Jesse Lemisch
Despite our pretensions to social science, we would seem to
be hardly more genuinely scientific than we were fifty years ago. Many social
scientists continue to draw conclusions about entire societies on the basis of
examinations of the minority at the top. This approach has distorted our view
and, sometimes, cut us off from past reality. Our earliest history has been seen
as a period of consensus and classlessness, in part because our historians have
chosen to see it that way. One of them, describing colonial Massachusetts as a
“middle-class democracy," has tried to show that urban workers could
qualify for the vote by offering evidence which sometimes proves only that their
employers could do so, much as one might demonstrate that slaves had it easy by
describing the life of the antebellum Southern belle. Another has diluted a
useful study of Loyalism and blocked our understanding of any possible class
aspects of this phenomenon by presenting his data in a form which does not
distinguish between employers and employees. In a valuable study of legislatures
before and after the Revolution, another tells us that "colonies . . . did
not yet conceive that the demos should actually govern." Which colonials?
Earlier in the same article he had noted that “the majority . . . were not
asked, and as they were unable to speak or write on the subject, their opinions
were uncertain.” Thus the conclusion about "colonists" indicates
either that the historian has allowed the opinions of an elite to stand for
those
of a majority or that he has forgotten that he really does not know what the
majority thought. This dilemma suggests two very different ways of writing
history.
The first way, the one criticized so far, assumes the absence
of conflict without demonstrating it. After consensus has been assumed, the very
categories of analysis foreclose the possibility that the researcher will find
evidence of conflict. . . . And in our history we can no longer allow the
powerful to speak for the powerless.
Those who rule may have, as
Barrington Moore has put it, “the most to hide about the way society
works." And these are the very people who are most favored by history and
historical sources. Thus "sympathy with the victims of historical processes
and skepticism about the victors' claims provide essential safeguards against
being taken in by the dominant mythology." . . . This sympathy for the
powerless brings us closer to objectivity; in practice, it leads the historian
to describe past societies as they appeared from the bottom rather than the top,
more from the point of view of the inarticulate than of the articulate. Such an
approach will have two components. It will continue to examine the elite, but
instead of using them as surrogates for the society beneath them, it will ask
how their beliefs and conduct impinged on that society. Having determined the
place of those who were ruled in the ideology of those who rule, it will study
the conduct and ideology of the people on the bottom: this is nothing less than
an attempt to make the inarticulate speak. This second task is perhaps more
difficult than the first. But both can and indeed must be done if our
generalizations about past societies are to have more than limited validity. . .
. It is the purpose of this essay to suggest how we might approach the history
of the inarticulate in the period of the American Revolution and to outline what
such a history might look like. We begin with a critical examination of the
place of the inarticulate in the political thought and practice of the colonial
elite and proceed to an examination of the thought and conduct of the
inarticulate themselves.
In 1955 Robert E. Brown joined the throng of social
scientists who have been telling us that America is a classless society, a land
of unblocked opportunity. Brown said it had always been so, or at least as far
back as seventeenth-century Massachusetts, which he labeled a "middle-class
democracy"; the "common man” in America "had come into his own
long before the era of Jacksonian Democracy.” Brown argued persuasively
against the idea that colonial America was "undemocratic” and especially
against the idea that “property qualifications for voting eliminated a large
portion of the free adult male population from participation in political
affairs." He showed that qualifications were often waived in practice:
election officials often winked at voting by the underage or financially
unqualified. At any rate, the qualifications were low enough and economic
opportunity high enough so that, Brown's sampling technique indicated, most men
could meet them. Of course there were a few exceptions: men whose work carried
them to sea, some tenant farmers, a few town dwellers; but even these could
expect, some day, to make it. Surrounded with all these blessings, Americans
went to war to hold on to a good thing: the "revolution," said Brown
(his Quotation marks questioning the very relevance of such a term), aimed
"to preserve a social order rather than to change it.”
Brown's methods have come under heavy fire, with Lee Benson
suggesting that there may be "no basis in fact” for the Brown thesis.
