Social Structure and Political Behavior in Revolutionary America: John Day's Remarks on American Affairs

Abstract

HE threatening situation in Anglo-American affairs following the Boston Tea Party and thecoercive response of the British government' elicited a flood of pamphlets.2 Few of these contain more of interest for scholars than John Day's brief and extremely rare Remarks on American Agfairs, printed in London in a very limited edition in May 1774.3 Day presents an unusually cogent analysis of the difficulties between Britain and the colonies and some insightful proposals for surmounting them. What gives the pamphlet unique importance, however, is the author's remarkably modern attempt to class out and arrange the inhabitants of North America into their several orders and to correlate political behavior with social position and economic activity. Not a man of wide contemporary prominence and even less familiar to historians, the author gives only a few clues to his identity, other than his name. He tells us that he was born in England, spent his early life in the king's service, lived for twenty years in America (the last five in the middle colonies), had his family and entire estate in the colonies, and had a member of assembly in one of the Colonies for several years. This last piece of information has been the primary means of identifying him as the merchant, John Day, whose base of operations was Halifax, Nova Scotia, where he was the most prominent member of the