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American Revolution. History of the little guy (and gal)Gary Nash and the Unknown American RevolutionUnpatriotic, or more complete and engaging?. American Revolution. This morning: participation by the non-elite.This afternoon: how radical (for most Americans) was the Revolution?. The Colonies at the Time of the Revolution.
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2. American Revolution History of the little guy (and gal)
Gary Nash and the Unknown American Revolution
Unpatriotic, or more complete and engaging?
3. American Revolution This morning: participation by the non-elite.
This afternoon: how radical (for most Americans) was the Revolution?
4. The Colonies at the Time of the Revolution Multi-ethnic
Westward movement.
Commercial, international, urban
Growing wealth, wealth inequality.
Changing landscape.
Involved in the Enlightenment.
Evangelical
Equal members of the British Empire, deserving respect and liberty.
5. The Colonies at the Time of the Revolution Political maturity
Legislative professionalism.
Main British regulation: Navigation Acts.
Smuggling
6. So why the Revolution?
7. Why the Revolution? Traditional reasons:
Ideologies of liberty.
Taxation, regulation, and the threat to commerce
Stamp Act, Tea Act, Intolerable Acts.
Official response from the educated elite.
Good book: Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution.
8. Why the Revolution? Reasons from below (Nash and others)
Slaves and elite agreed on desire for freedom.
To elite concern with tyranny of Parliament, poor white men added concern with tyranny of colonial elite.
9. Why the Revolution? Reasons from below:
Proclamation Line of 1763 and the problem of the west. A concern to everyone, including Native Americans.
Many more examples in Nash.
10. Why the Revolution? Common Americans and the threat to elite leadership:
Common Americans backbone of the Revolution:
Army and militias (careful!)
Mob energy and protests.
11. Why the Revolution? Commoners and the Boston Tea Party.
Alfred F. Young and the story of George Robert Twelves Hewes, The Shoemaker and the Tea Party.
12. Why the Revolution? Elite and commoner in the Boston Tea Party.
Acceptable riots:
No property damage.
No physical injury.
No brawling.
Example of Hewes and the Tea Party thief.
John Adams and the most magnificent moment of all. There is a dignity, a majesty, a sublimity, in this effort of the Patriots that I greatly admire.
13. One Captain OConner whom I well knew came on board for that purpose, and when he supposed he was not noticed, filled his pockets, and also the lining of his coat. But I had detected him, and gave information to the captain of what he was doing. We were ordered to take him into custody, and just as he was stepping from the vessel, I seized him by the skirt of his coat, and in attempting to pull him back, I tore it off. They scuffled. OConnor recognized him and threatened to complain to the Governor. You had better make your will first, quoth Hewes, doubling his fist expressively, and OConnor escaped, running the gauntlet of the crowd on the wharf. The next day we nailed the skirt of his coat, which I had pulled off, to the whipping post in Charles Town, the place of his residence, with a label upon it, to shame OConnor by popular indignation.
14. Why the Revolution? The role and demands of the commoner.
Be used by the elite in protests.
Threatened to exceed acceptable riots and make demands of their own.
Case in point: Lieutenant Governor Thomas Hutchinson and his brother-in-law Andrew Oliver, during the Boston Stamp Act controversy in Boston.
15. Why the Revolution? Mobs and Hutchinson and Oliver.
Early 1760s, Hutchinson as ostentatious aristocrat, attempt to shut down town meeting.
Mockery of James Otis, leader of commoners.
16. The satire, in the form of a news report, told the story of a London criminal, Hector Wildfire, who was obviously James Otis. The report told Bostonians that Wildfire had been hanged at Tyburn in London and then removed for autopsy. Upon ripping open [Wildfires] belly, which was much distended, it was found to be filld with wind which rushd out violently . . . . There seemed to be a profuse quantity of liquor in the Gall Bladder . . . The doctors found a heart very small and very hard as if gnawed away by wasps. The head had a double row of teeth, a forked tongue, a skull of uncommon thickness, and a brain cavity so small that its contents would not fill a teacup. After dissection, the doctors threw the pieces of the body to a kennel of hounds, who had since run mad. Nash, 24-25.
17. Why the Revolution? Commoners get revenge against Hutchinson/Oliver:
Oliver appointed stamp collector.
Ebenezer MacIntosh, shoemaker leader of commoners, hangs Oliver in effigy: a goodlier sight who eer did see? A Stamp-Man hanging on a tree!
18. Why the Revolution? Commoners get revenge against Hutchinson/Oliver:
Level Olivers warehouse.
Level Olivers home, in full view of the Governor and Sheriff.
12 days later, level Hutchinsons house.
Andrew Oliver resigned the next day.
19. Why the Revolution? Patriot elite protest the riot, with utter detestation, but do not take action against the leaders:
Key point: commoner mobs are useful, but dangerous.
In this way they drive forward the Revolution.
Woody Holton, Forced Founders: Indians, Debtors, Slaves, and the Making of the American Revolution in Virginia.
20. Why the Revolution? Slaves and Lord Dunmores Proclamation.
April, 1774, threatens to free and arm slaves.
November, 1775, issues such proclamation.
Perhaps up to 1000 slaves respond.