Using statistical techniques similar to Brown's, John Cary has been able to
demonstrate that 100 percent of the farmers and artisans
of Massachusetts were
disfranchised by the property requirements. Cary attaches
no particular significance to his results: for a sample to mean anything, we
must have some definition of the criteria used in selecting it. Brown's reply
has been a partial backdown, but he has stuck to his guns in saying that the
materials which he took from deeds and wills "could be called samples only
in the sense of being examples, but they were typical examples. "
So let us examine more closely the contention that colonial
America was democratic. In a study, optimistic about mobility in revolutionary
America, Jackson Turner Main nonetheless uncovered a "proletariat”
comprising nearly 40 percent of the population. Geographical mobility was
extremely high among the poor. Did this translate into vertical mobility: was
mobility out the same as mobility up? Main tells us that mobility is
"almost impossible to study in detail, but he proceeds to equate the
frontier with upward mobility. Thus, although there was a "permanent
proletariat” within the proletariat, it was very small .
"Habitual drifters" made up between 5 and 15 percent of the
population, he estimates. He offers figures which bring the total up to between
26.9 and 30.7 percent and indicates that in the pre-Revolutionary years 80
percent of indentured servants "died, became landless workers, or returned
to England."
Main concludes that "the
long-term tendency seems to have been toward greater inequality" and a
“growing number of poor.” Elsewhere, J. R. Pole has noted the potential for
increasing disfranchisement if suffrage is attached to property in an area
undergoing the kind of economic changes which were taking place in
eighteenth-century America. That potentiality was fast becoming actuality on
Brown's ground--Boston where James Henretta's statistical work reveals the
existence of a propertyless proletariat comprising 14 percent of the adult males
in 1687 and 29 percent in 1771. With the population doubled, "for every man
who slept in the back of a shop, in a tavern, or in a rented room in 1687, there
were four" in 1771. Increasingly, colonial Boston was less a place of
equality and opportunity, more a place of social stratification. Throughout
America property qualifications excluded more and more people from voting until
a "Jacksonian Revolution" was necessary to overthrow what had become a
very limited middle-class "democracy' indeed.
What if Brown were right? What if every single person could
vote in the colonies? Would that prove that the common man had come into his
own? The common man rarely ran for office.
The obstacles in the way of attaining office were far greater than those
in the way of voting. Throughout America, custom and law dictated the
perpetuation in power of a ruling oligarchy similar in profile to the exclusive
club which ruled England. "Birth into one of the ruling families was almost
essential to the making of a political career in 18th century Virginia,"
says one historian. The family patterns, the religious, social, and educational
homogeneity of the House of Commons were duplicated in the House of Burgesses.
An examination of six pre-Revolutionary legislatures shows that the
"economic elite" comprising the top 10 percent of the population held
85 percent of the seats.
Even the town meeting was not in fact the hotbed of democracy
of popular myth: Samuel Eliot Morison has called "political democracy” in
colonial Massachusetts a "sham," and a recent study has detailed the
devices which the powerful used to control the town meeting. Boston meetings
were often called with whole wards unnotified, and Brown's contention that
actual qualifications were less rigid than legal qualifications bears ironic
fruit when the evidence is examined more closely: we find not only informal
enfranchisement but also informal disfranchisement, all depending not on some
conception of democracy but rather on how those with power thought people might
vote on a particular issue.
Those who might suppose that the rise of the lower houses of
the colonial legislatures was equivalent to a rise in popular control of
government would do well to undertake a critical examination of the laws which
they wrote. First of all, regardless of the extent of disfranchisement, it did
not just happen. One group of the legislators had to take deliberate steps to
deprive others of the vote. Sometimes legislation was a blatantly one-sided
expression of class interest. . . . If the assemblies stood for popular control,
why was there so much conflict between the people and the legislatures on
questions of civil liberties? Leonard Levy has characterized the image of a
colonial America "which cherished freedom of expression" as “a
sentimental hallucination that ignores history."
If colonial legislatures seemed in
many ways like the House of Commons, this was no accident: they strove to be,
and they were elected in the same way--publicly and loudly, with influential
candidates on hand to note how their dependents were voting and sometimes to
thank them. . . . Although this is hardly free voting, some historians believe
that many elections might not have turned out noticeably differently even if the
ballot had been secret. For throughout the colonies they see a habit of
deference on the part of the lower and middle classes disposing them to accept
the upper class as their rulers.
