1775 (2 page)

In its own way, to be sure,
1775
is a political book. My aim has been to view and describe the onset of the American Revolution in the thirteen colonies through much the same multiple lenses that I had first employed between 1966 and 1968 in
The Emerging Republican Majority.
That book ventured its prediction on the basis of my examining prior decades of national politics and presidential, state, and local election returns against a teeming backdrop of history, economics, major wars won or lost, geography, migration, culture, race, ethnicity, and religion. This was an in-depth fascination I had started developing as a teenager in 1956. National election patterns went from hobby to vocation. Most of that volume was written before I worked as assistant to the campaign manager in that year’s Republican presidential effort. In fact, the early manuscript got me the job. The deeper I got into national politics, the more convinced I became that these various criteria served to explain most of the population’s presidential-level psychologies, trends, and electoral decision making. Voting for president in the United States has not been a haphazard thought process.

If, over nearly a half century, my books have been characterized by one vein of ongoing original research, it has been this fascination—deepening, enlarging, and extending my knowledge of the grassroots United States. Back in 1968 or even 1980, I might have known which presidential candidate carried a fair number of the nation’s individual counties, and I might have known the Republican or Democratic leanings of most congressional districts. No longer, of course. I have not kept up systematically on the detail of national elections since 1992, save for religion-related research in
2005–2006. That project was for a section of a larger volume, chapters that detailed the rise since the 1960s of conservative and born-again religious voters within the Republican Party’s national coalition. In the United States, religion is rarely unimportant in national politics. The 1770s provide their own strong affirmation.

Since the 1990s, the balance of my research and writing has shifted from contemporary politics back into earlier history. The focus in
The Cousins’ Wars
was on grassroots behavior and decision making during the periods leading up to and including the Revolution and the American Civil War. In researching
William McKinley,
my 2003 biography of the twenty-fifth president for Arthur Schlesinger’s
American Presidents
series, my search included grassroots detail, especially in the Midwest, for the realigning character of the 1896 presidential election. Over the last few years,
1775
has required its own round of museums, libraries, and back roads, ranging from coastal New England, Canada, and Vermont to the Chesapeake and the upcountries of both Carolinas. Once again, I found that ethnicity and religion most often guided a man’s choice of uniform—if he chose one—although many decisions were swayed by vocation, crops, hard times, or indebtedness.

I have tried to avoid too much detail on these matters. However, 50 years of some familiarity have bred not contempt for detail but appreciation. Proof matters. Elaboration is sometimes essential to understanding. Hopefully, a reasonable line has been drawn between documentation and minutiae.

In the process of reading and writing this book, my familiar methodology has buttressed my conclusion and vice versa. Taking all thirteen colonies together, no sweeping one-dimensional explanation of why 1774–1776 became a political and revolutionary watershed—be it ideology, economics, or religion—works everywhere, all of the time, or even most of the time. If anything, the upheavals of 1775 were laboratories for the
complexity
of local behavior and Revolutionary motivation.

History and Fashion

Unlike trends in men’s and women’s clothing, whose overnight shifts are documented avidly, fashions in American history change only slowly. The rapid inching-up of women’s hemlines above the knees toward midthigh, first seen in the 1920s and again in the 1960s, was closely observed and
widely taken as a national barometer of more permissive morality and speculative finance. Reinterpretations of American history, more glacial and less sensuous, occur over decades or generations, although old ones sometimes remain influential beyond their time.

The public, as opposed to the profession, has little interest. Historiography—the study of history and its processes—is dull stuff. A proposal entitled “The Role of the Consensus and Neo-Whig Schools in Shifting Public Perceptions of the American Revolution, 1946–1976” might win plaudits as Ph.D. ambitions go. However, as a published book it would be lucky to reach number 325,000 on Amazon.com. So this volume, including this preface, will tread carefully, but sometimes contextualizing comments are in order.

