The terms “right” and “left” as political descriptions originated during the French Revolution after the American one. However, you did have the terms liberal and conservativism. Now the terms didn’t have the same meanings back then as they do today, although there features of classical liberalism and conservatism that survive in modern liberalism and conservatism which can be seen by tracing the histories of both philosophies.

Generally speaking, the Revolutionaries subscribed to political liberalism, largely inspired by the liberal philosophy of John Locke. This is in opposition to conservatism which at the time had a meaning that was more pro-aristocracy. Now, not all of the revolutionaries held the same political philosophies or were even that concerned with the philosophical aspect, and when the country was formed it incorporated plenty of both liberal and conservative ideas, but the more novel aspects of the Declaration and eventual Constitution and Bill of Rights drew heavily from classical liberalism.

At the time, the Revolution was seen in many ways as a British Civil War and, as the revolutionaries gained allies in the form of France and Spain, it became part of a larger struggle for colonial domination.