The Marketplace of Revolution

 T.H. Breen. The Marketplace of Revolution: How Consumer Politics Shaped American Independence. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2004.

Accounts of the origins of the American Revolution often struggle with how to portray--or explain--participation and support from masses of ordinary, free colonists. As Breen points out, ordinary people only appear in sporadically in standard accounts which focus on colonial leaders, assemblies, and published writings. Yet, without substantive willingness on the part of the masses, the Revolution never would have happened.

Breen's highly original interpretation of the coming of revolution locates the answer within the broadly shared social experience of participating in the growing Atlantic world economy as consumers. It was in the marketplace that diverse colonists from disparate parts of eastern North American found a common language of consumption, identity, and engagement. He does not argue that being consumers, in and of itself, radicalized colonial consumers. But the dynamic of being consumers pulled colonists out of their localized lives and, through the growing Atlantic economy, brought them into contact with British merchants and markets; and with each other as well. 

At the beginning of the eighteenth century, different colonial groups such as backwoods farmers in New Hampshire, Puritan shopkeepers in Boston, and slave-owning tobacco planters in Tidewater Virginia had little in common. But, in a process which began increasing both quantitatively and qualitatively in the middle third of the century, increasing participation in the consumer marketplace created opportunities for self-fashioning and expression, while simultaneously also creating a shared experience with far-flung strangers up and down the Atlantic seaboard and beyond.

Because Breen's argument is so radical, he takes pains to develop it methodically--this is a dense book, and the argument is developed slowly. Well over half the book is devoted to establishing the context--the "Empire of Goods" as he terms it--within which this revolutionary change of public consciousness will take place. The crux of this change is the development of trust; Breen convincingly argues that this is the missing element in nearly all previous historiography concerning the revolution. Until ordinary people in all thirteen mainland colonies could trust that strangers in different communities who were personally unknown to them would be willing to make the same sacrifices they were, revolutionary activity was bound to falter and fail.

The consumer boycott, then, was not a minor expression of broader ideological commitment to revolutionary activity--it was the mechanism by which that commitment was developed and learned. The experience of being consumers taught colonists how to work together for a shared purpose, and how to create a national identity where none previously had existed. 

Tobacco Culture

 T.H. Breen. Tobacco Culture: The Mentality of the Great Tidewater Planters on the Eve of Revolution. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985

Breen's classic work on the 'mental world of the great Tidewater planters the mid-eighteenth century Virginia" (p. xi) challenged the dichotomy which had evolved regarding the motivations of the Revolutionary elite. In previous generations, patriotic hagiographies about 'the Founders' were replaced by Progressive interpretations grounded in economics--that generation of historians looked at the massive personal debts that these planters had assumed, and rather cynically concluded that a desire to escape that debt lay at the very heart of their eventual drive for independence. Later historians would reject that argument, finding instead a clear-eyed commitment to Republican ideology. 

Breen argued that both sides had seen part of the mental world of the planters but missed the actual dynamic. And the reason they missed it, in his telling, was because they paid no mind to the lived realities these men experienced. They really were obsessed with debt, but what mattered less was a balance sheet-centered credits-and-debits reckoning, than their perception of debt and the ramifications of personal debt to their sense of self and their place in colonial Virginia society. At the same time, their adaptation of country-Whig ideology was not an abstract intellectual exercise; rather, their experience with the economics of being tobacco planters led them to an interpretive framework within which the extreme rhetoric of country Whig polemics (which was largely marginalized in the British society they were formulated in) resonated and made sense.

In threading this conceptual needle, Breen not only found a new way to understand the process that brought much of Virginia's planter elite to revolutionary activism; he also found a way to look at the relation between work and daily life to ideology and intellectual life. Breen notes that while historians of past generations presented the Virginia gentry as enlightened philosopher-Republicans, they were in fact agriculturalists who spent most of their waking hours attending to--and thinking about--their yearly tobacco crops. The work of being a planter was all-consuming, and scholars who ignore this have missed the context in which their political and ideological thinking occured.

Breen concludes that, while colonial discourse was moving into conflict with the British government even before the French and Indian War exacerbated previously untested areas of tension, it wasn't until 1772 that the Tidewater planters were fully brought to the conceptual point of overt conflict not just with the merchants they were indebted to, but Parliament and eventually the Crown. This shift in mentality was not a mindlessly materialist process, but the erosion of the traditional tobacco culture led the planters to uncomfortable conclusions which made it easier to consider breaking with the past. 

Old Dominion, New Commonwealth

 Ronald L. Heinemann, John G. Kolp, Anthony S. Parent Jr., William G. Shade. Old Dominion, New Commonwealth: A History of Virginia, 1607-2007. Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 2007.

