Book Review

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Book Review | The Journal of American History, 86.4 | The History Cooperative

The American Counterrevolution: A Retreat from Liberty, 1783-1800. By Larry E. Tise. (Mechanicsburg: Stackpole, 1998. l, 634 pp. $49.95, isbn 0-8117-0100-X.)

This long and lucidly written book offers a very startling interpretation of the early republic from 1783 to 1800. According to Larry E. Tise, the American Revolution set out to establish the world's first land of liberty in which people, including slaves, would be free and everyone, including women, would be made equal. "And yet," says Tise, "by 1800, less than a quarter century from the time Americans declared these exalted ideals to the world, they had almost to a person rejected the very principles and ideals of their Revolution." 1

Words that were once radical in meaning quickly became conservative. "Freedom, once the absence of restraint, came to mean choice among defined options." Equality changed from a condition of nature to stand simply for equal opportunity. The rights of man established by nature became the rights of man established by men. "Democracy came to connote a right to vote, not a fair division of property or equality of rights and treatment." So subtle were these shifts in meanings in the twenty-five years following the Declaration of Independence, says Tise, "that almost no one at the time recognized or understood what had taken place." All that Americans knew, if they were among the original "friends of liberty," was that they and their ideas were no longer welcome in American society. . . .

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