Did the people defer to their rulers? Certainly we know that
their rulers expected them to defer. Obedience was fully within the Lockean
tradition. The Second Treatise is full of reassurance lest Locke's reader fear
that the assertion of a right of revolution might lead to the overthrow of
government "as often as it shall please a busy head, or turbulent spirit.
“Revolution is permissible only after a long train of Abuses convinces the
majority that the time has come for an Appeal to Heaven. Until that time the
stress is on Obedience to the Legislative": the premature dissenter
is "the common Enemy and Pest of Mankind and deserves ruin and
perdition." Obedience is mandatory until the majority concludes that the
government has broken its trust. Developing within this tradition, the political
theory of the colonial elite saw the people as subordinate to their legislators.
As Richard Buel, Jr. has put it: the people could apply the brakes when their
rulers went off the track, but they could not dictate to them so long as they
were still on the track. And when rulers went off the track--as the British did
in 1776--the people were bound to obey the new governments which replaced them.
. . .
The men who wrote and signed the Declaration of Independence
were far from literal in their interpretation of the phrase "all men are
created equal." Jefferson's belief that urban workingmen were "the
panders of vice and the instruments by which the liberties of a country are
generally overturned" suggests the narrow limits of his faith in the
ability of what he unashamedly called "the swinish multitude" to
govern itself. And although the Congress rejected his condemnation of the slave
trade, it did let stand his attack on the King who had excited insurrection by
offering slaves their freedom if they would desert their masters. It seems
entirely likely that the Negro never even entered Jefferson's mind as he wrote
of the equality of men: his later statements on the Negro characterize him as a
definitely inferior being, and possibly inferior by nature rather than merely by
condition. The meaning of Jefferson's egalitarianism in 1776 can be better
understood if we examine its institutional implementation in his drafts for a
constitution for Virginia. His plan resembled that presented in Adams' Thoughts
on Government: a bicameral legislature, with only the lower house directly
elected, and with senators elected for lengthy terms, possibly for life. A
similar antipopulism expressed itself in most of the other state constitutions:
all but three provided for bicameral legislatures; property qualifications were
prescribed in most; qualifications for electors and members of the upper houses
were higher than for the lower houses and terms were generally longer.
Some of the state constitutions
went against this trend: Pennsylvania's was the most notable. Here a convention
led by men who put "personal liberty and safety" ahead of "the
possession and security of property” drew up a constitution on the principle
that “any man, even the most illiterate, is as capable of any office as a
person who has had the benefit of education." An early draft of a bill of
rights spoke of the dangers of large concentrations of wealth in the hands of a
few and saw the discouragement of such concentrations as a proper role for
government. The constitution finally adopted was only slightly less populist.
Its enemies called it a poor man’s constitution: the people cherished their
copies as they did the Bible, and they would later take up arms against its
domestic opponents. . . . Property qualifications were abolished for both voters
and officeholders. Power was centered in a single legislature, annually elected,
checked, and balanced by the people themselves, to whom the doors of the
assembly hall were to be open and who were to participate in lawmaking through a
device resembling the referendum. Various officeholders were made more
accountable-to meet "the danger of Establishing an inconvenient
Aristocracy"-rotation in office and limits on terms, while other provisions
abolished imprisonment for debt and established the right of conscientious
objection.
The Pennsylvania Constitution of 1776 shows the mark of Tom
Paine's thought, not his authorship. In Common Sense Paine had been concerned
that "the elected might never form to themselves an interest separate from
the electors "; he ridicule the idea of checks and balances in England and
proposed for each colony a single house legislature, to meet annually; elections
must be held often, in order that "frequent
interchange among electors and elected] will establish a common interest. Later,
he defended the Pennsylvania Constitution, calling it good for rich and poor
alike and supporting the elimination of property qualifications and the
establishment of a unicameral legislature: "bolts, bars, and checks"
were only an obstacle to freedom. All in all, Paine is one man whom we should
not be timid about calling a "democrat”
when he spoke of freedom or rights, he meant "a perfect equality of
them," and I was quite literal about it. A unicameralist in an age of
checks and balances, he was also an abolitionist, an internationalist, something
of a feminist and anticolonialist, and one of the few leaders of the American
Revolution to apply his egalitarianism to the plight of the poor. He was in the
tradition of the Levellers, and his thought presents an alternative and a
standard by which to judge the thought of the other leaders of the Revolution,
for most of whom Locke went far enough.
