Liberty Tree: Ordinary People and the American Revolution

By Alfred F. Young

“This fascinating collection of essays” by the acclaimed historian offers an “inclusive, nuanced vision of the Revolutionary War era” (Publishers Weekly, starred review).

 

In Liberty Tree, Alfred F. Young presents a selection of his seminal writing as well as two provocative, never-before-published essays. Together, they take the reader on a journey through the American Revolution, exploring the role played by ordinary women and men (called, at the time, people out of doors) in shaping events during and after the Revolution, their impact on the Founding generation of the new American nation, and finally how this populist side of the Revolution has fared in public memory.

Drawing on a wide range of sources, which include not only written documents but also material items like powder horns, and public rituals like parades and tarring and featherings, Young places ordinary Americans at the center of the Revolution. Moreover, Young interrogates standard historical narratives through close examination of Revolutionary icons, such as the pamphleteer Thomas Paine and Boston's Freedom Trail.

For decades, Young's path-breaking work has shed light on ordinary people of the Revolutionary era, seamlessly blending sophisticated analysis with compelling prose. From his award-winning work on mechanics, or artisans, in the seaboard cities of the Northeast to the all but forgotten liberty tree, a major popular icon of the Revolution explored in depth for the first time, Young continues to astound readers as he forges new directions in the history of the American Revolution.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Nov 6, 2006
• ISBN: 9780814729359

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Liberty Tree

Liberty Tree

Ordinary People and the

American Revolution

Alfred F. Young

CONSULTING EDITOR, HARVEY J. KAYE

NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PRESS

New York and London

www.nyupress.org

© 2006 by New York University

All rights reserved

Library of Congress Cataloging–in–Publication Data

Young, Alfred Fabian, 1925–

Liberty tree: ordinary people and the American

Revolution / Alfred F. Young.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN–13: 978–0–8147–9685–6 (cloth: alk. paper)

ISBN–10: 0–8147–9685–0 (cloth: alk. paper)

ISBN–13: 978–0–8147–9686–3 (pbk.: alk. paper)

ISBN–10: 0–8147–9686–9 (pbk.: alk. paper)

1. United States—History—Revolution, 1775–1783—Social

aspects. 2. Radicalism—United States—History—18th

century. I. Title.

E.209.Y68  2006

973.3—dc22           2006008340

New York University Press books are printed on acid-free paper,

and their binding materials are chosen for strength and durability.

Manufactured in the United States of America

c 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

p 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

For my grandchildren:

Davia, Noah, Isabel, and Ruby

Contents

List of Illustrations

Introduction: Why Write the History of Ordinary People?

PART I. The People Out of Doors

1. The Mechanics of the Revolution: By Hammer and Hand All Arts Do Stand

2. Persons of Consequence: The Women of Boston and the Making of the American Revolution, 1765–1776

3. Tar and Feathers and the Ghost of Oliver Cromwell: English Plebeian Culture and American Radicalism

PART II. Accommodations

4. Conservatives, the Constitution, and the Genius of the People

5. How Radical Was the American Revolution?

PART III. Memory: Lost and Found

6. The Celebration and Damnation of Thomas Paine

7. The Freedom Trail: Walking the Revolution in Boston

8. Liberty Tree: Made in America, Lost in America

Index

About the Author

List of Illustrations

1. Liberty tree, James Pike’s powderhorn, 1776

2. Pat Lyon at the Forge, oil painting by John Neagle, 1827

3. Poor Richard Illustrated, engraving, c.1796

4. General Society of Mechanics and Tradesmen of New York certificate

5. Society of Master Sailmakers certificate

6. The death of Christopher Seider, broadside, 1770

7. A New Method of Macarony Making, engraving, 1774

8. Oliver Cromwell, engraving, Nathaneal Low’s Almanack for 1774

9. Society of Pewterers of New York, flag, 1788

10. Gen. Daniel Shays and Col. Job Shattuck, engraving, 1787

11. The World Turned Upside Down, engraving, 1783

12. Thomas Paine, engraving, London, c.1792

13. Mad Tom in a Rage, engraving, c.1800

14. Map of the Freedom Trail

15. Liberty tree, engraving by Paul Revere, 1765

16. The True-Born Sons of Liberty, broadside, Boston, 1765

17. Liberty pole, New York City, engraving by P. E. DuSimitiere, c.1770

18. Defence of the Liberty Pole in New York, by Felix Darley

Introduction

Why Write the History of Ordinary People?

Joseph Plumb Martin was a Connecticut farm boy who enlisted in the Continental Army in 1777 when he was sixteen and served until 1783, the length of the Revolutionary war. He was a private, then a sergeant, in the Corps of Miners and Sappers who conducted sieges of enemy fortifications, a dangerous service. In 1830, when he was seventy, Martin published his memoir, A Narrative of the Adventures, Dangers and Sufferings of a Revolutionary Soldier, which has to be the best autobiography that has survived for a rank-and-file soldier: pungent, humorous, and always irreverent.

After describing a particularly hard-fought battle he had taken part in, Martin wrote, but there has been little notice taken of it, the reason for which is, there was no Washington, Putnam, or Wayne there. Had there been the affair would have been extolled to the skies. He was naming three of the most famous generals of the war: Israel Putnam, Anthony Wayne, and, of course, the commander in chief George Washington, under whom he had served from Valley Forge to Yorktown. Great men get great praise; little men, nothing, wrote Martin. He conceded that every private soldier in the army thinks his service is essential to carry on the war he is engaged in, but he asked, What could officers do without such men? Nothing at all. Alexander never could have conquered the world without private soldiers.

