The Human Tradition in the American Revolution

Abstract

BOOK REVIEWS Human Tradition in the American Revolution. Edited by Nancy L. Rhodes and Ian K. Steele. (Wilmington: Scholarly Resources, 2000. Pp. xxi, 368. Illustrations. Cloth, $50.00; paper, $18.95.) Revolutionary America, 1763-1815: A Political History. By Francis D. Cogliano. (New York: Routledge, 1999. Pp. x, 275. $65.00.) A survey intended for undergraduates and general readers, Revolutionary America is a traditional political narrative of the revolutionary and early Federal periods. Spanning the period from Pontiac's uprising in 1763 to the end of the War of 1812, it covers all of the expected high-political events: the acts, Congresses, major players, and key battles. Individual chapters chronicle the formation of the Articles of Confederation, the creation of the Constitution, and political life in the 1790s. Revolutionary America places more emphasis on chronology than on detail or interpretation, with much of the more original discussion banished to the footnotes. best two chapters, unfortunately tacked onto the end of the volume, chronicle the experiences of women and African Americans. Author Francis Cogliano shows that the American Revolution was a more liberating experience for northern blacks than for their southern counterparts. Although southern slaves sided with the British during the Revolutionary War in hopes of freedom, the British, with no desire to eliminate the plantation system, were not committed to freeing them. Slaves also were the unfortunate victims of constitutional compromise over the slave trade, as 60,000 were imported to the Carolinas alone in the three decades leading to 1808. Women were similarly active participants in the revolutionary effort, bearing more than their share of suffering no matter which political affiliation their husbands chose. Their postwar reward, the ideology of republican motherhood, increased their educational opportunities but failed to expand their responsibilities beyond nurturing children within the household. Throughout the remainder of his narrative, Cogliano rarely refers to the ways in which people below the decision-making stratum influenced and were influenced by political events. Crowds played a role in making the Stamp Act unenforceable and in eliciting the violence of the Boston Massacre; women boycotted British goods in the 1760s and 1770s. But because Cogliano has banished the in-depth consideration of ordinary people from all but his last two chapters, many aspects of the American experience (even those relating directly to politics) are absent: Who served in the Continental Army, and what were the soldiers' motivations? How did working people join in the political divisions of the 1790s? What kinds of political symbols or language did ordinary Americans deploy? Throughout his narrative, Cogliano attempts a transatlantic perspective, with uneven results. An early chapter titled The Imperial Crisis is a richly-detailed synopsis of the challenges facing successive British ministers. Chatham and Rockingham, Grenville and Townshend struggled to force colonists accustomed to self-rule to accept responsibility for the defense of their big corner of the British empire. Cogliano emphasizes that British North Americans thought of themselves as freeborn Britons, their opposition to taxation without representation part of their view of traditional liberties. This emphasis helps to explain the conservatism of the Revolution; until 1776, the colonists were reacting rather than revolting. On the other hand, Cogliano might have amplified and contextualized a later discussion of Jacobinism by comparing the American reaction to the French Revolution and Citizen Genet with the ruthless suppression of Jacobinism that occurred in England. …