The American Revolution Reborn

The American Revolution Reborn

THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION REBORN

Edited by

Patrick Spero

and

Michael Zuckerman

PENN

UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA PRESS

PHILADELPHIA

Copyright © 2016 University of Pennsylvania Press

All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher.

Published by

University of Pennsylvania Press

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112

www.upenn.edu/pennpress

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

10  9  8  7  6  5  4  3  2  1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

ISBN 978-0-8122-4846-3

To Frank Fox, who inspired us

And to the American Philosophical Society, Boston Beer, the David Library of the American Revolution, HISTORY, the Library Company of Philadelphia, the McNeil Center for Early American Studies, and the Museum of the American Revolution, who helped make it happen

CONTENTS

Introduction. Origins

Patrick Spero

PART I. CIVIL WARS: CHALLENGING THE PATRIOTIC NARRATIVE

Chapter 1. War Stories: Remembering and Forgetting the American Revolution

Michael A. McDonnell

Chapter 2. The Intimacies of Occupation: Loyalties, Compromise, and Betrayal in Revolutionary-Era Newport

Travis Glasson

Chapter 3. Uncommon Cause: The Challenges of Disaffection in Revolutionary Pennsylvania

Aaron Sullivan

Chapter 4. Loyalism, Citizenship, American Identity: The Shoemaker Family

Kimberly Nath

Chapter 5. Executioners of Their Friends and Brethren: Naval Impressment as an Atlantic Civil War

Denver Brunsman

PART II. WIDER HORIZONS: DECENTERING THE NATIONALISTIC NARRATIVE

Chapter 6. British Union and American Revolution: Imperial Authority and the Multinational State

Ned C. Landsman

Chapter 7. Revisiting the Bishop Controversy

Katherine Carté Engel

Chapter 8. Empire’s Vital Extremities: British Africa and the Coming of the American Revolution

Bryan Rosenblithe

Chapter 9. The Great Awakening, Presbyterian Education, and the Mobilization of Power in the Revolutionary Mid-Atlantic

Mark Boonshoft

PART III. NEW DIRECTIONS

Chapter 10. This Is the Skin of a Whit[e] Man: Material Memories of Violence in Sullivan’s Campaign

Zara Anishanslin

Chapter 11. Environmental History and the War of Independence: Saltpeter and the Continental Army’s Shortage of Gunpowder

David C. Hsiung

Chapter 12. The Problem of Order and the Transfer of Slave Property in the Revolutionary South

Matthew Spooner

PART IV. LEGACIES: THE AFTERLIFE OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION

Chapter 13. The United States and the Transformation of Transatlantic Migration During the Age of Revolution and Emancipation

Aaron Spencer Fogleman

Chapter 14. First Partition: The Troubled Origins of the Mason-Dixon Line

Edward G. Gray

Chapter 15. The Power to Be Reborn

David S. Shields

Conclusion. Beyond the Rebirth of the Revolution: Coming to Terms with Coming of Age

Michael Zuckerman

Notes

List of Contributors

Index

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Origins

PATRICK SPERO

The ground strewed with the dead and the dying; the impetuous charge; the steady and successful repulse; the loud call to repeated assault; the summoning of all that is manly to repeated resistance; a thousand bosoms freely and fearlessly bared in an instant to whatever of terror there may be in war and death …

VETERANS! you are the remnant of many a well-fought field. You bring with you marks of honor from Trenton and Monmouth, from Yorktown, Camden, Bennington, and Saratoga. VETERANS OF HALF A CENTURY! when in your youthful days you put everything at hazard in your country’s cause …

—Daniel Webster, Bunker Hill Monument, dedication address, June 17, 1825

When Americans in the nineteenth century remembered the Revolutionary War, as Daniel Webster did at the Bunker Hill dedication in 1825, they painted images with their words of defiant patriots facing off with British redcoats. They told of valiant soldiers fighting for the cause of democracy and of a populace rallying around them and the cause for which they fought. The principle of free government adheres to the American soil, Webster declared in the same speech. It is bedded in it, immovable as its mountains. Such a rendering of the Revolution was intended to instill democratic ideals and nationalistic feeling in a generation born after the war. As Webster noted with no small a hint of concern, Those who established our liberty and our government are daily dropping from among us. The great trust now descends to new hands. The idealism imbedded in Webster’s speech represents the very first popular interpretation of the American Revolution. Its influence still lingers in the American psyche today.

But, as The American Revolution Reborn shows, the experience of living through the American Revolution, rather than its romantic memory, was a far more complicated affair than Webster’s glorified depiction. This perspective can get lost as time makes the American victory at Yorktown in 1781 appear a mere fait accompli and the eventual prosperity of the nation that the war secured an inevitable result of a democratic revolution. The historians in this volume avoid this trap. The authors themselves embody the promise of the present generation, and their work hints at a future of renewed interest in the struggle for independence. They recover the uncertainty, fears, and discord in American society during a war that did eventually succeed and give rise to a new nation. But that eventuality is of little concern to them. Rather, they want to treat the Revolution as a historic event divorced from the interpretative pressures the present can sometimes place on historians. For our authors, the American Revolution was a lived experience filled with many contingencies and alternative paths. As one of them asks, "What did this divisive and bloody war time experience mean to its many participants?"