Martin remembered the army in the terrible winter of 1777, when soldiers were not only starved but naked. The greatest part were not only shirtless and barefoot but destitute of all other clothing, especially blankets. And he remembered joining his fellow soldiers, exasperated beyond endurance, by such conditions, who resorted to mutiny in 1780. To Martin his comrades in arms were a family of brothers, but a half century after the war he was bitter. When soldiers enlisted, he wrote, they were promised a hundred acres of land.... When the country had drained the last drop of blood it could screw out of the poor soldiers, they were turned adrift like old worn-out horses, and nothing said about land to pasture them upon.... Such things ought not to be.¹

The liberty tree is at the center of a scene carved on James Pike’s powderhorn. To the left are British soldiers labeled REGULARS the AGGRESSORS, April 19, 1775, and to the right, PROVINCIALS DEFENDING. The scene represents the patriot version not only of the Battle of Lexington but of the Revolutionary war. Pike was a Massachusetts militia man who served at the Battle of Bunker Hill. Soldiers stored their gunpowder in powderhorns. Photograph courtesy of the Chicago Historical Society.

After the war, Martin, the landless veteran, squatted on land on the Maine frontier confiscated from Loyalists and bought by General Henry Knox, one of the Great Proprietors who acquired legal title to hundreds of thousands of acres for a pittance. Together with other settlers in Maine, Martin fought for years for the right to the land he farmed, believing with the Liberty Men, as they called themselves, that Who can have better rights to the land than we who have fought for it, subdued it & made it valuable ... God gave the earth to the children? In 1801, settlers won the right to buy the land they farmed, but Martin was never able to pay for his and eventually lost it. In 1818, when he applied for a pension under the first general pension law passed by Congress for veterans in reduced circumstances, he testified, I have no real or personal estate, nor any income whatever.... I am a laborer, and by reason of my age and infirmity, I am unable to work. My wife is sickly and rheumatic. I have five children.... Without my pension I am unable to support myself and my family. Martin eked out a living and died in 1850. The epitaph on his gravestone reads, A Soldier of the Revolution.²

Martin’s poignant life story opens a window to a side of American history almost totally lost in the master narrative of the Revolution when it is told as a success story led by great men. Martin was not unusual, save for his ability as a writer. He was one of more than one hundred thousand young men, most of them landless, who saw military service in the Continental Army over the seven years of the war. Another one hundred thousand served in the militia, and several tens of thousands at sea. He was among the tens of thousands of veterans who applied for a pension in 1818, or in 1832. And he was like several thousand farmers in other states who for several decades after the war faced struggles to acquire or to hold on to land: the Green Mountain Boys in Vermont, the debt-ridden, tax-plagued rebels in western Massachusetts (among them Daniel Shays), Down-Renters in the Hudson Valley, the misnamed Whiskey rebels in Pennsylvania. Many would have shared a sense of the Revolution as not fulfilling its promises, as expressed by Herman Husband, leader of two backcountry rebellions in North Carolina in the 1770s and in western Pennsylvania in the 1790s that were both put down with force: In Every Revolution, the People at Large are called upon to assist true Liberty, but when the foreign oppressor is thrown off, learned and designing men assume power to the detriment of the laboring people.³

As Martin’s words testify, ordinary people in the revolutionary era were far from being inarticulate or passive. Quite the contrary, they could be eloquent. As the participant-historian Dr. David Ramsay of South Carolina wrote in 1789, When the war began, the Americans were a mass of husbandmen [farmers], merchants, mechanics and fishermen, but the necessities of the country gave a spring to the active powers of the inhabitants and set them on thinking, speaking, and acting in a line far beyond that to which they had been accustomed.... It seemed as if the war not only required but created talents. One can say the same thing about ordinary people in the Revolution that the historian Ira Berlin said of freed African American men and women in the era of the Civil War and Reconstruction after reading thousands of their letters: under the pressure of unprecedented events, ordinary men and women can become extraordinarily perceptive and articulate.⁴

Martin was one of more than five hundred Revolutionary war soldiers who kept diaries or wrote their memoirs or collaborated with others in as told to accounts. Some tens of thousands told their wartime experiences in their pension applications. Collective activity by ordinary people was the hallmark of the American Revolution: the Sons of Liberty, Committees of Correspondence, Committees of Inspection, Committees of Safety, town meetings, caucuses, county conventions, militia organizations. And for these there are bodies of scattered documents: petitions, resolutions, newspaper accounts, speeches, court testimony, legal records. If, over the past half century, a fraction of the resources that have poured into the projects publishing the papers of the leaders of the Revolution went into assembling the full record of popular participation, we might have a more proportionate sense of the role of ordinary people in the Revolution.⁵

The essays in this volume grow out of my long-standing interest in exploring history from the bottom up in the long era of the American Revolution. I have been interested in exploring successively three large questions: What part did ordinary people play in the making of the Revolution? What impact did they have on the results, and what impact did the Revolution in turn have on them? And how have they fared in the public memory of the Revolution? I have grouped the essays in this volume in historical sequence, which allows the reader who so chooses to follow strands of the Revolution as they unfolded and passed into public memory.

