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.