Lived Experience, Loyalties, and Lost Histories of the American Revolution

Abstract

Lived Experience, Loyalties, and Lost Histories of the American Revolution Lauren Duval (bio) Donald F. Johnson, Occupied America: British Military Rule and the Experience of Revolution. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020. Illustrations, notes, and index. 256 pp. $34.95. Donald F. Johnson, Occupied America: British Military Rule and the Experience of Revolution. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020. Illustrations, notes, and index. 256 pp. $34.95. Reflecting on the American Revolution in the early nineteenth century, John Adams famously declared that the Revolution occurred "in the minds and hearts of the people" long "before a drop of blood was drawn at Lexington."1 In subsequent centuries, historians have parsed these triumphal sentiments to reveal the extended, contingent, and varied means by which Americans dissolved their ties to Britain.2 In his ambitious new book, Occupied America: British Military Rule and the Experience of Occupation, Donald Johnson joins this flourishing conversation by considering how this ideological transformation emerged—contrary to Adams's assertion—from the military conflict itself. Focusing on the six cities occupied by the British army during the war—Boston, New York, Newport, Philadelphia, Savannah, and Charleston—Johnson examines how diverse civilians adapted to and survived the experience of British military rule. Urban ports were political and economic centers—"nodes" of Britain's "commercial empire" (p. 12)—that had an outsized influence on American economies and politics in the revolutionary era.3 During the imperial crises of the 1760s and 1770s, these cities were centers of revolutionary protest; urban street theater, crowd action, and consumer boycotts punctuate the timeline of a mounting imperial crisis. But cities were also, as Johnson reminds us, sites of war that ensnared thousands of Americans in periods of immediate and extended violence. Living under martial law for periods ranging from 9 months to 7 years, urban inhabitants experienced the American Revolution in ways that were at once quotidian and deeply disorienting. Some people prospered during British occupation, but many others endured hunger, economic hardship, violence, social upheaval, and increased precarity. These worsening conditions, Johnson argues, contributed to ordinary Americans' disillusionment with the Crown and gradually transformed the inhabitants of occupied cities into reluctant revolutionaries who "no longer [End Page 521] saw restored royal rule as a viable option" (p. 6). Responding pragmatically rather than ideologically to the challenges of life in occupied cities, ordinary Americans reshaped their relationship to Britain in small, casual ways—one day at a time, with "a profound effect on both the American Revolution and the new world that it produced" (p. 7). Put another way, Johnson suggests that the lived experience of military rule cleaved an uncomfortable disjuncture between hearts and minds, between longstanding loyalty to the Crown and the pressing needs of daily life. Occupied America reorients our perspective on the American Revolution away from the familiar vantages of Valley Forge, Yorktown, or Independence Hall to focus on the everyday experiences of people living under British military rule. Some of these names are familiar: Quaker diarist Elizabeth Drinker, Philadelphia merchant Tench Coxe, New York poet Hannah Lawrence Schieffelin, and self-emancipated Carolina carpenter Boston King. Others are less so, such as Quaker physician William Tillinghast, who thrived during the British occupation of Newport and whose experiences epitomize the contradictory and messy ways that Americans endured the Revolution. Like many American colonists, Tillinghast had connections to both sides of the war. He socialized with British officers, even as the army displaced Newport's Quakers from their meeting house. He tended to British troops but also ministered to Continental prisoners. Local women of varying political persuasions and occupations, including sex workers, passed through his care. A religious pacifist, Tillinghast leaned loyalist, but his kinsman was confined aboard a prison ship for refusing to swear allegiance to the Crown. Tillinghast became disillusioned with the British cause over the course of Newport's three-year occupation, and ultimately, he rejoiced at troops' withdrawal. The Revolution, when viewed from William Tillinghast's perspective, looks less straightforward and more perplexing. Centering the voices of ordinary people like Tillinghast, Johnson persuasively demonstrates that for many people, the turn away from Britain proceeded slowly, forged in daily experiences and fraught with "ambiguities and contradictions" (p...