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.ÿþ31.Meade, 1:14.Meade s characterization of William Byrd II illustrates the bishop s evangelicalpiety: Colonel Byrd was a man of great enterprise, a classical scholar and a very sprightly writer.The fault of his works is an exuberance of humour and of jesting with serious things, which some-times degenerates into that kind of wit which so disfigures and injures the writings of Shakspeare. Ibid., 1:282.32.Bailyn, Faces of Revolution, 162.33.J.Franklin Jameson, The American Revolution Considered as a Social Movement (Princeton, N.J., 1926;pbk., Boston, 1956), 88 96.34.American Episcopalians effected their own ecclesiastical revolution in the wake of the war anddisestablishment by fashioning an elective episcopacy bishops elected by clergy and laity together.These were bishops with power restricted to spiritual functions a primitive episcopate or a mitre withut sceptre. Mills, Bishops by Ballot, vii xi, 155 307.35.Bernard Bailyn, On the Teaching and Writing of History: Responses to a Series of Questions, ed.EdwardConnery Latham (Hanover, N.H.,1994), 62.Peter Wilson concurs with Gordon Wood in discerningthe decisive characteristic of the American Revolution as the wholesale destruction and recon-struction of the ties which held colonial society together. The British reformers, the Americansand Kant put the individual citizen in the position of determining the goals of the community.Therevolutionary ideas of representation and federation redefined the very understanding of commu-nity that had guided the early modern statesmen. Peter N.Wilson, Defining the Common Good: Empire,Religion and Philosophy in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Cambridge, 1994), 12, 16, 421.36.The case for the radical implications of the American Revolution is most persuasively madeby Gordon S.Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution (New York, 1992).Holly Brewer providesfurther evidence of the radicalism of the Revolution in Virginia in her revisionist account of thelegislation ending entail and primogeniture.Brewer, Entailing Aristocracy in Colonial Virginia: Ancient Feudal Restraints and Revolutionary Reform, WMQ 3d ser., 54 (1997): 307 46.For JoyceAppleby, it was the rejection of the past that was most revolutionary: The French Revolution hadmade explicit in the 1790s what had been implicit in the American Revolution: the possibility ofshedding the past, shedding, that is, the belief that the past is the principal source of informationabout human society. Appleby, Capitalism and a New Social Order: The Republican Vision of the 1790s (NewYork and London, 1984), 79.37.Wood, Radicalism of the American Revolution, 6.38.Jefferson s reforms, Henry Adams argued, crippled and impoverished the gentry, but didlittle for the people, and for the slave nothing. Adams, History of the United States,1:137.If the Anglicanestablishment was a weak, enervated institution, then why did Jefferson believe that his Statute onReligious Freedom was one of his most significant contributions? Isaac argues that Jefferson rightlybelieved that he had accomplished a radical change.Isaac, Transformation of Virginia, 273 75.Isaac thenmakes the fascinating suggestion that Jefferson sought to replace the religious establishment withan establishment of learning modeled in part on the eighteenth-century parish experience: A newVirginia republican establishment would replace the old Anglican Christian one.Community in-volvement in the moral formation of its members would be reaffirmed.Hierarchy was given bothsymbolic and functional form in this arrangement of things.Over regional groupings of the local hundred schools, where poor children could get three years of free instruction toward basic liter-acy, were set grammar schools for the sons of the gentry, and for one poor boy.per year fromeach of the elementary schools. Ibid., 294 95.39.Buckley, Church and State, 6 7.462 notes to pages 301 2
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