Friends of Freedom: The Rise of Social Movements in the Age of Atlantic Revolutions by Micah Alpaugh

Abstract

Alpaugh’s Friends of Freedom provides an integrated narrative of the rise of social movements, political protest, and revolutionary mobilization in the eighteenth century in the United States, Britain, Ireland, France, and Haiti. The author contrasts his own work with that of Palmer, who undertook a similar project more than half a century ago in The Age of the Democratic Revolution.1 Like Alpaugh, Palmer argued that common ideals motivated eighteenth-century revolutionaries on both sides of the Atlantic, but as Alpaugh points out, Palmer’s account portrays the American and French Revolutions as “more simultaneous than interrelated” and has little to say about slavery or Haiti. Alpaugh answers these deficiencies, elucidating interconnections between events in various parts of the Atlantic World and highlighting the importance of abolitionism as a precocious protest movement that developed arguments and tactics that would later be adopted by revolutionaries in every place he examines.Alpaugh has overcome daunting challenges in producing this book. Drawing on material from archives in France, Britain, Ireland, and the United States, and engaging with scholarship in a range of historical fields, he has pulled his material together effectively, telling coherent stories and making his argument clear. The book operates on two scales. On the large scale it is divided into two halves, Part I emphasizing the influence of the American Revolution, and Part II tracing the widespread impact of the French Revolution, with French Revolutionary influences ultimately crossing the Atlantic to become manifested in the formation of U.S. party politics. Within this broad framework, the eight chapters in Part I and the five chapters in Part II tell smaller-scale discrete stories including, for example, the struggles of various Protestant groups in America to secure religious liberty and the campaigns of the United Irishmen in the 1790s. This structure allows Alpaugh to recount local developments clearly while emphasizing their Atlantic contexts.The book had to be divided in this way. The overall story is too rich, detailed, and intricate to be conveyed in a single uninterrupted narrative. But there is a noticeable tension between Alpaugh’s claims about interconnected Atlantic revolutions, giving primacy to the American and French Revolutions, and his smaller-scale efforts to recount local developments accurately in detail. The struggle for Protestant American religious liberty, for example, started long before the American Revolution, as did the transatlantic struggle over slavery. In both instances, while the American and French Revolutions changed the terms of argument in important ways, Alpaugh strains to acknowledge the diverse range of voices engaged in the long-running debates.In discussing abolition, Alpaugh emphasises the role of Quakers and white evangelical Protestants who championed new tactics and lines of argument to recruit allies in America, Britain, and France. Africans and people of African descent enter the analysis only mid-stream. On the twelfth page of his discussion of abolitionism in America, Alpaugh introduces Black abolitionists with a paragraph starting, “African-Americans advanced their own cause” (183). Similarly, in the chapter on abolitionism in Britain, Black abolitionists appear only after eight pages discussing white abolitionist leaders. “Blacks living in England,” he writes, “allied for the cause” (205). Black leaders figure more prominently in Alpaugh’s discussion of the Haitian Revolution, but he is emphatic that they were responding to events in France and French debates, and he criticizes historians who fail to center their analysis on the influence of the French Revolution.While Africans and people of African descent figure in the book’s narrative, many inhabitants of the Atlantic world who contributed to the tumult of the revolutionary era—indigenous Americans, Spanish, Portuguese, Latin Americans—are left out. Alpaugh has demonstrated that Atlantic history is intrinsically liberating, releasing us from the confines of national narratives, but—especially if historians wish to work from archival materials—a fully inclusive, comprehensive history of the Atlantic World will almost always be out of reach.