Briefly put, the ongoing, exaggerated American focus on 1776, which grew in the nineteenth century, became even more insistent after World War II. This was when historians of the so-called Consensus and later Neo-Whig schools—less than electric names, obviously—displaced the Progressive or Economic Determinist schools. The latter’s own downfall had come from overstating economic factors and motivations in the Revolution. Deification of 1776 was further encouraged by the bicentennial commemorations in 1976, which, as
Chapter 7
will amplify, promoted that single year as if it—or the Declaration of Independence—were a toothpaste or automobile. In recent decades, several scholars have gone so far as to describe the Declaration’s portraiture as quasireligious.

Such legacies are not trivial, because they continue to weigh on national opinion. It has often been remarked, for example, that Washington officeholders pontificating on markets, taxes, and monetary policy are usually repeating the ideas of some dead economist, often one of whom the orator had no inkling. Similarly, Fourth of July speakers holding forth about the Declaration or the Spirit of ’Seventy-Six are often repeating the ideas of some deceased Consensus historian or trite bicentennial commemoration. Such are the ways that historical fashion can linger well beyond its expiration date.

For example, the theses offered by Consensus historians in the confident decades following World War II typically emphasized American distinctiveness and exceptionalism. Many played down internal divisions in the colonies, instead suggesting a considerable homogeneity of pro-Revolutionary opinion. In the words of Daniel Boorstin, the Revolution “was hardly a revolution at all” and bore little resemblance to upheavals in Europe.
²
If
Americans were not entirely united in 1775 and 1776, the argument went, they were not seriously divided either. Neo-Whigs were less consensus driven. Although they rejected social and economic causations, most singled out “more political, legalistic and constitutional” explanations of the Revolution’s emergence. Patriot victory, pronounced one, represented “the triumph of a principle.”
³

The late 1940s, 1950s, and early 1960s were also a time when prominent thinkers imagined an “end of ideology” and a triumph of moderation. Others enthused over a “melting pot” bound to lessen ethnic and racial differences. Some homogenization was presumed, if not endorsed. The concept of Americanism became strong enough that the House of Representatives could establish a Committee on Un-American Activities. Beyond politics, for those of us old enough to remember the cooking of the 1950s, that too was bland. Jell-O was a staple; frozen pizza was a breakthrough.

More depth and attention to historical complexity developed in the 1970s and 1980s, abetted by the rise of specialties such as military history, as well as by cliometrics and neoprogressive emphasis on “bottom-up” economic history that analyzed the circumstances of ordinary folk. The first camp directed attention to internal conflict and civil war in Revolutionary America. The second latched on to social and economic discontent, not least in prewar cities and seaports. From a relatively conservative perspective, military historians were persuasive in maintaining that “close study of the areas committed to one side or the other supports the view that ethnic and religious differences were important determinants of Revolutionary behavior.”
⁴

Sophisticated information technology has been a particular boon, opening up new resources, making available specialized detail, and providing easy access to hard-to-find collections and publications. This, too, diminished misconceptions of relative colonial homogeneity and the oneness of political opinion. The Internet Revolution, especially in the 2000s, worked its own magic. Colonial America regained complexity and tension; Consensus and to a lesser extent Neo-Whig interpretations lost ground. Social, economic, and internal conflict-based explanations regained influence.

This book does not contend that a particular set of social and economic forces touched off the Revolution. On the contrary, no one set of causations played that role, because too many separate ingredients were involved. Of thirteen colonies, roughly half were economic and cultural amalgamates.
New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and the Carolinas were conspicuously so. Social, economic, political, ideological, and religious forces all influenced local versions of the Revolution.

