TAHPDX: History Topic

1. Context

The great majority of people in the thirteen colonies did not anticipate the American Revolution, a conflict that owed a great deal to both longstanding historical developments and a series of more recent political events.  The roots of American independence ultimately resided in the independent and peculiar nature of the thirteen colonies.  Many early settlers had come in search of economic opportunity and religious freedom, and most of the colonies had become habituated to controlling their own affairs, affairs that Great Britain routinely neglected. The spread of religious revivals (which stressed conversion through a direct experience of God rather than through the mediation of educated clergy) throughout the populace and of Enlightenment ideas (which emphasized the use of individual reason rather than established authority) among more educated colonists undercut traditional patterns of deference in the eighteenth century.  At the same time, northern colonies in particular developed economies that competed with rather than complemented England’s.  They built ships, harbored large numbers of merchants who often traded or smuggled goods outside of approved channels, and processed as well as produced wheat, timber, and iron.  Southern colonies were more apt to export raw and import finished goods, but they, too, had grown accustomed to running their own affairs.  In sum, the colonies that would become the United States did not act as imperial colonies were supposed to act.

Great Britain’s leaders at last turned their full attention to the thirteen colonies after the costly Seven Years’ (French and Indian) War.  The war had brought a crippling level of debt, and the British believed that the colonies, lightly taxed up to this point, should begin to shoulder their share of the burdens of war and empire.  After the war they tried to curb westward expansion (and the often expensive Indian wars this expansion ignited) by issuing the Proclamation of 1763, that prohibited settlement west of the Appalachian Mountains.  They also began trying to extract tax revenue from the colonies.  The Stamp Act of 1765 imposed a tax on all paper and documents used by colonists, from playing cards to newspapers to legal documents.  The taxes, though slight, affected just about everyone and groups of patriots calling themselves the Sons of Liberty formed in at least fifteen places across the colonies and organized mobs who made implementation of the Stamp Act impossible.  Nine colonies contributed representatives to a Stamp Act Congress that accepted the right of Parliament to make laws for the colonies, but denied their right to tax them.  The British backed down in this instance but continued to search for ways to tax the colonists.  Conflict again flared in Boston in 1770 when a group of British soldiers fired on a mob of patriots who had been harassing a sentry and in 1773 and 1774, when a large group of Bostonians expressed their resistance to the Tea Act by throwing East India Company tea into the harbor.  This brazen destruction of property enraged even British leaders who had defended the colonies and prompted the Intolerable Acts which closed the port of Boston and deposed the colonial government of Massachusetts.  The Quartering Act empowered British soldiers to use private homes as barracks and the Administration of Justice Act asserted that British soldiers and officials who suppressed riots would not be subject to trial by jury.

These imperial acts, in turn, outraged colonists inside and outside of Massachusetts and lent credence to the growing belief that the British were determined to crush liberties that the American colonists had grown accustomed to.  Committees of correspondence throughout the colonies kept patriots informed of events and communities sent relief shipments to the “poor of Boston.”  In September, 1774 the first Continental Congress met in Philadelphia and called upon the local committees of correspondence to oversee a boycott of British trade.  The following spring, General Gage met resistance when he set out to seize arms cached at Concord -- the shooting war had begun.

But were the colonies ready for independence?  Congress hedged their bets by both authorizing the creation of an army and sending the king an Olive Branch petition that called for negotiation rather than war.  But the King, who had been convinced that the colonies were in “an open and avowed rebellion,” turned the petition aside, an action that in turn hardened public opinion in the colonies, particularly once people learned that Hessian mercenaries and additional British troops were making their way to North America.  The war looked like it was bound to deepen, and people were faced with the uncomfortable task of making up their minds on how to respond to it.

