American Revolution Research Articles

The Second American Revolution: The Civil War–Era Struggle over Cuba and the Rebirth of the American Republic by Gregory P. Downs, and: Breaking the Chains, Forging the Nation: The Afro-Cuban Fight for Freedom and Equality, 1812–1912 ed. by Aisha Finch and Fannie Rushing, and: Racial Migrations: New York City and the Revolutionary Politics of the Spanish Caribbean by Jesse Hoffnung-Garskof

The Second American Revolution: The Civil War–Era Struggle over Cuba and the Rebirth of the American Republic by Gregory P. Downs, and: Breaking the Chains, Forging the Nation: The Afro-Cuban Fight for Freedom and Equality, 1812–1912 ed. by Aisha Finch and Fannie Rushing, and: Racial Migrations: New York City and the Revolutionary Politics of the Spanish Caribbean by Jesse Hoffnung-Garskof

The Executive Branch and the Origins of Judicial Independence

The early history of the federal judiciary as an independent branch of American government presents a puzzle. How did an institution that barely existed as a separate entity before the American Revolution be¬come coequal, and in some ways preeminent? Most accounts of the judiciary’s rise tell a story in which the courts consolidated their authority—especially the power of judicial review—by tacitly agreeing to withdraw from partisan politics. This article considers early judicial independence through a differ¬ent lens—the idea that the executive and legislative branches cannot interfere with judicial proceedings. This notion, which seems self-evident to us now, was less clear at the Founding. State legislatures in the 1780s routinely overrode judicial decisions, and it was not until the 1820s that courts seriously began to question the practice. As this article shows, the most insistent assertions of judicial invio¬lability came not from courts, but instead from the executive branch officials—in large part because they had little other choice. With a threadbare bureaucracy and no standing army, the early federal gov¬ernment existed more in theory than in fact. What it had was courts, which sat in every major port city and enjoyed broad jurisdiction over maritime matters. Forcing foreign disputants to adjudicate their claims in court spared the executive from making decisions that risked anger¬ing powerful European empires, and enabled it to leverage judicial resources to solve problems it could not manage on its own. In so doing, executive officers helped transform a still-undefined concept of judicial independence into a putatively hard barrier between the branches.

Tacitus in American Revolution

Tácito fue uno de los escritores más reconocidos en los círculos intelectuales de la América revolucionaria. No se conservan muchas referencias explícitas en los escritos del periodo, pero su influencia es perceptible en los argumentos empleados para legitimarla independencia de las colonias del Imperio británico. En el siguiente trabajo, se identificarán los elementos de la obra de Tácito que fueron recuperados por los padres fundadores durante la revolución. Las traducciones consultadas de clara ideología whig, modelaron la interpretación de la obra de Tácito y su aplicación en la práctica política. Además, se analizará su empleo en el debate político de formas bien distintas, pero siempre por su utilidad en la construcción de la nueva república.

Lafayette, the Thinker

Between 1775 and 1834, the Marquis de Lafayette played a role in the ongoing development of both the American and French Revolutions. Most previous scholarship about Lafayette highlights his military activities as a major-general in the American Revolution and as General of the National Guard of Paris in the French Revolution. This paper examines Lafayette’s draft of the Declaration of the Rights of the Man and of the Citizen, a list of enslaved peoples that were chosen for Lafayette’s experimental plantation in French Guiana, Lafayette’s membership in the Society of the Friends of Blacks, and letters between Lafayette and America’s Founding Fathers to suggest that Lafayette was deeply concerned with questions of liberty and slavery. Overall, this paper demonstrates that the Marquis de Lafayette played a far larger role than as a military general, instead he acted as one the greatest thinkers of the Revolutionary Era.