Although Paine clearly represents a
minority strain in American political thought, he was not alone in 1776. Others,
many of them anonymous pamphleteers, felt that the people, who “best know
their own wants and necessities," were "best able to rule themselves."
In the midst of the ferment of the year 1776 the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting of
the Society of Friends decided to bar from membership those who continued to own
slaves. The decision of 1776 was the outcome of over a century of antislavery
agitation among Quakers. In 1688 the Germantown Quakers had condemned slavery as
a violation of the freedom to which all men were entitled, and two decades
before the Declaration of Independence the New Jersey Quaker John Woolrnan had
applied to slavery the observation that "liberty [is] the natural right of
all men equally." That the Quakers thought these thoughts demonstrates that
others could have, as well; the range of thought among such groups as the
Quakers gives us another perspective from which to examine early American
values. Quakers had disobeyed unjust laws long before the American Revolution.
They steered clear of the American mainstream in their increasingly humane
treatment of Negroes and were usually equally deviant and equally humane in
their conduct toward Indians, other religious and ethnic groups, women, and the
poor. Few more striking alternatives to the American business ethos can be found
than John Woolman, aged thirty-six, telling his customers to go elsewhere, so
that he could lessen an increasingly prosperous business in order better to seek
'the real substance of religion, where practice cloth harmonize with
principles" This absolutism, this literalism, is in a sense definitive of
radicalism in a culture which has had no lack of high principles but a great
deal of difficulty realizing those principles. . . .
In order to demonstrate that humane
and democratic thoughts, in some ways more in tune with a later age, could be
conceived in 1776, we need find only one man who thought them; in fact there
were many such men. Surely the intellectual and empirical ingredients which
produced the thought of a Paine or a Woolman were available to an Adams or a
Jefferson. (Even if the ingredients of such thought were not available, the
product was, in the form of personal conduct and published writings.) Thus we
cannot explain the failure of the Revolution's leaders to choose more democratic
and humane ways on grounds that the ideas' time had not yet come. The ideas were
in the market place; the leaders' failure to buy them constitutes a choice, even
if they did not conceive of it as such. Against this background, the meaning of
the phrase “all men are created equal" to the men who signed the
Declaration becomes clearer: they interpreted it in a limited way, and in doing
so, rejected alternatives offered by their contemporaries and their
predecessors. Those who have cried out for “liberty" have often sought no
more than the liberty of a few, intending nothing in the way of social
revolution: the liberties spoken of by Coke and Pym were primarily, as
Christopher Hill has suggested, “the rights of the propertied.” Thus, those
who, like Daniel Boorstin, have asserted that the Revolution aimed only at
separation from Great Britain and not at social revolution are quite right, but
only insofar as they have described the attitudes of the elite: what the common
people and articulate radicals made of the Declaration of Independence may have
been quite a different matter.
The evidence presented thus far suggests that in 1776
confidence in "established modes" was far from a universal sentiment.
To say that Paine, Woolnan, and the others mentioned above took the egalitarianism of the
Revolution more literally than did
those who signed the document is to say that there existed in 1776 a body of
political thought which did not endorse deference. To detect such a body
of thought is not necessarily to demonstrate the people who were supposed to
defer refused to do so. However, it is suggestive: people less articulate than
those mentioned thus far might have developed similar ideas directly out of the
actual experience of their lives.