21. Why the Revolution? Slaves and Lord Dunmore.
Slave rebellion every white persons worst nightmare.
Dunmores blunder: turns moderates into Patriots.
South Carolinian Edward Rutledge: the Proclamation was more effectual in working an eternal separation between Great Britain and the Colonies . . . than any other expedient. Nash, 166.
22. Why the Revolution? Up to 100,000 slaves go to the British?
Henry Laurens of SC, claimed 1/3 of SC slaves at least attempted an escape.
Death, recapture, perhaps 20,000 leave with the British.
Patriots respond with their own offers of freedom.
23. Why the Revolution? Importance of slaves in the Revolution:
Their own emancipation.
Drove the Patriot leaders into Revolution to secure their own local leadership.
24. Why the Revolution? Role of women:
Communicators of rhetoric.
Made boycotts possible.
Involvement in public protests.
Maintaining farms and businesses, cooking, laundry, nurses, messengers.
25. A Radical Revolution? July 5th, 1852, former slave Frederick Douglass, speech to the Rochester Ladies Anti-Slavery Society.
Revolution: simple, dignified, and sublime.
Then
26. Fellow-citizens, pardon me, allow me to ask, why am I called upon to speak here to-day? What have I, or those I represent, to do with your national independence? What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelly to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciations of tyrants, brass fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade, and solemnity, are, to him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy - a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices, more shocking and bloody, than are the people of these United States, at this very hour.
27. A Radical Revolution? Big question: What was the Revolution? A radical revolution of society, or merely a political separation?
28. A Radical Revolution? Slaves:
Gaining of freedom during the war.
Overheard, and replayed on their own behalf, revolutionary rhetoric after the war.
The Revolution as a golden opportunity for slaves.
29. A Radical Revolution? Quock Walker of Massachusetts.
Overheard the rhetoric.
Walked away from Jennison.
Jennisons punishment protested by other whites.
Walker successfully sues, claiming Mass. Constitutional rights.
30. A Radical Revolution? Slaves use verbal protest, legal action, visible contradiction of slavery and revolutionary rhetoric.
But often only gradual emancipation.
PA gradual emancipation law in 1780, slave sales continue to 1820s, 403 slaves resident in 1830.
31. A Radical Revolution? Why gradual emancipation?
Racist fear of:
Vengeance.
Competition for jobs.
Dependency and criminality.
Southern states refuse to legally emancipate.
Constitution protected slavery.
32. A Radical Revolution? Women:
Was Revolutionary work political?
33. A Radical Revolution? Women and the concept of Republican Motherhood
Men fight in politics, war, and business.
They need a softening influence.
Women serve as refiners of mens rough edges, by instilling virtue, mercy, and self-sacrifice, honesty
34. A Radical Revolution? Women and Republican Motherhood:
Republic of citizens needs virtuous citizens, or slavery ensues.
Citizen governors need training in selflessness and commitment to the common good.
Mothers can train these sons of the Republic.
35. A Radical Revolution? Republican Motherhood and womens rights in the 1800s:
Women crucial to reform movements.
Women argue that reform movements are part of task of Republican Motherhood.
Later they would leverage that public voice into womens rights movements.
36. A Radical Revolution? The common folk:
Continue protest past the Revolution, this time against local elite leadership.
Case in point: 1786 Daniel Shayss Rebellion. Protests debtor laws, taxation
Scares elite leadership into a centralized government under the Constitution.
37. A Radical Revolution? Common folk continue protest past the Constitution.
1790s and PA, at least 62 road obstructions, preventing travel of tax collectors, judges, sheriffs
Trees, stones, ditches, craters manure?
Journal of American History, Dec. 2000.
38. A Radical Revolution? Common folk and the irony of the Constitution
Politicians need voters!
Great example: Election of 1800 (and you thought 2000 was rough!)
Jeffersonians organize fundraising, rallies, canvassing of neighborhoods.
Triumph of the little guy (not gal yet!)
39. A Radical Revolution? Gordon S. Wood: The Radicalism of the American Revolution.
Thesis of new innate equality.
Recall colonial social hierarchy.
Revolution leads to new sense of equality:
Not economic, not of talent
But of basic worth.
40. A Radical Revolution? Woods thesis of equality:
Ruler rules by authority of the people, not by divine ordination.
Wealth needs to be earned, not entitled.
Equality became so potent for Americans because it came to mean that everyone was really the same as everyone else, not just at birth, not in talent or property or wealth, and not just in some transcendental religious sense of the equality of all souls. Ordinary Americans came to believe that no one in a basic down-to-earth and day-in-and-day-out manner was really better than anyone else. That was equality as no other nation has ever quite had it. Wood, 234.
41. A Radical Revolution? Woods thesis of equality:
Equality was in fact the most radical and most powerful ideological force let loose in the Revolution. Its appeal was far more potent than any of the revolutionaries realized. Once invoked, the idea of equality could not be stopped, and it tore through American society and culture with awesome power. Wood, 232.
42. A Radical Revolution? Woods thesis of equality:
Elite ideologies and rhetoric of rights, liberty, and equality made possible the eventual strivings of othersblack slaves and womenfor their own freedom, independence, and prosperity. Wood, 368.