As it happens, the arrangement of the essays is also more or less in the sequence in which they were published between 1980 and 2004. They are reprinted as they originally appeared, save for some changes to avoid repetition. Two essays, written for this volume, appear in print for the first time: The Mechanics of the Revolution: By Hammer and Hand All Arts Do Stand, originally presented at an international conference in Milan and published in an Italian historical journal in 1982, is much expanded on the basis of two decades of new scholarship—my own and others. Liberty Tree: Made in America, Lost in America, the most recent essay, is entirely new. In these two new essays I take up all three of the questions about popular movements of the Revolution that have engaged me: their origins, their impact, and public memory.

For readers interested in where these pieces fit in with my other, more familiar books on the Revolution, most of them were published after The American Revolution: Explorations in American Radicalism appeared in 1976, with groundbreaking scholarship by other historians focused for the most part on the origins of popular movements, and before its sequel in 1993, Beyond the American Revolution: Explorations in the History of American Radicalism, in which scholars focused on results. The essays in this volume were written while I was also trying to get at the questions I posed about groups by exploring the lives of little-known individuals. My study of George Robert Twelves Hewes, the Boston shoemaker active in the Boston Massacre and the Boston Tea Party who told his life story while he was in his nineties, was an attempt to get at the consciousness of artisans by exploring one artisan’s memory of the Revolution. My biography of Deborah Sampson, a twenty-one-year-old weaver and former indentured servant in a Massachusetts farm town who disguised herself as a man and served in the Continental Army for seventeen months, was an attempt to understand what the Revolution meant to women of her social class, who had limited life options.⁶

The People Out of Doors, the title of part 1 of the book, is a phrase commonly used at the time of the Revolution to refer to people outside the political system or on its edges who made demands on legislators and officials who ruled within doors. My focus in the three essays in this part is on city people: the mechanics in the major seaboard cities (Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and Charleston) and the women of the middling and lower sort in one city, Boston. Mechanics is the term adopted by artisans (master workmen employing journeymen and apprentices) as they became conscious of their power as active citizens and a presence in political life. I follow them through the making of the Revolution into the postwar era and the years of the young nation (1788–1815), when their influence in public life peaked, after which the traditional artisan system eroded.

The women of Boston called Daughters of Liberty by the Sons of Liberty thought of themselves, as one of them put it, as persons of consequence, as they assumed one role after another in the conflict with Britain: spectators, boycotters, manufacturers, rioters, mourners, exhorters, and military supporters. In the third essay I examine the ritualized activities which appeared for the first time in America in the revolutionary era: tar-and-feathering, summoning up the ghost of Oliver Cromwell, and artisans marching en masse in parades with symbols of their crafts. I look for the origins of these activities in English plebeian culture, leaving the door open for what has been called the invention of tradition. In the Liberty Tree essay in part 3 I return to this puzzle of where political symbols came from, as well as how they were lost in public memory.

The popular movements of the revolutionary era of the cities and countryside have often been dismissed as short-lived, localized, and of little consequence. The essays in part 2, called Accommodations, examine the influence of the movements from below and from the middle by measuring their impact on those on top. I am interested in the would-be ruling classes who tried to create a political system (as James Madison called it) that would put the genie of popular radicalism back in the bottle. I focus (in essay 4) on the political results of the Revolution at the point of drafting and ratifying the federal Constitution in 1787–88. I see the framers essentially as a conservative elite trying to fence in agrarian majorities that threatened moneyed men with the excess of democracy, as many of them put it in the Constitutional convention in Philadelphia. The framers were forced to grant democratic concessions both to create a government that would survive in an increasingly democratic society and in order to secure the popular approval necessary for ratification—especially from city mechanics.

In essay 5, I broaden the discussion of results to ask, How radical was the American Revolution? and pull the camera back to attempt a panoramic view of the country as a whole. I see would-be rulers forced to make accommodations of all sorts, not only with people of the middling sort who were pushing their way into the political system—yeoman farmers and artisans—but also with those not in the system: enslaved African Americans on the bottom, and with the outsiders to the system: women and Native Americans. Looking at this process of ongoing negotiations in the private sphere as well as the public sphere, the Revolution seems at once more radical and more deeply conservative than the conventional master narrative has allowed.

The history of the American Revolution, like most history, was passed down in two kinds of memory: the private memories of individuals and in public memory managed by keepers of the past. These were the people who in the fifty years after the Revolution erected statues and decided what holidays should be observed, whose papers historical societies should collect, and what should go into children’s textbooks. Public memory is made up of what a leading scholar calls dominant memories (or mainstream collective consciousness) and alternative (usually subordinate) memories, held by those outside the mainstream. The study of public memory is especially important in recovering ordinary people because history is usually written by the winners, and what happened to the losers often is passed down with the winners’ class bias, or it is willfully forgotten.⁷