Consider some of the things the authors of the following chapters observe. They present strong evidence to suggest that a majority of the American populace were neutrals. Indeed, a set of our authors challenge us to rethink loyalty and allegiance during the war. Seaports, they show, were torn apart by warring armies, with many residents simply swearing allegiance to whatever power prevailed at a given moment. Other urban denizens seized the opportunity British occupation presented to declare their continued loyalty to the British Crown. The American countryside was no different. Disillusioned with the tactics of both sides, many farmers simply tried to stay out of the fray. On the high seas, impressment, one of the reasons Thomas Jefferson cited in justifying American independence in the Declaration, was, in fact, a tool both sides used, and sometimes imprisoned sailors switched sides as a means to find their way back home.

Meanwhile, other contributors provide new insights on the way the war for American independence altered the status quo in many colonies turned states. War measures in the South, for instance, strengthened the institution of slavery, as patriots’ use of slave labor to serve their political and military ends also rechanneled the distribution of wealth and power in their favor. The production of saltpeter, an ingredient necessary for conducting war in the eighteenth century, spurred a race to manufacture it on the home front that challenged Americans’ knowledge of science and the environment.

Finally, other essayists take a more global perspective on the Revolution to demonstrate that the coming of the American Revolution and the war itself tested the limits of an expanding British Empire. The fracture of the British Atlantic community raised questions about the best ways to hold an empire together politically, while upsetting the social institutions that once bound colonists and Britons together.

While these perspectives aim to cast the American Revolution anew, they also aim to do something more. They mean to reinvigorate a field. Collectively, the essays reflect both the past successes of and current frustrations with a previous generation of scholars who once dominated the scholarly landscape. For the past several decades, scholarship on the Revolution has generally fallen into one of three competing schools. There is the neo-whig school that emphasizes the power of ideas as the catalyst for the Revolution. Then there is the neo-progressive school, which pays more attention to the economic discontent and social discord in the colonies that propelled common people to rebellion. And then there is the neo-imperial school, which focuses on the breakdown of imperial politics and the function (and dysfunction) of institutions of empire. These historiographical schools have expanded our understanding of the cause and course of the American Revolution, and they have all influenced the contributors to this volume, sometimes explicitly, more often implicitly. But none of our authors attempt to conform to one school or another. Rather, they seek to upset the patterns of historical inquiry that have defined scholarship for the past generation.

Our authors also disconnect their scholarly interpretations of the Revolution from the nation-building project to which it has so often been tied. Americans have always linked the American Revolution and the founding of the United States to the political efforts they undertake in the present, as Webster’s speech reminds us. The Revolution, in other words, has persisted in the present. Its principles—real or imagined—have animated our society. It has been alive in our popular imagination, in the best-seller lists, in dramatic miniseries, in the inaugural addresses of presidents, in the protests that have filled our streets and parks, and in the built environment of our oldest cities.

The present has always influenced historians’ interpretations as well. The nineteenth-century historians who vaunted the rise of a democratic nation were self-consciously trying to inculcate certain values in a populace still learning about itself. In the early twentieth century, historians concerned about the rise of big business and corruption in politics in their own time took a more jaundiced view of elite leaders at the founding, with many arguing that economic interest rather than political principles drove revolutionary fervor. The major schools of interpretation in the late twentieth century likewise tracked contemporary events. The neo-whigs’ emphasis on the power of ideas to explain the cause of the Revolution and lay the foundation for the Constitution coincided with the heightening of the Cold War clash of ideologies. The neo-progressives’ insistence on the power of ordinary people and the importance of class rose alongside the New Left and its critique of American power and capitalism. And the neo-imperial scholars’ stress on political institutions and other processes that stretched across the Atlantic tracked the growth of international organizations and the greater integration of economies around the world in the 1980s and 1990s.

By examining the Revolution as a lived experience shadowed by an unknown future, our contributors avoid the implicit teleology of the scholars who preceded them. Their depictions of this moment may not lead to the clear interpretative frameworks that once defined studies in the field, but they may, ironically, provide a more accurate picture of an event that was, after all, a very messy one. Indeed, the great schools of thought that have dominated the history of the era, each with its own established line of interpretation, may have obscured more than clarified the true nature of the American Revolution. Instead of trying to fit the past into one of these schools, our authors embrace the diversity of experience and reject straightforward narratives to explain the course of history.

