Well the thing is, the American government didn't really change that much directly after the US revolution. The Articles government was very much a continuation of the Continental Congress that had governed the colonies during the war. Furthermore, many of the men leading the Articles government (and later the early Constitutional government) were the same men who had been in control of the colonial governments before the war.

And those colonial governments had been rather autonomous. It's pretty hard for a king or parliament to micromanage a colony when its on the other side of an ocean that takes months to cross. The colonies had been fairly self governing for a while, including their own representative bodies. The colonists started getting angry when the empire started trying to impose more central control through taxation and trade controls. In many ways, the colonists already had their own independent society.

So you can see that the American Revolution didn't totally upend American society the way the French Revolution tried to do. It wasn't nearly as radical. In France they were lopping off the heads of nobles, while in the US the wealthy elites were the ones making the new rules. That's why they were so big on property rights and fearful of democracy. As far as revolutions go, the American Revolution was very conservative.

Finally, the colonial masses were not rebelling against their native government as the French proletariat was. It was the local governments rebelling against a far away imperial government. So instead of the socioeconomic situation deteriorating until the country exploded in violent, emotional, uncontrollable mass rebellion, there was an educated political class leading the colonies through a more procedural independence.

Really, calling both what happened in the US between 1775-1783 and what happened in France a few years later 'revolutions' is misleading. They were different types of events in very different circumstances. The American colonists weren't overthrowing the government of Britain, they were seceding from it.

Now the modern US government has changed a lot since the revolution. But that happened over the course of decades, and it did certainly come at its own deep cost. The American Civil War should be seen as the final conclusion of the revolution as it's when we truly defined the national project that the founders had begun. Their intelligence and willingness to make this country work is what held the union together as long as it did, but they were only able to do so because they were leading a society that was already stable and fairly prosperous.

Edit: I failed to mention one thing that I can't believe I forgot. The frontier. Throughout early US history, if you had a problem with the way the society around you worked or your place in it, you could just move out west and start a life for yourself.

A lot of violent revolutions start due to wealth disparity. The proletariat feel like they have no options and no control over their lives because of a system set up by elites to use and abuse the common man. The situation builds up like a pressure cooker until an event happens that pushes the people past their breaking point (such as a famine or the murder of a popular idol). Then the whole thing just explodes violently and uncontrollably.

Now, there were and are definitely powerful wealthy families in the US. But the common people rarely got desperate enough to raise arms because they always had another option: move out to the frontier and make a self sufficient life with your own land without ever needing to engage with markets controlled by wealthy capitalists. You won't have the latest fashions or gadgets, and it'll be a tough, risky life, but you'll get to live on your own terms. You'll never be dictated to by any boss, or manager, or clock, or whistle, not by anyone other than mother nature. Early American society never had any of the type of widespread mass uprisings that lead to dictatorship because there was always a release valve.

Edit2: Thanks for the gold!

Well first of all we had a weak central government at first under the Articles of Confederation. Many of the individuals who were already in government in the colonies, continued after they became states creating a lot less insecurity about the power structure. Second, in order for the Constitution to be ratified a compromise was brokered that guaranteed the Bill of Rights passage to alleviate many fears of a corrupt government by guaranteeing certain protections that were important to the people at the time. Lastly, I would argue it was George Washington and the first few Presidents are mainly responsible. They set the precedent for maintaining power, by force if necessary when the government was attacked and yet still peacefully passing the office along to the next man when the time came. This is by no means a comprehensive list, but some of the general reasons why the United States fared differently than France or others.

