We always say that the 1776 revolution was led by the bourgeoisie, but most of its leaders came from the American Aristocratic planter class, not the merchant class. After all, we had to have a second revolution in 1864 to completely destroy the feudal class in America. So was the 1776 really a bourgeois revolution? How similiar in content was it to the French Revolution??

and a third was attempted but failed. (civil war was really a revolutionary war.)

Check out Race and Radicalism in the Union Army by Mark lause. Mark is an ex-SWP US member. I've been told it's a really good book, but I'm waiting for the paperback.
Peter Camejo also wrote a good book on the Reconstruction era -- I think it's out of print. Certainly, the Civil War /became/ a revolutionary war -- in part because of the policy of recruiting Black troops and Sherman's march to the sea. What Sherman did was necessary for the victory of the union and defeat of the planter class. Try arguing that in a high school history class in 1975 in the South. I found out it wasn't a popular idea. :-)

Thanks very much, but I'm afraid my question hasn't been answered. Yes, of course the Civil War became a revolutionary war, but I'm focusing more on 1776. So many people call it a bourgeois revolution because it happened at the beginning of the bourgeois revolutionary epoch, and sure the American bourgeoisie played a huge role in the revolution, but people like Thomas Jefferson and George Washington were of the Planter Aristocracy, ie a feudal class. This in many ways goes back to my point that the basic framework of the US Constitution is not incompatible with a proletarian revolution because I question just how "bourgeois" it was to start out with before 1864. To me it seems like it started out as feudal-democratic, then bourgeois democratic after 1864, and why cant we have a proletarian democratic revolution and government of the same magnitude of 1776 and 1864 and still preserve the purely democratic fundamentals of the constitution and allow the State to naturally wither away after we have had a complete and permanent revolution?

OK, I guess what we are getting at is the 1776 revolution was incomplete/partial. It wasn't a bourgeois revolution in the sense that the industrail bourgeoisie took power. It laid the basis for the creation of the industrial bourgeoisie and the industrial proletariat. The democratic tasks of the bourgeois revolution in the uS were not complete.

Check out A People's History of the Revolutionary War (not by Zinn, but he put the series together--I recommend all of the books in the series). The revolution began as a people's war. In order to redirect the people's instincts away from a social revolution and forestall the leveling of property, the merchants, and later the planters, took charge of the struggle.

BTW, the planters were not a feudal class, but were slave owners. That class predates feudalism and dates back to antiquity. They owned the slaves and the land. Feudal landholders only own the land. The serfs are tied to the land, but they are not the property of the landowners.

yeah, try arguing that in a history class today. i found out it still isn't a popular idea.

America was never France and the owning classes were never "bourgeois." They never had to struggle against a Nobility above them so in a sense they were defending the position to which they were accustomed against what they saw as "innovations."
The Northern and Southern provinces were at least as different from each other as from France, so generalizations about the two often fall flat. What the leadership of both North and South shared with the French Revolutionary leaders - and with Marx, Lassalle, Lenin and other Revolutionaries- was the practice of law and/or legal studies.

That has very interesting implications for the study of class struggle in american history. The occurence of the 1776 revolution at the begining of the bourgeois epoch, its nominal banner of enlightenment ideals, its direction against royalty, and the intended goal of establishing a "republic" all seen to indicate it to bee a bourgeois revolution. However, in the philosophic manuscripts of 1848 Marx said that we can no more view an epoch based on the way that the people of that time viewed themselves than we can correctly view a person the way they view themselves. So even though the leaders of the american revolution identified themselves with the general trend of bourgeois revolution (though they would not have used that specific term) and purported those ideals: checks and balances, separation of church and state, free press, ect. they were not in fact, a society with the bourgeois/feudal mode of production. The America of 1776 was a slave society and THAT was the economic base of the superstructure and mode of production- not a fuedal type base of superstructure and mode of production. After this event, we see the branching off of America into two distinct economic directions: the slave based south and industrial north. The bourgeois revolution in the north was in my opinion, a gradual cultural transformation: the rise of abolitionism, influx of immigrants and increased diversity, gradual elimination of slavery in northern states, and industrialization. The driving force behind this was industrialization- it is the change in the mode of production which is the genesis of the change from one epoch to another (i.e. from feudal to bourgeois). The rural south needed slavery for its survival and an entirely independent southern superstructure and identity developed around it: the ideal of states rights being a euphemism for pro-slavery legislation. Because of the persistance of a backwards economic base, the southern superstructure was dominated by the reactionary forces of state racism, patriarchy, and organized religeon. The civil war was a bourgeois revolution in character but for the situation in the south was really the transformation of a slave based society into a feudal society. I call the post-civil war south feudal and not bourgeois because sharecroppers and wealthy white families were still able to exploit the masses in a manner similar to feudal society.The civil war began the process of moving the south from the slave epoch into the bourgeois epoch but only immediately served to update to transfer the economic base to the feudal mode. Progressive elements from the inustrial north (Radical Democrats, Abolitionists) worked to enact policies and programs characteristic of a bourgeois revolution during the Reconstruction era because that was the ideological impetus instilled in them by the material conditions in which they were raised. But historically, the full transition of a slave society directly into a bourgeois society failed and Reconstruction retreated into moderatism, eventually ending alltogether and succumbing to the Jim Crow laws: the same old bigotry with a different face. For years after the civil war, the south largely still had a "feudal feel" to it, and only around the 20th century finally evolved into a bourgeois society. This is because while certain segments of the white southern population were effectively members of the bourgeois class by this time, blacks were still subjected to the outrageous conditions of discrimination, forced ingorance and economic bullying. Perhaps the civil rights movement could be regarded as the revolution which transformed the south from a feudal intoa bourgeois society- with the historical equivalent of serfdom (Blacks) emancipating themselves from the feudalistic pseudo-aristocracy (white political power structure). With this new time frame the movements of the 60's, the New Left, Wheather Underground, Black Panthers, and Punk Rock all occured rapidly after the birth of the full bourgeois era.