In part 3, Memory: Lost and Found, I explore how three famous icons of the Revolution have fared in public memory: Thomas Paine, Boston’s Freedom Trail, and the liberty tree. Paine, commonly regarded as the quintessential radical of the Revolution, was the author of Common Sense and The Rights of Man, the two most influential pamphlets of the revolutionary era. The Freedom Trail, initiated in the 1950s, links the historic sites of some of the most celebrated popular events of the Revolution. The liberty tree at the time of the Revolution was a major site of popular resistance in Boston (conducted literally out of doors), as were liberty trees and liberty poles throughout the colonies. As it turns out, each essay in this part is an exploration of lost public memory. When Paine returned to the United States from France in 1802, he was reviled in many quarters as was no other major figure of the era, the beginning of two centuries of remarkable ups and down in historic memory.⁸ On Boston’s Freedom Trail, visitors can follow the red brick line in the streets to buildings that have been restored with loving care, but they are left to themselves to piece together where ordinary people fit into the picture. As for the liberty tree in Boston, the site is not even on maps of the Freedom Trail, nor are liberty trees and liberty poles marked in most other places.

I chose Liberty Tree as the title for this book after I discovered—actually very recently and very much to my surprise—that the liberty tree was the principal symbol of popular opposition to British measures and at the same time the site of the efforts of the Sons of Liberty leaders to control popular resistance. During the war it became a major symbol of the Revolution, and it became a metaphor to later generations, especially African Americans, seeking to fulfill the unfulfilled promise of the Revolution. That so important a symbol should be lost in historical amnesia in a country that demands so much reverence for its patriotic symbols is astonishing.

Why write the history of ordinary people in the American Revolution? I use the term ordinary not as the opposite of extraordinary but in opposition to elites, the people in a society with wealth, power, and status. I prefer the term common people, which, unlike ordinary people, was much used at the time, except that when used today too often it smacks of condescension. Actually, the most common term at the time was simply the people, which emerged as part of the changing language of the Revolution. In Boston, leaders called meetings of the whole body of the people when they wanted to broaden participation at public rallies beyond those eligible to vote in official town meetings. John Adams referred to the whole people, James Madison to the genius of the people, others to the people at large. And, of course, the Declaration of Independence spoke of the right of the people to alter or abolish governments that persistently violated their rights.⁹

Such common usage alone should make us wonder: do we even have to ask why write the history of ordinary people? They were there. They were actors and players: they made history happen, as individuals and especially collectively. They were hardly marginal or peripheral—indeed they were often indispensable. And they have not received the recognition they sought at the time. But much more is at stake than giving credit, as important as that is. And it is more than a matter of expressing a humane compassion, not that that isn’t much needed in the United States in the twenty-first century. The simple truth is that we cannot understand the American Revolution without taking into account the part played by the people at large. Consider briefly three famous moments in the Revolution in 1765, 1776, and 1787, which essays in this volume take up.

1. Sometimes the presence of the little men, to use Sergeant Martin’s words, casts the great men in a new light. The ideas and actions of the leaders take on new dimensions when set alongside the aspirations and actions of ordinary people. The Revolution in Boston is often interpreted as the work of the famous leaders Samuel Adams, John Hancock, and John Adams. In the best-known biography of Samuel Adams, subtitled Pioneer in Propaganda, Adams is treated as the puppeteer who manipulated all the marionettes of the city. Examine the political explosion that set off the era, the resistance to the Stamp Act in Boston in 1765, when the Tree of Liberty made its first appearance (see essay 8), and the three leaders look different when set alongside the little-known Ebenezer Mackintosh, who was called Captain General of the Liberty Tree. He was a poor shoemaker previously known only as the head of one of the two rival companies that every November 5 managed the raucous ritual of Pope’s Day (Guy Fawkes Day in England). In the campaign against the Stamp Act in 1765, Mackintosh was the visible leader of the five major crowd actions, ranging from the peaceful self-disciplined parade of two thousand Bostonians that in effect nullified the Act, to the violent crowd that gutted Lieutenant Governor Thomas Hutchinson’s mansion. The Sons of Liberty leaders courted Mackintosh, collaborated with him, and then shunted him aside. From 1765 on they waged a war on two fronts: against British measures and to control the crowd. The liberty tree is an apt symbol of these two sides of the Revolution.

The political leaders who came out on top in this internal tug-of-war were men who followed the advice that Robert R. Livingston Jr., a landed aristocrat of the Hudson Valley in New York, gave to the fellow members of his class who were confronted with rebellious tenants, politically awakened yeoman farmers, and urban mechanics with leaders of their own. Convinced of the propriety of Swimming with a Stream which it is impossible to stem, he warned them that they should yield to the torrent if they hoped to direct its course.¹⁰ In Massachusetts, the leaders who survived learned to navigate through the torrent of democratic politics, each in different ways. Samuel Adams became a tribune of the people, one of America’s first professional politicians. John Hancock, the wealthiest merchant in New England, became a master of an aristocratic paternalism, using his fortune to buy popularity. And John Adams, a lawyer steeped in political philosophy, began a long career trying to balance the democratic and the aristocratic. The American political leaders who set themselves against the torrent generally did not survive.

2. Sometimes ordinary people have enough influence to shape the outcome of events. Add the people at large to the picture and time and again the conventional picture changes. Take a very famous moment in July 1776 which many Americans feel is familiar: the day when the delegates to the Continental Congress from the thirteen colonies meeting in Philadelphia adopted a Declaration of Independence. Whose moment was it? We feel we know it from visiting the faithfully restored Independence Hall in Philadelphia or from looking at John Trumbull’s endlessly reproduced painting of the delegates now displayed in the rotunda of the United States Capitol building in Washington. We also feel we know the event from the familiar facsimile of the handwritten version of the Declaration on parchment on which John Hancock’s signature is sprawled across the page and leads us to the signatures of the signers below.