The main reason the American revolution was not like other revolutions is that it was mostly about preserving the status quo rather than overthrowing everything about society. It might be better to call it a war of secession from the British Empire than a true revolution. The roots of the separation go back to the fact that over the previous 150 years the colonies had established forms of self government with little or no influence from Britain. In fact, until after the French and Indian War Parliament had almost nothing to do with the colonies. The view of many of the colonists was that they were subjects of the king, but not of Parliament. Parliament represented British subjects in Britain and the colonial legislatures represented British subjects in the American colonies. They saw their legislatures as having equal footing with the British parliament. When Parliament began to pass taxes for the colonists, the colonial legislatures saw this as a usurpation of power. A modern analogy would be if the New York legislature passed a law levying a tax on the people of California. The people of California would say that the New Yorkers have no rights to tax them, and they would be right. The American colonists protested these taxes, not because they were opposed to taxation in general, but because of which body was imposing the taxes. If Parliament had incorporated the colonists into the Parliamentary system, and allowed them to send representatives to Parliament, it is quite possible we would still be British subjects today. Once it was clear that Parliament was intent on changing the system that had been in place in the colonies for the past 150 years and asserting their power over the colonial representative bodies, the colonists turned to the king. When the king supported Parliament over the colonists the colonial leaders realized that if they wanted to preserve the liberties they had enjoyed for generations they would need to break ties with the British Empire. While they rejected the king and the authority of Britain, however, this was not a complete rejection of all political ideas, customs, and traditions that had come from Britain. Indeed, many of the early leaders of the United States saw the British king and Parliament as having departed from the spirit of the Magna Carta and the English Bill of Rights, and were in many ways more conservative than the British in terms of keeping things the same. In this sense, the American Revolution was an anti-revolutionary movement. The Declaration of Independence makes it plain in its list of grievances that the king and Parliament were ignoring English law, and listed numerous illegal acts done by the king and Parliament. Indeed there were some in Parliament that agreed with their assessment, among them noted statesman Edmund Burke, who rightly argued in 1774 that Parliament had no power of taxation in the colonies and that if revenue was needed from the colonies by the crown that they should tax themselves (speech "On American Taxation"). Burke said further that Americans "...are not only devoted to liberty, but to liberty according to English ideas, and on English principles. Abstract liberty, like other mere abstractions, is not to be found. Liberty inheres in some sensible object; and every nation has formed to itself some favourite point, which by way of eminence becomes the criterion of their happiness."

Edmund Burke, Speech on Conciliation, in The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, 9 vols. (London: Henry G. Bohn, 1854–62)

The French, on the other hand, did not have the luxury of self-government or a history of good government. The whole system was corrupt and the only way to change it was to tear it apart. Since they were trying to change a system, rather than preserve it as was the case with the American leaders, the situation was more chaotic. There was simply no comparison with the preservation of a system that had been slowly built over 150 years in America, and trying to simultaneously tear down a corrupt system and replace it with a better one overnight, especially since everyone had different ideas of what the replacement system should be. Most other countries who have had revolutions have faced similar challenges.

Edmund Burke, whom I mentioned earlier, approved of the French gaining liberty from a tyrannical king, but he eventually condemned the French Revolution for its descent into mob rule, anarchy, and violence. He said in a letter to a member of the National Assembly:

"Men are qualified for civil liberty, in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains upon their own appetites. . . . Society cannot exist unless a controlling power upon will and appetite be placed somewhere, and the less of it there is within, the more there must be without. It is ordained in the eternal constitution of things, that men of intemperate minds cannot be free. Their passions forge their fetters."

It is impossible to build a stable society overnight, and the only reason the American Revolution didn't go the way of the others was because it was not truly a revolution, but a war of preservation.

To understand the motivations of the Founding Fathers, I would suggest reading the Federalist and Anti-Federalist papers. Both have good insights into the thought processes of the founders and reveal that they respected British society as it had been in the past, and that above all they sought stability and the rule of law.

For one, though the fact has been obscured by nationalist narratives, we have to remember that the Revolution was carried out by numerous sovereign states, not members of a single centralized power. They all had competing local interests, and this division made it difficult for any one faction to dominate the entire confederation.

Second, the people running the continental government weren't an oppressed underclass who'd revolted and seized power; many of the political leaders had been prominent figures (for instance, in committees of correspondence, as businessmen, plantation owners, etc) before the war, which made the transition to power much smoother, and gave fewer chances for factions to seize power.

I just want to post a few things. First I have seen the commonly repeated assertion that the American revolution was a conservative revolution that preserved the status quo, While certainly this a popular opinion the recent work of Gordon Wood has had a large impact on how we look at the revolution. Wood's work has demonstrated that on many levels the American revolution was a very radical revolution, and it at least deserves to be mentioned.