For the 400th anniversary of the founding of Virginia, the University of Virginia Press brought forward a new narrative history of the Commonwealth for general readers as well as students. Written in collaboration by four historians (Heinemann assumed primary editorial duties as well, with assistance from Kolp), each of whom took a different chronological era, the book does a solid job of updating standard narrative accounts of Virginia social and political history, and was the first such general history of the state published since the 1970's.

The book is solidly written and the work and perspective of the four different historians rarely if ever seem in disagreement. Overall, the collective authorship focused on concisely telling a straightforward narrative centered on a handful of key themes, such as the ongoing conflict between progressive economic reforms and the deeply-rooted political and fiscal conservatism that has defined Virginia politics for generations. A work of synthesis, this volume is not only an excellent introduction for a reader completely unversed in Virginia's history, but would also be a useful corrective for older natives of the state who learned earlier narratives either through popular understanding, grade-school social studies, or outdated popular histories. All four authors at least make some effort to bring (then-) new scholarship into their accounts. 

But while solid and useful, the volume can also be a little unsatisfying. Partly that may be conceptual--the book is not merely a political history, but politics are centered rather firmly in this account, and while a case could be made that this is appropriate as the polity of Virginia is the sole parameter of this study, the authors could have been more explicit about this point of view. 

However, this shortcoming may ultimately be an endemic feature of textbooks. The broader the scope, the thinner the analysis. The book's shortcomings mostly come into focus when the authors move away from a narrow focus on politics and economic development; consideration of issues of race in particular, while well-intentioned and generally sound, can almost seem perfunctory and contextually removed from the main thrust of the narrative. There is no way to tell even the political history of Virginia without reference to race, but the occasional attempts to broaden the story only highlight how little space the book allows for aspects of social and cultural life outside the narrow field of politics. And given that the book still comes in at well over 300 pages, that may be unavoidable. Textbooks which try to cover a wide range of historiography as well as the subject matter can end up spreading themselves too thin.

All in all, this is a very readable introduction to the subject, and can form a good temporal framework for further reading.

Internal Improvement

John Lauritz Larson. Internal Improvement: National Public Works and the Promise of Popular Government in the Early United States. Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 2001.

The first sentence of Larson's book is "Why create the American republic?" (1) Early Americans grappled with this question for decades. Repeated failures to create a comprehensive, national transportation network--which can b attributed to neither geography nor logistical challenges, but rather ideological barriers--demonstrate the degree to which this question was never clearly resolved.

 For roughly a century, Americans struggled to reconcile a sincere desire to live up to classical republican notions of disinterested public virtue with the demands and desires of an increasingly self-interested, market-oriented electorate. In Larson's telling, the rhetoric of republican virtue increasingly became a trap from which nationally-minded plans for internal improvement could not escape. Voters wanted a robust transportation infrastructure but feared the political mechanisms by which it could be built.

George Washington famously worried about the problems of western settlement without strong economic bonds between the seaboard East and the trans-Appalachian West. His support for a canal along the Potomac was national in scope; yet even he was unable to completely separate self-interest (his own landholdings would have benefited from such a project, if successfully implemented) from public-minded civic duty. And the Jeffersonian Republicans--quick to sniff out the slightest hint of hypocrisy from any Federalist less venerated than Washington (i.e., all of them)--were soon able to undo any notions of top-down internal improvements carried out by a natural aristocracy operating on some variant of noblisse oblige.

Which left the Republicans and eventually their Jacksonian heirs with the quandary of an electorate primed to fear "consolidation" and "corruption"--both of which would be easy to find in any government-controlled infrastructure project--in the abstract, yet desirous of internal improvements that local communities couldn't pay for.

In the end, the country stumbled out of the internal improvements era and into the Railroad Age--complete with robber barons like Jay Gould who achieved a level of "consolidation" and "corruption" far beyond the wildest schemes of Henry Clay--without realizing how it happened, or appreciating their own role in making that consequence inevitable.

Democratizing the Old Dominion

William G. Shade. Democratizing the Old Dominion: Virginia and the Second Party System, 1824-1861. Charlottesville, VA: The University of Virginia Press, 1996.

This history of the rise and fall of the Second Party System in Virginia is also a history of antebellum Virginia's dynamic market economy, and the different geographic, ethnic, sectarian, and class divisions (and coalitions) in the Commonwealth. Shade argues that while national issues were the initial motivating factor which led to the creation of new electoral coalitions which eventually became the Democratic and Whig parties, the Second Party System grew out of both a dynamic market economy and an increase in democratization which largely predated the 1851 state constitution which formally (and belatedly) expanded the electorate to nearly all white men.