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2. Revolutionaries

General

Public sentiment for the war of course varied widely across and often within the thirteen colonies.  In Concord, Massachusetts, on the doorstep of where the war’s first shots had been fired, enthusiasm ran high.  Concord absorbed Harvard College’s students and faculty during 1775-1776 so that the campus in Cambridge could house American troops, and by July 4, 1776, Concord had contributed half of its adult male population to military service far from home.  Many of the remainder helped to push the Redcoats out of Boston that year.  Pastor William Emerson joined sixty of his townsmen in a journey to fight the British at Fort Ticonderoga, though he assured his wife, who had just given birth to their fifth child, that the “parting with my Family and Flock” was harder “than perhaps you are aware of.”  He became ill during the party’s treks through the rain and swamps and died on his way home.  Concord residents who opposed independence or who wished to remain neutral were either few in number or apt to keep their opinions to themselves.

In fact, the great majority of colonists wished to remain neutral in 1776, even though they resented British impositions.  But many people who pursued neutrality nonetheless drifted into the patriot camp.  The local committees of correspondence and revolutionary militia played a crucial role in this transformation, as failure to support and serve in the militia invited censure or worse.  The rebels had the great advantage of being an integral part of most communities.  Their power of course receded when the British Army occupied a given area, such as New Jersey in the closing months of 1776.  But the British and their Hessian troops often abused and alienated colonists regardless of their professed loyalties, and Washington’s daring raid on Trenton late in the year proved that British hegemony was much more tenuous than it had seemed.

A substantial minority of the colonial population was eager to fight the British, particularly at the war’s outset, when hope of a short, decisive conflict ran high.  Indeed, the very independent spirit that motivated so many men to volunteer also undermined the early war effort.  The militias and the early continental army were notorious for their lack of order, neglect of cleanliness (which led to many deaths from disease), and drunkenness and general revelry.  European armies at the time were largely composed of those who chose military service over prison or poverty, and officers used the fear of whippings or worse to keep them in line.  General Washington, by way of contrast, found in 1776 that his troops were often both eager to fight and quick to flee, that they lacked the drill and the discipline necessary to keep their heads and their formation when under fire.  By the end of 1776 his army was down to 3,000 men.  Outside of its officers, the Continental Army that would persevere and eventually triumph was largely made up of marginal men.

Women

Women played a significant role in the political events and agitation leading up to the Revolution.  The various non-importation movements that began in the 1760s deeply implicated women, as these movements entailed the boycotting of goods such as tea that women commonly purchased and the substitution of products such as homespun that women commonly produced.    Fifty-one women organized the Edenton ladies’ Patriotic Guild organized in North Carolina late in 1774 and concluded that it was their “duty” to support their provincial congress and the “publick good.”

Patriot women continued to serve their young nation during the war.  They donated clothing, collected money and supplies for the soldiers by going door to door, nursed the wounded, and as camp followers cooked, laundered, sewed, and occasionally even spied and fought for the continental army.  General Washington admitted that driving away the wives and mothers who followed their husbands and sons would prompt the desertion of “some of the oldest and best soldiers in the Service.”

Many more patriot women stayed at home, where the war brought both independence and vulnerability.  In men’s absence, women by necessity assumed more control over farms and other businesses.  They also risked poverty and often worse, as Hessian and British troops and camp followers not infrequently looted the farms and homes and raped the women of areas they controlled.

Sam Adams

Though highly educated and born into a prosperous family, Adams struggled in business and as a tax collector before becoming a leading Boston opponent to British taxation in the mid-1760s.  He led attempts to boycott British goods and was an effective writer of newspaper articles who argued eloquently for the cause of freedom.  He believed in the necessity of independence long before many others seriously considered it.  Thomas Hutchinson, governor of Massachusetts, warned officials in London early in the 1770s that Adams doubtlessly “would push the colonies into a rebellion tomorrow, if it was in his power.”  Adams was a key player in initiating and maintaining the committees of correspondence, a network of patriot groups across the colonies who shared information about and encouraged the independence movement.  The committees were critical to creating a national consciousness where only regional sensibilities and identities had previously existed.  Early in 1773 he became the first to call for a national congress, and he was instrumental in organizing the Boston Tea Party.

Adams was a great supporter of Thomas Paine’s Common Sense, and in 1776 he worked hard in Congress to get the Declaration of Independence approved—though his reputation as a leading radical prompted him to keep a low profile in congressional debates.  But by pressing for a vote on independence in early July, he again played a critical role in the nation’s independence, for if congress had waited just a few months, a string of dispiriting military defeats might have caused them to set aside their declaration of independence.  Adams’s health and influence, however, declined during and after the Revolution, for he was more successful as an agitator than a consolidator.