Secondly everyone seems to be under estimating the political crisis of the 1790's, which is likely the closest we have came to civil war until 1850. Washington's popularity and his ability to remain above the political battlefield was seriously depleted by the end of his second term, he had become highly partisan and increasingly found himself under attack within the public sphere. By Adam's presidency the Federalists are prosecuting or threatening to prosecute anyone who publishes something critical of the government. The new American army's officer corps is composed almost entirely of high federalists many of which entertain dreams of marching into Virginia and quashing the Republicans. The de-facto commander of the army goes so far as to write "Once a sound military force is raised it should be drawn towards Virginia....and then let measures be taken to act upon the laws and put Virginia to the Test of resistance" - Alexander Hamilton. In response there is ample evidence to argue that Virginia was preparing for war, stocking piling arms, increasing militia training, raising taxes 25%, and putting a hold on civil projects to pay for military expenditures. Prominent political figures are now writing to one another considering the possibility of separate unions such as John Taylor of Caroline. Meanwhile a desperate Jefferson uses Virginia and Kentucky as his last line of defense against disunion. Set against this we have a naval war on the high seas between France and the US, republican and federalist mobs beating each other in the street (and sometimes Congress), a major general being bribed by the Spanish to break a portion of the United States off into its own country. This is of course not even mentioning the election of 1800 and the Federalists attempts to replace Jefferson with Burr and other plots (which John Adams seemed amenable to) to delay the election until March at which point the Federalist pro-temp of the Senate would have taken over as acting president until a new congress convened in December of 1801 ( giving another nine months of Federalist control) which in my opinion would have amounted to a de-facto coup and an outcome which Jefferson said would " produce resistance by force".

There were several attempts at coups, and there were quite a few cases of military and political leaders running around with some rather long knives.

There was the Conway Cabal aimed against replacing George Washington. They were simply trying to replace Washington (who lost a bunch of battles) with someone who won more like Horatio Gates. A lot of this is covered in detail in The First of Men: A Life of George Washington.

Then there was the Newburgh Conspiracy where a combination of Military Officers who wanted their men to be paid and to secure pensions for the wounded and widowed and Congressmen who believed that Congress should have an independent tax base. It closely mirrored what happened at the end of the First English Civil War where the New Model Army and aligned Parliamentarian allowed the Army to March into London to secure pay and pension from a civilian authority unwilling or unable to pay its own debts. That way led to two additional civil wars, a military dictatorship, and the eventual restoration of the Monarchy. George Washington would have been familiar because the leader of the New Model Army was Fairfax, a family that moved to Virginia and Washington was married into. George Washington famously interfered with the developing conspiracy and collapsed the coup before it could get momentum.

Simply, there really weren't all that many centers of power to launch an attack from. There was no unruly mob of professional malcontents in Philadelphia like there existed in Paris. No one could whip up the massive riots that overran the National Convention whenever the left-most coalition in the national government felt control slipping.

Where would the attack spring? From the several states? They were stable and still held all the cards. Yeah, they had the army and the money to launch a coup, but they didn't have any need to. The national army was professional and could have swept everyone before them, but George Washington said no and that was that.

An argument could be made that the Constitutional Convention was the closest things came to a coup in the American Revolution. They weren't authorized to write a new constitution and toss aside the Articles of Confederation. They were there to propose a set of amendments to the Articles, and instead locked themselves in a room and rewrote everything from scratch without telling anyone. They then gerrymandered the hell out of the thing, up until that point things that bounds all states had to be ratified by all states, instead the Constitution said it would bind everyone if only 9 out of 13 states agreed. It also would have normally had to go through the existing state legislatures, but that didn't happen. Instead, the Constitution said it could only be accepted or rejected by purposely called special conventions. It was all shady as fuck.

One of the motivating factors for a "lack" of coups after the Revolution was that the Revolutionaries essentially got everything they were seeking.

So, the unified front was appeased and was able to establish its vision of what good government should be with little interference.

Of course, this "unified" front didn't last long - and the revolutionaries began to bicker amongst themselves. However, they were intelligent enough to realize that A) their common goals were met and; B) they were two sides of the same coin - and could use debate to resolve their differences. The nearly endless ratification process is evidence of this.

An interesting note: although there weren't any serious "coups", there were many times where individual or groupings of states threatened to secede from the union.

There was actually a coup d'etat during the American Revolution - the play-by-play for this comes from William Hogeland's Founding Finance (Hogeland has very particular views of the American Revolution, they might be classified as left-wing, but he's very much against layering modern ideology onto Revolutionary era actors).

John Dickinson, a leader in the Pennsylvania Provincial Assembly, seems to have been committed to the ideal of preserving Pennsylvania's legally chartered government and its rights; prior to 1776, he was perhaps the most influential member of the Patriot movement; his Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania were widely known. In 1774, Dickinson was attacking loyalists in the Pennsylvania legislature, partly through use of a body known as "the Philadelphia Committee of Inspection and Observation" or "the city Committee" - initially a collection of merchants, but the city's artisans forced their way in. In 1775, he and those who followed him were the dominant faction in the Pennsylvania Assembly. As leader of these "moderates" Dickinson instructed the Pennsylvania delegates to the Continental Congress to block any sort of moves towards independence - this was was easy since he was a delegate himself, and the Continental Congress met just below the Provincial Assembly.