The latter was a development which happened earlier in most states, but the delay did not indicate a passive political society. Virginia's first state constitution had been adopted in 1776, and from the beginning there was concern about suffrage restriction and the basis for representation. As the white population grew more diversified in occupation the old property basis for representation (slaves, of course, being the most valuable property in question) the continued dominance by eastern slave owners became more glaring. As the white population continued to move west of the Blue Ridge Mountains--a region where slavery was relatively rare and the population was under-represented in the legislature--calls for reform continued for decades. The eastern conservative elite held off reform as long as they could, but in 1829 they were forced to accede to a convention.

The result of that convention was a state constitution which, unlike so many other state constitutions of the same era, did not fully establish the white male Herrenvolk democracy that was a hallmark of the Jacksonian era soon to come. The conservatives were able to stave off all but the most superficial of compromises and maintain the imbalance of power in favor of the older, slave-holding East.

Yet, this was not the end of the story. Shade argues that the economy of Jacksonian and antebellum Virginia was much healthier and more dynamic than later "old South" mythologizing allowed for; the economy grew along with demands for increased responsiveness from elected officials, who responded in kind.

The two new parties both became well-established, with regular party apparatus such as newspapers, committees, networks of influential supporters, and politicians committed to advancing the policies and priorities of their respective party. Much divided Democrats from Whigs, but the issue of slavery wasn't a fault line for much of this period.

Neither was geography, for while each party had areas of strength both had a presence in their opponent's strongholds. And while the Democrats were the majority party statewide, their advantage was never overwhelming. The Whigs could only occasionally gain control of the state government but they could never be completely shut out of power, either.

It was the east versus west division which ultimately broke the system; the issue over secession versus Union turned the white-majority, non-slaveholding West against the East during the second and final vote on secession in April of 1861. The Second Two Party System died, and with its demise was lost an alternate story of Virginia during the antebellum era which later generations of state leaders aggressively sought to obscure. Shade's account was one of many which forced a reconsideration of the "declining Old Dominion" thesis which dominated for so long.

The Political Culture of the American Whigs

Daniel Walker Howe. The Political Culture of the American Whigs. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1979.

Howe's study was a landmark in restoring the reputation of the American Whig Party; a project which in retrospect seems to have been long overdue. This is an intellectual history of a political party which several generations of historians had dismissed as being without intellectual substance. It was therefore both an examination of political culture as well as a restoration project.

Because this is a book concerned with abstract concepts and often unstated assumptions, it might have become bogged down in purely theoretical language, but Howe solved that problem by framing his themes in short biographies. As he puts it, "One of the postulates of this book is that social tensions mirror individual tensions. By examining the lives of individual Whigs, we can locate problems that the party as a whole confronted." Using the careers of notable Whigs such as Henry Clay, John Quincy Adams, Alexander Stephens, and others not only adds a narrative element to what otherwise might have been a mass of supposition and abstracted inquiry, it also emphasizes the degree to which Whig ideology was a product of intellectual and cultural factors along with the economic and social indicators which traditionally defined Whigs in the popular and scholarly imagination.

Howe's central argument is that the Whigs had a coherent and rational ideology which was grounded in a defense of a particular understanding of the relationship between society and the market economy. That balance became untenable by the 1850's, not only due to rising sectional tensions over slavery, but because the growth of the market economy and the industrial revolution undermined the authority and legitimacy of an older, paternal approach to entrepreneurial capitalism.

1877: America's Year of Living Violently

Michael A. Bellisiles. 1877: America's Year of Living Violently. New York: The New Press, 2010.

Ten years after the publication of his controversial Arming America, Michael A. Bellesiles returned to the public eye with a much less contentious account of what most historians would agree was indeed an exceptionally violent and unsettled year in American history. Eight years after its appearance, none of the controversy over sources and integrity which rightly plagued the reputation of his previous book have arisen. This is a solid, well-supported account of a very bad time in American history.

The book is organized thematically, framed by brief vignettes from the beginning and end of the year. Each chapter covers a particular issue or event--the aftermath of the contested 1876 Presidential election, which led to increased sectional and partisan tensions which many thought would lead to another civil war; the violent re-imposition of white supremacy in the former Confederacy; military actions against Western Indian tribes and Mexican-American citizens; the violent suppression of the labor movement and Women's suffrage; and the increase in homicide and the prevalence of guns in the civilian population.

Bellesiles, doesn't cover much new ground, but he does tie together many different events through extensive research of contemporary newspaper coverage, creating a convincing picture of an overarching national conversation about--and anxiety over--violence overtaking the nation and society. Each chapter is a well-written summary of an important facet of the story, but the book gathers its strength from the overall effect of a year which most Americans were happy to see the end of, but which also shaped much of the social, legal, political, and economic inequalities which marked the next several decades of American history.