The Pluralization of Scripture in Early American Protestantism: Competing Bible Translations and the Debate over Universal Salvation, ca. 1700–1780

ABSRACTThis article addresses a pervasive historiographic assumption about the supremacy of the King James Bible in British North America by proposing that a process we call the “pluralization of Scriptures” forced colonial Protestants to square their belief in “the Bible” with the undeniable reality of many “bibles.” While the KJV remained dominant among anglophone Protestant populations, by the early eighteenth century some heirs of New England Puritanism were challenging its adequacy and pushing for improved translations of key passages, as members of the clerical intelligentsia became immersed in cutting-edge textual and historical scholarship. Also, during the eighteenth century, non-English cultures of biblicism with their own religious print markets formed in the middle colonies, most importantly among diasporic communities of German Protestants, who brought the Luther Bible to America, and diverse “heterodox” Bibles associated with radical Pietist groups. This essay contends that, well before the American Revolution, the advent of Higher Criticism in American seminaries, and the first wave of English-language Bible production in the early republic, Scripture had ceased to be a static, monolithic entity. A considerable number of alternative translations and commentary traditions in a variety of different languages came to co-exist and, at some points, also interact with each other. Moreover, we argue that competing translations, even of passages speaking to core Christian doctrines, were inextricably bound up with some of the most significant controversies among colonial Protestants, such as the debate over the doctrine of universal salvation, our main case study.

Dividing the Carolinas: Indians, Colonists, and Slaves in the Prerevolutionary Boundary Dispute, 1763–1773

Between 1763 and 1773, North and South Carolina officials intensified their competition over their western backcountry when they attempted to resolve the boundary that had remained in question for decades. Historiography about this boundary has failed to recognize how common people in the Carolinas—Indians, colonists, and slaves—set the terms for the dispute and shaped the geography of early America. This boundary dispute offers a unique comparative glimpse of the Carolinas and exposes their most severe internal divisions—for North Carolina, the widespread Regulator movement that originated in disputes over western land, and for South Carolina, the heightened risk of slave revolts that accompanied the province's development. Catawba Indians occupied a central focus of the dispute, courted as an essential ally by South Carolina, while Cherokees hoped to halt the western expansion of both Carolinas. The boundary dispute determined the future of the diverging Carolinas, particularly in foreshadowing the tensions of state formation that manifested during the American Revolution. Indians, colonists, and slaves claimed their own spaces in between the imaginary lines of imperial power.

The Primms of Fayette County: A Biracial Family in Nineteenth-Century Texas

The Primms of Fayette County: A Biracial Family in Nineteenth-Century Texas Randolph B. Campbell (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution Randolph B. Campbell is pictured here with his friend and colleague Richard Lowe, c. 1977, in the North Texas Daily, the student newspaper of North Texas State University (now University of North Texas). Photo courtesy of the Campbell family. [End Page 294] William Primm migrated to Texas at the age of fifty-seven in 1835 and within a year established a cotton plantation near the Colorado River to the northwest of La Grange in Fayette County. At a glance, Primm’s story does not appear to have been notably different from those of many other Texas immigrant planters at the time, but it contrasted dramatically in one way: Primm’s wife Celia was an African American woman whom he owned as a slave prior to emancipating and marrying in Ohio in 1817. They lived as a married couple in Louisiana before migrating to Texas and continued to live in the Lone Star state as man and wife until his death in May 1865. Celia died three years later in January 1868. The Primms had five mixed-race children who lived to maturity, four born before the family came to Texas and one after they reached Fayette County. Adding to their special situation as a biracial family, William Primm owned enslaved persons—twenty-one in 1850 and thirty-three in 1860, ranking his family in the Old South’s planter class.1 [End Page 295] From the time of their arrival in Texas until 1865, the Primm family lived first in a slaveholding republic and then in a slave state that both had extensive legal codes dedicated to upholding the Peculiar Institution. Laws dictated the conduct not only of slaves, but of free Blacks as well. For example, the Congress of the Republic of Texas in 1837 outlawed the marriage of any person of “European blood” with “Africans, or the descendants of Africans.” Any couple who broke that law would have their marriage nullified and be “deemed guilty of a high misdemeanor and punished as such.”2 When the Civil War ended slavery in the state in 1865, it certainly did not usher in an era of racial equality in any aspect of life. Thus, the central question raised by the story of the Primm family is how a White father, a Black mother, and their biracial children endured the complications of living as a biracial family in Texas during the years from the 1830s until the twentieth century. The answers show a notable range of individual variation. No person considered “Black” escaped the briar patch of race relations unscathed, but as the story of the Primm family shows, some found their way through with fewer injuries than others. Fayette County local histories that deal with the Primms usually describe the family as coming from colonial Virginia aristocracy. Unlike most of the Old Dominion’s leaders, however, the family’s founder in America, John De La Pryme (1725–80), was of French rather than English ancestry. A descendant of French Huguenots who moved to England in the late seventeenth century to escape religious persecution, he migrated from England’s Isle of Man to Stafford County, Virginia, in 1735. Eventually, probably to escape anti-French animus during the French and Indian War, the Prymes changed their family name to Primm.3 John Primm’s third son, also named John and usually called John Primm II, was born in 1750. John II served in a Virginia unit during the American Revolution and participated in the siege of Yorktown. Belying the claim that the Primms belonged to the Virginia “aristocracy,” John Primm II owned no slaves. In fact, soon after the Revolution, he began to migrate in a direction that took him away from the Old Dominion and any possibility of slave ownership. He moved west to Hampshire County, Virginia (now West Virginia), by 1797 and then in 1803 continued on to St. Clair County, Illinois, where he remained until his death in 1837.4 The eldest of John Primm II’s eighteen children, William Primm, was born...