The painting invariably misnamed The Signing of the Declaration of Independence, represents a top-down version of the event. It actually portrays not the signing but the five members of the drafting committee presenting the document to Congress: Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Roger Sherman and—Swimming with the Stream—Robert R. Livingston. The delegates only look on. The signing actually took place later over many months. Trumbull, who worked on the painting for some three decades, took great pains to make sure he rendered an accurate likeness of each eminent statesman but he perpetuated the myth of an American consensus for independence. There was no such scene when all the delegates were gathered. Trumbull included men who voted against declaring independence, men who were absent at the time of the vote, and many who opposed a break with England. The painting delivers the message that the signers within doors led the way to independence.¹¹

You would never know from the painting that the well-dressed gentlemen Trumbull portrayed—the men in suits of that day—had been brought to abandon reconciliation and declare American independence by a groundswell of opinion publicly expressed out of doors by the plough joggers of the countryside, who wore homespun clothes, and the mechanics of the cities, known as leather apron men (see essay 1). Nor would you know that war had begun and people were debating options for the country and for themselves as never before. In January 1776, Common Sense appeared, written by a former English artisan recently arrived in Philadelphia who made the case for independence in language that stirred ordinary people to a sense of their own capacity to effect change. We have it in our power to begin the world over again, wrote Thomas Paine. By July 1776, more than one hundred thousand people had read his pamphlet or had had it read to them in army camps, taverns, and meeting houses. It was greedily bought up and read by all ranks of people, said the delegate from New Hampshire (see essay 6).

In the spring of 1776, while Congress dithered, some eighty local meetings adopted resolutions instructing their representatives to support independence: town meetings, county conventions, militia companies. Nine state conventions did the same thing. The delegates knew it: on May 20, John Adams wrote that Every post and every day rolls in upon us independence like a torrent. On July 3, the day after Congress voted for independence, he spelled out the process: Time has been given for the whole people maturely to consider the great question of independence ... by discussing it in newspapers and pamphlets, by debating it in assemblies, conventions, committees of safety and inspection, in town and county meetings as well as in private conversations, so that the whole people in every colony of the thirteen, have now adopted it as their own. But Trumbull portrayed the men within the Pennsylvania State House as if they alone were responsible for the decision. In reality, the whole people were ahead of Trumbull’s eminent statesmen. A recent biographer of Adams could not have been more off the mark in writing, It was John Adams, more than anyone who made it happen. Trumbull, who excelled at painting stirring historical panoramas, of course would have needed another canvas to portray the people out of doors.¹²

3. Sometimes there is a complex interplay of the people and the leaders, and the political decisions of men at the top can be explained only by taking into account the movements from below of which they were intensely aware. Witness the drafting of the Constitution at the Philadelphia convention and the process of ratification in 1787–88 (see essay 4), as well as the response to it among mechanics (see essay 1). James Madison, James Wilson, and the other framers make sense not as geniuses who wrought a miracle in Philadelphia, as they are often portrayed, but as astute political leaders who knew they had to accommodate the genius of the people, a phrase that meant their values or spirit. As George Mason, a respected Virginia delegate put it, Notwithstanding the oppression & injustice experienced among us from democracy, the genius of the people is in favor of it, and the genius of the people must be consulted.¹³

The delegates were drawn from the elites: they were more well-to-do, more educated, more politically experienced than the average man—and they were far more conservative. Such democratic spokesmen as Thomas Paine, Daniel Shays, and Abraham Yates were not present at the convention, yet they were a distinct presence. They were the ghosts of the popular movements of the preceding two decades who haunted the delegates. Paine was so popular because he was the champion not only of independence but of simple democratic government based on a broad suffrage. Shays was one of several leaders of a rebellion of angry, overtaxed, debt-ridden farmers in western Massachusetts in the 1780s which set off a tremor of alarm among conservatives everywhere. Yates was a stormy petrel in the New York Senate, a man who began life as a shoemaker, a foe of all high flyers, as he called Alexander Hamilton. (Hamilton put him down as the late cobbler of laws and old shoes.) He was typical of state legislators elsewhere who had an itch for paper money (Madison’s phrase) and for laws preventing foreclosures on farm mortgages, both measures opposed by moneyed men.

The new Constitution vested the new national government with the power to suppress insurrections (so much for the ghost of Daniel Shays) and erected specific curbs on the states’ ability to emit paper money or pass laws impairing the obligation of contracts (which presumably laid the ghost of Abraham Yates). It also provided for the return to their owners of future fugitive slaves—a giant ghost that loomed over southern slaveholders, who had experienced a massive loss of runaway slaves during the war. (George Washington, presiding officer at the Convention, lost seventeen slaves from his Mount Vernon plantation alone.) But to accomplish these goals the framers knew they had to create a government that would last for the ages and, more immediately, that could be ratified by conventions in the states in which the delegates had to be elected by popular vote. In the big cities this meant by democratic-minded mechanics.