During the period of the American Revolution there was just
such an expression from below: the powerless refused to stay in the places to
which a theory of deference and subordination assigned them. Among the most
blatant cases are those of Negroes who petitioned for that freedom to which,
"as men," they claimed they had 'a natural Isic] right"; they
reminded their masters that their struggle was merely in imitation of the
Lawdable [sic] Example of the Good People of these States" who were
"nobly contending, in the Cause of Liberty,' and lectured them on 'the
inconsistancey [sic] of acting themselves the part which they condem [sic] and
oppose in others.” Merrill Jensen has ably described the pursuit of expanded
political power by disfranchised whites and has presented clear evidence of
conflict between rich and poor. Staughton Lynd has seen
"government-from-below" in the conduct and 'ideology' of New York's
mechanics on the eve of the Revolution. In 1774 Gouverneur Morris observed New
York's "mob' beginning "to think and to reason," debating with
the rich on whether government should henceforth be "aristocratic or
democratic." In 1776 much of the impetus for the movement to overthrow
Pennsylvania's old government and draw up a new constitution came from below, in
mass meetings and in the activities of privates in the militia.
Insofar as activities such as these focused on questions of
voting, they reflect a striking failure of the lower class to provide the
deference which their rulers expected of them. John Adams might boast of the
respect of the Massachusetts electorate for what he later called the 'natural
aristocracy,' and later writers might assure us that colonials did not suppose
that they should govern: according to Tom Paine, voters too poor to vote would
borrow or lie their way up to the property qualifications and they would do it
without hesitation. Let John Adams boast about the freeness of elections in
Massachusetts: in 1770 Philadelphia mechanics would refuse to rubber- stamp
tickets set in advance by "leading men," while their brothers in New
York would rebel against the coercions which made them vote, again and again,
for the same families. . . . If deference ever existed, it was clearly gone when
Americans began to describe the supporters of open balloting as "the great
and the mighty, and the rich, and the long Wiggs and the Squaretoes, and all
Manner of Wickednesses in high places."
“In Pursuance of the Declaration for Independency and
within less than a week, New York's debtors had been released from prison. The
freeing of these "oppressed" indicates that some took their
egalitarianism literally and extended their literalism to economics: Paine and
Woolman were not alone in identifying economic subordination with lack of
freedom. Ever since Thomas Morton's 'partners and consociates" had rejected
servitude in Virginia to 'live together as equals' amidst the pleasures of
Merrymount, many Americans had made the same identification and chosen freedom.
. . . Bound servants conspired to run away, to strike and to rebel, aiming
"either [to] be free or dye for it," and crying out for those “who
would be for liberty and freed from bondage" to join them.
Slaves, too, displayed what Cotton Mather called "a Fondness for Freedom
": they revolted, ran away, and governed themselves in runaway communities
from which they launched attacks against their former masters; they fought for
"Liberty & Life” and marched with Colours displayed, and . . . Drums
beating"--a black Spirit of '76. And long before the first trade unions,
free white workers had engaged in strikes, slowdowns, and other protests, in
some cases directly opposing laws which punished them for disobedience.
"Mutiny" is a poor word to describe those seamen who seized their
ship, renamed it Liberty, and chose their course and a new captain by voting.
Many colonial laborers, white and Negro alike, expressed their refusal to defer
by protests in which the economic grievance is hardly distinguishable from the
social and political.
"Colonials"meant many
people, often people in conflict with one another. there was, from the very
beginning, something of a struggle over who should rule at home. The people on
the bottom of that conflict were also involved in the struggle for home rule,
but their activities have been made to seem an extension of the conduct of the
more articulate, who have been seen as their manipulators. The inarticulate
could act on their own, and often for very sound reasons. It is time that we
examined the coming of the American Revolution from their perspective. What
follows is an attempt to sketch some of the kinds of events and considerations
which should be explored if we are to understand what opposition to the British
meant to those who were to bear the burden of the fighting and dying.
Late in October of 1765 the Stamp
Act Congress added its Declarations to those of the individual colonies: the Act
was unconstitutional. As Edmund and Helen Morgan have put it, "it would
have been difficult to find an American anywhere who did not ) believe in them
[Declarations of the Stamp Act Congress]-as far as they went.'” The
problem was that many Americans did not think that they went far enough.
The Stamp Act Congress had adjourned without answering the
question, What is to be done? The Stamp Act riots showed that the mob had begun
to think and reason. Historians have been hesitant to acknowledge it. Instead
they have preferred to accept the testimony of British officials who attributed
the riots to "the Wiser and better Sort," who stirred up the lower
class in behalf of a cause in which that class had no real interest; thus they
easily turned to plunder and violence for its own sake. Gentlemen of property
associated themselves with mob violence only under the most extreme conditions.