In this volume the Revolution appears as a civil war as much as a fight for independence, as the product of a failed imperial project as much as a moment of nation building, and as influenced by the environment as much as by ideology. This impetus to complicate the interpretation of the Revolution might seem to run counter to what is often taken to be the historian’s obligation to clarify the past. But the willful quest for messiness is also part of a cycle that defines the development of most historiographies. When entrenched paradigms loom over a field in an almost stifling way, as seems to have been the case with the three interpretative schools of the previous generation, new scholars aim to unsettle the established narratives and approaches. While still influenced by the historians who came before them, the scholars contributing to this volume nonetheless refuse to be bound by their predecessors. Individually, they hope that their new perspectives on the Revolution will produce new interpretations of the past that move our understanding forward in new directions. Indeed, the geographic, methodological, and thematic range of these papers suggests that the new paradigm, at least for now, may be that there is no single paradigm that can do justice to an event as multifaceted as the American Revolution.

Although almost all our authors share this common impetus, their convergence did not arise by design. Each essay began as a separate study undertaken by an individual scholar, and most of them are parts of large book-length projects currently under way. In themselves, the chapters range widely. Geographically, they span a considerable swath of the globe, covering events in Europe, Africa, and America. Topically, they touch matters as diverse as the integration of Scotland with England, British policies toward West Africa during the 1760s, and the political economy of southern slave plantations. Methodologically, they run the gamut as well, with the environment, material culture, high and low politics, religion, demography, and economy as the foci of their analyses. Their diversity reflects the very nature of an event of global proportions.

Yet, despite their differences, some common themes help tie certain sets of these essays together. We have therefore arranged the essays into four parts, each of which elaborates a common concern that unites the group.

The first is Civil Wars: Challenging the Patriotic Narrative. This cluster of essays investigates the disparate loyalties of men and women living through the American Revolution in conditions of constant flux. Rather than depict the war as one fought by a doggedly determined people bent on overthrowing a monarchy, they reveal the fears, anxieties, and mixed loyalties of a populace caught in the midst of a destructive and violent conflict. For example, one of our authors finds that in 1777, as Philadelphia fell to the British and Washington hunkered down at Valley Forge, most Americans were unsure of what the fighting was really about, what its outcome would be, and what thirteen independent yet united states would become. Another brings the turmoil of Newport, Rhode Island, to life by showing the trials and tribulations of people battered by war and torn apart by competing allegiances. Similar uncertainty is peppered throughout the essays of this volume. Whether looking at the internal battles of families torn apart by the war or at people trying to survive in an occupied city, these authors show that the experience of war was traumatic for most Americans and that the convictions and commitments of those caught in the midst of the violence were anything but unequivocal.

The second is Wider Horizons: Decentering the Nationalistic Narrative. These pieces shift our focus from North America to consider the way other forces and parts of the world either affected or were affected by the American Revolution. Here we have historians examining the way institutions functioned in the era of the Revolution. One author contrasts the success of the Anglo-Scottish union in 1707 with the failure of the British Empire after 1763. Another shows the fissures emerging in the Anglican communion in the years preceding the Revolution. Another looks at the growth of dissenting academies in the eighteenth century and reveals that these institutions in North America educated a crop of leaders who challenged the established authority of the British Empire in 1776. Yet another shifts our gaze to West Africa to show that the divisiveness of the Revolution reverberated throughout the British Empire. Whether examining attempts to grow transatlantic denominations or comparing the politics of the Scottish Union of 1707 to the failed attempt to integrate North America into the empire in the 1760s, they show that, in the years before American independence, most British people on both sides of the ocean were more concerned with strengthening the empire than with dividing it and building anew.

The third is New Directions. These investigations advance innovative methodological approaches to the age of the Revolution. A southern scholar analyzes the hidden economy of slave labor. A student of material culture explores the strange history of a preserved piece of skin. An environmental historian canvasses the technical and economic factors that limited American production of the saltpeter the rebels had to have to sustain their war effort.

The fourth and final part is Legacies: The Afterlife of the American Revolution. These essays call into question our assumptions about the Revolution as a founding moment for the nation. They variously argue that it had a massively potent and positive effect on the new nation and the New World, that it had no real effect, and that its outcome remained unresolved long after the constitutional settlement. While the authors of these studies appear to agree on very little, together they force us to confront the significance of the American Revolution to the history of the United States. Indeed, their very disparities capture the spirit of this book.

The Conclusion tries to do the one thing many of these essays avoided: put their collective work in the context of the present. We hope that the range and diversity of viewpoints contained in these pages will spur scholars and students to think on the Revolution anew.

PART I

Civil Wars: Challenging the Patriotic Narrative

CHAPTER 1

War Stories

Remembering and Forgetting the American Revolution

MICHAEL A. MCDONNELL

We all love a good story. And the best stories usually pit good against bad, heroes against villains. Such stories become more compelling when they take on larger meaning than the plot itself. When a battle between good guys and bad guys becomes a battle between the forces of liberty and tyranny. When the fate of humankind hangs in the balance. When David takes on Goliath and, against all the odds, triumphs in the face of adversity, in a glorious cause.

