SOURCE: “John Adams: The American Revolution as a Change of Heart?” in Huntington Library Quarterly, Vol. 28, No. 4, August, 1965, pp. 293-300.

In the following essay, Ellsworth studies Adams's famous comment that the Revolutionary War followed the real revolution, which took place in the hearts and minds of the colonists well before the commencement of hostilities.

John Adams has lent much support to those historians who interpret the American Revolution as caused by slow changes in the sentiments of the American colonists. The main source of this interpretation, in Adams' writings, is a letter addressed to Dr. J. Morse in 1815.¹ Here Adams remarked that the Revolutionary War was only an effect of a previous revolution that had taken place in the “minds and hearts of the people, and in the union of the colonies; both of which were substantially effected before hostilities commenced.”² In other papers written after his retirement...