“Even more exciting when you fully engage with its ambiguity“

Last month the Age of Revolutions site ran Tom Cutterham’s interview with Woody Holton about his new book, Liberty Is Sweet.

The conversation is as much about the process of writing that book and the current public debate about Revolutionary legacies as about the American Revolution itself.

That approach has its own interests, as this long passage from Holton early in the conversation shows:

I really wanted to reach people who love history but don’t realize that what they have seen so far—mostly wealthy white men—is only the tip of the iceberg. My pitch to American Revolution lovers is that their favorite topic becomes even more exciting when you fully engage with its ambiguity and kaleidoscopic diversity.

My focus on non-scholars shaped the book in two ways, only the first of which I anticipated. I knew history buffs would want a narrative, and I was happy to provide one, since one of my main points is that women’s, Indigenous, military, and all the other histories transpired on the same timeline, constantly influencing each other, and we miss a lot when we devote one chapter to African Americans, one to diplomacy, one to the economy, and so on. But going chronological does not have to mean merely telling stories. I tried to use events like the boughs of a Christmas tree, with the ornaments being placed where I paused the narrative to share various social historians’ insights as well as my own.

The unintended consequence of my determination to reach beyond college towns was that I became a military historian! My initial attitude toward the battles was cynical: amateur historians demand them, so I had to write them up. But as I began that research, I overcame the conventional academic prejudice that military history is mere storytelling, and I ended up offering what I consider some fairly new interpretations of the war.

Here’s one: the British realized early on that they could not win, since whenever they captured a hill—starting with Breed’s/Bunker—at the cost of 50 percent casualties, all the rebels had to do was drop back to the next hill and start the process over again. So all the Whigs (I found Patriots too partisan) had to do was stay on defense. But George Washington was initially bent on going on offense, and his classic elite-British-empire-masculine aggressiveness several times nearly ended in disaster. But he learned from his mistakes, and while he devised nearly a dozen plans to drive the British from their headquarters in Manhattan, he never actually executed even one of them. Ultimately Washington’s greatest contribution to the war effort was restraining his own aggressive instincts.

Here’s the whole interview.

Reviewing Resisting Independence

Benjamin Anderson just reviewed Brad A. Jones’s Resisting Independence: Popular Loyalism in the Revolutionary British Atlantic for H-Early America.

One can download the review in P.D.F. form here.

Jones doesn’t define Loyalists just as the people in colonial America who supported the Crown over local, Patriot authorities and, in many cases, left the thirteen breakaway colonies because of that.

Rather, this book studies people anywhere in the British Empire who chose the Crown over the Americans. Thus, Jones examined newspaper reports and essays from Glasgow, Halifax, Kingston, and New York City.

By this method, Jones sought to move beyond studies of individual Loyalists like Thomas Hutchinson and Jonathan Sewall, whose voluminous writings, both personal and public, let us trace their thinking and experiences.

Anderson seems to echo Jones’s argument that those newspaper reports, often anonymous, are “one of the very few places that a common colonist’s thoughts can be found.” However, while newspaper pages weren’t confined to the elite, they certainly learned toward the genteel. Anderson notes “Jones’s inability to bring African Americans and Native Americans into his analysis.”

Among the Loyalist writers he could access, Jones found they shared “a collection of Protestant Whig beliefs, ‘like free trade, political liberty, and religious freedom,’ and considered this representative monarchy to be the protector of liberty and Protestantism from Catholicism, France, and Spain.” That raises a couple of questions in my mind:

• Did these British subjects differ in those values from the American Patriots, or did almost all politically-minded Britons claim to be driven by “free trade, political liberty, and religious freedom”?
• How did Britons, both loyal and breakaway, deal with the contradictions between “free trade” and imperial mercantilism, “religious freedom” and anti-Catholicism, “political liberty” and community or national loyalty?

I suspect the ways people balanced and reconciled those values determined their political philosophies more.

Anderson writes:

…he appears to argue that this Protestant Whig argument was the sole motivator in leading Loyalists to choosing their allegiance. He criticizes historians for focusing “on [the] Loyalists’ personal interest to describe their political allegiances” (p. 11); yet, self-interest is an intrinsic theme in Resisting Independence.

In chapter 5, for example, he effectively demonstrates that local self-interests determined how the Loyalists reacted to the increasing tensions between the Patriots and Britain: Glasgow merchants recognized the profits they could gain from lucrative contracts to supply the British Army; white slave owners in Kingston saw Britain as their security against a slave rebellion on the island, thus ensuring their profits remained intact; and Haligonians saw the revolution as an opportunity to limit the authority of Nova Scotia’s unpopular governor. Only in New York, he explains, was there much more passionate support for British representative monarchy and Protestant Whig values because the Loyalists’ had experienced the Patriots’ violence firsthand.

Indeed, it seems there is an urge to treat political ideals and self-interest as two distinct motivations that were incapable of working in tandem with one another, but, in reality, this was not the case for many colonists. In Vermont, for example, Ethan Allen combined these Protestant Whig values with his own self-interests that lay in his land empire, which led him to open negotiations with the British Empire about Vermont returning to it.

The investigation of self-interest is a relatively new topic among historians of the American Revolution, who have predominantly confined their studies to towns and communities in New York and the southern backcountry that experienced multiple occupations by the Continental and British armies. Jones makes an excellent contribution to this field by elevating it from the North American colonies to the British Atlantic world.

The phrase “relatively new” seems to write out the Beardian approach to analyzing the Revolutionaries’ motivations, which is now over a century old and has never fully gone away.

The 2022 George Washington Prize Finalists

Last week the Washington College, the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, and Mount Vernon announced the finalists of the 2022 George Washington Prize.

This prize was created to honor the “best works on the nation’s founding era, especially those that have the potential to advance broad public understanding of American history.” It comes with a significant cash award for the author.

In alphabetical order, this year’s five honored authors are:

• Max M. Edling, Perfecting the Union: National and State Authority in the U.S. Constitution
• Julie Flavell, The Howe Dynasty: The Untold Story of a Military Family and the Women Behind Britain’s Wars for America
• Jeffrey H. Hacker, Minds and Hearts: The Story of James Otis, Jr. and Mercy Otis Warren
• Bruce A. Ragsdale, Washington at the Plow: The Founding Farmer and the Question of Slavery
• David O. Stewart, George Washington: The Political Rise of America’s Founding Father

As usual, the selection includes books about Washington himself but also books that examine the Revolutionary era more broadly.