As these three moments suggest, would-be rulers were very much aware that they were living through a time of tumults, rebellions, democratic upheavals, and popular awakenings that challenged the status quo. One of the charges in the Declaration of Independence was that the king had excited domestic insurrections, a reference to the appeal to slaves by the British general in Virginia to flee their masters. Another charge was that the king had made the colonies subject to convulsions within, a reference to the democratic upsurges in the political vacuum of 1774–76. Still another was that he had encouraged the merciless Indian savages on the frontier, which was hardly the way the many tribes of Native Americans viewed their choice to defend their own independence from the colonists. The American Revolution was not a proletarian revolution, but it was a revolution with strong plebeian currents, some of which flowed into the mainstream and many of which ran as crosscurrents to it. Viewing this storm-tossed history solely from the conventional vantage point of the top down simply fails to come to grips with the history seen from the bottom up (African Americans) or from the middle (yeoman farmers and artisans), let alone seen from the vantage point of outsiders (Native Americans) or of women. My objective in these essays is a more inclusive history that brings these perspectives together and illuminates the whole.

Years ago in an undergraduate literature course on Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman, I was taken by Ralph Waldo Emerson’s advice to scholars in his famous The American Scholar address, delivered at Harvard in 1837, to explore the near, the low [and] the common. And I was introduced to mechanics by Whitman’s I Hear America Singing. The themes of a democratic history of the Revolution are not new to Americans or to historians. They are hardly the result of some recent fashion for political correctness, a red herring dragged across the trail. I encountered the themes in graduate school more than half a century ago when I became a historian. And I have since written at length about the way historians throughout the twentieth century responded to the challenge posed by the so-called progressive historians who dealt with them. J. Franklin Jameson, a historian at the peak of the historical profession, asked scholars to consider The American Revolution as a Social Movement: But who can say to the waves of Revolution: Thus far shall we go and no farther.... The stream of revolution, once started, could not be confined within narrow banks, but spread abroad upon the land. Many economic desires, many social aspirations were set free by the political struggle. Carl Becker, focusing on the political, framed the double character of the Revolution as not only a war for home rule but a war for who shall rule at home. And Charles Beard, the most influential and widely read American historian through the 1940s posited the Constitution as the triumph of a small group of leaders trying to curb the excess of democracy.

These interpretations by the progressives were common among historians, as well as in many textbooks, until the end of World War II. They moved our understanding of the Revolution away from a rather arid constitutional interpretation. They were insightful and provocative in the best sense, yet in many ways limited. (My exploration of the mechanics was inspired in part by a desire to explain a class Beard could not account for, and my book on the Democratic Republicans by a desire to understand Jeffersonians who could not be explained solely as agrarians.)¹⁴

In the decade and a half after World War II well into the 1960s, however, the very questions the progressives raised were eclipsed among all but a handful of scholars. At the height of the cold war, the historian Peter Novick concludes after examining the writings and private correspondence of a host of leading historians, a sense of urgent crisis and impending Armageddon was widespread in the historical profession. The focus of American historians shifted from the conflict of classes to a consensual culture, Novick writes. Radicalism outside the consensus, suspect in the age of McCarthyism, was out of fashion in the study of the past.¹⁵

From the point of view of ruling circles, the American Revolution had to be sanitized and made into a safe revolution for export. The cold war, framed as an apocalyptic struggle between democracy and communism, was also a time when colonies and former colonies in the third world were undergoing revolutions of their own, some taking inspiration from the Russian Revolution, some from the American. It would not do to portray the American revolutionary era, as had the progressives, as rife with social transformations, internal strife, and leaders who represented class interests. Nor would it do to probe its failures: celebration was in and iconoclasm out. I can remember a president of the American Historical Association, a leading colonialist, warning young historians against robbing the people of their heroes ... insulting their folk memory of great figures they admired. He called for a sanely conservative history of the United States.¹⁶

The events of the mid-1960s and 1970s punctured this balloon. The debacle of the Vietnam War (which Americans might have understood if they had a better grasp of their own successful seven-year colonial struggle that toppled the greatest imperial power of the eighteenth century) and the corruption epitomized by Watergate put a big dent in the hero worship of national leaders. The successes in the broadly based struggles for racial and gender equality made Americans—historians among them—more aware that there was a long past to such struggles and enormous gaps in our historical knowledge. As the historical profession expanded amidst a boom in higher education and reflected more of the diversity in American life, and as a changed atmosphere in academic life encouraged a more questioning attitude, new approaches to history were entertained and new fields of history came into being. The agency of movements bringing about contemporary change made it impossible to ignore the agency of their predecessors. Agency is a word that became popular among historians as it was expressed in a memorable turn of phrase by E. P. Thompson, the widely read English historian, who said that he was seeking to rescue ... from the enormous condescension of posterity the agency of working people, the degree to which they contributed, by conscious efforts, to the making of history.¹⁷

As a result of these changes, subjects long regarded as closed (and considered uninteresting by most senior historians) were reopened, and historians began to rediscover the popular side of the Revolution, including a range of subjects the progressives had paid scant attention to, like the ideologies they had dismissed as propaganda or the histories of African Americans and Native Americans left out of the conventional narrative. The new scholarship, as the historian Linda Kerber summed up the achievements of the first generation of historians as of 1990, tended "to restore rebellion to histories of the American Revolution, stressing the ways various groups shaped the revolution and were in turn affected by it. By 2005, Gary Nash, another leading pathbreaker, summing up two generations of scholarship, could write, in the last few decades, a remarkable flowering of an American history sensitive to gender, race, religion and class, which is to say a democratized history, is giving us an alternative, long forgotten American Revolution."¹⁸