Thomas Jefferson

Descended from prominent planter families, Jefferson was one of the young nation’s most accomplished and prominent statesman—in addition to being a leading naturalist and agriculturalist, a man who both relied for his living on the endeavors of his many slaves and tirelessly experimented with new seeds and crops.

Jefferson was an ardent supporter of independence by 1776.  His wide readings in political theory had convinced him that the colonies had the right to political self-determination.  In A Summary View of the Rights of British America, published as a pamphlet in 1774, he both charged Great Britain with a “systematical plan of reducing us to slavery” and claimed that Parliament “has no right to exercise authority over us.”  The king, rather than appointed by divine providence, was merely “the chief officer of the people, appointed by the laws, and circumscribed with definite powers, to assist I working the great machine of government erected for their use, and consequently subject to their superintendence.”

Jefferson’s bold and clear prose made him the logical choice to draft the Declaration of Independence two years later.  In it he laid out his twin case for independence: neglect and abuse by Great Britain on the one hand and the natural rights of the colonists to seek independence on the other.  After the war Jefferson would play a key role in the growth of political parties (Federalists and Jeffersonian Republicans) and served as the third President of the United States.

George Washington

Though Washington was the young nation’s “indispensable man” in war and peace, he was the least literary and philosophical of the founders.  Washington grew up in a moderately prosperous home but rose due to family connections, marriage to a wealthy woman, and his considerable ambition and talent.  He became active in the Virginia militia at an early age and campaigned in the backcountry before and during the French and Indian War, where he displayed great courage and a mixed record as a strategist.

Back at Mt. Vernon, Washington, like many Virginia planters, accrued heavy debts despite his extensive land holdings (he was a tireless speculator in western lands) and slaves.  He also shared with other planters alarm over Britain’s closing of the port of Boston in 1774, which he found “repugnant to natural right” and “subversive of the law and constitution of Great Britain itself.”  Washington served in the first Continental Congress and was much respected for his courageous bearing.  A year later, when the Continental Congress chose him to head its army, he was prepared to lead.

The year 1776 brought great defeats and victories to Washington and his fledgling army.  They pushed the British out of Boston, but Washington’s inexperienced army was roundly defeated in and around New York City and was lucky to escape annihilation.  His daring attack across the Delaware River late in the year revived the army’s spirits and the young nation’s hopes, for it was an attack in horrible weather over treacherous ground that required both boldness and discipline to carry off.  But many years of fighting lay ahead for General Washington and his plucky army.

John Adams once remarked that Washington won so many posts simply because he was always “the tallest man in the room.”  Washington indeed had a regal bearing that inspired respect, but he also believed strongly in the nation’s republican experiment.  He laid down his sword after the Revolution rather than seizing power, an act that prompted King George III to remark that he must be “the greatest man in the world.”  He returned to public service to preside over the Constitutional Convention of 1787 and was the only logical choice for the nation’s first president.  After two terms he again surrendered power, setting a precedent that the leaders of many modern nations have not been willing or able to follow.

Abigail Adams

Married to John Adams, one of the leading founding fathers, Abigail Adams was a highly intelligent and independent person in her own right.  Her willingness to run the family farm and business and to care for her children enabled John to serve in the Continental Congress at the war’s outset.  Her famous letters to John made it clear that she had her own ideas about what that body and her husband should do.  She praised Common Sense early in 1776 and wrote John of her hope that “it could gain credit enough in your assembly to be carried speedily into execution.”  Though she had grown up in a family that owned slaves, she opposed the institution by 1776, and she advised John to “remember the ladies” in their deliberations, for “all Men would by tyrants if they could.”  John dismissed her concerns, but Abigail’s letters revealed her hopes that the Revolution would bring greater legal and educational rights for women.  Abigail was not advocating for women’s full political equality.  But her pessimistic view of human nature coupled with the movement toward independence prompted her to hope for laws that would limit husband’s dominance over their wives and enlarge women’s influence.