Mount Vernon would be happy to sell copies of these five books.

A Study of Women, Finance, and the Law in Newport and Boston

H-Early-America just published Prof. Linda Sturtz’s review of Sara T. Damiano’s To Her Credit: Women, Finance, and the Law in Eighteenth-Century New England Cities (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2021).

Damiano studied women’s economic pursuits in Boston, Massachusetts, and Newport, Rhode Island, across the eighteenth century, delving most deeply into legal records.

Sturtz’s review notes some of the results:

Damiano sampled a vast collection of cases heard by the Newport and Suffolk County courts between 1730 and 1790, assembling a total of over 1,800 cases for each location to identify the significance of debt suits as a percentage of the total cases (around 75 percent). . . . Between 1730 and the Revolutionary War, women made up 12 percent of the participants in the debt suits in Newport County and 9 percent of the litigants in…Suffolk County (p. 180). Her database allows her to trace incremental change over time as well as the impact of more abrupt events like war and postwar economic depressions on family finances. . . .

For example, she shows the importance of female witnesses who were often bystanders to transactions that escalated into court cases because financial exchanges occurred in spaces women frequented, especially homes but also in heterosocial public spaces. . . . men in these port cities engaged in both local and long-distance transactions while women’s cases were generally limited to a more local focus. Women were overrepresented as creditors in debt suits and benefited from courts’ increasing support of creditors. . . .

Damiano’s argument connects to several historiographical debates, most notably the literature on gender, the economy, and the law in New England. . . . After the revolution, according to Damiano, wealthy Newport and Boston women who were creditors in suits increasingly hired professional lawyers to shepherd their cases through the legal system while the women themselves took advantage of their privilege to retreat from direct involvement.

There’s a lot more to the review, including discussion of other scholarly books about American women in business (and in litigation) during the eighteenth century.

Damiano is now a professor at Texas State University. Her current project “investigates interactions between officers of the law and laypeople, both free and enslaved, in early American cities.”

Public Occurrences, Both Foreign and Domestic

Last month on H-Net, Tristan Stubbs reviewed D. H. Robinson’s The Idea of Europe and the Origins of the American Revolution, published in 2020 by Oxford University Press.

Stubbs wrote:

…this highly impressive work offers a genuinely new paradigm through which to view the years leading up to 1776. Americans made the fateful decision to secede not for the economic reasons offered over a century ago by Charles Beard and the Progressive historians; they were not the “radicals” drawn by Gordon S. Wood; and their motivations cannot be ascribed solely to civic republican ideals of virtue and liberty favored by the “canonical intellectual histories” of Bernard Bailyn and J. G. A. Pocock.

Instead, Americans had seen themselves for a long time before the Declaration of Independence as intimately connected to European geopolitics, took a deep interest in the balance of power across the ocean, and were disappointed by the metropolitan Tory government’s failure to shoulder its responsibilities in defending continental liberties against the overweening power of France and Spain. . . .

it spends an impressive amount of time on the effect on metropolitan and colonial opinions of Sweden’s 1772 reversal to absolutism and of the British government’s failure to support the Republic of Corsica against what colonists viewed as French attempts to impose Catholic “universal monarchy” not only on that Mediterranean island but throughout the French sphere of influence—including in America.

This hypothesis truly does seem like a “new paradigm,” in that I hadn’t considered inadequate protection from Catholic empires to be a major concern for the Americans resisting Crown measures from 1765 to 1775.

There would be at least a great irony if colonists adopted independence due to fear of France and Spain given how the young U.S. of A. soon allied with France and Spain. And then felt threatened by Spain/Napoleonic France as well as Britain on its new borders without the protection of a large empire.

To be sure, the Revolution in New England was fueled by suspicion of popery and ended with national freedom of religion, and the war in large slaveholding states was fueled by fear of slave uprisings and ended with slavery coming to an end in other parts of the country. So a paradoxical outcome doesn’t negate a possible cause of the conflict.

But the idea that colonial American discourse about European geopolitics strongly influenced resistance to Parliament’s new taxes and royal officials seems very tenuous. Ebenezer Mackintosh named a son after Corsican independence leader Pasquale Paoli and Loyalists claimed that William Molineux wanted “Paoli” as a nickname himself, but I really don’t see the farmers of Hampshire County shutting down their courthouse because they felt the London government hadn’t supported Paoli’s Corsican cause enough six years before. (Indeed, it was well known the British Crown granted Paoli a pension, supporting him as an asset against France.)

Today we Americans live in a much more democratic society, meaning more people are involved in political decisions. We’re privy to more news from around the world. Our economy is more globalized, as are our military forces. By all measures we should be more concerned with international relations than eighteenth-century farmers. And yet foreign policy is rarely a big factor in our politics, so was it a factor in theirs?

Robinson’s argument appears to rest on what he calls “the discursive evidence,” the same body of evidence that he says should also rule out historical hypotheses about the Revolution based on “relations between classes and genders...racism and material cultures.”

As Stubbs writes, “the discourse under investigation here was led primarily by white, male, anglophone professionals.” And in this case “professionals” appears to mean the sliver of educated, usually wealthy white men who wrote essays for the newspapers.

I have no doubt those essays used contemporary Sweden as an example of the danger of autocracy, the same way they used the Stuart monarchs and the Roman emperors. But I doubt those writings from such a narrow, well, class really got at all the forces driving political change at the time. And I’m skeptical that developments well outside the British Empire motivated colonial Americans to rebel as much as “pocketbook issues.” 

Considering the Quaker Way of Business

Earlier this month Robynne Rogers Healey’s review of Esther Sahle’s Quakers in the British Atlantic World, c. 1660-1800 appeared on H-Net.

Nineteenth-century American culture viewed Quaker merchants as unusually successful and moral. Sahle’s book, Healey writes, “challenges the narrative of Quaker exceptionalism—the idea that Quakers’ success in business was a result of unique Quaker structures and business practices, or ‘because, so the story goes, they were Quakers.’”

In fact, the formal ethos of Quaker business networks wasn’t unusual. “Placing Quaker and non-Quaker prescriptive business literature side by side, Sahle reveals their similarity if not their sameness: both shared concerns about debts, taxes, and fraud, all of which were believed to be born out of covetousness; both called upon identical verses of scripture to support their admonitions; and both employed the same metaphors to communicate their message.”