Meanwhile, the city Committee had expanded to include many less elite individuals. By mid-1775, the Committee and its allies in the countryside essentially acted as the executive authority for Pennsylvania. Likewise, a Committee of Privates, managed by math teacher James Cannon, formed, organizing the province's militia companies to make demands on the provincial government; radical ideas for the time, such as extending the vote to people without property and putting a cap on property ownership (maybe not an unreasonable demand when one family pretty much owned the province).

The Privates did take disciplinary actions against dissenters; they forced someone who challenged the authority of the city Committee to recant his views in front of a public crowd; in another example they took a lawyer guilty of defending merchants who broke the boycott against the British around the city on a cart and had him renounce his actions throughout the journey.

Dickinson was blocking the push for independence from the Adams brothers (John and Samuel) and the Virginians Richard Henry Lee and Thomas Jefferson. The city Committee and the Committee of Privates were in direct contact with the Adamses, Samuel's protege Thomas Young. They also had a great agitator in Thomas Paine.

On May 1, 1776, Pennsylvania held elections, with there being a split being the pro-independence camp (supported by Adams) and the pro-reconciliation camp (supported by Dickinson). The city Committee threatened a provincial convention, which would negate an election, using a complaint about western counties being underrepresented. Dickinson offered the western counties greater representation, to which the Committee agreed, believing they would win. They dropped the threat of a convention.

Instead they lost, Dickinson and the reconciliation camp won. So instead of agreeing to the result, the decided to force a provincial convention anyways.

John Adams and Lee then introduced a resolution in Congress that would advise the colonies to throw out existing governments and put in new ones, clearly targeting Pennsylvania. Dickinson endorsed this, claiming the election showed Pennsylvania had a functioning government, and thus the resolution didn't apply. The resolution passed, but with no effect on Pennsylvania.

So John Adams wrote a preamble for the resolution (one longer than the actual resolution) that said the Pennsylvania Assembly's oath of loyalty to the king made it invalid. Thomas Paine quickly sprang into action, publishing denouncements of the Assembly for the oath, and calling on them to be thrown out.

The preamble was adopted five days after the resolution, and its passage (despite proceedings being supposedly secret) were passed onto the Committee through delegate Thomas McKean (an Adams-Lee ally), plus a clerk and the secretary of the Congress.

The city Committee then held a series of mass meetings aimed at ending the Assembly, culminating with a May 20th meeting attended by thousands where through voice vote they called a provincial convention to institute a new government and constitution in Pennsylvania. This resolution was passed to the Committee of Privates, and on June 10, by battalion, the Pennsylvania militia affirmed ending the Assembly. A military coup d'etat in America.

The American revolution is also described as a war of independence, a political entity breaking away.

It can be contrasted with the French or Russian revolutions in which it was not possible for the revolutionaries to break away, they existed in the same military-geographic area and had to defeat the old regime, and they had to deal with the same problems when forming their new government.

The American revolution brought little change inside the country. I mean, the Thirteen Colonies were used to rule themselves before that, and once the revolution was over life went on as usual.

Also, a big difference is that in 1776 US population was a mere 2.5 million people. It's much easy to keep such a small country together, since peoples' interests will be much more aligned. For comparison, by 1789, France has 28 millions inhabitants and was by all standards a population behemot (only China and India were more populated at the time).

Because it was more of a war of independence than a revolution.

Also, in the U.S., the basic power structure remained intact: wealthy landowners before =wealthy landowners after. Other revolutions sought to restructure society as a whole; the U.S. had exercised considerable self-governance for years, until George iii gained a renewed interest in his "backwater" colonies. The Americans were basically fighting to continue what they saw as preexisting rights, whereas the French sought to recreate their social fabric from scratch.

Source: high school history class

In a sense, the French Revolution is precisely why the American Revolution was so successful--it led to a solid quarter-century of war between Britain and France, culminating in the unprecedented scale of the 1803–1815 Napoleonic Wars. During that time, the U.S. was left in relative peace to put together a government and dig in; by the time Britain tried to reconquer the States in 1812, it was too late.

Compare with Mexico, which had to fight off a major foreign invasion almost every other decade following independence in 1821 (Spain, U.S., France). Or the disastrous Canadian Rebellion of 1837, which received a much bigger British Empire's undivided attention and was rapidly crushed.

In the winter of his life, John Adams began to cast his gaze retrospectively upon the events that marked his life: births and deaths of his children, friendships, and, of course, the revolution. Writing to a H. Niles in 1818, Adams took to the later. About the revolution he posits that,

"The American Revolution was not a common event. Its effects and consequences have already been awful over a great part of the globe. And when and where are they to cease?