Such stories are irresistible, especially when they are founding stories. The story of the American war for independence is one such tale. As William Huntting Howell has recently written, the American Revolution narrates beautifully in the popular imagination. There is a clear beginning, at Lexington and Concord, and a series of progressive middles, unfolding against now-hallowed spaces. Epic battles at Bunker Hill, Trenton, Saratoga, and Cowpens. Trials and tribulations at New York, Valley Forge, Morristown, and Charleston. Clear lines drawn between the patriots and the monarchical forces of the British and their loyalist minions. And the stakes are high and obvious: independence or dependence; democracy or monarchy; liberty or tyranny. The choices are simple and the denouement is almost inevitable: victory at Yorktown and the creation of a new nation.¹

Historians are equally wedded to this tale. We frame our books and the courses that we teach around the story. We follow the same plot from resistance to independence, from Lexington to Yorktown, and from the Continental Congress to the federal constitution. To be sure, we tell the story in different ways and with different emphases. Some of us focus on patriot leaders, others highlight the role of popular action. We differ over the motives of patriots and the relative importance of particular groups and people. We disagree over whether rights and liberties were fought for or ought to have been extended to different communities within that new nation. We puzzle over the seeming contradictions inherent in a war fought for liberty that also entrenched slavery and legitimated the conquest of Native Americans. Sometimes we pause and consider those who opposed the unfolding story. But rarely do we question the story itself.²

The trouble is, far too many people—and far too many messy details—end up left out of this simple tale. When the story of the Revolution becomes a contest between freedom-seeking patriots and the despotic British, what are we to do with Native Americans who sought their own independence in this era? How do we explain the many different choices made by African Americans in bondage? How can Tories, or loyalists, be anything other than shadowy or stuffy figures who dared oppose liberty? What are we to make of women who sought to keep their husbands and sons at home? And what can we make of the tens of thousands of people who were disaffected or alienated from both sides or tried to tack between them to make the best of a bad situation. At best, we compartmentalize these others. We have separate lectures or chapters on women or African Americans in the Revolution or on the war in the West. Sometimes we make room for familial divisions and the civil war in the South, and every now and again we pause to consider neutrals or the disaffected. But we all know they are not the main story. That one belongs solely to patriots who pursued liberty and independence and founded a nation. These others do not—cannot—fit in easily to that more important narrative, despite the fact that they made up far more than a majority of the population at the time.³

We tell the story this way in part because it was the tale that at least some of the participants at the time desperately wanted us to believe. Beginning in 1783 and continuing through to 1815, some sixty or so histories were written by at least forty-three different writers. Though these authors differed in their politics, they were all of the same class and they were remarkably uniform in their interpretation of events. They wrote with a clear agenda. They self-consciously set out, as Arthur Shaffer observed some time ago, to form the entire American past into a pattern that contradicted the reality of American life. Though local loyalties and internal dissensions were the persistent facts, … national unity became the interpretive credo. As one of those early historians, David Ramsay, described it, a sense of common danger extinguished selfish passions during the conflict, and local attachments and partialities were sacrificed on the altar of patriotism. These writers were all nationalists. They were all committed to the new nation and to promoting the unity they thought vital to it. So they rewrote colonial and Revolutionary history to promote an idea of a gradual, inevitable, and orderly evolution of a new nation based on a common set of ideals. They wrote to give meaning to a confusing past and what seemed like a senseless war to many. Without this idea of history, Shaffer noted, the birth of the United States would have appeared as a parochial event born of chance circumstances.⁴

Civic- and nationalist-minded compatriots of these early historians joined them in their early efforts to orate, commemorate, and remember the Revolution in the same way. In the 1780s and 1790s, memories of the war were used in intensely partisan ways, but the metaphors of both sides almost invariably returned to shared images of battle and of a justifiable conflict that was forced upon them by the British. Though a few of these commentators occasionally acknowledged the divisive civil war that it was, most tried to remember selectively and so emphasized that the war was also humane and reasonable. As one orator asserted: Other revolutions have been conducted with sanguinary violence; ours with a spirit of dignified moderation, worthy of the cause, and characteristic of the nation. The patriots of the revolution were as humane as they were brave. These early celebrants made sense of the Revolution by sanitizing it and creating a clear narrative of a righteous cause that required and justified a response. As several observers have noted, the public memory of the war was carefully controlled by elites in the generation or two after the event. And the interpretive framework laid down by those founding generations—the story they told—predominated for decades and remains influential even today.⁵

But what we seem to have forgotten is that this story was told almost exclusively by the winners themselves, using the same language and labels they employed at the time to justify and legitimate a costly, divisive, bloody, and perhaps unnecessary war. Those who survived the war and came out on top consciously and unconsciously forgot the details of that messy war and instead wrote a story about the triumph of liberty and the birth of a nation. And because a new nation did indeed emerge from that war and survive till today, people believed that story. We continue to believe it.⁶

