Popular Uprisings and Civil Authority in Eighteenth-Century America

Abstract

T is only natural that the riots and civil turbulence of the past decade J and a half have awakened a new interest in the history of American mobs. It should be emphasized, however, that scholarly attention to the subject has roots independent of contemporary events and founded in long-developing historiographical trends. George Rude's studies of pre-industrial crowds in France and England, E. J. Hobsbawm's discussion of archaic social movements, and recent works linking eighteenth-century American thought with English revolutionary tradition have all, in different ways, inspired a new concern among historians with colonial uprisings.1 This discovery of the early American mob promises to have a significant effect upon historical interpretation. Particularly affected are the Revolutionary struggle and the early decades of the new nation, when events often turned upon well-known popular insurrections. * Mrs. Maier is a member of the Department of History, University of Massachusetts. 1 See the following by George Rude: Crowd in the French Revolution (Oxford, I959); The London 'Mob' of the Eighteenth Century, Journal, II (959), i-i8; Wilkes and Liberty: Social Study of 1763 to 1774 (Oxford, i962); Crowd in History: Study of Popular Disturbances in France and England, 1730-i848 (New York, i964). See also E. J. Hobsbawm, Primitive Rebels: Studies in Archaic Forms of Social Movement in the s9th and 20th Centuries (New York, I959), esp. The City Mob, i08-I25. For recent discussions of the colonial mob see: Bernard Bailyn, Pamphlets of the American Revolution (Cambridge, Mass., i965), I, 58I-584; Jesse Lemisch, Jack Tar in the Street: Merchant Seamen in the Politics of Revolutionary America, William and Mary Quarterly, 3d Ser., XXV (i968), 371-407; Gordon S. Wood, A Note on Mobs in the American Revolution, Wm. and Mary Qtly., 3d Ser., XXIII (i966), 635-642, and more recently Wood's Creation of the American Republic, 5776-i787 (Chapel Hill, i969), passim, but esp. 319-328. Wood offers an excellent analysis of the place of mobs and extralegal assemblies in the development of American constitutionalism. Hugh D. Graham and Ted R. Gurr, Violence in America: and Comparative Perspectives (New York, i969) primarily discusses uprisings of the i9th and 20th centuries, but see the chapters by Richard M. Brown, Historical Patterns of Violence in America, 45-84, and The American Vigilante Tradition, I54-226.