Defiance of the Patriots

Benjamin L. Carp. Defiance of the Patriots: The Boston Tea Party & The Making of America.

New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010.

Despite being a famous event that almost every American is familiar with, the Boston Tea Party has not generated a great volume of scholarly literature. Carp notes in the “Further Reading” section of the bibliography that his book is the first academic work on the matter since The Boston Tea Party by Benjamin Woods Larabee, published in 1966. Despite Carp’s claims to the events larger significance (much of which is certainly justified) of the incident, the fact remains that the Boston Tea Party itself was a brief incident in a larger story. The story Carp tells is interesting and even illuminating, but it doesn’t challenge any general historiographical consensus on the Revolutionary period.

This is not a criticism—Carp makes no claims that a clearer picture of the Tea Party will force a rethinking of any accepted interpretations of the Revolution or American history in general. Instead, he is mainly interested—beyond the telling of the story itself—in a warts-and-all account which can complicate subsequent references to the event by those who would use the Tea Party as a symbol of protest for a wide spectrum of national, political, social, and ideological causes.

He points out that Americans struggled with the memory of the event from the beginning—was it a righteous outburst of patriotic resistance, or an extra-legal resort to property destruction, vandalism, and terrorism? Carp leaves that to the reader—that ambiguity is the real legacy of the Tea Party, perhaps, although he also refers to the democratic aspects of a mass effort carried out by men from a wide spectrum of colonial society, with broad support (both tacit and otherwise) from society at large.

In the end, knowing the story of the Tea Party helps illuminate the story of the outbreak of the American Revolution; this is a fairly modest and un-revolutionary goal, but this well-written and readable book does add some nuance and color to a crucial turning point in the imperial crisis of the early 1770s, as well as giving contemporaries who harken back to the original event a fuller and more richly nuanced version of those events than sloganeering activists generally grant it.

The King's Three Faces

Brendan McConville. The King's Three Faces: The Rise & Fall of Royal America, 1688-1776.
Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press (for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, Williamsburg, VA), 2006.

This book is a cultural history of a colonial America which has been completely forgotten, and which most Americans have no idea ever existed. The “Royal America” that the subtitle refers to was a colonial society which defined its relationship to the British Empire (the first British Empire, as McConville repeatedly stresses) through a primarily emotional attachment to the monarchy. This royal attachment grew stronger in America even as society in England itself was developing a greater attachment to Parliament as the locus of British sovereignty and the defender of British liberties. It did not break until the very eve of the American Revolution.

This view of colonists as arch-monarchists in an Empire formally committed to legislative supremacy contrasted sharply with the generally accepted view of an eighteenth-century proto-America drifting away from the British system and developing its own republican traditions and values. Because this is a history of a mentalitie McConville focuses on a cultural history of what colonial Americans were reading, hearing, and seeing—in an attempt to recreate what they were feeling. Their tie to the King was primarily an emotional one; it had to be, as their understanding was at odds with British constitutional theory and practice as it was developing in the mother country.

This came to be because the empire early on relied on such emotional bonds, in the wake of the Glorious Revolution, to hold the disparate and multi-cultural empire together in the absence of a robust administrative infrastructure. Emotional bonds replaced institutional ones. This system might have worked in the long run, but in the American colonies demographic realities mitigated against that possibility—the population grew much too fast for the halting growth of the imperial administration to provide opportunities for ambitious young colonials. As a result, the colonies developed a sizeable “ruling class” which wasn’t allowed to rule—a colonial elite which was increasingly shut out of the sort of offices which provided precious social status.

The break between colonists and the distant King whom they mistakenly identified as the protector of their liberties and their ally against what they perceived as Parliamentary tyranny was much-delayed, and all the more anguished and violent when it came. The destruction of royal iconography destroyed much of the material culture which might otherwise have survived to remind us of this history, but depth of that emotional purging can still be seen in the angry and defiant wording of the Declaration of Independence

The Minutemen and their World

Robert A. Gross. The Minutemen and their World. New York: Hill and Wang, 1976, 2001.

This "25th anniversary" reprint of a classic of social history adds a forward by Alan Taylor and a new afterword by the author; both of which put the book into the context of the time (as a then-novel melding of the quantitative methodologies of the "new social history" with more a narrative-based approach than most other practitioners were considering) as well as giving Gross an opportunity to tell the story of how the book came to be.

The book itself is short, readable, and relatively straightforward. In brief, Gross portrays Concord as a place which was deeply local in outlook until very close to the outbreak of the war; the locals were little involved or interested in the world beyond their borders (although in the Afterword, Gross concedes that subsequently he has learned that he probably exaggerated the level of isolation in the community), and deeply committed to traditional, hierarchical social norms. In fact, he argues that their involvement in the Revolution--once the movement for liberty came to Concord--was motivated by an effort to defend tradition as they understood it.

However, there were two reasons why that didn't work. First-the world as they knew it was already changing, and in fact he does a great job illustrating the demographic and economic pressures which were behind the deep anxiety the community was marked by at the time. Secondly, the logic of the Revolution itself created new dynamics which would allow--or even force--many locals to look forward to new opportunities rather than backward to an idealized past.

The republican unity which Concord sought to defend was an organic whole in which the 'individual' was expected to defer his or her own interests and even opinions to local society as a whole. And it was a unity which was proudly local in outlook. Yet the Revolution produced a world in which the individual would increasingly reign supreme, and the community would be more deeply engaged in--and its interests dictated by--the outside world than ever before.

The triumph of this book is that Gross rescued the Minutemen from the gauzy haze of patriotic myth. He restores them to their own complex world and their own complicated lives.