But perhaps Quakers enforced those rules more strictly than other merchants? In the latter half of the period Sahle studied, the Society of Friends underwent a number of significant changes that historians have dubbed the “Quaker Reformation.” Among those changes was a “dramatic increase in disownments after 1750” in both London and Philadelphia.

But I have trouble sorting out the chronology of cause and effect as described in the review:

While Sahle accepts that the transformation of eighteenth-century Quakerism began as a religious reformation in the 1740s, she asserts that dramatic change accelerated in mid-century in response to a series of political conflicts in Pennsylvania that harmed the Society’s public reputation. Disputes between Thomas Penn, the proprietor, and the Quaker-led Assembly during the Seven Years’ War resulted in Quakers becoming the scapegoat for General [Edward] Braddock’s defeat at Fort Duquesne in 1755. Public faith in Quakers deteriorated over the course of the war and during Pontiac’s War that immediately followed [1763–1766], especially after Quakers joined the militia mustered to protect Philadelphia from the Paxton Boys [early 1764].

The Paxton pamphlet war dealt a decisive blow to the Society of Friends’ reputation. The pamphlets crafted an image of Quakers as self-interested, duplicitous pacifists motivated solely by money and power; they refused defense funding for their non-Quaker fellow colonists but resorted to violence if they themselves were threatened. This was not the Friends’ first pamphlet war, but it was one they did not win.

With Quakers threatened by accusations of dishonesty and avarice, Sahle argues, leaders tightened their internal discipline, “especially against infractions that brought dishonor on the Society—financial dishonesty, fighting, and slaveholding.”

I’m unconvinced that events of the 1760s brought about a change that scholars trace to 1750 or earlier. Furthermore, the review notes that most disownments weren’t prompted by violations of business ethics, such as defaulting on debt. Instead, “Violations of the marriage discipline accounted for almost half of the disownments between 1750 and 1800.” Disowning people for marrying outside the sect (as happened with, for example, Betsy Ross) would certainly promote more coherent unity among those left. But it doesn’t seem like it would solve a local public-relations problem.

“The young Wood performed a scholarly triple axel”

This has been a good week for fans of American Revolution historiography. In addition to the article on “The 1619 Project” that I quoted the last two days, the Boston Review published David Waldstreicher’s review of Gordon Wood’s Power and Liberty: Constitutionalism in the American Revolution and Carol Anderson’s The Second: Race and Guns in a Fatally Unequal America.

Waldstreicher is a professor of history at the City University of New York and author of Slavery’s Constitution: From Revolution to Ratification (2009); Runaway America: Benjamin Franklin, Slavery and the American Revolution (2004); and In the Midst of Perpetual Fetes: The Making of American Nationalism, 1776-1820 (1997). His own review of the long controversies leading up to “The 1619 Project” appeared on the Boston Review in January 2020.

The new review assesses two very different books on American constitutionalism, which lets Waldstreicher make a long running start from Charles Beard’s 1913 An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States and Warren G. Harding’s tradition-minded counterattack against it.

Eventually that brings us to Wood’s first book The Creation of the American Republic, 1776-1787, published in 1969:

That study won acclaim for highlighting the intellectual and practical dilemmas of republicanism and for seeming to split the difference between celebration and criticism of the founders. Wood argued that, ironically, the course of the 1780s led toward a Madisonian “science of politics” that sought to bury economic conflict in schemes of federalism and representation, and did it so successfully that it created an American political tradition that couldn’t deal honestly with class or money.

In this, the young Wood performed a scholarly triple axel. At great length and sophistication, he had offered something to those inclined to celebrate the Constitution, those who criticized it, and those looking for some way between. The republic, simply put, was moderate yet innovative, advanced yet caught up in self-deception.

The Creation of the American Republic was and remains an important book, but in the half-century since it appeared growing numbers of historians have pointed out the limits of its approach.

One factor in that change was simply that new scholars need to develop new ideas. About Cold War-era academics, Waldstreicher writes, “Ever Oedipal, young historians began to make their name by attacking the pieties of their Progressive forebears.” The same process applied to what seemed radical in 1969.

Another is how much America changed in the following decades. When women and people of color play a larger role in society, including the top ranks of our government, economy, and culture, it’s natural to wonder how those individuals were part of the American Revolution. Wood spent little time on those people or issues concerning them. The formal politics of the time excluded them, and he continues to view those politics as most important.

As a result, Waldstreicher and other historians don’t see much new in Wood’s latest book, or in the several that preceded it. It presents the big political documents of the Revolution—the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution—as world-changing while waving away all the ways life didn’t change for most Americans.

In contrast, Anderson’s The Second emphasizes the continuity from colonial-era slave codes through the Second Amendment’s protection of the white male militia to the armed backlash against Reconstruction and civil rights. Wood would probably say her perspective misses the big picture. She would probably say the same of his.

Giving the Loyalists Their Due and Then Some

Yesterday’s Boston Globe included a review of one of at least three overviews of the American Revolution published this season: H. W. Brands’s Our First Civil War: Patriots and Loyalists in the American Revolution.

Brands holds a named chair in the History Department at the University of Texas at Austin. His dissertation and early books were about the Cold War, but he moved to earlier periods in U.S. history. Among his many books is The First American, a biography of Benjamin Franklin.

Reviewer David M. Shribman says Brands’s book “turns upside down the view of the struggle” that we usually see, mostly by treating the Loyalists as equally patriotic in their way.

In the last two decades there have been several scholarly books about Loyalists and how they saw the conflict. The observation that the Revolutionary War was in many ways a civil war, as many adherents of the Crown termed it at the time, has become common. In fact, the phrase “our first Civil War” appears in writing by Edward Everett Hale and Charles H. Levermore in the late nineteenth century, during the first period of sympathy for the Loyalists.

Brands might well give equal space or sympathy to the Loyalists, which would be unusual in an overview for general readers. In other respects, Our First Civil War appears to be rather traditional. It follows some of the biggest names of the Revolution, all upper-class white men: Franklin, George Washington, John Adams, Benedict Arnold, Thomas Hutchinson, Joseph Galloway, and William Franklin.

As for local issues, Shribman writes:

Brands characterizes both George Washington of Virginia and Benjamin Franklin of Pennsylvania as moderates in comparison with the radicals of Massachusetts. He describes Boston as “the hotbed of resistance to British authority.”