Reconceptualizing American Democracy: The First Principles

An outstanding group of leaders left evidence that a richer and more sustainable democracy could be achieved with American independence and democratic principles integrated into a new republican form of government. They were moved by principles that are the very spirit of democracy. These principles are needed to enhance democracy and improve well-being. Using the constructivist tradition of grounded theory and Aristotle’s conception of abstraction, the article proposes a theory of the first principles of democracy based on substantive data: the Declaration of Independence, the Articles of Confederation, The Federalist Papers, and the United States Constitution. Knowledge, fairness, human dignity, hope, unity, and security are the first principles of democracy and are regarded as the bedrock of democracy and a government framework for the people. This theory contributed to a formal model of democratic social change. It also contributes a conceptual framework that supports Solum’s semantic originalism, a theory of constitutional interpretation. The principles of democracy can revitalize democracy and provide new possibilities by protecting education as an innate human right, abolishing capital punishment, criminalizing private prisons on the stock market, and reevaluating the proportionality of prison sentences.

“In Honorable Remembrance to All Generations”: Commemoration and the Making of Mormon Battalion Memory, 1921–2021

“In Honorable Remembrance to All Generations”: Commemoration and the Making of Mormon Battalion Memory, 1921–2021

Rethinking the History of the American Revolution: An Interview with Michal Jan Rozbicki

Rethinking the History of the American Revolution: An Interview with Michal Jan Rozbicki

From Pirates to Patriots: Constructing the Oppositional Indian on the Road to the American Revolution

From Pirates to Patriots: Constructing the Oppositional Indian on the Road to the American Revolution

Thomas Burke and State Sovereignty, 1777

Article II of the Articles of Confederation states that “Each state retains its sovereignty, freedom and independence, and every Power, Jurisdiction and right, which is not by this confederation expressly del-egated to the United States, in Congress assembled.” While the provision is well-known, its author, Thomas Burke of North Carolina, is not. Scholars who have explored Burke’s role in crafting the Article have described him as the father of states’ rights or a republican ideo-logue and often dismiss Article II as unimportant to the American founding. This essay challenges those interpretations. It explores the context of Burke’s words and actions in 1777 to understand better his reasoning for calling for what became Article II. From his congres-sional debates with Richard Henry Lee and clashes with James Wilson over the use of implied and extra-constitutional powers to his calls for a bicameral Confederation Congress, Burke concluded that a provision that properly constitutionalized and protected a division of powers be-tween the states and central government was necessary. Rather than being an ideologue, this article reveals Burke to be searching for a so-lution to the metropolitan-periphery problem while remaining faithful to what he perceived to be the constitutional principles of the Ameri-can Revolution. Thus, rather than a neglected or dismissed member of the American founding, Burke emerges as an important theorist of fed-eralism.

