Rape as a Cause of the American Revolution?

Earlier this month The National Journal ran a profile of Rep. Todd Akin, now running for the U.S. Senate in Missouri with the on-again/off-again support of the national Republican Party.

Over the summer Akin stated that rape caused a woman’s body to “shut that whole thing down” and prevent conception, with the logical conclusion that there’s little need for “Plan B” birth control or abortion for rape victims. In the national backlash that followed, members of Akin’s own party said that he should drop out of the senate race (while presumably remaining in the House).

The article described this response of Akin’s wife Lulli:

The pressure and attacks clearly reinforced Akin’s sense of mission. For the family of the lawmaker known for dressing in colonial garb at Fourth of July parties, the attacks also increased their identification with Revolutionary America. Lulli Akin said that efforts to push her husband out of the race threaten to replace elections “by the people and for the people” with “tyranny, a top-down approach.” She added, “Party bosses dictating who is allowed to advance through the party and make all the decisions—it’s just like 1776 in that way.”

She cited colonists who “rose up and said, ‘Not in my home, you don’t come and rape my daughters and my…wife. But that is where we are again. There has been a freedom of elections, not tyranny of selections since way back. Why are we going to roll over and let them steamroll us, be it Democrats or Republicans or whomever?” Obama and Mitt Romney “both seem to be embodying” a British monarch, “with all the tactics that they’ve been revealing” toward her husband, Lulli Akin said. “Are they that dissimilar?” she asked. “Are they really dissimilar? They say with their mouths ‘free enterprise’—but, really, how free?”

Asked about comparisons of his plight to revolutionary Americans, Todd Akin called it “a little more grandiose than the way I would say it.”

It does seem audacious for Lulli Akin to invoke “rape” when that was precisely the issue that got her husband in trouble, and then to tie it to “free enterprise” and whether the national party would give money to her husband’s campaign.

But what about Akin’s claim that a threat to “rape my daughters…in my home” was why American colonists “rose up” in the American Revolution? That has no historical basis. In 1768-69 Boston’s Whigs published occasional complaints about soldiers treating women poorly, but those involved theft or disrespect in the street. No soldier was charged with rape. No soldiers were quartered in people’s homes. The long lists of grievances put out by colonists which culminated in the Declaration of Independence mention “Murders” but not rape.

I suspect this belief, which is not Akin’s alone, is an outgrowth of the common misinterpretation of the Quartering Act: that the royal government forced individual householders to host soldiers in peacetime. That didn’t happen. The Quartering Act required colonies to provide barracks and supplies for royal troops. If the enlisted men had been in individual homes instead of barracks, the main result would have been even more desertions.

Rape and sexual abuse have happened in virtually all known wars, and Americans did complain of rape by British troops before the end of 1776. British officers even joked about the topic. There are also allegations of American soldiers raping a Loyalist woman in a 1777 raid on Staten Island.

But those documented complaints came after the war had started and the Continental Congress had voted for independence. They weren’t why the colonists had risen up. Picturing rape as a cause of the American Revolution turns a political dispute into a fictional melodrama and mixes up metaphorical propaganda like the cartoon above with actual events. It blurs the real history, just like seeing both “Obama and Mitt Romney” as George III.