How radical was the American Revolution? (the subject of essay 5) is a question that would have been dismissed several decades earlier with the response, not very, and would have been difficult to answer as long as historians focused on a very small cast of leaders and were preoccupied with the origins and causes of the Revolution to the exclusion of revolutionary processes and outcomes. It is a sign of the enormous shift in scholarship that in 1994 the National Standards for History could set as a requirement for students that they be able to confront the central issue of how revolutionary the Revolution actually was. And to accomplish this, students necessarily will have to see the Revolution through different eyes—enslaved and free African Americans, Native Americans, white men and women of different social classes, religions, ideological dispositions, regions and occupations. The Standards were drafted after several years of discussion by hundreds of historians, teachers, and educators at all levels delegated by some thirty national educational organizations.¹⁹

In truth, the volume and quality of scholarship has so expanded that trying to grasp the Revolution as a whole has become challenging and exhilarating. The study of African American history has moved both the agency of the enslaved and slavery as a public issue from the periphery to the center of the Revolution, forcing a long overdue reexamination of the policies of the great men.²⁰ Research on farmers has shown that rebellions were common and widespread, while research on the working people of the cities has revealed a tenacious mechanic presence. A rich new social history dealing with long-range trends in private life has made it possible, among other things, to compare American society before and after the Revolution. Women’s history has revealed not only the active role of women in different classes and the emergence of American advocates for the rights of women but also how restrictive were the notions of gender embedded in the ideology of the founders. The new Indian history shows how catastrophic the expanding American empire looked from the vantage point of those in its path and how varied was their response.

If you imagine the revolutionary era as a dramatic play, you could say that historians have been successful in peopling the stage with a much larger cast of characters, who in the past were treated as extras in a crowd scene or given no more than bit parts. The famous great men are still very much there, but they are no longer the only actors on the stage, they don’t have all the lines, and they interact with players they confronted at the time. The play now has to accommodate a host of people who in various ways made a difference either as leaders of popular movements or as exemplars of a trend: leaders of agrarian movements (Herman Husband, William Prendergast, Ethan Allen, Samuel Ely, Daniel Shays, John Fries); urban radicals (Thomas Paine, Dr. Thomas Young, James Cannon, Alexander McDougall, Isaac Sears); activist artisans (Ebenezer Mackintosh, Paul Revere, George Robert Twelves Hewes, Samuel Simpson, Timothy Bigelow, George Warner, James Cox); legislators risen from humble origins (Abraham Yates, William Findley, Matthew Lyon, Melancton Smith); articulate women (Abigail Smith Adams, Mercy Otis Warren, Judith Sargent Murray, Deborah Sampson Gannett, Phillis Wheatley); African Americans (Richard Allen, Absalom Jones, Prince Hall, Elizabeth Mumbet Freeman, Thomas Peters, Boston King); soldiers and seamen who were hard-core veterans who recorded their experiences (Joseph Plumb Martin, Jeremiah Greenman, James Collins, William Widger, Andrew Sherburne); radicals of various persuasions (John Woolman, Rezin Hammond, Abraham Clark, Philip Freneau, Joel Barlow, William Manning); crusaders for First Amendment freedoms (Isaac Backus, Jemima Wilkinson, Tunis Wortman, Jedediah Peck); and, of course, Native American chieftains (Dragging Canoe, Joseph Brant, Cornplanter, Red Jacket, Alexander McGillivray, Daniel Nimham).

If the names of the players in this vastly expanded cast of characters send readers to libraries, it is a sign of the times that readers are likely to find a good many of them written up in the new multivolume collections of biography which are changing the who’s who of American history.²¹

Historians have added so many characters in so many subplots that how the play should end is subject to differing interpretations: the play seems to cry out for multiple endings at different times because lots of these histories are not confined by the dates of the political American Revolution. The Constitution of 1787 may have been the consummation of the Revolution for some but hardly for others. And the many groups on the stage were decidedly not in harmony with one another: the cast did not all assemble at the finale to sing a chorus of Yankee Doodle, the national anthem of the Revolution. The Revolution was more multisided and multicolored than has been allowed, which is why it could be at the same time more radical and yet more conservative. If we in the audience two hundred years later allow ourselves to respond emotionally to the drama, we may see that the Revolution was more inspiring and more heartbreaking than most Americans ever imagined.

As I look back on the past half century or so, I am struck not only by how much the research of historians has changed the contours of the American Revolution but also by the ways in which the institutions responsible for scholarship about early American history have changed. Study in what in 1945 was called a neglected field has expanded and become decentralized and democratized. The training of historians is no longer confined to a handful of elite graduate schools. Major bodies of original sources, once available only in a small number of libraries and archives in the East, have been made more accessible, first through microcopy and more recently through electronic dissemination. (In 1950, for my dissertation on the Democratic Republicans of New York, in order to read the newspapers and pamphlets published in the state I had to travel in a 1937 Ford to a dozen libraries.) The Institute of Early American History, founded in 1945 and long clubbish and stuffy, has become a path breaker in broadening the boundaries of scholarship and making way for young scholars.