Wives Not Slaves: Patriarchy and Modernity in the Age of Revolutions by Kirsten Sword

Reviewed by: Wives Not Slaves: Patriarchy and Modernity in the Age of Revolutions by Kirsten Sword Maria O'Malley (bio) Wives Not Slaves: Patriarchy and Modernity in the Age of Revolutions kirsten sword University of Chicago Press, 2021 408 pp. Kirsten Sword's Wives Not Slaves: Patriarchy and Modernity in the Age of Revolutions offers an incisive and compelling argument about how the rise of print, in particular public notices in newspapers, mediated spousal separation and to a certain extent shaped legal discourses surrounding the dissolution of marriage. The book provides ample context for the cases it highlights by tracing the halting and roundabout ways the jurisdictional debate about divorce unfolded in England and in the colonies. Sword finds that "the dramatic growth of the press gave ordinary people power to draw on a transatlantic repertoire of debates about household order, and to make legal and moral arguments independent of the claims of local legal authorities" (12). She notices how advertisements in newspapers were used as an alternative to the law to exempt a spouse from the financial obligations of marriage. Rather than taking a spouse to court for a legal divorce, which would involve a lengthy process and an uncertain verdict, a husband would place an advertisement in a local paper explaining to merchants that he was not responsible for her expenses. Sword includes, as a frontispiece, one such ad placed by John Davis in the New-Hampshire Gazette in 1762 asking for his wife's return as well as distancing himself from any of her finances: "This is therefore to forbid any Person entertaining or harboring her on my Account, or giving her Credit for Money or any Thing whatsoever" (qtd. in Sword 1). Her argument is built on extensive archival evidence that she culls from divorce cases, legal commentaries, ecclesiastical pronouncements, political treatises, novels, letters, personal journals, and newspapers. The study, ultimately, demonstrates how "newspaper [End Page 254] reporting of these phenomena, as well as of parliamentary petitions for full divorce, helped escalate demand for legal and quasi-legal remedies to marital conflict on both sides of the Atlantic" (111). Sword spotlights how these demands shored up or challenged the hegemony of patriarchal systems. The book starts with great promise by explaining in the introduction how racialized figurations shaped the public relations campaigns spouses launched and how, in some ways, the practice of race-based slavery raised new questions about eighteenth-century marriage and divorce. Her study analyzes the phrasing, paradigms, and epistemes that set the terms for marriage law against the background of political revolutions stretching from the Interregnum to the American Revolution. She finds that at times the practice of slavery informed marriage law: "European colonial powers revived [arguments about household patriarchy] to support new forms of government and new forms of slavery between the sixteenth and seventh centuries" (4–5). As evidence, she identifies substantial similarities between newspapers advertisements seeking the return of enslaved people and wives who had absconded. The great strength of the book lies in its close attention to language to broaden the study's scope from divorce to conceptions of slavery and the ties it finds between divorce and the expansion of a credit-based marketplace. The first parts of the book focus on single divorce cases from the sixteenth century: one in the colonies (Christopher and Elizabeth Lawson) and one in England (Manby v. Scott). These cases demonstrate how patriarchy undergirded legal decisions even as those decisions demarcated some limits to males' authority over their households. Sword cites new primary source material to give a more balanced account of these cases. Not until the second half of the book does a reader get an extended treatment of the tropes relying on enslavement for understanding marriage law. The promises of the introduction bear fruit starting in chapter 5 and ripen especially in chapter 8 when the book's argument sharpens and clarifies. Many scholars will find her discussion of aggregated archival work of newspapers notices useful. Much of Sword's archival work involved digging up public notices submitted to local papers by husbands publicizing the behavior of their errant wives to distance themselves from any financial obligations and then the...