Running the family business and household brought both autonomy and stress to Abigail.  She had the family inoculated for smallpox, a process that consumed two months and came near to killing one of their children.  She endured a difficult pregnancy and a stillbirth during John’s absence and coped with regular food shortages.  John returned home in 1776 but the state legislature again appointed him to Congress.  Abigail “had it in my Heart to disswade him from going and I know I could have prevaild, but our publick affairs at that time were so gloomy an aspect that I thought if ever his assistance was wanted, it must be at such a time.  I therefore resigned myself to suffer much anxiety and many Melancholy hours for this year to come.”

Abigail’s descendants included a son who became president (John Quincy Adams) and some of the nation’s leading intellectuals (Henry and Brooks Adams).

Thomas Paine

Paine came to America at age thirty-nine, late in 1774, and seemed an unlikely candidate for influencing the course of the Revolution.  The son of a corset maker, he had failed at a variety of callings when he encountered and impressed Benjamin Franklin.  Franklin, then serving as a diplomat in England, steered the gifted writer and political agitator to Philadelphia, where Paine was soon writing for the city’s newspapers.  Early in 1776 he published Common Sense, an extended essay in pamphlet form that spread across the colonies and played a crucial role in mobilizing support for independence.

Paine possessed two great strengths.  He was an engaging and effective writer, and he understood the American Revolution not simply as a necessary and regrettable reaction to Great Britain’s abuses.  Rather, Paine heaped scorn upon the entire notion of divinely appointed kings and dusty constitutions.  William the Conqueror, the hallowed founder of the cherished British monarchy, was nothing more than “a French Bastard landing with an armed Banditti and establishing himself king of England against the consent of the nation.”  Reverence for such tyrants simply served to obscure relations of power and self interest, and American rights and self interest were inherently at odds with the entire British system of governance.  “England consults the good of this country, no farther than it answers for her own purpose,” he asserted.  The pursuit of independence was a matter of simple “common sense”—though an act that would “begin the world over again” by freeing humankind from the superstitions of the past to instead pursue the promotion of “the public good.”  Paine’s bold statement of the case for political independence rallied thousands of Americans to the patriot cause.

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3. Loyalists

General

The Loyalist impulse was a complex one.  For some, loyalty to Great Britain was a simple choice.  Royal officials and many recent immigrants were very loyal to Great Britain and suspicious of the rebels.  Others simply had a conservative case of mind and were appalled at the notion of colonies forming themselves into a nation simply because they objected to some aspects of royal rule.  Human nature required and history and scripture revealed that human welfare demanded subordination to established authority.  Others had strong economic or political interests that predisposed them to Loyalism.  Tenant farmers in New York State tended to be Loyalists because their exploitive landlords were patriots, for example.

Many Loyalists changed their minds in the course of the war.  New Jersey offered Great Britain nearly 2,500 volunteers when the British occupied it in 1776.  But many of these men put down their arms or became patriots when it quickly became clear that the British could hold only small portions of the countryside.  Maintaining loyalty to Great Britain became, in general, more difficult as the war progressed and as patriots asserted themselves in areas not directly controlled by British armies.

Women

Tory women tended to have a lower profile than their patriot counterparts.  After all, loyalty to Great Britain implied traditionalism, and women traditionally had little role in politics.

Loyalist women often experienced a great deal of stress during the Revolution.  Pressure began mounting in 1775, when some 1,000 New England Loyalists fled to Canada.  Most Loyalists fared relatively well during 1776, when the young United States made little headway outside of Boston.  But Loyalist women would be increasingly vulnerable to losing their property and otherwise being harassed by local patriot organizations (such as the committees of safety) during the course of the Revolution.

William Franklin

Born in 1730 or 1731 as the illegitimate son of his famous father, Benjamin, William grew up in his father’s household and at age thirty, with his influential father’s support, became the governor of New Jersey.  He was for several years an effective mediator between the colony and Great Britain, though by the early 1770s this had become more difficult.

As the patriots moved toward independence, William did not.  The local militia placed him under house arrest, and a few months in later in 1776 Congress determined that William had been writing letters to England offering intelligence on the patriots and should therefore be imprisoned.