That has very interesting implications for the study of class struggle in american history. The occurence of the 1776 revolution at the begining of the bourgeois epoch, its nominal banner of enlightenment ideals, its direction against royalty, and the intended goal of establishing a "republic" all seen to indicate it to bee a bourgeois revolution. However, in the philosophic manuscripts of 1848 Marx said that we can no more view an epoch based on the way that the people of that time viewed themselves than we can correctly view a person the way they view themselves. So even though the leaders of the american revolution identified themselves with the general trend of bourgeois revolution (though they would not have used that specific term) and purported those ideals: checks and balances, separation of church and state, free press, ect. they were not in fact, a society with the bourgeois/feudal mode of production. The America of 1776 was a slave society and THAT was the economic base of the superstructure and mode of production- not a fuedal type base of superstructure and mode of production. After this event, we see the branching off of America into two distinct economic directions: the slave based south and industrial north. The bourgeois revolution in the north was in my opinion, a gradual cultural transformation: the rise of abolitionism, influx of immigrants and increased diversity, gradual elimination of slavery in northern states, and industrialization. The driving force behind this was industrialization- it is the change in the mode of production which is the genesis of the change from one epoch to another (i.e. from feudal to bourgeois). The rural south needed slavery for its survival and an entirely independent southern superstructure and identity developed around it: the ideal of states rights being a euphemism for pro-slavery legislation. Because of the persistance of a backwards economic base, the southern superstructure was dominated by the reactionary forces of state racism, patriarchy, and organized religeon. The civil war was a bourgeois revolution in character but for the situation in the south was really the transformation of a slave based society into a feudal society. I call the post-civil war south feudal and not bourgeois because sharecroppers and wealthy white families were still able to exploit the masses in a manner similar to feudal society.The civil war began the process of moving the south from the slave epoch into the bourgeois epoch but only immediately served to update to transfer the economic base to the feudal mode. Progressive elements from the inustrial north (Radical Democrats, Abolitionists) worked to enact policies and programs characteristic of a bourgeois revolution during the Reconstruction era because that was the ideological impetus instilled in them by the material conditions in which they were raised. But historically, the full transition of a slave society directly into a bourgeois society failed and Reconstruction retreated into moderatism, eventually ending alltogether and succumbing to the Jim Crow laws: the same old bigotry with a different face. For years after the civil war, the south largely still had a "feudal feel" to it, and only around the 20th century finally evolved into a bourgeois society. This is because while certain segments of the white southern population were effectively members of the bourgeois class by this time, blacks were still subjected to the outrageous conditions of discrimination, forced ingorance and economic bullying. Perhaps the civil rights movement could be regarded as the revolution which transformed the south from a feudal intoa bourgeois society- with the historical equivalent of serfdom (Blacks) emancipating themselves from the feudalistic pseudo-aristocracy (white political power structure). With this new time frame the movements of the 60's, the New Left, Wheather Underground, Black Panthers, and Punk Rock all occured rapidly after the birth of the full bourgeois era.

No, the 1776 war was for independence. It was not necessarily a revolution in the Marxist sense. It wasn't really a changing of the mode of production. It was more of a national independence war against the British empire. There was a sort of political revolution in that Enlightenment bourgeois-democratic ideals were made popular parts of public discourse. See, the "founding fathers" were a coalition of Northern bourgeoisie and intellectuals, and the Southern slave holding aristocracy. And of course there was a military elite alongside them. The Civil War was more of a fully industrial bourgeois revolution getting rid of slavery rather than feudalism. I would argue that feudalism existed in the South in the form of the sharecropping system throughout the end of 19th century and the early 20th century. The Southern landowners had more in common with feudal lords at that time and the black sharecroppers and white yeomen farmers were more like serfs or peasants. They were not workers but they were no longer slaves either. The Reconstruction process was a radical bourgeois revolution of sorts to impose industrial capitalism upon the South. It failed, though, because of the corrupt nature of the bourgeoisie culminating in the Hayes-Tilden election of 1876.

Anyways, to answer your question, the 1776 war was a war for national independence, led by a coalition of bourgeoisie, slave-holders, bourgeois-democratic intellectuals, and a military elite based on all of those groupings.

As far as the French revolution, that was a revolution against an old, feudal monarchy to establish a bourgeois-democratic republic. It was quite different from the American one. The Americans were fighting against an imperial monarchy for independence. While the French were fighting against the ruling monarchy within their own nation. They weren't fighting for independence like the Americans. They were two different situations but they were both heavily influenced by the Enlightenment-era bourgeois-democratic philosophers and political economists.