The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution

Bernard Bailyn. The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution. [Enlarged Edition] 
Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1967, 1992.

Bailyn's book, which is now an acknowledged classic, still stands the test of time as a useful intellectual history of the Revolutionary period, in spite of its tendency towards a "Whiggish" if not teleological viewpoint. Originating as an introduction to a multi-volume publication reprinting an enormous collection of pamphlets from the Revolutionary era, Bailyn argued that this literature presented a broader view of the intellectual climate of the era, as well as new insights into the well-known literature scholars were already familiar with.

Bailyn makes his viewpoint clear in the first chapter; on page 19 he states that

"What was essentially involved in the American Revolution was not the disruption of society, with all the fear, despair, and hatred that that entails, but the realization, the comprehension and fulfillment, of the inheritance of liberty and of what was taken to be America's destiny in the context of world history."

This is problematic, not just because Bailyn is staking out a position very different than that argued later by his own protege Gordon Wood--let along later scholars who would argue that even Wood is essentially Whiggish although he did regard the Revolution as truly "revolutionary" rather than merely the culmination of a logical intellectual process, but also because it is clear that while Bailyn's study pays a great deal of attention to what a wide swath of the literate colonial population was writing and publishing, he spends a great deal less trying to unravel who was reading these pamphlets, as well as how they were reading them.

That said, his argument still merits attention even a full half-century after its initial publication. Given that it is such a widely read classic, it probably isn't necessary to recount the outlines of his major points. I will, however, note a couple of core strengths the book still possesses.

First, the emphasis on both the Enlightenment as experienced in the provincial world, as well as the legacy of the first Great Awakening would have been interesting at that; the way in which Bailyn argues that these two seemingly incompatible ideologies actually shared many common assumptions and often reinforced each other in the ways they played out socially and culturally is a fascinating insight--a reminder that ideologies often "work" in ways that don't necessarily fit preconceived notions of how they "should."

Secondly, the ways in which the colonials understand English common law in their own context is fascinating.

And finally, of course, there is his argument that the legacy of the Glorious Revolution of 1688 largely framed and informed the intellectual climate the colonists worked in--and the ways in which they understand their place in the British Empire. This might be the most important legacy of Bailyn's book, and while I take issue with many aspects of his conceptual approach, this book still merits a great deal of respect for having opened this avenue of interpretation.

From Colonials to Provincials

Ned C. Landsman. From Colonials to Provincials: American Thought and Culture, 1680-1760. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000, 1997.

Landsman's book is a brief intellectual history of a period which he acknowledges has been described as a "Death Valley" in terms of interest. On the surface, this is an understandable bias--the era was not marked by the tumult, change, and conflict of the early decades in American colonial history; and of course it is followed by the much more dynamic and dramatic years leading up to the American Revolution. 

However, he argues that while the era might have been devoid of obvious drama and clear narrative interest, there was a great deal "going on" in the intellectual life of the colonies. When the era began, the colonists were isolated, both geographically and culturally, from the center of English culture. When it concludes, they are British subjects, intimately connected to--and involved in--the cultural and intellectual life of the Empire. This was a complex process that occurred on many different levels; Landsman is concerned with the intellectual changes which fed, directed, and helped create this conceptual shift.

Central to his argument is the meaning of the term "provincial", which here has a less negative or condescending meaning than it largely does in a contemporary context. Landsman is speaking of the "provinces" which developed in the wake of the 1707 Act of Union which, among other things, served to create a 'British' context in which subjects outside of the "metropolitan" (London, of course, but also the main centers of English culture and commerce) lived, and from which they conceptualized their place in this new political, social, and cultural sphere. It wasn't merely the North American (and Caribbean) colonists who were "provincials"--the title also applied to the Scots, Protestants in Ulster, and even some more remote parts of England proper.

The Scots are particularly important here, as the links between the Scottish and American colonial intelligentsia were frequent and robust--writers, theologians, officials, philosophers, etc. from both sides were in frequent contact with each other, through letter writing, literature, business, and personal relationships. Scotland was a poor country with a sizable educated professional class in need of opportunity; after the 1707 Union many of them increasingly sought those opportunities in the New World. 

Even as "provincials" were struggling--and often succeeding--to create enhanced roles for themselves in the newly-created "British" polity, other intellectual trends were in the works which would determine much of the climate in which they worked. Contrary to earlier beliefs that the Enlightenment was a narrowly elite intellectual event, confined to the Continent and largely to France, Landsman points out that historians today have a broader idea of what the Enlightenment was, where it happened, and who participated in it. In a chapter on the "republic of letters", he illustrates how a broad sector the literate public (and while literacy for this period is hard to measure, it was certainly relatively widespread) participated in the Enlightenment by engaging in "conversations" on a wide variety of questions moral, scientific, and so on. By focusing not just on what people were writing but also on what they were reading--and what their reactions to what they read were, when possible--Landsman is able to illustrate that there was indeed an American Enlightenment.

Aside from written culture--philosophy, science, history, even the relatively-new genre of the novel--the other arena in which provincial culture was worked out was in religion. Landsman goes over seemingly well-trod ground--the Great Awakening, the schisms in Puritan culture, the debate between Jonathan Edwards and Charles Chauncey, etc.--but puts this religious and theological history in a broader context. Parallel with the growth of Enlightenment thinking, the religious changes and controversies of this period helped develop a new culture in which a more self-consciously individualistic mode of thought developed. Provincials began to see themselves in new ways, and become more aware of their status as British subjects and their place within the larger imperial order.

This book has a lot to say about how colonial Americans learned to think about "liberty" in ways which would, ultimately, lead to revolution and independence.