But by 1770, tensions in the Bay Colony reached the boiling point, with unruly mobs roaming through Boston, threatening those regarded as sympathetic to British officials. In March came the Boston Massacre, followed three years later by the Boston Tea Party. “Respect for order and the rule of law all but vanished in Boston,” Brands writes.

The mere fact the measure that the Lord North government titled the Coercive Acts was dubbed the Intolerable Acts in America speaks to the widening gap between colony and mother country.

In fact, that last sentence doesn’t express a fact at all. As I wrote in this 2013 article, I haven’t found the words “Intolerable Acts” in any Revolutionary writings, much less in many of them. The label surfaced first in U.S. history textbooks a century after the Revolution. I can’t tell if the phrase appears in Brands’s book, but I’ve seen it in two reviews so far.

As for the sentence about “Respect for order and the rule of law” quoted from the book, that was how Loyalists saw the situation in Boston. But as a historical judgment it’s missing how Bostonians saw themselves as enforcing local order against people who were violating the British constitution. The issue wasn’t “rule of law”; it was which level of government overruled the other. For importers and other friends of the royal government in 1770, the worry wasn’t “unruly mobs”; it was ruly ones.

Yanks Abroad

I don’t want to leave the topic of early Americans in Paris on a down note, so I’ll share this link to Michael K. Beauchamp’s review of A View from Abroad: The Story of John and Abigail Adams in Europe by Jeanne E. Abrams.

Beauchamp writes:

The book begins with John Adams’s initial journey to Europe to serve as part of the US diplomatic mission to France, where he served alongside Arthur Lee and Benjamin Franklin. Adams arrived after the Treaty of Amity and Commerce had been signed and ended up doing much of the grunt work of keeping accounts and records while mediating between Franklin and Lee, who were often at odds. While Adams appreciated aspects of French art and culture, he found himself horrified by the decadence of the aristocracy, the futility of court ceremony, the superstitious Catholicism of the lower orders, and the Deism of so many members of the French elite.

Well, maybe John was more impressed on his second long-term posting, in Holland.

Though a Protestant country and one in which Adams secured diplomatic victories, here, too, Adams criticized elements of Dutch society such as the absence of hospitality, the lack of public spirit, and an obsession with accumulating wealth. He also wrote of a growing American oligarchy, which he linked to his opponents in Congress.

Perhaps when Abigail Adams joined her husband she saw more to like.

Abigail’s arrival in 1784 resulted in an analysis of France that mirrored her husband’s judgments. Abigail proved highly critical of Americans like Anne Bingham, whom she believed had become too enamored of French culture, though Abigail praised French women like Adrienne de Lafayette due to her husband’s service to the United States, her knowledge of English, and her elegant but simple dress.

And then the family moved to London.

As in France, the Adamses proved critical of British society, with Abigail particularly shocked by the degree of poverty: “She insisted that the English elite were occupied with the pursuit of enjoyment and pleasure and that they suffered from depraved manners. Moreover, she was grateful that American society did not exhibit the extreme social divides she witnessed in England” (p. 167).

Ironically, John Adams’s political opponents in America would later point to his years in Europe and say he’d become too enamored of Old World societies and too aristocratic in his thinking. However much Adams distrusted popular politics, he consistently criticized European countries for being too dominated by aristocracy and feared America would produce a new aristocracy of wealth.

“Abrams does an excellent job of interweaving the official diplomatic duties of Adams and the personal family dynamics at play,” Beauchamp writes in his review. “Just as importantly, Abrams writes well and the text has a strong narrative, which should allow it to reach a more popular audience than most university press monographs.”

Remembering the Work of Gary B. Nash

Gary B. Nash, a leading historian of the early America, died late last month just after turning eighty-eight years old.

This is from Carla Gardina Pestana’s obituary for Nash at the Omohundro Institute website:

Over the course of a very prolific career, Gary produced dozens of books: monographs both authored and co-authored, textbooks, edited collections. They were all written with flare and grace. His work ranged widely across the history of Quakers in early America; race, race relations, and African American history; and the American Revolution. . . .

Gary’s attention to race in early America has ranged widely but began with his path-breaking Red, White, and Black: The Peoples of Early America (1974). For younger scholars, it might be difficult to capture the shockwave that book generated, with its insistence that early American history can only be understood as the interaction among three groups, Natives, Europeans, and Africans. . . .

Gary’s contributions to the study of the American Revolution were varied, but his signature contribution was the 1979 The Urban Crucible: Social Change, Political Consciousness and the Origins of the American Revolution. Comparing three urban centers—Boston, New York, and Philadelphia—in the years leading up to and during the revolution, he showed how economic crisis helped to galvanize ordinary urban dwellers to engage in revolutionary politics. A signal contribution to New Left historiography, it continued a line of inquiry associated with scholars such as Jesse Lemisch and Al Young.

In addition to his research-based scholarship, Gary was a fierce advocate for history education. His involvement in the controversies surrounding the National History Standards, which pitted him against Lynne Cheney and all those who want history taught as a simple and patriotic tale of U.S. exceptionalism, are well known. Serving as the public face for maligned history educators was only one aspect of his commitment. In his retirement from UCLA, he oversaw the Center for History in the Schools which promoted U.S. history and World history education. He participated in curricular revision at UCLA and more widely. He hosted workshops for teachers for decades, for which he became well known and much beloved among K-12 teachers.

Visiting the American Republics

Two historians I follow on Twitter published reviews of Alan Taylor’s American Republics: A Continental History of the United States, 1783–1850 last week.

For The New Criterion, Daniel N. Gullotta of Stanford and the Age of Jackson podcast wrote:

Taylor’s history incorporates Canadian, Mexican, and Native American perspectives to recount the birth of the early Republic and the rise of American democracy. Taylor’s sources, which also include material from European diplomats and foreign travelers, offer unique insights on episodes routinely covered in similar books. International events loom particularly large in the mind of his antebellum American subjects, such as the establishment of Haiti as a free black republic in 1804, the various Latin American revolutions that erupted throughout the early nineteenth century, and the United Kingdom’s Slavery Abolition Act of 1833.

While other works have shown how involved Americans were in regional events and national politics, Taylor demonstrates their keen awareness of foreign events and global changes, too. They were, for instance, angry that Canadians and Britons thought of the United States as a nation of irresponsible drunks, ill-tempered ruffians, and hypocritical slavers. . . .