Those conditions had not been achieved in 1765. British officials assumed that
the lawyers and property owners were the riots' secret leaders partly because of
a bias which said that leaders had to be people of "Consequence." In
addition, these officials were accustomed to confronting members of the upper
class as political adversaries in the courts and in the assembly halls. But a
new politics, a politics of the street, was replacing the old politics, the
politics of the assembly hall. British officials failed to understand these new
politics. Wherever they went--and most of them did not go very far--they saw
lawyers, merchants, and men of substance. When events which displeased them took
place in the streets, they understood them only in their limited frame of
reference. Transferring events, they saw only their old enemies.
The upper classes may not have been pulling the strings
in the Stamp Act riots. The assumption that an uninterested mob had to be
artificially aroused-created- disregards the ability of the people to think for
themselves; like everyone else in the colonies, they had real grievances against
the British. Unlike others, they had fewer legal channels through which to
express their grievances. So they took to the streets in pursuit of political
goals. Within that context, their "riots" were really extremely
orderly and expressed a clear purpose. Again and again, when the mob's leaders
lost control, the mob went on to attack the logical political enemy, not to
plunder. They were led but not manipulated: to dismantle the puppet show is not
to do away with the whole concept of leadership, but instead of cynical
fomenters, we find direction of the most rudimentary sort, a question of setting
times, of priorities, and in the heat of the riot, of getting from one street to
another in the quickest way possible.
The struggle against the Stamp Act was also a struggle
against colonial leadership.
Declarations had not prevented the Act's taking effect. Those who had declared
now had to do, but they could do no better than a boycott: the cessation of all
business which required the use of stamps. This strategy put pressure on the
English merchants, but it also increased the pressure on the American poor, the
hungry, the prisoners in city jails who could not hope for release so long as
the lawyers refused to do business.
Radicals protested against the absurdity of American
blustering about liberty and then refusing to do anything about it: if the law
was wrong, then it was no law and business ought to go on as usual without the
use of stamps. They urged disobedience. Upper class leaders demanded legality
and tried, sometimes by shady means, to suppress or distort
this dissent. But the radicals continued their pressure, and they were supported
by the self-defeating character of the boycott strategy. The more time that
passed without ship sailings, the more attractive a policy of disobedience
became to merchants, and they began to send their ships out without stamped
papers. British officials began to cave in: they were worried about "an
Insurrection of the Poor against the Rich," united action by unemployed
artisans and the increasing numbers of unruly seamen who were pouring into the
colonial cities and finding no way to get out. The seamen-"the . . . people
. . . most dangerous on these Occasions"- especially worried customs
officials; instead of waiting for them to force their captains to sail without
stamps, the officials yielded, giving way before enormous pressures and allowing
a radical triumph. Then the Parliament itself backed down, repealing the Stamp
Act. The poor people of the colonies had reason to congratulate themselves: word
of their actions had thrown a scare into Parliament, and they might even suspect
that the economic rationale which Parliament offered for repeal covered its fear
of a challenge not so much to its view of the constitution as to its actual
authority in the colonies. Thus the meaning of the Stamp Act crisis goes beyond
the pursuit of constitutional principles. The lower class had spoken out against
the British, against deference, and against colonial leadership, and they had
won.
The repeal of the Stamp Act left the Sugar Act of 1764 still
on the books, and in 1767 Parliament added a new revenue act. Oliver M.
Dickerson has described the activities of the new American Board of Customs
Commissioners in enforcing these acts beginning in 1768 as “customs
racketeering" and has blamed the Board for transforming “thousands
of loyal British subjects into active revolutionists." Corrupt
customs officials made seizures on technicalities and pocketed the proceeds. The
Hancocks and Laurenses
suffered greatly, but the poor suffered more. Even the pettiest of woodboats in
purely local trade were seized; even the common seaman had his chest riffled and
its contents confiscated. Seamen, small traders, and rich merchants all came to
identify British authority with corruption and injustice.