But what do we mean by the American Revolution? Do we mean the American war? The Revolution was effected before the war commenced. The Revolution was in the minds and hearts of the people; a change in their religious sentiments of their duties and obligations. While the king, and all in authority under him, were believed to govern in justice and mercy, according to the laws and constitution derived to them from the God of nature and transmitted to them by their ancestors, they thought themselves bound to pray for the king and queen and all the royal family, and all in authority under them, as ministers ordained of God for their good; but when they saw those powers renouncing all the principles of authority, and bent upon the destruction of all the securities of their lives, liberties, and properties, they thought it their duty to pray for the continental congress and all the thirteen State congresses.

There might be, and there were others who thought less about religion and conscience, but had certain habitual sentiments of allegiance and loyalty derived from their education; but believing allegiance and protection to be reciprocal, when protection was withdrawn, they thought allegiance was dissolved.

Another alteration was common to all. The people of America had been educated in an habitual affection for England, as their mother country; and while they thought her a kind and tender parent, (erroneously enough, however, for she never was such a mother,) no affection could be more sincere. But when they found her a cruel beldam, willing like Lady Macbeth, to “dash their brains out,” it is no wonder if their filial affections ceased, and were changed into indignation and horror.

This radical change in the principles, opinions, sentiments, and affections of the people, was the real American Revolution.

By what means this great and important alteration in the religious, moral, political, and social character of the people of thirteen colonies, all distinct, unconnected, and independent of each other, was begun, pursued, and accomplished, it is surely interesting to humanity to investigate, and perpetuate to posterity."

His letter continues and is worth reading in the full (found here: http://teachingamericanhistory.org/library/document/john-adams-to-h-niles/) but the point is, also argue by historian Gordon S. Wood in "The Radicalism of the American Revolution", that the revolution was, indeed, radical. But this radicalism was not of the same stripe as the French because it was widely diffused by all Americans--high and low, rich and poor. It was the air breathed by all (See Bernard Bailyn's magisterial "The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution"). Therefore, once the guns went silent and diplomats hashed out peace, there was already an American culture which had been organically growing and evolving for over a century--buttressed by norms, formal and informal institutions, et al.--that provided a rather stable (in comparison to other revolutions) post-war transition.

I apologize if this question seems snarky, as I don't intend it that way, but...isn't it valid to say that, right from the first moment that America threw off England's yoke--or whatever it was that we did--the seed of a terrible, inevitable, bloody, years-long coup was already planted? It took a while for things to simmer to a boil, sure, but the American Civil War could have been the end point to America's brief flirtation with independence, and the starting point of a whole different kind of story.

It seems to me that your question implies that America's war for independence worked, as opposed to so many other revolutionary wars that end in failed states and civil wars and such. Is it not reasonable to say that America's war for independence was little more than a prelude to the real struggle over its national character, a struggle that was, in 1783, yet to come?

I think that one of the most decisive moments in preventing that was Washington's surrender of his commission to the Continental Congress.

In my opinion, it is the most defining moment in the history of American (and modern world) civil-military relations.

There are numerous occasions of countries becoming independent and not succumbing to internal chaos. I would say that the American Revolution is less of a Revolution than it is a War of independence. Although definitions are a hard case.

Perhaps the distiction comes from against who the revolution is targeted. The French revolution and the February and October revolutions in Russia were targeted against elements of society: nobility, rent-seekers, bourgeoisie, clergy etc. While the American revolution was a revolution against a foreign power/subjugator.

The first case is by definition a civil conflict, ripping the society apart. The second one usually occurs when the society is fairly united around the idea of independence. So instead of ripping society apart, it is unifying it as a whole.

"On the Revolution in France" by Edmund Burke draws a great contrast between the revolutions in the states and in France. He basically argues that the revolution in the US was a return to an earlier state and to the English tradition of limited government that dates back to the magna carta, while the French revolution was a liberal revolution on abstract ideas drawn from the philosophes such as Jean Jacques Rousseau.

Edit- this is a work that was actually a letter to a friend in France and is often read as a work of political philosophy and not a historical document. Burke gets some of the facts of the French revolution quite wrong, but his general analysis of the nature of the revolutions is not weakened by these minor inaccuracies.

I heard somewhere that the American Revolution was supported by outside forces such as the French, but when the French asked for America's help with their own revolution, America declined. This was a great factor on why the French went a lot more extreme because they thought they had no help from others, and they had to overcompensate.

Does this hold any weight?