Even the Americans who did want to expand the nation’s borders rarely did so out of a national sense of shared destiny, but rather out of regional self-interest. The absence of early American nationalism in this period might surprise readers, who will find more figures proudly willing to call themselves Virginians, Georgians, or New Yorkers than Americans. This regionalism and the issue of slavery made for a young nation full of anxiety and built on fragile alliances, ready to break out into civil war at almost any moment.

The Washington Post commissioned its review from Colin Woodard, author of American Nations and Union and journalist at the Portland Press Herald:

The takeaway is that this era of conquest and expansion was a time of anguish and acrimony for U.S. leaders — manifest uncertainty — and terrible tragedy for many of the continent’s inhabitants. In an effort to achieve security for its White citizens — to protect them from imperial rivals, native nations and enslaved-person uprisings — the United States aggressively expanded. The effort instead triggered the Civil War, as the balance of power between slave and free states became impossible to maintain. . . .

For Americans used to the comforting myth of an exceptional union boldly leading humanity in a better direction, this account may sting. Taylor doesn’t seek to salve such pain, but neither has he written a polemic. Diligently researched, engagingly written and refreshingly framed, “American Republics” is an unflinching historical work that shows how far we’ve come toward achieving the ideals in the Declaration — and the deep roots of the opposition to those ideals.

In addition, Taylor did a podcast interview with Lewis Lapham.

Ferling Reputations for Clinton and Cornwallis

I claim only a basic knowledge of the southern campaigns of the Revolutionary War, but I’ve long had the impression that these are the standard assessments of two British commanders:

• Gen. Lord Cornwallis, despite losing at Yorktown, was a competent commander dealing with a nearly impossible mission and undercut by lack of resources from New York.
• Gen. Sir Henry Clinton was a whiny, self-justifying subordinate who wheedled his way into being commander-in-chief; he was then over his head and bears the blame for not sending Cornwallis enough resources.

John Ferling has just written a new book about that part of the war which, according to Thomas E. Ricks in the New York Times Book Review, turns those judgments on their head:

In WINNING INDEPENDENCE: The Decisive Years of the Revolutionary War, 1778-1781 (Bloomsbury, $40), the veteran historian John Ferling sets out to redeem the reputation of Sir Henry Clinton, the British general who lost that war. As Ferling notes, the conventional view is that Clinton was “capricious, indecisive, overly cautious, muddled and confused, persistently inactive, lacking a strategic vision or a master plan and fatally inhibited by his subliminal sense of inadequacy.” The enjoyment of reading this huge volume is watching Ferling make his case that Clinton was instead “an accomplished, diligent and thoughtful commander.”

Writing with admirable clarity, Ferling contends that Clinton’s “Southern strategy” of shifting the focus of British military operations to Georgia and the Carolinas was an intelligent move. It might have succeeded, he calculates, had Gen. Charles Cornwallis, who led that effort in the field, not been both mendacious and insubordinate.

Had the Southern gambit worked, Ferling states, the British might have been able to retain much of the South in a peace settlement — perhaps holding on to Georgia, Florida and the Carolinas — and so whittle down the new United States into a precarious position for survival. But Cornwallis undercut Clinton’s strategy by disregarding orders and marching off to Virginia and then getting trapped there, at Yorktown, by the arrival of a French fleet. In the clumsy hands of Cornwallis, Ferling charges, the South became “a quagmire for the British.”

As I recall, many traditional assessments of Cornwallis went on to point out that he was a competent commander in India later in his career. I wonder if wider regret about British imperialism in India makes that seem less of an accomplishment.

A Critical Review in The Critical Review

In 1764 James Otis, Jr., published The Rights of the British Colonies Asserted and Proved, which based the campaign against Parliament’s new colonial revenue laws on the ideas of natural rights and (though this term wouldn’t be formulated for another four years) “no taxation without representation.”

The Critical Review was a British political magazine founded in 1756. It was firmly conservative or Tory. The founding editor was the doctor and writer Tobias Smollett, but he left in 1763 and I’m not sure who helmed the magazine the following year.

In November 1764 The Critical Review ran a critique of Otis’s argument. Typical for the magazine, much of the space devoted to that book consisted of long extracts from it. At the end the reviewer wrote:

The author then…affirms, that government is founded on the necessity of our nature; and that the supreme absolute power existing in, and presiding over, every society, is originally and ultimately in the people, who cannot freely nor rightfully renounce that divine right. These are maxims far from being new; but as the author endeavours to prove that ancestry cannot renounce the rights of posterity, we wish he had thrown in an argument to demonstrate, by a parity of reasoning, that posterity ought to renounce all benefits from ancestry.

Perhaps our reader may be curious to know the definition Mr. Otis gives of a plantation, or colony; which, he says, ‘is a settlement of subjects in a territory disjoined or remote from the mother country, and may be made by private adventurers, or the public; but in both cases the colonists are entitled to as ample rights, liberties, and priviledges, as the subjects of the mother country are, and, in some respects, to more.’

We are next entertained with a dissertation on the natural rights of colonists, where the author gives us some quotations from Grotius, Puffendorff, Domat, Strahan, and others; who, it is plain, knew nothing of the British constitution, or of the relation which our colonies have with the mother country. The sum total of what our author contends for, seems to be that our ‘northern colonies, who are without one representative in the house of commons, should not be taxed by the British parliament.' Good Mr. Otis, give Great-Britain fair play, and do not put into the heads of Leeds, Hallifax, Birmingham, Sheffield, that part of the duchy of Lancaster which lies at the very gates of the Royal Palace, and many other places of great opulence, that they are not bound to pay any taxes imposed by a British parliament, because they have no representative in that body.

We applaud Mr. Otis’s zeal, and should, be glad that he had published a scheme of reciprocal independence between our colonies and Great Britain, which may be done in the way of debtor and creditor, and which very possibly might awaken him and his vigorous friends from their visionary dreams of independency upon their mother country. There is nothing like fair counter-reckoning, good Mr. Otis.

I don’t find “Our system is unfair to lots of people, not just you” to be a convincing argument not to change. The reviewer rests his dismissal mostly on the idea that the North American colonists had inherited a great many advantages from the British system, political and economic, and should be grateful rather than seeking equality based on philosophical principles.

Atlas of Boston History Wins Historic New England Book Prize

Historic New England (formerly the Society for the Protection of New England Antiquities) has awarded its 2020 Book Prize to The Atlas of Boston History, edited by Nancy S. Seasholes and written by her and a bevy of contributors, including me.