After almost 230 years, can we tell a different story? Where can we start? If we had the will, how could we break this impasse? How could we write a more comprehensive and more inclusive story of the Revolutionary War? The first step would have to be to uncouple the war from the founding of a nation. To undo what those first historians and nationalists tied together. To forget what came next and dwell instead on the war itself. To take the war seriously as a historical phenomenon and not merely as a waymark on the route to the founding of a nation. To tell a story that gives as much weight to the murderous riots and reckless plundering and privateering that occurred as to the deliberations of the Continental Congress; to the vicious rapes and bloody cruelties perpetrated by both sides as to the suffering of the Continental Army; to the deliberate burning and looting of houses, farms, and whole towns as to the Declaration of Independence; to the painful separations and thousands of lost lives as to the victory at Yorktown; to the destructive economic effects of the war leading to what one historian has called the First Great Depression as to the political machinations that led to the Constitutional Convention.⁷

We might also abandon—or at least nuance—the labels that the winners themselves used first to appropriate the moral high ground in the developing contest and then to cast the conflagration in historically favorable terms. Some colonists, reeling from accusations of treasonable rebellion, quickly emphasized their patriotism and later wrote as if all Americans were with them. The British preferred to call them rebels, and many other colonists regarded them as dangerous, designing agitators. As Timothy Breen has recently reminded us, in another context militant patriots might also be considered insurgents. Nor were the many who were not patriots easily lumped under the label Tories, or its later counterpart, loyalists. Thousands made decisions about the developing conflict that had little to do with the pejorative political term used by patriots. Thousands more were labeled as neutrals or the disaffected by patriots. Historians still struggle to comprehend an extraordinarily wide array of peoples using such simple and ultimately opaque terms. Finally, we might abandon the term liberty as the driving force of patriots. There were too many different kinds of liberty at stake during the war, often conflicting with each other, and equally often invoked to trample someone else’s liberty. When both the British and the patriots claimed the mantle of torchbearers of liberty, we should surely suspect the conceptual usefulness of the term, no matter how important it might seem to the rhetoric of the age.⁸

Another possible way to start writing a more inclusive and comprehensive history would be to consider a counterfactual: what if the British had put down the rebellion and won the war? It is not hard to envision. Patriots thought they were about to lose everything at several critical moments during the war. Conservative historians today emphasize the role of luck, chance, and even divine providence in the winning of independence. Most military historians acknowledge that had the French not entered the war when they did, the British would have retained most if not all the colonies. Part of the wonder of the more familiar story is knowing the patriots had to overcome great obstacles to achieve their ends and almost failed—after the evacuation of New York in 1776, following the occupation of Philadelphia in 1777, or in the wake of the fall of Charleston in 1780 and the successful British invasion of Virginia in early 1781.

If we could just imagine this, our story might change dramatically. We would have to look much harder at those great obstacles instead. Rather than a tale that showed how a nation conceived in liberty came to be, we would have to tell a story that emphasized the diversity inherent across and within thirteen colonies with different histories, cultures, and economies—a diversity that continued to undermine efforts at unity. We would have to comprehend how clashing interests, militant action, and terror played a role in driving a coalition of often unlike-minded people into a premature declaration of independence. Our histories would have to give at least equal weight to the role and motives of the thousands of colonists who did not support independence. We would also have to explain why both patriots and loyalists failed to capture the imagination of so many of their neighbors in making their arguments for or against independence. We might then be forced to acknowledge and understand why almost every state turned to conscription to raise its quota of Continental soldiers, most within a year of the Declaration of Independence. Ultimately we would be compelled to frame our histories of the war for independence not just as a nation-making event but also as a complicated and divisive civil war, one in which more Americans fought against each other than in any other war except the nineteenth-century Civil War. Only then might we be able to understand how a supposedly popular war for independence became one of the longest wars in America’s history.⁹

We would also have to acknowledge that the Revolutionary War was one of the bloodiest in America’s history. We know that at least 25,000 and perhaps as many as 36,000 people died during active military service on the patriot side. Most did not die a glorious death in battle like General Montgomery at the gates of Quebec. Many were conscripts and died for a cause they may not have understood or in which they did not believe. They usually died far from home, often hungry, and in the midst of deprivation. Seventeen thousand of them died from starvation or disease. They suffered on British prison ships as much as they did at patriot winter encampments. Perhaps most shocking, we still have no reliable statistics for the number of dead among loyalists, Native Americans, and civilians. For over two centuries now, no one has bothered to try counting them up. The patriot story has left the war dead in its shadow.¹⁰

Even if we leave this worrisome fact aside for a moment, we surely still have to tell a war story that can comprehend the staggering numbers of people enmeshed and uprooted in this conflict. The per capita equivalents of the number of deaths, refugees, and combatants in this civil war should alone make us rethink the narrative we spin around it. What would we call a civil conflict today that saw some millions of Americans take up arms against each other? What would we call a war that produced an exodus of seven million refugees and the deaths of at least three million more people? A Glorious Cause? A patriotic war for liberty? There can only be one answer: we would call it a human tragedy.¹¹

