From Resistance to Revolution

Pauline Maier. From Resistance to Revolution: Colonial Radicals and the Development of American Opposition to Britain, 1765-1776. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1991, 1972

The process by which once-loyal British subjects in the North American colonies became radicalized and turned against the government of a "mother country" in just a decade is the subject of Maier's now-classic study. By looking at published writings from the era as well as correspondence, she places the rise of the Patriot movement in the larger context of both British imperial history and the legal tradition colonists inherited.

The book is divided into three parts. Part One, "Traditions", recounts the heritage of acceptable resistance and public demonstrations against perceived governmental overreach which British law and custom had long tolerated and even protected. Understanding the forms in which colonial opposition to such British initiatives as the Stamp Act and so forth took is much easier when the reader is aware of this legacy.

Part Two, "Resistance", studies the early years of post-French and Indian War discontent and increasingly organized dissent in the context of British law and colonial conditions. The need to justify resistance in terms of social and cultural norms guided many of the actions taken. The Sons of Liberty and other early Patriots operated within colonial societies still wedded to traditional, corporate forms, so the importance of consensus (or at least the outward appearance of such) and propriety were stressed. "Mobs" were often restrained and even the most rabble-rousing leaders spoke out against the violations of norms.

Part Three, "From Resistance to Revolution", begins by putting the colonial resistance movement as it stood in the late 1760's in a broader context, stressing the connection between the colonists and their perceived allies in Parliament, the City of London, Ireland, and elsewhere. But as "corruption" seemed to clip the wings of most British radicals on the other side of the Atlantic, the colonists came to feel that they were on their own; a realization which fed their increased willingness to consider separation as an option well before the outbreak of actual hostilities in 1775, let alone the summer of 1776.

In the end, Americans embraced republicanism as an alternative to the British constitutional order in which earlier resistance had been based once they concluded that that order had been corrupted beyond hope. They moved towards republicanism in a deliberate move to establish a new ideological basis for continued resistance and then rebellion and revolution.

Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, & Anxious Patriarchs

Kathleen M. Brown. Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, & Anxious Patriarchs: Gender, Race, and Power in Colonial Virginia. Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 1996; published for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, Williamsburg, VA.

The role of racism and slavery in establishing the social order in colonial Virginia was already well understood at the time Brown published this provocative study, which argued that gender and race were actually "intertwined components of the social order" (1) which reinforced and informed each other in the construction of the white, patriarchal gentry class which came to dominate society.

Brown anchors her analysis in the English experience in Ireland and the first encounters with American Indians. Beginning with those early interactions with non-English "others", a dichotomy began to develop contrasting English "masculinity" with the less virile, less assertive, less powerful "femininity" of conquered peoples, whether the Catholic Irish or the "pagan" Indians. Gender, then, became the conceptual basis of legitimacy in that maleness was presumed to have a natural mastery over femaleness.

The ways in which this early formulation informed and shaped the development of colonial Virginia as the institution of slavery developed was complex; Brown traces this process through the seventeenth century, particularly focusing on Bacon's Rebellion which she regards as pivotal for many reasons, including because it hastened the identification between full citizenship and the ability and right to bear arms in defense of rights. This right would soon become restricted to white men; one of many steps along the path in which black men would be stripped of the prerogatives of maleness even as black women were denied the status of womanhood which was increasingly restricted to white women--and even then, not all white women. There was a class component at play, but in the end race and gender would triumph over any possibility of a repeat of the Bacon's Rebellion alliance between white indentured servants and African slaves.

The society which emerged would be ruled over by a confident, united gentry class which was at the peak of its powers between 1700 and 1750. It was a gentry in which marriage served to maintain ties and class unity at the top, as well as uniting family fortunes. Marriage was monitored and negotiated by parents and society in order to protect family positions in the upper reaches of the social hierarchy, and gender roles were closely guarded in order to protect the interests of the planter class.