The society honors “a book that advances the understanding of life in New England from the past to today by examining its architecture, landscape, and material culture.”

About this year’s winner it says:

The book traces the city’s history and geography from the last ice age to the present with fifty-seven beautifully rendered maps. Thirty-five experts in a variety of fields contributed to the publication. From ancient glaciers to landmaking schemes and modern infrastructure projects, the city has been transformed almost constantly over the centuries. The Atlas of Boston History explores the history of the city through its physical, economic, and demographic changes, and social and cultural developments.

Historic New England also named two titles as Honor Books for the year:

• Connecticut Architecture: Stories of 100 Places by Christopher Wigren of Preservation Connecticut.
• The Paintings of J.O.J. Frost: An American Story by Bethe Lee Moulton.

All three could of course make good holiday gifts for the right people.

In other present-day news, last week I spoke to Bradley Jay and Prof. Robert Allison for the Revolution 250 podcast. I was prepared to speak about the Boston Massacre trials and other Sestercentennial events. But Bob and Bradley wanted to talk mostly about my projects, so you’ll learn more about the background to this blog. Find the episode here or wherever you download podcasts.

A London View of the Electoral College Controversy

At the London School of Economics blog, Kyle Scott reviewed Prof. Alexander Keyssar’s new book, Why Do We Still Have the Electoral College?

Dr. Scott wrote:

Throughout the book, Keyssar draws upon congressional testimony, third party research and news accounts to debunk common objections to electoral college reform. Supporters of the Electoral College argue that its reform would abandon the ideals of the US founders, disadvantage smaller states, create a rural/urban divide in the electorate, disadvantage minorities living in poor urban communities and violate the republican (as opposed to democratic) ideals embodied in the US Constitution. States’ rights and federalism would also be threatened by electoral college reforms.

The author provides convincing counterexamples and enough evidence for the reader to conclude that, while reform would be a departure from the norm, it would be neither an unprecedented departure nor a stark break from the past. . . .

Seven of the seventeen amendments ratified after the Bill of Rights have increased representation and removed barriers between the populace and elected officials, and five of the seventeen have dealt directly with the office of the president. If we don’t count the 18th and 21st (concerning the prohibition of alcohol and its repeal, respectively), one-third of all amendments ratified after the Bill of Rights have dealt directly with the office of the president and more than a third have increased representation.

The reader is left to wonder what is unique about the Electoral College that separates it from amendments like Women’s Suffrage (19th), Direct Election of Senators (17th), Presidential Tenure (22nd) or Abolition of the Poll Tax Qualification in Federal Elections (24th). All these amendments were controversial and had to overcome entrenched interests — including those with racially discriminatory motivations — in order to be ratified.

While praising Keyssar for “original insight on how racism can be a motivating factor in preventing reform,” Scott concludes that it’s unfortunate that the book didn’t compare the stalled attempts to reform the Electoral College with the successful campaigns for those other amendments.

But I’m at a loss to think what “racially discriminatory motivations” drove opposition to the 22nd Amendment limiting Presidents to two terms in 1947 to 1951. Likewise, the 17th and 19th Amendments certainly increased representation, but within a system already permeated with racial discrimination.

It strikes me that the most fruitful comparisons would be to the 23rd Amendment, extending the Presidential vote to citizens in the District of Columbia (1960-1961, opposed in the Southeast), and the 24th Amendment, barring poll taxes (1962-1964, largely opposed in the Southeast). The former even had a direct effect on the Electoral College—but of course also worked within that system rather than making broader changes.

Charles Royster and the Rage Militaire

The historian Charles Royster died in early February. He was the author of Light-Horse Harry Lee and the Legacy of the American Revolution (1981), The Fabulous History of the Dismal Swamp Company: A Story of George Washington’s Time (1999), and studies of the Civil War.

But the book historians will most remember Royster for is A Revolutionary People at War: The Continental Army and American Character, 1775–1783 (1979). Eighteen years after its publication, Joseph R. Fischer wrote on the H-War listserv that it “continues to rank as the definitive work on the Continental Army’s relationship with the American people.”

This month, twenty-two years after that encomium, Michael Lynch wrote in an appreciation on his Past in the Present blog:

I first encountered Royster’s work when I was fresh out of college. At that time I was a newly-minted aspiring historian who had decided to study the American Revolution. On a family trip to Williamsburg I found a copy of A Revolutionary People at War in a bookstore. It probably had a bigger impact on me than any academic book I’ve read, whether at that time or since. It was one of my first experiences with a work of history that asked such probing questions and constructed such meaningful answers.

Sometimes, when you’re just beginning to engage with a field, a book will smash its way into your intellect like an asteroid, but then you revisit it later when you’re more seasoned and find the magic’s worn off. You decide it must have made a big impression only because you read it when you were green and had a narrow frame of reference. That’s never been the case with me and A Revolutionary People. Every time I take it off the shelf, it’s as powerful and insightful as it seemed before I started graduate school. To this day, I think it’s an unparalleled analysis of the Continental Army and its role in defining what the Revolution meant.

Focusing as I do on the start of the war, I find the most helpful concept from Royster’s book his emphasis on the rage militaire that energized Patriots in 1775. That phrase was the title of his first chapter. It’s cited widely by other authors. Royster studied how that feeling fell apart over the next year and a half, and what thoughts and feelings replaced it.

That’s not just a story of the army—it’s also a story of the society that produced, sustained, grumbled about, and reabsorbed that army. As Gaines Foster wrote in his obituary for the American Historical Association, “Charlie always bristled at being termed a ‘military historian,’ although he would admit that he studied ‘war and society.’”

Arming America: How “the Controversy Arose”

As I described yesterday, in 2002 Emory University asked three outside scholars to investigate charges of “failures of scholarly care and integrity” against Michael Bellesiles, author of Arming America.

Those scholars were academic heavyweights: Stanley N. Katz of Princeton, Hanna H. Gray of the University of Chicago, and Laurel Thatcher Ulrich of Harvard. They had the assistance of a graduate student who visited archives in Massachusetts, checked other sources, and reran calculations.

That committee filed their report (P.D.F. download) in July. Emory University released it in October. On the same day, Bellesiles resigned.

In his interview last year with Daniel Gullotta for the Age of Jackson podcast, Bellesiles made some comments about that report and other criticism of his book. I decided to assess those remarks against the historical record.

