Some Reflections on the South in the American Revolution

Abstract

THE SUBJECT OF THE SOUTH IN THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION WAS ONCE freighted with emotion and controversy. Professional historians were hardly guilty of such partisanship, though relatively few of them examined the Revolution in comprehensive regional terms--a notable exception being John R. Alden, who authored volumes on the land below the Mason-Dixon Line. (1) Rather, the fireworks came before the Civil when southerners complained that northern writers had neglected the South's role in the victory over Britain. It was a strange spectacle, declared John Hope Franklin, two sections that were virtually at war with each other in the 1850s, not merely over the current problems that beset them but also over their comparative strengths and weaknesses during the for Independence. (2) In 1988 Jack P. Greene's stimulating and somewhat controversial book Pursuits of Happiness might warmed the hearts of antebellum southerners. Greene, hardly sharing their biases, partly agreed with them about their region's history. Until relatively recently, he wrote, serious historians have devoted far more attention to the northern colonies, specifically to New England, than to the South. (3) Were northerners and southerners of the Revolutionary era also very sensitive to sectional matters and to their respective contributions to the war's outcome? For the most part, they were not, although Alden's The First South notes that some Americans were. In fact, Greene has argued that the sections had become more alike by 1776 than they had been earlier and than they would ever be in the years before the Civil (4) There were regional characteristics, especially related to slavery and plantation agriculture. But it is the theme of this essay that Greene is essentially correct and that the South between the Seven Years' and the conclusion of the of Independence remained in the American mainstream. What Americans had in common was for most white people a common language, a Protestant religion, a British political heritage, and an Anglophone culture that made the colonists more rather than less like the mother country because of growing trade and commerce in the Atlantic world. American unity also increased after 1763 because of the London government's new colonial policy, which seemed threatening with its parliamentary taxes and burdensome administrative regulations. (5) Provincial jealousies and rivalries, rarely North-South divisions, occurred between more immediate neighbors. New York and New Hampshire clashed over Vermont. Pennsylvania had boundary disputes with Virginia. But in one way New England perceived the southern colonies in unflattering terms: the South was less experienced in war. As Colonel George Washington admitted in the French and Indian War, is a Country young in War. Blessed with Tranquil Peace after 1700, Virginians had not studied War or Warfare. (6) The French and Indian was not universally popular in Virginia. One historian has drawn implicit analogies to American internal divisions during the Vietnam War, for many of the poorer sort in the Old Dominion saw the conflict as one to benefit wealthy planters' lust for western lands. (7) New Englanders shouldered a disproportionate share of the burden compared with the middle colonies as well as the South. The irony here is that immediately prior to the Civil southerners boasted of a martial South, of Dixie having a stronger military tradition. The assertion is suspect, for the North had a better military record than the South before the Revolution. (8) In any case, southern colonials matched New Englanders in mounting a vigorous defense of American rights after 1763, and both sections outdistanced the middle colonies. North Carolina was one of only provinces to brand the Sugar Act of 1764 as a tax and a violation of the British constitution. A year later Patrick Henry's Virginia Resolves issued the most stinging rebuke of any colony to Parliament's Stamp Act. …