Revolutionary change happens in public opinion before it happens on battlefields

Evidence

Warfare represented only one aspect of the American Revolution, and hardly the most important one. “What do We mean by the Revolution?” John Adams later asked Jefferson. “The War? That was no part of the Revolution. It was only an Effect and Consequence of it. The Revolution was in the Minds of the People.” Adams found evidence of this revolution in “the Records of thirteen Legislatures, the Pamphlets, [and] Newspapers in all the Colonies … by which the public opinion was enlightened and informed concerning the Authority of Parliament over the Colonies.” While Adams saw this revolution in popular opinion beginning before 1776, it surely culminated in 1776 with new state constitutions, pamphlets by Paine and others, and a flow of newspaper articles, including those reprinting Jefferson’s words from the Declaration of Independence. Through arguments advanced in these documents over the course of 1776, a fight for rights and reconciliation became an American war for liberty and independence. — Edward J. Larson, Declaring Independence, 353

Categorization

• XREF: Adams’s ‘revolution in the minds of the people’ echoes how the book has stressed public-opinion enlightenment via state constitutions and pamphlets. — connects to: Ideas and bloodshed together, not either alone, moved colonists to revolution; WWI imperial powers treated global public opinion as strategically important as the battlefield — James Renton, Ben Gidley (eds.), Antisemitism and Islamophobia in…, 662; Legislative change follows shifts in public opinion by decades, so opinion must come first — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1646
• SEED: Angle for an article: how the legal-conceptual shift from ‘a fight for rights and reconciliation’ to ‘a war for liberty and independence’ tracks a change in public legal consciousness via documentary persuasion.

Broader Connections

• Legislative change follows shifts in public opinion by decades, so opinion must come first #corroborates (0.82) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1646
• WWI imperial powers treated global public opinion as strategically important as the battlefield #corroborates (0.78) — James Renton, Ben Gidley (eds.), Antisemitism and Islamophobia in Europe, 662