'An anachronistic approach to the Revolution—that is, interpreting an event in a manner that is inconsistent with, or not relevant to, the general historical conditions prevailing at the time of its occurrence—works against an understanding of the event and the subsequent development of American and world history. As Wood writes in The Radicalism of the American Revolution, the democratic principles of the revolution called into question the previously unquestionable:

Americans now recognized that slavery in a republic of workers was an aberration, “a peculiar institution,” and that if any Americans were to retain it, as southern Americans eventually did, they would have to explain and justify it in new racial and anthropological ways that their former monarchical society had never needed. The revolution in effect set in motion ideological and social forces that doomed the institution of slavery in the North and led inexorably to the Civil War.'