William was freed in a prisoner exchange two years later and spent the remainder of the war in New York City, trying to organize guerilla resistance to the young nation before leaving North America in 1782.  Two years later he tried to reconcile with his father: “I can with confidence appeal not only to you but to my God that I have uniformly acted from a strong sense of what I conceived my duty to my King and regard to my country required.  If I have been mistaken I cannot help it.”  But his celebrated father never forgave or reconciled with him.

William Smith, Jr.

Smith was a well-educated and wealthy New York attorney when the American Revolution began.  A political leader with strong ties to both the patriots and Great Britain, he had played a leading and mediating role in the Stamp Act Crisis of the 1860s by both halting the stamps’ distribution and violent reaction to them.  Smith criticized Great Britain for not granting more liberty to the colonies.  Congress should show Britain “her folly in contending for what she does not really want and cannot execute,” without seeking independence.  A sort of American parliament could bring the colonies together and represent their interests to Great Britain—and offer an annual “gift” to the mother country that would at least defray the costs of administering and defending the colonies.  But he found very little company on this middle ground.  “The clouds grow very dark,” he confided to his diary in June, 1776.  “My hopes for conciliatory negotiation almost fail me.”

The patriots paroled Smith to a manor later that year, and until 1778 he continued to adopt a position of neutrality.  He then traveled to New York City, where he advised the British on how to defeat the revolutionaries.  He left for England at the war’s close before serving as the Chief Justice of Canada.

Samuel Seabury

Seabury followed his father into the Anglican ministry and in 1766 settled in the parish of Westchester, New York.  A defender of religious orthodoxy, he was greatly alarmed by the appearance of the First Continental Congress and their attempts to halt imports from Great Britain.  In Letters of a Westchester Farmer and other writings, Seabury charged Congress with producing “a venomous brood of scorpions to sting us to death.”  Seabury had a religious explanation for the patriots’ rash words and actions: “Preposterous pride!  It defeats the end it aims at” and cheated people from the capacity “to learn prudence from our own misconduct.”  He attributed the urge for independence to emotionalism, a lack of reason: “The words independency and colony convey contradictory meanings.”  Colonies, by definition, were dependent, not free.

Seabury was arrested late in 1775 and held prisoner in New Haven, Connecticut, though he refused to admit authorship of his Loyalists tracts.  He then returned to New York, where he remained during the war.  Late in 1776 he recalled that he had responded to the “present unnatural rebellion” by endeavoring “to stem the torrent of popular clamor, to recall the people to the use of their reason, and to retain them in their loyalty and allegiance.”  He remained in the United States after the war and became a loyal citizen.

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4. African Americans

Upper South

Many white patriot leaders in Virginia, Maryland, and Delaware believed that slavery was an immoral institution, including more than a few planters who themselves held substantial numbers of slaves.  Indeed, Virginia’s state constitution of 1776 banned further slave importations in the hopes that this would lead to its eventual end.  Revolutionary leaders such as Thomas Jefferson did not believe in racial equality, and they hotly resented and resisted attempts by outsiders to end slavery.  But many of them joined Jefferson in asserting that slavery was ultimately at odds with the principals of the Revolution.  Indeed, the number of manumitted slaves in the Upper South swelled in the last decades of the eighteenth century.

But the great majority of slave owners did not free their slaves.  Indeed, slaves were much more likely to be freed by joining the purported enemies of liberty, Great Britain.  Virginia Governor Lord Dunmore in 1775, from the British warship he had fled to in Chesapeake Bay, offered freedom to slaves who would join him in fighting the rebels.  Of the 800 or so who did, about 300 left with him a year later for England.  Yet as many had probably died of smallpox.  In the coming years, as the British war efforts shifted to the South, thousands of slaves would join the British.  Cornwallis’s army had perhaps 5,000 escaped slaves by the time it reached Yorktown in 1781.  Most of these former slaves had a difficult time.  The men commonly worked as laborers, under awful conditions, and some were re-enslaved to entice or reward white Loyalists.  But a substantial minority survived and settled in Canada after the war.