Of Thee I Sing: The Contested History of American Patriotism by Ben Railton (review)

Reviewed by: Of Thee I Sing: The Contested History of American Patriotism by Ben Railton Brian Whetstone Of Thee I Sing: The Contested History of American Patriotism. By Ben Railton. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2021. ix + 194 pp. Note on sources, index. $36.00 cloth. The tumultuous administration of Donald Trump and ensuing initiatives to examine American history and identity, such as Nikole Hannah-Jones's 1619 Project, have produced extensive public and academic conversations about American patriotism and identity. Ben Railton's Of Thee I Sing: The Contested History of American Patriotism intervenes in these scholarly and popular debates, tracing the history of American patriotism from the American Revolutionary era to the Reagan Revolution of the 1980s before concluding with a reflection on patriotism in the age of Trump. Railton's method reflects his background in English and American literature as he draws upon the writings and cultural works of a diverse spectrum of Americans across the nation's history, including such disparate works as Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address, the passionate appeal of Ponca chief Standing Bear in his 1879 trial, and the Wizard of Oz to underscore the appeal of patriotic sentiments across time. Less interested in rooting his analysis in original archival research, Of Thee I Sing works well as a broad synthesis of secondary literature on American patriotism, and Railton's accompanying Note on Sources will surely serve as a useful entry point for students and scholars of American identity looking to expand their research beyond Railton's overview. Railton identifies four varieties of United States patriotism: celebratory, mythic, active, and critical. Celebratory patriotism encompasses actions and shared rituals like the national anthem invested in portraying the US uncrit ically as the "greatest country in the world." Mythic patriotism, Railton argues, is the most dangerous because it generates mythologized narratives about the past that increasingly divided the US into communities perceived to belong to an idealized nation and "those overtly and violently excluded from it." In contrast to celebratory and mythic patriotism, active and critical patriotism constitute more constructive and inclusive patriotic impulses. The former involves active commitments to the US such as military service, social activism, and protest, while the latter stems from a desire to right historical wrongs and drive the country to live up to its high ideals for all Americans. Railton devotes considerable attention to developments in the Great Plains, particularly westward expansion, that generated expressions of critical patriotism, such as the works of Helen Hunt Jackson in the nineteenth century and the American Indian Movement in the late twentieth century. While Railton's work succeeds at introducing readers to a wide cast of historical actors, his analysis and insistence on dividing patriotism into four primary expressions tends to oversimplify complex historical developments. While characters come and go through each of the eras Railton analyzes, the four varieties of patriotism are unyielding and unchanging, presenting American history as one timeless, unchanging struggle between those who subscribe to celebratory and mythic forms of patriotism and those who place faith in active and critical patriotism. Despite this oversimplification, Of Thee I Sing still offers an important historical intervention into contemporary debates about American patriotism, nationalism, and identity. [End Page 111] Brian Whetstone Department of History University of Massachusetts Amherst Copyright © 2023 Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska–Lincoln

Thomas Paine and his Rights of Man

This paper examines the historical context, the content of Thomas Paine’s book, Rights of Man, and its impact on British working class. Paine, a British philosopher involved in the American independence movement, wrote Rights of Man in response to Edmund Burke’s criticisms of the French Revolution. The book defended the principles of the French Revolution and inspired workers to fight for their rights. Paine’s ideas on innate rights, representative democracy, and the roots of poverty resonated with the underclass workers. The conclusion highlights Paine’s contributions to democratic revolutions and his influence on the establishment of the American republic. Paine’s ideas continue to shape modern society and inspire ongoing democratic movements.

Tocqueville’s America

Abstract On the evening of November 5, 1831, a young Frenchman by the name of Alexis de Tocqueville met the last surviving signer of the Declaration of Independence, Charles Carroll of Carrollton. Just a little over a year after their meeting, Carroll, age 95, would pass away to much acclaim from the young republic. He would be memorialized as a great man in Israel and as the last of the Romans. That he would be remembered as both a Hebrew prophet and a Republican demigod would not shock the young Frenchman. Indeed, Carroll impressed Tocqueville so much that he lamented that “this race of men is disappearing now after having provided America with her greatest spirits.” With the passing of the revolutionary generation, Tocqueville continued, “the tradition of cultivated manners is lost; the people is becoming enlightened, attainments spread, and a middling ability becomes common. The striking talents, the great characters, are rare. Society,” he thought, “is less brilliant and more prosperous.” Whereas Europe had theorized about such great men in the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, America had actually produced a genius generation. Carroll was the last remnant. Carroll reminisced proudly about his days in the American Revolution, his own thoughts on independence, and his respect for the English. Tocqueville, it seems, listened with rapt attention.