Disseminators of historical knowledge have responded. Decades ago, when Colonial Williamsburg Inc. restored the capital of colonial Virginia as a living museum in an age of segregation, tourists would never have known that half the colonial town was African American. Today it sponsors the other half tours and reenacts stark scenes from slave life, like the capture of a runaway. The Chicago Historical Society mounted an exhibit, We the People (1987–2005), for which I served as guest co-curator, devoted to the question, what was the role of ordinary people in shaping the nation? The National Park Service has been open to revising interpretations at many of its sites of the Revolution. The multiauthored college textbooks in American history usually include historians who have contributed to the new scholarship. The National Standards for History, mentioned earlier, have been welcomed by high school teachers. All of this suggests that there are many publics ready to welcome the new scholarship about the Revolution.²²

But in spite of such very substantial gains—indeed, probably because of them—many gatekeepers of the past have resisted change. Publishers of elementary school textbooks throw in token images of the groups left out but seem all too ready to cave in to pressure groups that threaten the boards which grant approval for school adoptions. Television, which gave us a moving documentary about ordinary people in Ken Burns’s The Civil War and a riveting series dramatizing slavery in Roots, cannot seem to break out of a reverential narrative dominated by the founding fathers. Hollywood is yet to produce a first-rate movie on the Revolution. In The Patriot, Mel Gibson created a fantasy world in which a South Carolina planter’s happy slaves join with him to fight on the American side, when in reality they were more likely to have run away to join the British. The National Endowment for Humanities (NEH), long a major source of funding for innovative research and public history, now flags proposals dealing with sexuality, race, and gender for special review. A former chairman of the NEH rails against the National Standards for History (which the NEH funded and which she earlier sponsored) on the misleading charge that George Washington makes only a fleeting appearance in them.²³

It has long been common in the United States for self-appointed guardians of the past to take potshots at history professors and school textbooks. (Charles Beard lost his job at Columbia in World War I.) In the late 1940s and the 1950s, the cold war inquisition into political opinions, followed in the 1960s by the intolerant backlash against nonconformists, took a toll on college faculties, historians among them. In 1970–73, I served on a committee of the American Historical Association that reported on the wreckage of these decades. As a result of that report, the AHA adopted an Academic Bill of Rights for Historians.²⁴ I am struck by the extent to which in the 1980s and 1990s the radical right made history and historians a target in their culture wars. Their campaigns are well funded, orchestrated, and sustained. In the 1990s, one year it was the National Standards, one year the curators at the Smithsonian museum, the next year the NEH itself, in one state a campaign for a school curriculum that eliminates slavery as a subject of study, in other states laws legislating diversity in state university faculties. There is a steady drumbeat demonizing historians and humanities faculties for political correctness, relativism, and multiculturalism as caricatured by the right.²⁵

The self-appointed guardians of the past seem intent on policing the founding era in particular. They would have us look upon the founders as demigods, the Constitution as the Miracle at Philadelphia, and the original copies of the Declaration, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights as sacred texts, enshrined for public display in Washington. They parse the words of the Constitution to discover the original intent of the framers, as if those very pragmatic men wanted to keep government frozen for two centuries. How reluctant the guardians are to allow historical issues to become central to the Revolution that might detract from the founding fathers. How narrow their conception of who were founders. They want a history of the United States taught in the spirit of triumphalism.²⁶

The success of the new scholarship accounts in part for the guardians embracing the celebratory biographies of the great men of the era that have appeared in such profusion: they see them as an antidote to the new scholarship, books that bring the country back to the comforting heroic master narrative of the Revolution.²⁷ The new biographers have drawn on the new scholarship embodied in the richly edited multivolume publication projects of the Papers of the greats, yet have refused to accept the challenge of the massive new scholarship that arguably puts the leaders in a new light—with the exception of one subject: the biographers have found it more and more difficult to avoid the issue of slavery in the revolutionary era on which the new scholarship confronts the founders at their Achilles heel.²⁸

As I listen to the din from the right-wing guardians of the past, they seem unwilling to recognize the historical method itself. They cling to the notion that there is some finite, unchanging body of facts about history in general and the American Revolution in particular. The reality is that historians, whatever their subject, have no choice but to select from among a vast array of facts to present a narrative or an analysis. This means that as new facts are discovered, the narrative or analysis is revised. A president sneers at revisionist historians as if revisionist is a dirty word.²⁹ But that, of course, is what historians do: revise interpretations of the past found wanting. Historical revisions often have political implications, but sometimes they cut one way, sometimes another. The business of historians is to examine previous versions of history: to look at familiar subjects from a new vantage point or with original sources that have been newly discovered or little appreciated. Above all, the business of the historian is to ask new questions of the past in the light of new interests that sometimes arise from perceived gaps in historical knowledge and often arise out of the world we live in. The essays in this book flow from all of the above.

Joseph Plumb Martin, the irreverent sergeant in the Continental Army who wrote, Great men get praise; little men, nothing, was unduly pessimistic when he added, But it was always so and always will be. Martin would be excited to know that his memoir of 1830 was reprinted several times in the twentieth century and that historians make use of it to recover the experiences of rank-and-file soldiers and probe the meaning of the Revolution for those who felt its promises were