Bellesiles told Gullotta:

The controversy arose because seventeen years ago, there was a flood in Bowden Hall at Emory University in Atlanta, which severely damaged the offices of numerous professors in the history and philosophy departments, including mine. Most of the original notes for my book Arming America were destroyed in that flood. And within days, opponents of the book picked up on this loss to argue that I had never conducted the research supporting three paragraphs in the book that concern probate records.

The sprinkler-pipe flood happened in April 2000, nineteen (not seventeen) years before this conversation. Arming America was published in early September 2000, so “opponents of the book” couldn’t have responded to the flood “within days” because the book didn’t yet exist. But of course we may not recall exact details of a difficult time.

Here’s the sequence of events as best I can recreate it. Bellesiles published a paper on gun ownership in early America in the Journal of American History in 1996. Its evidence included travel accounts and probate inventories. Clayton E. Cramer, a graduate student with whom Bellesiles had corresponded about gun laws, then wrote to the journal listing other travel accounts that contradicted the paper’s findings. Bellesiles replied by dismissing Cramer’s criticism as politically motivated.

Meanwhile, Bellesiles had agreed with the Knopf division of Random House to publish what became Arming America. The July 1999 Economist reported on the upcoming book. In December, Charlton Heston, president of the National Rifle Association, sniped at Bellesiles’s work. The editing and production process on the book must have also begun in 1999. That sprinkler pipe burst in April 2000, making news only in the Emory community. In that same month, the New York Times reported on Bellesiles’s intriguing conclusions.

Arming America was officially published in September 2000, receiving prominent and mostly positive reviews in the mainstream press. As early as 30 August, Prof. James Lindgren of Northwestern University wrote to Bellesiles with questions about his research since he’d been working on the same questions using probate inventories. On 19 September, Bellesiles sent Lindgren an email saying, among other things, that the office flood had destroyed his notes. That appears to have been the first link between the burst pipe and the probate data, and it came from Bellesiles himself. (Subsequently, the Emory committee found, Bellesiles made a “disavowal” of some other statements in those 30 August and 19 September emails to Lindgren.)

The first public mention of that flood’s effect on the debate that I’ve found was a draft of Lindgren and Justin Lee Heather’s essay “Counting Guns in Early America” dated 28 December. Some critics of the book were indeed skeptical of Bellesiles’s explanation about the loss of his probate data—some had to be convinced there even was an office flood. But Lindgren and others accepted, if only for argument, that Bellesiles had indeed counted probate records on yellow pads as he described and included that in their analyses of his work. That was sloppy technique and the numbers still didn’t add up, they said.

But that aspect of the book wasn’t where the “controversy arose” first. Cramer had objected to Bellesiles’s conclusions back in 1997. After the book appeared, Cramer expanded on his criticism, finding more omitted and distorted sources. As a software engineer, he used his expertise with computers to set up webpages sharing those findings. Unfortunately for the appearance of political leanings, Cramer located his pages within the website of the Golden Gate United National Rifle Association, making it easy for Bellesiles and his defenders to dismiss the complaints.

Cramer, as a graduate student in California, didn’t have the resources to try to replicate most of Bellesiles’s probate research in the east. But he found plenty of other details in Arming America to criticize. Lindgren and his team had already worked in some of those probate archives, so they could analyze what data Bellesiles reported and find discrepancies. Eventually formal reviews in scholarly journals voiced more doubts, though most didn’t appear until late 2001 or 2002, after Arming America had received the Bancroft Prize.

I’ve always been struck by how Lindgren’s critique carried much more weight than Cramer’s. According to Bellesiles in his interview with Gullotta:

Now, I think the reason they picked on the probate records is because those are the most obscure of all the materials I use, that pretty much require you to go to the individual archives in order to examine them. It’s not something that could easily be verified by going to a good research university library.

Except that Cramer found a lot wrong with Arming America by “going to a good research university library.” Bellesiles’s ongoing emphasis on the book’s small section about probate inventories gives the false impression that no one had found other problems with the book.

There are better explanations of why Lindgren’s criticism got more traction within the academic world than Cramer’s. Lindgren was a professor at Northwestern. Cramer was a graduate student at Sonoma State University. Lindgren wasn’t a proponent of gun ownership in contemporary America while Cramer was. Lindgren’s argument rested mostly (but not wholly) on numbers. Cramer’s critique was largely about words, which can seem more open to interpretation. But isn’t quoting words out of context just as inaccurate as reporting a false count of wills?

Whatever the reason, we can see that Emory University gave more weight to the Lindgren critique. All five of the questions it tasked the outside committee with examining involved “probate records” of some sort. Furthermore, the committee noted that its mandate covered “ONLY” those questions. (In Appendix B, Part 3, the research assistant did address discrepancies with travel narratives that Lindgren had noted, but disagreed with parts of his assessment.)

TOMORROW: Bellesiles’s comments on the committee’s conclusions.

Arming America Twenty Years On

As my Sestercentennial postings from last fall recounted, the last part of the year 1769 in Boston was punctuated with gunfire:

• a shot from a British soldier’s musket during the Neck Riot.
• two pistol shots during the merchants’ assault on John Mein.
• at least one more musket shot that night while a mob carted around sailor George Gailer.

There were no serious injuries from those gunshots, much less deaths. Nonetheless, they showed that violence in Boston was becoming more lethal. And indeed, the first two months of 1770 would bring the shooting deaths of Christopher Seider and then five people in the Boston Massacre.

Back in 2000, Michael Bellesiles published a study titled Arming America: The Origins of a National Gun Culture. It received prominent pre-publication blurbs and lots of newspaper reviews, most of them (but not all) laudatory. At the time, I looked at the book for what it said about pre-Revolutionary Boston and was surprised to see this statement on page 177:

The only incidence of gunfire in the long decade before the Revolution came in Boston in 1770, when British soldiers opened fire on an angry crowd and killed five men.

I already knew that Boston alone provided several counterexamples to that blanket statement. Bellesiles had apparently missed not only the non-fatal shots of 1769 but Ebenezer Richardson shooting a child from his window—not to mention James Otis shooting out his own window two months later.

Back then, the main platform for discussion among historians was listservs and other forms of email groups. (A few years later, blogs took over, with Boston 1775 among them. A few years after that, and most of the discussion moved to Twitter, with podcasts gaining ground.) I noted that mistake in the book on H-Net’s OIEAHC listserv (now H-Early-America) in October 2000 and probably on the Revlist group on Yahoo! as well.