The point is that we need to create a history that makes sense of the experiences of the many rather than the few—of the losers as well as the winners, and of the hundreds of thousands who sometimes won little, lost a lot, and most certainly suffered much. We have to refrain from using terms such as "the colonists or Americans. And we have to stop trying to shoehorn so many different stories and complicated events into a linear narrative of the rise and triumph of something so vague as liberty." In short, we still need to examine the war on its own terms and create a body of scholarship as rich as the literature on the American Civil War, or the First World War, or just about any other war that was not also a founding moment. As we do this, we also need to start measuring the impact of this civil war and its meaning(s) among its very diverse participants. We have much work to do yet to understand fully the social, cultural, economic, ideological, religious, and political consequences of this cataclysmic event. What did this divisive and bloody war time experience mean to its many participants?¹²

* * *

For now, one thing we can do is to listen to other kinds of war stories. Though there are relatively few of them, at least several dozen ordinary participants wrote their own personal accounts of the war, sometimes years afterward. In style, substance, and tone, they often contrasted markedly with the celebratory public histories being written at the time and even those written today. Some historians have struggled to use them. But even such exceptional ones have generally ended up including them more for illustrative purposes as subjects in their own right. These divergent accounts have rarely occasioned reflection on the conflict from a different perspective.

Consider John Greenwood. He seemed to embody the patriotic spirit of ordinary people. David McCullough certainly thought so. Reading Greenwood’s memoir, McCullough noted that when Greenwood got news of the bloodshed at Lexington and Concord, the sixteen-year-old set off on foot with little more than the clothes on his back and walked 150 miles to join the patriot forces. McCullough quotes Greenwood announcing to astonished listeners that even at his tender age, he was going to fight for my country. McCullough then draws details from Greenwood’s memoir to add color and detail to his story of the travails of the Continental Army through 1776.¹³

Yet Greenwood, even after thirty-five years, could not gloss the reality so easily. He told a different story. He had been sent away from the family home in Boston in 1773, most likely to serve an apprenticeship with his uncle, who was a cabinetmaker. When word came of bloodshed to the south in the spring of 1775, Greenwood had not seen his family for over two years. He saw his chance and slipped away in the confusion. He was very clear about his motives: My reason for going was I wished to see my parents, who, I was afraid, would all be killed by the British, for, as I observed before, nothing was talked of but murder and war. On the road back to Boston, he quickly learned that if he played his fife and told people he was going to join the army—to fight for my country—he was almost guaranteed free quarters nearly upon the entire route. People were, he said, astonished such a little boy, and alone, should have such courage. Only when he arrived at Boston and was refused entry to the besieged city did he finally enlist—but only because he found himself completely alone and desperate for the food and clothing new volunteers were promised. There I stood alone, he wrote, without a friend or a house to shelter me for the night, surrounded by women and children, some crying and others in different situations of distress. He thought the army he was enlisting in at the time was no better than a mob, but he felt he had no choice.¹⁴

Greenwood almost deserted after three weeks with the army but ended up returning and reenlisting for one more year. Again he made it clear that he did so because he was determined not to go back to his uncle’s care and equally committed to finding his family. He served in the unsuccessful invasion of Canada and a little later in the surprise attack at Trenton. But a few days after the battle, his enlistment expired, and despite being offered almost double his pay for the past three months to stay on another six weeks, Greenwood refused. I did not enlist for the purpose of remaining in the army, but only through necessity, as I could not get to my parents in Boston, I was determined to quit as soon as my time was out. Greenwood had no mystical conversion to the patriot cause in the course of serving in the army. Though there is some anecdotal evidence that he served again in the militia in 1777 and may have done time in an independent company near White Plains in 1778, Greenwood himself never mentioned it in his memoir. He had had enough of army life. Instead, he did what many young New Englanders did during the war. He joined a privateer, bent on finding a fortune plundering vulnerable ships along the eastern seaboard and down into the Caribbean. Though Greenwood took note of the ships he served on that were officially commissioned privateers by Congress, not all carried letters of marque. In other words, he turned to pirating. And even so long after the war, he could not bring himself to omit mention of the fact that he also joined a British ship in order to escape captivity in Jamaica. Greenwood the patriot ended his Revolutionary War career by plundering a ship that flew the flag of his country’s Spanish ally.¹⁵

Even if we overlook Greenwood’s initial motivation for enlisting, he was at best a patriot for a year or two. At the time, he would have been cursed and sworn at and labeled the the worst of all creatures by patriot officers for refusing to reenlist when the army was so desperate for soldiers. Yet Greenwood did not seem to care at the time or when he wrote his memoir. And not long before he became a privateer, John Paul Jones raged against the common Class of mankind for doing just that. Jones thought men such as Greenwood were Actuated by no nobler principle than that of Self-Interest—this and this Only determines all Adventures in Privateers. Robert Morris, too, just before he invested in his own privateering venture, worried about the irregular Conduct of the privateers that savours more of Moorish Piracy. While members of Congress were torn about the relative merits of privateering, Continental Army and navy officers, desperate for men, were not. Privateers were mere Moorish Pirates. They were as far from being noble patriots as you could get.¹⁶

Greenwood’s unwillingness—or inability—to tilt his recollections toward the more familiar story already being told in the history books—the story of a providential fight between good and evil—was echoed by many other Revolutionary War veterans. Recalling their experiences years later, few could assign clear reasons for joining patriot forces. Historians studying the 88,000 pension applications of war veterans have been hard-pressed to find more than a few claims to have enlisted in the cause of my country. Most men offered no explanation for joining or admitted that they did it to pick up the bounty money or clothes on offer, to escape bondage of another sort, or simply to make a living.

