MDDM related books: re American Revolution

[Doug Millison]

http://www2.h-net.msu.edu/reviews/showrev.cgi?path=88911024079065

Ray Raphael. A People's History of the American Revolution: How the Common
People Shaped the Fight for Independence. People's History Series. New
York: The New Press, 2001. viii + 386 pgs. Index, notes. $25.95 (cloth),
ISBN 1-56584-653-2; $13.95 (paper), ISBN 0-06000-440-1.

Gordon S. Wood. The American Revolution: A History. New York: The Modern
Library, 2002. xxv + 190 pgs. Chronology, maps, bibliographic note, index.
$19.95 (cloth), ISBN 0-679-64057-6.

[...] Each of the first six of Raphael's seven chapters concerns a select
portion of the American population. Chapter 1, "Rank-and-File Rebels,"
explores the ways that "plain folk" contributed to the sociopolitical
upheaval of the Revolution, both in urban centers and rural areas. Portions
of this chapter are drawn from Raphael's First American Revolution and may
bear special appeal for legal scholars. Here, as in the later book, Raphael
narrates the tumultuous summer of 1774, during which the people of western
Massachusetts wrested political authority from the royal government in a
bloodless and subsequently forgotten coup. His conclusion that "moderate
delegates to the Continental Congress [who] pushed for reconciliation in
the fall of 1774 ... were a bit too late" ignores certain contingencies,
such as Congress's approval of the inflammatory Suffolk Resolves or
Parliament's rejection of Lord Chatham's Provisional Bill, the failure of
which might have prevented or forestalled the war. But Raphael justifiably
draws our attention to the people's revolution against the Crown-appointed
judiciary, a revolution that, to its participants, may very well have
seemed irreversible.

Chapter 2, "Fighting Men and Boys," views the military conflict "through
the eyes of privates and petty officers" to see more clearly the hardships
of war: hunger, want of adequate clothing and shelter, injury, disease, and
death (p. 53). Here Raphael is attuned both the economic disparities that
enabled some wealthy men to avoid military service as well as the masculine
peer pressures that pushed some young men into it. Chapter 3, "Women,"
moves beyond the elite ladies who first captured historians' attention in
the early 1980s, exploring instead the lives of working-class farm
laborers, price protesters, and camp followers. Raphael also dedicates
several pages of this chapter to instances of rape and sexual assault
inflicted by both the American and British armies, a topic seldom discussed
in popular histories of the Revolution. In Chapter 4, "Loyalists and
Pacifists," Raphael captures well the internecine essence of the
Revolution: communities and families split apart as men and women supported
or opposed the Patriot cause for a variety of complex, shifting, and
seemingly counterintuitive reasons, ranging from ideology to economic
interest to personal allegiance to sheer self-preservation. And, in defense
of their own liberties, American Revolutionaries frequently quashed the
rights of their perceived enemies, the same rights, ironically, that they
later enshrined in the Bill of Rights, including the "[f]reedom of speech,
trial by jury, the right of cross-examination, [and the] prohibition
against bills of attainder" (p. 185).

Chapter 5, "Native Americans," concludes that the Revolution had a
devastating impact even for those Indian nations not drawn into the
heaviest fighting. The war caused wrenching conflict within communities,
often along generational lines. Remapping the geopolitical landscape of
North America, the war also isolated many Native American groups from their
British allies, situating them instead as antagonists of the United States'
soon-to-be-realized Manifest Destiny. Chapter 6, "African Americans,"
reveals the willingness of British and American leaders alike to "play the
'slave card'" (p. 246), that is, to entice slaves to runaway or to exploit
planters' fears of slave insurrections for political or military purposes.
In each of these chapters, Raphael amasses a remarkable array of
informative, rarely read, primary source material. General readers may balk
at Raphael's tendency to present these quotations (which he has not
modernized), as well as much of his own argument, in lengthy, bulleted,
small-font paragraphs, but those who stave off the temptation to skim will
be rewarded for their efforts with rich, eye-witness accounts of the
Revolution. [...]


Wood has little patience for histories of the Revolution such as Raphael's.
In his preface to The American Revolution, Wood lambastes those scholars
for whom "it has become fashionable to deny that anything substantially
progressive came out of the Revolution" (p. xxiv). By contrast, Wood argues
that the Revolution and the Critical Period produced "a rambunctious
middling democracy" characterized by broadened representation and
interest-driven party politics, a system that neither the Patriots of 1776
nor the Federalists of 1787 fully anticipated (p. 166). [...]

The giddy and licentious people, in turn, requited the emergence of a
natural aristocracy by feeling no great veneration for it, and this is
Wood's second significant observation. In Radicalism, Wood posits that the
Revolution swept away a culture of monarchical deference and ushered in its
place one of democratic egalitarianism. Though not the focal point of The
American Revolution, this argument is diffused throughout the book. An
"unplanned popularization of politics," Wood argues, resulted from the
pre-Revolutionary resistance movement. "Ordinary people were no longer
willing to trust only wealthy and learned gentlemen to represent them in
government" (p. 51). Citing widespread opposition to the Society of the
Cincinnati, legal reforms such as the abolition of entail and
primogeniture, the increasing assertiveness of American women in defense of
their rights, and a burgeoning antislavery movement, Wood claims that
republican equality--that is, equality of opportunity--"became a rallying
cry for people in the aspiring middling ranks who were now more openly
resentful than before of those who had presumed to be their social
superiors" (pp. 120-129). [...]

A People's History and The American Revolution thus mirror each other, each
inverting the other's strengths and weaknesses. Raphael powerfully conveys
the suffering and affliction wrought by the Revolution, but he presents
this information in a fragmented, almost despondent fashion. Wood, by
contrast, offers a useful and informative narrative of the Revolution and
the Constitution, but in celebrating their legacies of democracy and
egalitarianism, he overlooks the many human costs of war. In consequence,
neither of these books will likely become the last word on the subject.
Until a popular history is written that tells a complete story of the
American Revolution, a story that recognizes and fully articulates the
ironic and painful ways in which liberty and equality in the United States
have been bound up in a history of inequity and oppression, the American
public would be best served to read both Raphael and Wood. Perhaps nothing
could be more ultra-chic than that.