1774: The Long Year of Revolution by Mary Beth Norton

Abstract

Reviewed by: 1774: The Long Year of Revolution by Mary Beth Norton Jennifer Dorsey (bio) 1774: The Long Year of Revolution By Mary Beth Norton. New York: Vintage, 2021. 528 pages, 5 3/16" × 8". $18.00 paper. In an 1818 letter to Hezekiah Niles, John Adams drew a careful distinction between the American War of Independence and the American Revolution. He described the revolution not as an event, but as a process that began in the 1760s with the slow but steady “alteration in the religious, moral, political, and social character for the people of thirteen colonies.” The war, by comparison, started with a sudden “burst out in open violence, hostility, and fury” in Lexington, Massachusetts, on April 19, 1775. In her latest history of the American Revolution, Mary Beth Norton affirms Adams’s description of the revolution as a process, but she also significantly shortens the timeline to a single “long year”—1774. She argues that the 1773 Boston Tea Party prompted a popular, colony-wide reappraisal of the constitutional ties that bound America and Great Britain together. When the British Parliament responded to that violent act by shutting down the Boston port, Americans offered a mixed response. On the one hand, they sympathized with the plight of the Bostonians, and they were certain that the Tea Act was bad policy. On the other hand, most Americans beyond Boston did not agree that the same act was unconstitutional or that it required direct action. Rather than join the Bostonians in a fight, Americans spent 1774, the “long year of revolution,” debating—in letters, town hall meetings, newspaper editorials, and political tracts—their thoughts about the British constitution, their place in the imperial system, and their expectations for the future. 1774: The Long Year of Revolution (originally published by Knopf in 2020) reads like a curated collection of these discussion. Norton guides the reader across America to listen in on conversations among family, friends, and neighbors to understand how, in a single year, Americans came to accept revolution and “practice independence in thought and deed” (343). The author of five books on colonial and revolutionary America, including the groundbreaking Liberty’s Daughter: The Revolutionary Experience of American Women, 1750–1800, Norton is fluent in the subject matter, and the greatest strength of 1774 is her determination to amplify lesser known or underappreciated voices. Events in Boston drive the chronology of the book, but Norton is mindful of keeping our attention on how men and women across the colonies experienced and discussed the constitutional crisis unfolding before their eyes. [End Page 211] Readers of New York History will be pleased to know that New York City has a special place in Norton’s narrative. Norton states in her introduction that it was her earlier work on Loyalists that convinced her that 1774 was critical to the development of the independence movement. She spotlights the career of loyalist publisher James Rivington to explain what a difference it made that New York City was “the progenitor of public Loyalism.” She argues that Rivington recognized the urgency of providing readers with diverse political perspectives on current events, and he succeeded for some time. The conservative works that he published circulated broadly, and the ideas trickled into popular thinking. The New York–based conservatives also shaped the deliberations of the first Continental Congress. In effect, Rivington’s press forced Americans to question the claims of the revolutionaries. By the end of 1774, Americans did not necessarily agree on how to proceed in the defense of their constitutional rights, but as Norton argues, a consensus emerged among conservatives, moderates, and radicals that “compromise would need to be initiated in the home island, not in North America.” Then, in the early winter of 1775, the colonists learned that King George III had declared his intention to defend parliamentary authority in America. Thereafter, Americans recognized that the die had been cast. Everyone understood that a “bloody rupture” was coming, even if they did not know when. As expected, 1774: The Long Year of Revolution is thoroughly researched and thoughtfully annotated to direct readers to lesser-known sources. Sadly, there are no references to the records held at...