Daniel Trabue and his brother set off to enlist in the army in 1776, but only because they could see no other way to make money. Finding no market for their goods—"at this time no sail [sic] for produce—they concluded we would Join a company that was a going to the North under General Washington and pick up the generous bounty offered for doing so. Daniel then fell ill, so he did not enlist, but his brother did. A little later, Daniel volunteered under George Rogers Clark for a special expedition westward to claim and conquer the Ohio Valley and Illinois country. Though it is not clear what Clark promised potential recruits for his secretive expedition, Trabue astonished" his Virginia neighbors with the plunder he brought back from conflict with the Indians. He subsequently used his time in service to prospect for good western lands to settle once the war in the West was over.¹⁷

More generally, few veterans made any effort to relate their own experiences during the war to the stories circulating in the press and the history books at the time, unless to try to correct popular misconceptions about the conflict. Veterans wrote of friendships and family and emphasized hardships and toil. Joseph Plumb Martin, in his memoir, wrote persistently about his acute hunger. Another veteran of the Quebec campaign, John Joseph Henry, spent the first eighty pages of his memoir writing in gripping detail about the harrowing deprivations he suffered on a scouting trip across Maine ahead of the expedition. Details about his experiences on the battlefield paled in comparison. Others veterans, even when they were present at significant battles, remembered such events only because of the friends they met, the dead they buried, or the relations they missed. Even in their pension applications, they used publicly memorable events merely to situate their own, more important, memories. Contrasting civic orations and celebrations with private recollections, historian Caroline Cox concluded that the grizzled veterans told a different story of the Revolution, one more haphazard and uncertain, even decades after the war.¹⁸

While veterans were often coaxed to tell their stories by courts assessing their pension claims, or by curious neighbors, many thousands who did not serve in the Continental or state forces never told their stories. No one seemed to want to listen. A very few, however, specifically wrote their memoirs because they felt the story they remembered best had been forgotten. John P. Becker of Schoharie, New York, was one of those. He opened his narrative, written around 1831, by expressing regret that there were not more recollections like his published about the Revolution, as there were thousands, like my own father and his family, [who] suffered and lamented, rejoiced and exulted, unknown to any beyond their immediate neighborhood. Born the year of the repeal of the Stamp Act, in 1765, Becker—likely echoing his father—said that the whole province was aroused by the legislation but added what I believe is now little known, that many of our most wealthy and influential Whigs were at the bottom of these disorders. At several points in his narrative, Becker zeroed in on Boston as the center of the troubles. Even after relating the alarm following news of Lexington and Concord, he wrote that among the unenlightened and uneducated portion of the public, an undoubted apathy in relation to the contest prevailed. And he and his family were as apathetic as their neighbors. The Beckers were a reasonably well-to-do farming family, so John spent most of the war with his family. He worked as a wagoner when his father needed his services, and he refused to join the army because he considered his family’s circumstances rather above that which furnished the usual recruits for the regular army. His hostility to the army was evident in his aspersions on the total incapacity, moral and intellectual, of those who served in the military. His father also declined to serve and turned down his election as a militia officer to continue wagoning. Both he and his father felt this kind of support was enough. Becker’s more patriotic contemporaries might have labeled him disaffected or more generously looked upon him as a neutral in the war. But Becker was not interested in labels.¹⁹

His memoir was full of details and anecdotes about the roads and passages that he and his father had to cross, the amounts they were paid, their hunger and deprivations, and the accidents they had. Becker’s was a local view of the war. The people he remembered and discussed were mostly local officials and officers, some of whom had achieved a degree of national fame by 1831. But his travels only reinforced his parochialism. Inhabitants of Westfield, Massachusetts, for example, amused the Schoharie native with their quaintness and honest simplicity. The Pennsylvania troops he met were the most quarrelsome, and I regret to say, profligate set of men I had ever seen together. Becker also detailed the escapes he and his father made from efforts to impress them into military service. He constantly criticized Congress and its officials, too. His father was supposed to get certificates for impressed grain and supplies but never received them. This is one of the thousand instances of the petty tyranny and injustice of public agents in the days of the revolution, and is given to corroborate the facts sets forth in our most au then tic histories. Nor was his father paid when in the service of Congress. Echoing the complaints of Joseph Plumb Martin, Becker wrote that it was "one thing to be employed by congress, and another to be paid by them. It was our fortune on this occasion, as on former ones, to know the difference: we drew the boards but never drew our pay. Becker grew so weary of the demands for his service and supplies that for a joke he taught his horse to rear up when he was commanded to do anything in the name of congress."²⁰

