Page:Bertram David Wolfe, Jay Lovestone, William Francis Dunne - Our Heritage from 1776 (1926).pdf/11

 Rh and conservative persons might have unhesitatingly taken part; but such revolutions have never been known to happen."

The truth of the matter is that our revolution of 1776 was carried out as a class dictatorship with all the accompaniments of force and revolutionary terror that the ruling class historians of today attack in the case of Soviet Russia and that the polite liberals deplore.

All revolutions create alongside of the regularly constituted government their own unconstitutional, extra-legal revolutionary authority that unites the revolutionists, mobilizes their forces for resistance to the legal authority and forms the germ of the future government if the revolution succeeds. In the bourgeois revolutions of the continent these "dual authorities," as Lenin called them, were the clubs of Girondins and Jacobins in the French revolution and the clubs of workers in the revolutions of 1848. In the Russian revolution the revolutionary authority that challenged the legally constituted government is to be found in the Workers' and Peasants' Councils or Soviets.

In the American Revolution of 1776 the dual or revolutionary authority was to be found first in the Committees of Correspondence and then in their national delegate bodies called Congresses. The Committees of Correspondence were small, local, unofficial groups of revolutionaries, formed to develop and unite resistance on an all-colonial scale against objectionable British measures. They held meetings, sent out emissaries, carried on correspondence, supervised the boycott of British goods, tarred and feathered and otherwise punished those who broke the boycott or who informed on smugglers or other violators of British law, carried on a constant propaganda and in the later period mobilized and drilled volunteers and secretly gathered supplies of ammunition and developed a spy system to reveal the movements of British troops. They are analogous to the provincial clubs of the French Revolution or to the local Soviets of the Russian Revolution. From another standpoint, they correspond to locals or sections of a revolutionary political party. They acted as the unifying vanguard of the revolutionary forces.