The last third of the twentieth century saw the new or further documentation of many innovations, local animosities, and competing interests. Consider the First Continental Congress in late 1774. It called for localities to set up committees of observation and inspection. By mid-1775, some 500 to 600 counties and towns had done so, many of them quickly developing loyalty-enforcement and regulatory mechanisms. The Revolution’s committees, conventions, congresses, and associations, although recalling English Civil War terminology and precedents, were deployed more quickly and in much greater numbers. In Philadelphia, as research published during the 1980s showed, the local committee structure mushroomed between 1774 and 1776. What’s more, as
Chapter 5
will illustrate, committee membership became more radical in each stage. True, their politics and practices fell short of what emerged in France during the 1790s. But although the French analogy is limited, the number of Loyalist émigrés who fled the United States ultimately exceeded the count of Frenchmen who fled their revolution.
⁵

Military historians have documented the civil war characteristics that the Revolution displayed in many areas. In New York, New Jersey, and the Carolinas, tabulations show that in roughly half of the battles in which militia participated, Americans were fighting Americans.
⁶
This bitterness continued to the war’s end.

Population-minded scholars have shown how the rapid growth of the thirteen colonies worried British officials by the 1760s, pushing them toward restrictive measures like the Royal Proclamation of 1763, which sought to prohibit settlement west of the Appalachians. Unless western expansion could be stopped, it was feared that the colonies would soon be too populous to be restrained militarily. Migration to North America was for some years seen as threatening depopulation and loss of wealth in northern Ireland and parts of Scotland.

As for colonial economic growth and opportunity, it is now clear that especially after 1764, British policies unduly restricting paper money shrank the local money supply in some American colonies to an extent that throttled commerce and forced more people into debt. The expanding ranks of artisans, most notable in Boston, New York, and Philadelphia, grew restive in the pre-Revolutionary decade as their share of municipal wealth and income
declined. Remedies they put forward included reducing or cutting off imports from Britain, as well as promoting the growth of American manufacturing enterprises that Parliament discouraged or flatly prohibited.

Powerful ethnic and religious divisions mocked notions of cultural and political homogeneity. Wartime loyalties were splintered and divided among emergent groups like Germans, Irish Catholics, Methodists, and Baptists, and despite nineteenth- and twentieth-century boosterism determined to praise their Patriotic fervor, probing scholars have documented something less. In New Jersey, for example, bitter divisions set Patriot Dutch Reformed adherents of the Coetus faction against Conferentie-faction congregations who took the Loyalist side. In South Carolina, Regular Baptist clergymen on the Patriot side failed to sway backcountry Separate Baptists, many of whom instead followed an unctuous pro-Tory preacher.

Sometimes the new detail has been double-barreled in its revisionist effect. Arthur Schlesinger, Sr., in 1917 a young Ohio historian, made a splash that year with his influential volume
The Colonial Merchants and the American Revolution, 1763-1776.
⁷
Much of the revolutionary impetus of the 1760s, he argued, came from merchants, and the eventual Revolution represented a clashing of economic interests. Late twentieth-century research has amplified how different specializations within the urban merchant communities, not broad overall merchant status, best explained their Patriot-versus-Loyalist commitments. This upheld the salience of economic issues. However, the same research into Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Norfolk, and Charleston loyalties has shown how ethnicity and religion split the merchants, rebutting the notion of a largely economic clash of issues.

Ideally, this information should rebut the insistences of historians who claim a singular and paramount role for politics, economics, or religion. Part of that singularity is also a matter of definitions, which need not detain us here.

Historians and others who write for a popular audience tend to minimize or eliminate the quotations from scholarly tracts and from others in the field. This book does, too, but not always happily. As with
The Cousins’ Wars
a decade and a half ago, and for that matter
The Emerging Republican Majority
forty-five years ago, the frameworks, general theses, and interrelations in this book are mine. However, when it comes to specifics of the new complexity, be they colonial money supplies, local merchant ethnicity and religion, the European munitions trade of 1774–1775, the evolution of Philadelphia Revolutionary committees, or the intramural tensions between
Coetus and Conferentie in what is now suburban New Jersey, the original spadework is someone else’s. I have drawn on individual historians whose names and writings should add to the credibility of the points made.