SOURCE: Tagg, James D. “The Limits of Republicanism: The Reverend Charles Nisbet, Benjamin Franklin Bache, and the French Revolution.” The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 112, no. 4 (October 1988): 503-43.

In the excerpt that follows, Tagg considers Bache's early life, especially his relationship with his grandfather, and its effect on his views on the French Revolution, liberty, sovereignty, and other political ideas of the time.

For more than two decades, a great transformation has been taking place in our understanding of the nature and evolution of late eighteenth-century American republicanism. Before the late 1960s, historians generally saw early Americans as natural republicans, pragmatically free of ideology. Insofar as philosophical ideas intruded on a republican ethos, they did so primarily through a common Lockean source. It was assumed that ideas were tangible, employed by individuals who consciously and deliberately embraced them in order to resolve real political issues and problems...