Customs racketeering was on the
wane by mid-1770. This was due in large part to popular opposition and
especially to the withdrawal of troops from Boston: the Commissioners could not
survive without armed support. The troops left Boston after the street fight
which came to be known as the Boston Massacre. The Massacre, in turn, grew out
of an antagonism between the troops and the population which has been given too
little attention. Long-standing practice in the British army allowed off-duty
soldiers to take civilian employment, and they did so at wages which undercut
those given to American workingmen: soldiers in New York in 1770 worked for
between 37.5 percent and 50 percent of the wages offered to Americans for the
same work. As might be expected, this situation led to great antagonisms,
especially in hard times. . . . On the evening of March 5 one of the ropemakers
who had been wounded in the earlier encounter led a mob which took on the
rampaging soldiers. “'Come on you rascals, you bIoody backs, you lobster
scoundrels, fire if you dare, G[ojd damn you, fire and be famned, we know you
dare not." Somebody did dare: when the smoke cleared, the ropemaker was
dead along with two others and several wounded. . . .
The British Navy was as unpopular in the colonies as was the
Army. One of the reasons for the Navy's unpopularity has been almost entirely
missed by historians who have shown too little concern for those matters which
concern the inarticulate. Impressment, previously seen as significant only in
connection with the War of 1812, also played a role in bringing on the
Revolution. . . . The poor were the press gang's peculiar victims. . . . Their
numbers mounted into the tens of thousands. The complaints of American
governmental bodies spoke for the merchant, not for the seaman; they focused on
the harmful effects of the practice on colonial trade and were almost as
critical of those who violently resisted the
Royal Navy. So the seamen and poor people of the colonies were on their own.
Historians have failed to see the significance of their active opposition to
impressment: one seems to put blame on seamen for escaping and fighting back,
much as one might blame slaves for the same
offenses; another, admitting that colonial crowds became "political"
in 1765, the innumerable impressment riots before that
were ideologically inert. But the
seamen were fighting, literally, for their life, liberty, and property, and
their violence was all the politics they could have. . . .
Excessive attention to Common Sense
for its propaganda values has obscured its substantive meaning as an expression
of populist democracy. Indeed, the very concept of Propaganda has perhaps
hindered us more than it has helped us to understand the uses of the American
Revolution. "We know today," wrote Philip Davidson in 1941, that large
bodies of people never cooperate in any complex movement except under guidance
of a central machine operated by a comparatively few people.
Davidson
found a few people--men like Tom Paine and Sam Adams managing such a campaign:
"By their fruits ye shall know them.'" The assumption here is that one
can read back from the "fruits"-the Revolution-to the efforts of
propagandists, that is, that Paine and Adams in some sense caused the
Revolution. . . . All of this smacks of the
unproved conspiracy and utterly ignores the fact that Paine did speak
"common sense": the
Revolution has substantive causes and is rooted in genuine grievances; to
explain it as the result of efficient propaganda is to belittle the reality of
the grievances and to suggest that the Americans were largely content until they
were aroused by a few demagogues.
The final test of the agency of the
lower class is their conduct in the Revolution: if they had been tricked into rebellion by demagoguery and propaganda,
we might expect them to have had second thoughts when the fighting became
bloody. From April 19, 1775, the war was fought, on the American side, by a
people in arms, understanding and interpreting their war goals in their own way.
The American technique was frequently that of guerrilla warfare, depending on
mobility, withdrawal, and unexpected counterattack: they fled when they could
not win and turned and fought only when they had a good chance of victory. The
Revolution was like modem guerrilla wars in another sense. In guerrilla warfare,
according to the aphorism, the people are the water
and the troops are the fish who inhabit that water. The troops must live
off the people, retaining their support not by coercion but rather because the
people believe in and support the cause for which the troops fight. Although the
analogy with guerrilla warfare is only an analogy, it is suggestive. As long at
the Americans continued to fight, it was impossible for the British to win the
war. Mere military conquest was insignificant:, to win, the British would have
had to occupy simultaneously the entire populated area of the thirteen colonies,
and even then their victory would have been unstable, a peace maintained only by
force. The British could not win precisely because the Americans were fighting a
popular war.