Lower South

Few patriot slave owners in the Carolinas or Georgia felt much guilt over owning slaves.  This was partially a product of the different scale and nature of slavery in South Carolina, where coastal plantations tended to be large and owners absent.  Here, too, slavery seemed more profitable than in the Chesapeake, where planters like Jefferson had become deeply indebted to British merchants.

British armies moved into the Lower South later in the war, though Florida’s royal governor had commissioned four black militia companies in 1776.  But slaves throughout the South had detected the change in the political climate much earlier.  In 1766, when disagreement over the Stamp Act was raging, slaves shouted “Liberty” while parading through Charleston, South Carolina, an act that greatly alarmed the city’s white populace.  Late in 1774 or early in 1775, a black Methodist preacher trained in England had to be spirited out of Charles Town to avoid a white lynch mob after preaching to slaves that “the Children of Israel were delivered out of the hands of Pharo and he and all his Host were drowned in the Red Sea and God will deliver his own People from Slavery.”  The revolutionary theme of freedom from oppression resonated most strongly where oppression was most acute.  A slave named Limus informed his master before fleeing him in 1775 that “he will be free, that he will serve no Man, and that he will be conquered or governed by no man.”  Such actions prompted counter measures.  During this period, slave owners stepped up their surveillance and punishment of slaves, including hangings.

Northern

Slavery existed throughout the northern colonies, though on a much smaller scale than in the South, and the proportion of blacks who were free was much higher in the North.  Not a few northern whites expressed opposition to slavery before and during the Revolution.  Reverend Samuel Hopkins of Rhode Island addressed a pamphlet in 1776 to the Continental Congress calling for the emancipation of slaves.  Freedom “is of more worth to them than every thing else they can have in the world.”  How could Americans “complain so loudly of attempts to enslave them,” wondered Thomas Paine, “while they hold so many hundreds of thousands in slavery?”  Indeed, the Revolution set in motion the gradual abolition of slavery in the North.  Massachusetts began the process of emancipation during the Revolution.

Many slaves did not wait.  New York City had the largest concentration of slaves in the North, and British occupation of that city in 1776 offered many of them the opportunity to pursue liberty by deserting their masters.  The slave population of Philadelphia fell by a quarter between 1775 and 1780, as many fled to the British or simply melted into the North’s free population.  Cuff Dix ran away from his Pennsylvania master for Dunmore’s “own black regiment” in the summer of 1776, as he believed that Dunmore was “contending for” the “liberty” of slaves.

But free blacks also often backed the patriot call.  Crispus Attucks had died in the Boston Massacre of 1770.  Boston’s Phillis Wheatley became free in 1773, and her poems and other writings celebrated the Revolution.  Boston’s African-Americans several times petitioned for their freedom in the first half of the 1770s.  Slaves and free blacks alike entered the military, some with the promise of freedom, though many slave owners opposed this practice, particularly in the South.  The American Revolution presented slaves with unprecedented opportunities, but even these opportunities were hedged with dangers.

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5. Native Americans

Molly and Joseph Brant

Their Iroquois Confederacy (comprised of the Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, Seneca, and Tuscarora) had historically sought to balance European powers, to maintain an area of sovereignty between competing white governments.  By the mid-eighteenth century this meant forming a “Covenant Chain” with the British colonists of New York, with the king identified as the lead patron.  But by the 1770s it was clear that the interests of the king and many of his white colonists in North America had diverged.

Molly and Joseph Brant were all for backing the crown.  Molly was the mistress of Sir William Johnson, an Irish immigrant who had settled near the Mohawk in the 1730s and cultivated close ties with both Mohawk chiefs and New York’s governors.  In 1756 he became the king’s superintendent of Indian affairs for the northern colonies.  Molly and Johnson had their first child in 1759, and Johnson treated her as a wife.  Johnson gained more than companionship and children from this liaison.  A white colonist observed that Molly “is descended from and connected with the most noble families of the Indians, she was of great use to Sir William in his Treaties with those people.”  Johnson became an enthusiastic sponsor of Joseph, Molly’s little brother, who fought with Johnson against the French.  He sent Joseph to Eleazar Wheelock’s Connecticut school for Indians in 1761.  The Brants, then, sought a synthesis between British and Indian cultures that would both enhance Mohawk wealth and maintain their autonomy.