Andy Warhol’s Silver Liz at the International Celebration of the U.S. Bicentennial in 1976

In 1976, at the moment when the U.S. celebrated the 200th anniversary of the American Revolution, one of its prominent citizens, Pop artist Andy Warhol (1928–1987), enjoyed growing popularity. By turning from a Sixties underground artist into a truly mediated business persona, he inaugurated his Interview magazine, published several books, and began to receive hundreds of commissioned portraits from socialites, film and music stars, and celebrities. Even though some academic research sheds light on the history of the international circulation of Warhol’s oeuvre during the artist’s lifetime and after his death, nothing is still widely known about his contributions to the international celebrations of the U.S. Bicentennial. The current paper aims to fill in this research gap. It examines how and why Warhol’s painting Silver Liz was exhibited in 200 Years of American Painting organized by the U.S. government in Landesmuseum Bonn in 1976 as part of the international celebrations of the U.S. Bicentennial and explains how this show influenced both the artist’s international success and the U.S. Cultural Cold War strategy.

“Una casa divisa”: conflitto civile e identità rivoluzionarie in America

Moving from the most recent literature, not only the academic one, this essay analyzes the current status of internal unrest in the United States, which could even result in a new Civil War according to many analysts. Therefore, the crisis that is affecting the American emocracy is examined mainly with respect to the capability of the American revolution of igniting the world (as Jonathan Israel has notoriously argued) at the end of the 18th entury, and keeping it until few years ago.

2022 IRVING S. WRIGHT AWARD

Abstract Dr. Gill is a leading international authority on the epidemiology and prevention of disability among older persons. His nomination for the Wright Award lauded his groundbreaking research on the mechanisms underlying and interventions targeting functional decline and disability among community-living older persons., He collaborates with investigators throughout the country, is a leader of multisite clinical trials, and is a devoted mentor. He has published more than 350 original reports and has been continuously funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and multiple foundations since 1997. Dr. Gill is the Humana Foundation Professor of Medicine (Geriatrics) and Professor of Epidemiology (Chronic Diseases) and of Investigative Medicine; Director, Yale Program on Aging; Director, Claude D. Pepper Older Americans Independence Center; Director, Yale Center for Disability and Disabling Disorders; and Director, Yale Training Program in Geriatric Clinical Epidemiology and Aging-Related Research.

FOSTERING MULTIDISCIPLINARY SOLUTIONS IN AGING: THE RESEARCH CENTERS COLLABORATIVE NETWORK

Abstract The NIA supports the Research Centers Collaborative Network (RCCN) to build collaborations between scientists from the 6 NIA-sponsored center programs: Alzheimer's Disease Research Centers, Centers on the Demography and Economics of Aging, Claude D. Pepper Older Americans Independence Centers, Nathan Shock Centers of Excellence in the Basic Biology of Aging, Resource Centers for Minority Aging Research, and Roybal Centers for Translational Research on Aging. RCCN's premise is that researchers from different disciplines are most likely to collaborate when they are addressing common problems. To provide a forum for collaborative exchange, the RCCN has convened 6 workshops on topics that cross-cut the concerns of the various NIA center programs ranging from sustaining behavior change in older adults to measuring biologic age. After each Workshop the RCCN awards pilot funds related to the theme. This symposium will present key learnings from the workshops and present work of four RCCN pilot teams from the third and fourth workshops which focused on resilience and reserve, and life course perspectives on aging. Dr. Ramos will discuss how measurement of psychological resilience may predict physical resilience in older patients with lung cancer, while Dr. Reid will discuss positive affect as a source of resilience for older adults with chronic pain. Dr. White will discuss association between perceived discrimination trajectories and multimorbidity burden among middle-aged and older black adults, while Dr. Brooks will discuss development of a resilience index in chronic musculoskeletal pain. Dr. Kritchevsky will also summarize lessons learned across the first 6 workshops.