For Becker, the war was mostly something to be endured. He claimed he and his family saw little of the display, [and] much of the inconvenience of war. Nor was the war a unifying experience. Recounting the streams of refugees fleeing from General John Burgoyne’s advancing army, he could only remember the selfishness that prevailed: Every one for himself was the constant cry. Though his travails were made worse by the Rank toryism and infamous venality of the disaffected inhabitants, Becker also had to defend himself and his family from the predations of patriot soldiers. Indeed, he noted that Burgoyne’s troops had cut his family’s wheat in order to seize it but that Continental forces then took it after the British surrendered. It was a dispiriting experience. There was only coolness among Becker’s countrymen and much suspicion which seemed to color every transaction. Everyone seemed to imagine his own danger and difficulty as great as it was possible to encounter; and under this impression ties the most natural and affecting were like ropes of sand, broken at the very touch. He lamented the divisions between kith and kin almost everywhere.²¹

Becker’s first sight of the bloody reality of war was no better. When he and his family began their journey back to their farm after Burgoyne surrendered, they came across some of the wounded from both sides. Becker recoiled at the sight of these wretched people, pale and lifeless, with countenances of an expression peculiar to gunshot wounds, as the surgeons have truly informed us, and the sound of groaning voices as each motion of the litter renewed the anguish of their wounds, filled me with horror and sickness of heart. He also remembered with horror the hanging of seven disaffected men by a mob after a public brawl and queried the point of it all: Is much public happiness then bought at the price of individual wretchedness? Must blood and sorrow be the result of even the most just and righteous controversies? … We were much affected with what we saw … and the remembrance cannot be effaced.²²

In the end, and even after fifty-five years living in the new republic, Becker was not sure it was worth it. His memoirs were tinged with regret and bitterness. Though he had spent most of the war helping his family tend the farm and fulfill contracts for wagoning, he believed his family had sacrificed much and done more than its fair share to support the war effort. The army had seized provisions from them, and they had been impressed into service for the Continentals to ferry supplies. Becker felt they had lost much during the war and never been repaid for the services they performed or the goods that were taken from them: My father died a creditor to the government in more than this one instance. His posterity have never gained any thing by his devotion to the cause. Before he died, his father said the unsettled state of affairs would injure his son’s prospects, and Becker concluded that it had. Though he wrote that he had originally looked forward to a good future at war’s end, the opportunities melted away. Investments never made their promised returns, loans went unpaid, and his brother took most of his savings. Even hope deserted him. He wrote his memoir, he said, with death and consolation only a few days away.²³

Others whose voices are lost must also have wondered whether the conflict was worth the suffering. What did the inhabitants of Falmouth, Norfolk, and New York remember about their experiences of the war? Militant patriots in northeastern Massachusetts suspected that the residents of Falmouth were too cozy with the British ships lying at anchor in the harbor. So they kidnapped a British officer and stole food and liquor from the townspeople, threatening to burn the town if the inhabitants did not declare their allegiance to the patriots. But the militants did not have to burn it. The British were so angry at the kidnapping of the officer that they bombed and burned the town in retaliation. In New York in 1776, even so prominent a patriot as Nathanael Greene wanted to evacuate and burn the town because he speculated that two-thirds of the residents were Tories. Washington agreed with him but hesitated to issue the order to do so. And then, just days after the British occupied the town, a fire raged out of control and hundreds of buildings burned—up to a quarter of the town. It was a hellish event. One man wrote that it was almost impossible to conceive a scene of more horror and distress. The sick, the aged, women, and children, half naked, were seen going they knew not where. Amid the shrieks and cries of the women and children, there were still more grisly scenes. British troops caught a woman in the act of starting a fire and, without Ceremony, she was tossed into the Flames. So too was a suspected rebel with a fire brand in his hand. Another man was hanged from a signpost by British sailors and then hung up by the heels like an animal. Though most of the evidence suggests that rebel arsonists began the conflagration, patriot leaders denied it. Still, they were pleased with the destruction. George Washington, who had desperately wanted to burn the city, publicly called it an accident but privately concluded that Providence—or some good honest fellow, has done more for us than we were disposed to do for ourselves.²⁴

In Norfolk, Virginia, patriots most certainly did put a thriving town to the torch because they suspected the loyalties of many in it. Under the very noses of Continental officers, soldiers with fire-brands in their hands reduced the town to Ashes. Over the course of three days, they burned the property of suspected loyalists and plundered and burned the houses of patriots, too. Damn them, we’el burn them all, they cried. And they very nearly did. A total of 1,331 buildings were burned, or almost 90 percent of the town. Colonel Robert Howe of North Carolina described its ruinous condition yet thought the devastation greatly beneficial to the Public. He reveled in the destruction because the patriots quickly blamed it on the shocked British. Newspapers up and down the eastern seaboard carried reports that the British had started the fire. George Washington thought the burning of both Falmouth and Norfolk would provide flaming Arguments for independence. Meanwhile, the General Assembly in Virginia, knowing that patriot forces were probably responsible, held off an inquiry for another year and then buried the report that clearly placed the blame on patriots. They did not make