Who Shall Rule at Home: The American Revolution as a Crisis of Legitimacy for the Colonial Elite

Abstract

Emotions, historians are well aware, had much to do with the coming of the American Revolution. Bailyn has recently suggested that the impact of Thomas Paine's Common Sense in 1776 was partly due to the way in which it expressed and crystallized American anger. Furthermore, many scholars have long suspected-as Wood put it ten years ago-that the revolutionary character of the Americans' ideas... indicates that something profoundly unsettling was going on in the society.... With a few notable exceptions, however, most students of the Revolution have taken the emotional element for granted, and that oversight has accentuated some artificial divisions among them. For the difficulty of disentangling the complex relationships between socioeconomic developments and ideology has created an either-or situation in which individuals have been drawn into studying-and consequently emphasizing the primacy of-one element or the other. The resulting debate has been fruitful in the past, but it probably cannot be resolved.' The time has come therefore to give more attention to the emotional matrix through which contemporary ideas were linked to social phenomena. Clearly, as two scholars who have studied the emotional roots of rebellion note, Americans were boiling mad on the eve of the Revolution, and there was a myriad of reasons for their anger. But an examination of the situation in South Carolina, which will be the focus for much of the present discussion, indicates that the precarious