During those months, however, I wasn’t ready to write off Bellesiles’s entire book. Those examples of more gunfire in Boston didn’t necessarily negate Arming America’s larger argument because it claimed that there were more guns in port towns than in interior farming communities. The unwelcome stationing of the army regiments in Boston in 1768-1770 definitely made it an exceptional place.

I also wasn’t ready to conclude that such errors were evidence that Bellesiles had knowingly misrepresented the historical record—not without more solid evidence. As long as there was a way to reconcile the evidence he cited with what others were bringing to light, I felt we should consider that before deciding the only explanation was fraud.

At the same time, I found myself speaking up in the online discussions for Bellesiles’s harshest critics, reminding scholars not to dismiss them because they came from outside academia without considering the evidence.

As time went on, it became clear that Bellesiles’s evidence was full of holes. The book’s citations didn’t support its claims. A burst pipe in his Emory University office building had destroyed his notes on probate inventories, he said. (There was indeed such a disaster.) But then other researchers found that his counts of those inventories didn’t add up—mathematically couldn’t add up. Some of the archives he listed as having consulted didn’t exist.

In that context, what might have seemed like careless errors—overlooking the gunfire in pre-Revolutionary Boston, misreading accounts of life on the frontier, missing examples of gun crimes in the courts—came together in a more ominous pattern. On the H-Net listservs I posted messages about how I found Bellesiles’s explanations unconvincing, which prompted some pearl-clutching for a week and also produced one of the first academic citations of my work.

In 2002 Columbia University revoked the Bancroft Prize it had awarded Bellesiles for Arming America. Emory commissioned three respected historians to review particular accusations about his work—not all of them, just those raised by other academics and most easily tested. Random House stopped publishing the book, though Soft Skull Press issued a paperback edition with Bellesiles’s corrections and response to his critics (the edition shown above).

Last year, Daniel Gullotta of the Age of Jackson podcast tracked down Bellesiles and interviewed him at length following a discussion of the book with one of its early critics, Joyce Lee Malcolm. The transcript of the second half of the Bellesiles interview was published on the Contingent Magazine website. And I found myself wading back into those waters.

TOMORROW: Assessing claims in that interview.

Online Events and Videos While We Stay Home

With the pandemic, almost every historical site, museum, and society that hosted events has now pivoted to organizing and promoting online events.

Sometimes that means an interview with a historian or other expert at home, produced over a platform like Zoom. Sometimes it’s a video of the site recorded gingerly at two arms’ lengths. Sometimes it’s an older lecture, a virtual tour, or another offering.

This makes it possible to enjoy the resources of distant historic sites, or to partake in two events scheduled for the same day and catch up on others. Of course, that adds tremendously to one’s list of events one really should get to. Even without being able to go anywhere, I’m starting to feel overscheduled.

Here’s the first installment of a periodic roundup of online events and resources that have caught my eye. I hope you find them educational, entertaining, or simply distracting enough.

Last month I chatted with Lee Wright and Carrie Lund of History Camp about what myths of the Battle of Lexington and Concord and what the British troops were seeking on 19 Apr 1775, the subject of The Road to Concord. This month Lee and Carrie had a similar conversation with Alexander Cain, expert on Lexington and Essex County’s response. More video interviews will follow every couple of weeks, and this Thursday there’s a history trivia contest.

Minute Man National Historical Park’s “Virtual Patriots’ Day” videos are all available now, and Jim Hollister is continuing to offer “Ask a Ranger” question-and-answer sessions each Friday.
https://www.facebook.com/MinuteManNPS/

The Paul Revere House has ongoing audio and radio series.

Check out History Summit for self-produced videos from the authors of over two dozen recently published history books.

Mount Vernon has deep pockets and one of the most extensive livestream video programs with different themes for each weekday:

• Mansion Mondays – Exploring different areas of the Mansion.
• Teaching Tuesdays – For K-12 students, teachers, and parents.
• Washington Wednesdays – Dive into a different piece of Washington history.
• Tranquil Thursdays – Enjoy the sights & sounds of Mount Vernon.
• Casual Fridays – We’ll do something new & different each week!

I get the feeling someone there watched The New Mickey Mouse Club as a kid.

Becoming Most Wanted

This month brings a new picture book about Samuel Adams and John Hancock: Most Wanted, written by Sarah Jane Marsh and illustrated by Edwin Fotheringham.

That same team previously created Thomas Paine and the Dangerous Word. Fotheringham also illustrated Those Rebels, John and Tom, written by Barbara Kerley.

All these books are in the genre called “picture book biography,” which introduces kids in the early elementary-school grades to notable figures. The mode emphasizes lively storytelling and historical accuracy—which can be at odds, especially when subjects’ lives were not well detailed. (There’s ongoing debate in the field about just how accurate every detail must be.)

I’m highlighting Most Wanted: The Revolutionary Partnership of John Hancock and Samuel Adams because back in 2018 I had the pleasure of fact-checking the manuscript for the publisher. I’ve worked in publishing and even written for kids myself, so I can mix my nitpicky remarks about interpreting historical sources with some some realism about what’s feasible in a children’s book.

For instance, how to explain the Stamp Act in a picture book when it took me years to grasp it myself? And when a picture-book page contains one small paragraph of text? Most Wanted takes the editorial-cartoon approach, with Marsh explaining (in 35 words!) the purpose and scope of the law and Fotheringham sketching a giant sheet of stamped paper falling onto the colonists’ heads. Hancock’s comments on the law appear in italics to underscore how those words are documented to be his.

In fact, we checked all the quotes in the book. Marsh provided detailed source notes, and I dug further. Then a few months later I reviewed Fotheringham’s sketches and queries because he was just as concerned about depicting Hancock’s coach, wardrobe, natural hair, and other details correctly.

Most Wanted covers Adams and Hancock from the formation of their political partnership in the mid-1760s to their arrival at the Second Continental Congress ten years later. It describes the Stamp Act, the Liberty riot, the Massacre, and the Tea Party. But the climax of the book, taking up about a quarter of its 80 pages, is the drama of April 1775, as Hancock and Adams hole up in the parsonage at Lexington only to learn about redcoats marching their way. It’s therefore quite an appropriate book to share with young readers this month.