The Brants believed that the Revolution offered the Mohawk an opportunity to expand their land and power.  Early in 1776 Joseph told British officials in London that “it is very hard when we have let the King’s subjects have so much of our lands for so little value,” and he recalled that “our late, great friend Sir William Johnson” had “often assured” them “that the King and wise men here would do us justice.”  Brant landed in New York City in July where he helped General Howe drive the patriots out of the city before heading north, where he labored to convince other Iroquois to join him in fighting for the British.  The powerful western Iroquois viewed Joseph as an upstart who had perhaps become too white, and they preferred to bide their time rather than spill Iroquois blood.

Brant reacted by forming “Brant’s Volunteers,” a force of 100 men comprised of about twenty Mohawks and eighty white settlers who dressed as Indian warriors and raided patriot settlements.  Despite his bloody reputation among patriots, Brant won acclaim among the British for his restraint and effectiveness in battle.  Molly, meanwhile, used her status as a prominent Mohawk woman to influence Iroquois diplomacy.  One British officer judged her influence “far superior to that of all their Chiefs put together.”  The British showed their gratitude by constructing mansions for her and her family and awarding her an annual pension of 100 pounds. 

But the war brought division and defeat to the Iroquois.  Some, particularly the Oneida and the Tuscarora, sided with the patriots, with the Oneida raiding the homes of Molly and Joseph Brant.  In 1779 a Patriot army unleashed a series of crippling attacks on the Mohawk and their allies.  One general claimed to have destroyed 40 villages.  By the war’s end, the population of the Iroquois had fallen from 9,000 to 6,000, and land-hungry Americans who viewed them as defeated enemies of the United States were poised to settle on their lands.  Brant was enraged by news of the British surrender, but found it difficult to continue his raids without British support.  The British offered him and Molly sanctuary in Canada, where they continued to be influential leaders.

Stockbridge

The Indian community of Stockbridge, in western Massachusetts, consisted of fragments of Indian nations from that region and the Hudson Valley.  The village had been laid out in 1736 as an Indian mission, the last “praying town” of the colony.  Ninety Indians lived there at the town’s founding, where missionaries taught English and Christianity.  Stockbridge Indians served in the French and Indian and Pontiac’s War.  Yet by 1773 the town’s Indians had lost all of their common land and complained to the General Court of Massachusetts that they were in “the Utmost Dificulty & Distress by Reason of the Traders who have settled Among & Near us as well as other Designing People who aim at Getting Away All that The Indians are possessed of.”  In 1776 they asked for two years of relief from being sued for debt “and that Tavern-Keepers may be restrained from selling them spirituous Liquors.”  By this point the Indian population of Stockbridge was about 300, far less than the nearly 1,000 non-Indians who lived there.

The Stockbridge Indians eagerly volunteered for the patriot cause.  In May one proclaimed that they would “be of great Service should the King’s Troops march out of Boston.”    One leader expressed the hope that “if we are victorious we hope you help us to recover our just Rights.”  The Stockbridge Indians hoped to be rewarded with land for their loyalty to the patriot cause.

Congress authorized General Washington to use the Stockbridge Indians as he wished in the summer of 1776.  Later that year two Stockbridge Mahicans traveled to a treaty council of the Delaware and Shawnee at Fort Pitt to invite those nations to join the United States.  Stockbridge Indians began fighting for the young nation in 1776 and suffered very large losses in a 1778 ambush on the outskirts of New York City, at Kingsbridge. 

The Stockbridge Indians continued to suffer from poverty and to lose land during the Revolution, and many who survived joined the Oneida in New York soon after the war ended.  Washington declared that the Indians had “remained firmly attached to us and have fought and bled by our side; That we consider them as friends and Brothers.”  But soon after the war the Stockbridge Indian community had essentially ceased to exist.
           
Dragging Canoe

Long a powerful Indian nation in the Southeast, the Cherokee had lost much of their power by 1776, as disease and involvement in European wars and trade—including the slave trade that supplied Indians to colonists—had reduced them to around 12,000 people.  The Cherokee also suffered from colonial traders who used debt as leverage to seize land.  The Sycamore Shoals Treaty of 1776 transferred a cabin full of trade goods for 27,000 square miles of land, a deal that violated British law and angered many Cherokee.  Tsi’yugunsi’ny, also known as Dragging Canoe, a Cherokee chief, reportedly pledged to render the land “dark and bloody.”

