Watching/listening to Mitt, various pundits, et al talk about the politics of envy and class warfare being un-American sparked a recollection from my undergraduate days. Though I doubt that the self-proclaimed "historian" in the GOP primary will ever bring this up, I thought perhaps I would.
The fact is this: Class warfare was a common feature of the American Revolution.
Back in the mid-70s, I was an undergraduate at UT-Austin. I don't recall what madness possessed me, whether it was failure to understand what I was getting myself into, that the course description was really interesting or youthful hubris, but rather than taking the typical undergrad requirement for "first half" of US History, I got permission to enroll in a graduate seminar: "Radical Politics and the American Revolution 1765-76."
We looked at a lot of original source documents, surviving letters, news accounts, etc. There was (as I recall) a lot of info (probably from someone's doctoral work) on New York, for example. It has been estimated that a third of the Colonists were rebels, a third were Loyalists, and a third were undecided.
During this time, particularly in areas like the Hudson and Mohawk river valleys, there were huge estates held by the wealthy (these were Tory and Whig - or Loyalist and Revolutionary, if you prefer) and farmed by tenant, leasehold farmers, frequently under exploitative arrangements. Initially, in the run up to the actual Declaration of Independence, most of these tenants (knowing which side their bread was buttered on, so to speak) tended to support whichever political point of view their landlord sided with. And, typically, this meant that the landlords made no moves to disarm their tenants.
But, as things heated up and the political debates from the cities made their way to the countryside, things changed. Not only did the tenants become angry at being drafted into the military effort of one side or the other, they also began to see the idea that having title to the land was as great an element of liberty as democracy itself. But, in an interesting twist - which upholds the premise that "class warfare" was a part of the Revolution - tenants began to take the opposite side from that of their landlords, no matter which side the landlord was on! (Foresee-ably, most of these wealthy landowners had been granted lands by the crown or were otherwise connected to nobility and so tended to be Loyalists - which tipped the numbers of tenants toward the Revolutionary cause.)
Meanwhile, in Virginia, the planter class that included Washington and Jefferson had a different motivation. With slaves instead of tenant farmers, the same sort of "class conflict" is not as obvious. Instead, the planters were in debt, primarily to the British merchant class, after the collapse of tobacco prices. In 1764 American colonists owed British merchants ₤6 million and British mercantilist policies drained an additional ₤500,000 a year from the tobacco colonies. Virginia's small landholders and business people - and no doubt, their counterparts in other colonies - realized British commercial, monetary and immigration policies favored the mercantilist-creditors back in London. Thus it was that debtors in Virginia became unrelenting critics of British policy, making them a persistent political force in favor of independence.
So, "class warfare" is an American value!
Now . . . if one of those Congresscritters that read the Constitution could just point out to me where "capitalism" is enshrined in that document . . . . .
For additional reading:
LAND AND LIBERTY: HUDSON VALLEY RIOTS IN THE AGE OF REVOLUTION
A people's history of the American Revolution