between the two is the central political fact of early nineteenth-century Spanish America.

Miguel Hidalgo (1753–1811) and José María Morelos (1765–1815), the leaders of the Mexican independence movement, who were both Catholic priests and who combined Enlightenment ideas with the social program of the Mexican Revolution. Hidalgo’s Grito de Dolores (September 16, 1810) is the founding moment of Mexican independence, and the social program of the Grito — which included the abolition of slavery and the return of land to indigenous communities — was, in many respects, more radical than what Bolívar was proposing in the south.

The independence movements of Latin America faced enormous difficulties. The new states were vast, sparsely populated, and divided by regional, ethnic, and class differences. The example of the United States, which had successfully established a constitutional republic, was powerful, but the conditions of Latin America were very different from those of the northern republic. The new states experimented with constitutionalism, federalism, and dictatorship, and most of them endured long periods of political instability. The “caudillo” — the strong-man, often a former military officer — became a recurring figure in nineteenth-century Latin American politics, and the gap between the constitutional theory and the actual practice was, in most of the new states, a wide one.

Brazil and Portuguese America

The Portuguese colony of Brazil followed a different path. The Portuguese royal family, fleeing from Napoleon’s invasion of Portugal, established the court in Rio de Janeiro in 1808. The heir to the Portuguese throne, Dom Pedro I, declared Brazilian independence in 1822, and the new empire of Brazil was established as a constitutional monarchy.

Brazilian independence was thus a relatively peaceful affair, and the new empire preserved many features of the old colonial order. Slavery was not abolished in Brazil until 1888, and the country’s political life continued to be dominated by a plantation elite. The transition to a republic in 1889 was led by military officers who had been influenced by the positivist philosophy of Auguste Comte, and the new republic was anything but liberal in its early decades. The Brazilian case is, in many respects, a study in the limits of Enlightenment influence; the political vocabulary was imported, but the political reality followed its own logic.

The Intellectual Culture of Enlightenment America

The American Enlightenment was not only a political movement but also an intellectual and cultural one. The new American republics were the site of a vigorous intellectual life, drawing on both the European Enlightenment and the new experience of American political life.

The New Republic of Letters

The American republics were deeply engaged with the European intellectual world. The great American political leaders — Franklin, Jefferson, Adams, Madison — were not only statesmen but also serious intellectuals. Franklin was a member of the Royal Society and a correspondent of the leading European scientists. Jefferson was a fluent reader of French, Italian, and Spanish, and he corresponded with many of the leading European thinkers; his library of 6,000 books, sold to the Library of Congress in 1815, is still one of the great collections of Enlightenment literature.

The new American intellectual institutions — the American Philosophical Society (founded by Franklin in 1743), the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1780), the Smithsonian Institution (1846) — were modeled on the European learned societies. The American colleges and universities taught the new natural philosophy, the new political economy, and the new political theory.

The Literature of Revolution

The American revolutions also produced a remarkable body of political literature. The Federalist Papers, the writings of the Anti-Federalists, the speeches and letters of the founding fathers, and the political pamphlets of the revolutionary period formed a body of political writing that has been studied and debated ever since.

In Latin America, the political literature of the independence movements was equally rich. The writings of Bolívar, San Martín, Hidalgo, and the other leaders of independence have been central texts of Latin American political thought. The great Argentine writer Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, the Chilean philosopher Andrés Bello, and the Cuban thinker José Martí all drew on the Enlightenment tradition in their attempts to understand the political life of the new nations. Sarmiento’s Facundo (1845), with its diagnosis of “civilization and barbarism,” is one of the founding documents of Latin American political thought; Martí’s essays on Cuban independence are another; Bello’s legal and philological work is a third. The literature is, in fact, more interesting than the politics it was nominally supporting.

The Limits of Enlightenment Universalism

The American Enlightenment, like the European, was marked by profound contradictions. The American revolutionaries proclaimed the equality of all men while enslaving and dispossessing millions. The Latin American liberators proclaimed the rights of the people while governing in highly authoritarian ways. The Haitian Revolution demonstrated that the language of universal rights could be used by the most oppressed, but the international response to Haiti — the United States did not recognize Haitian independence until 1862, and the French government extracted an indemnity of 90 million francs from Haiti in 1825, an indemnity that was not fully paid off until 1947 — showed that the practical commitments of the Enlightenment had significant limits.

These contradictions have been the subject of intense debate in modern scholarship. The defenders of the Enlightenment have pointed out that the abstract principles, even when violated in practice, eventually provided the basis for the abolition of slavery, the extension of the franchise, and the recognition of the rights of previously excluded groups. The critics have pointed out that the abstract principles, even when sincerely invoked, often served as a cover for the interests of the dominant groups. The honest reading is that both are right, and that the history of the period is the joint history of the principles and the violations.

The Legacy of the American Enlightenment

The legacy of the American Enlightenment is the political and intellectual life of the modern Americas. The United States Constitution, the Bill of Rights, the Declaration of Independence, and the political institutions that developed out of them have shaped not only the United States but also the political aspirations of people throughout the world.

The Latin American independence movements produced a continent of independent states, even if the political life of these states has often fallen short of the Enlightenment ideals. The Haitian Revolution demonstrated that the language of universal rights could be used by the most oppressed, and it provided an inspiration for the abolitionist movements of the nineteenth century and the civil rights movements of the twentieth.

The contemporary Americas are still working out the implications of the Enlightenment. The inequalities of wealth and power, the tensions between universal rights and particular identities, the conflicts between democratic aspirations and authoritarian realities — all of these issues are descendants of the questions that the Enlightenment raised and that the American revolutions tried to answer. The fact that the answers have not been settled, and that the same questions are being asked again in the twenty-first century, is the sign of a tradition that is still alive.

The encounter between the Enlightenment and the Americas is thus not a closed chapter of history. It is an ongoing project, still being worked out in the political institutions, the intellectual traditions, and the political struggles of the modern Western Hemisphere.