Although an analogy with guerrilla warfare can give us some
suggestion as to the extent of patriotism during the Revolution, we need more
specific information. One fruitful technique for evaluating the loyalties of the
inarticulate is to look at them under pressure--in prison. With little chance of
exchange, amidst starvation and disease, and ruled over by cruel and corrupt
administrators, captured American seamen were offered a way out: they could join
the Royal Navy. Most remained patriots, and they were very self-conscious about
it. Instead of defecting, they resisted, escaping, burning their prisons, and
defiantly celebrating the Fourth of July. Separated from their captains and
governing themselves for the first time, on their own they organized into
disciplined groups with bylaws--in microcosm the prisoners went through the
whole process of setting up a constitution. . . .
If the American Revolution was a popular war, still, support
for it was far from universal. John Adams later estimated that “nearly one
third" of the Americans sided with the British. Who were the Loyalists?
Social class may have had nothing to do with the phenomenon of Loyalism, but we
will never know if we foreclose research on the matter; we continue to need
studies which at least pose the question. A recent study generalizes about
Loyalists, including under the heading "Artisans and craftsmen" such
diverse groups as an owner of salt works, managers, and manufacturers
undifferentiated from laborers and waiters. Any conceivable difference between
merchants and their clerks, captains and common seamen, doctors and their
apprentices is obliterated by the categorization. So long as our techniques of
research foreclose the possibility of our finding anything but consensus the
case for consensus will be unproved. Finally, we need studies which will
use Loyalism as a touchstone for a more precise definition of the Revolution.
Loyalists had very little faith in man and reveled in the inequalities among
men. Wealthy Massachusetts judge Peter Oliver distinguished between such
"Men of Sense” as John Adams and the common people, whom he repeatedly
dismissed as "Rabble." Maryland clergyman Jonathan Boucher had
resolved, before his twelfth birthday, not to "pass through life like the
boors around me"; the people were "fickle,' "false,"
'wrongheaded,' and "ignorant." The Loyalist view of the American
Revolution built on their view of the nature of man. The "Mobility of au
Countries," said Oliver, were "perfect Machines" which could be
"wound up by any Hand who might first take the Winch." Sam Adams, he
said, "understood human Nature, in low life, so well, that he could turn
the Minds of the great Vulgar as well as the small into any Course that he might
chuse"; the people were 'duped,' 'deceived,' and 'deluded' by demagogues
who were motivated by ambition and pride and aimed to satisfy “private
grudges." “Many, if not most of you,” said Oliver to the rebellious
people of Massachusetts, "were insensible of the ambitious views of your
leaders” and would have spurned those leaders but for ignorance.
There seems to be a common theme in
Loyalism: a rejection of the idea that all men are created equal. If those who
opposed the Revolution rejected egalitarianism, this suggests that what they
rejected-the Revolution itself-might have been in some sense egalitarian. On the
other hand, how much difference would one find, in regard to egalitarianism,
between the views of an Oliver or a Boucher and a Hamilton? or even an Adams?
When egalitarianism is the point of division, men such as Hamilton and Adams
appear closer to the Loyalists than they do to Paine. Such a conclusion would
strengthen the theory that the Revolution was a fight over "the true
constitution of the British Empire" rather than a social movement-on the
level of leadership. Regardless of the result, studies comparing the
leaders of the Revolution with the right-wing altematives available to them
would bring us much closer to the meaning of the Revolution.
In neither the French Revolution
nor the American Civil War did a losing cause do so well on the battlefields of
historiography as has Loyalism. While the Loyalists themselves may not have too
many friends, their accents-manipulation, propaganda, and the mindlessness of
the people-reign largely unchallenged, albeit in somewhat different language, in
the recent historiography of the American Revolution. Perhaps underlying this
remarkable congruence is a modern lack of faith in man, echoing the Loyalists'
dirn view of human nature. Regardless of the cause, our historiography-has taken
on a flavor of unintentional partisanship; this has given rise to a one-sided
history which must be re-examined.
The American Revolution can best be re-examined from a point
of view which assumes that all men are created equal, and rational, and that
since they can think and reason they can make their own history. These
assumptions are nothing more nor less than the democratic credo. All of our
history needs re-examination from this perspective. The history of the
powerless, the inarticulate, the poor has not yet begun to be written because
they have been treated no more fairly by historians than they have been treated
by their contemporaries.