The Revolution seemed like an ideal opportunity for Dragging Canoe and his young followers to make good their recent losses.  In 1776 Dragging Canoe told a British envoy that “he had a great many young fellows that would support him and that were determined to have their Land,” and he blamed the recent land cession on “Old Men” who “were too old to hunt,” and therefore desperate for money.  The arrival at Chota, a key Cherokee town, of delegates from the Mohawks and several other northern Indian nations urging war emboldened Dragging Canoe’s young warriors, even as the British and many Cherokee women and older men urged patience.

After some initial success, the Cherokee raiders were repulsed and then punished. Indeed, many colonists welcomed the Cherokee attacks as justification for seizing even more of their land.  Jefferson hoped that “the Cherokees will now be driven beyond the Mississippi.”  That would not happen until the 1830s, but the Cherokee lost a great deal in the Revolution.  Big Island Town, which Dragging Canoe had been the leader of, was one of many villages destroyed by the patriots, and the Cherokee were soon compelled to surrender an additional five million acres.  Dragging Canoe and his followers fled to the South, where they continued to fight against the United States.  Divisions within the Cherokee grew, yet Dragging Canoe referred to his followers as “the Real people.”  He died in 1792.

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6. City and Countryside

New York City

War came to New York City in the summer of 1775, when a British warship shelled the city when some patriots removed British cannons from a fortification.  Some residents responded with anger and committed themselves to independence.  Others fled, including William Tryon, the Royal Governor, who sought shelter with a British warship.  Later in 1775 Congress advised local committees of safety to arrest people “whose going at large may . . . endanger the safety of the colony, or the liberties of America.”  But many patriots fled New York City when the British left Boston, as New York City seemed to be their likely destination.  “We are in daily expectation of having our city knocked down and burned by the Men of Warr,” wrote a resident in February 1776.

Patriot soldiers moved into the homes that had been deserted.  They built breastworks and batteries, and Congress ordered all the city’s men to assist in this work.  Tories who lingered in the city faced mob violence orchestrated by the patriot committees, such as being ridden on rails through the streets.  But the shoe was soon on the other foot, as the British easily swept away Washington’s army and patriot militias.  By mid-September the British had begun their seven-year occupation of New York City.

Tory refugees flooded into the city.  But, like their patriot and neutral counterparts, they were often frustrated by life there.  British and Hessian soldiers often seized what they wanted from the city’s residents.  The British expressed little interest in suspending the Prohibitory Act of late 1775 that suspended trade between the colonies and other parts of the empire, even for Loyalist merchants.  Yet enterprising merchants living outside the city—usually in areas controlled by patriots—often came to trade with the British, as this illegal trade offered high profits that General Washington denounced as an “extravagant passion for gain.”  In sum, the travails and opportunities of war often blurred the line between patriot and Loyalist in and around New York City during the war.

Philadelphia

Large numbers of pacifist Quakers complicated the response to the American Revolution in Philadelphia and Pennsylvania more generally.  Quakers were perfectionists who believed that humans—and human institutions—could live as Jesus had lived.  Many of them were also prosperous merchants with a reflexive fear of political radicalism.  By the end of 1775 the Quaker church had disowned sixty-five members for engaging in political and military activity.  Many young Quakers, especially, responded by leaving the church.  Many Quakers were passive loyalists who supported, but who would not fight, for British rule.  Well-to-do Philadelphians who were not pacifists worried that that the Revolution would bring social and political upheaval.  Many of them eventually chose independence without having actively pushed for it.

After the Intolerable Acts, Philadelphia’s leaders decided on a boycott of imports to express their solidarity with Boston.  Meanwhile, ordinary Philadelphians who had lacked much of a political voice—such as laborers and craftsmen and Scotch-Irish and Germans—were both embracing the Revolution and flexing their political muscle.  For these men, independence meant both freedom from Great Britain and the local elite.  By June, 1776 Philadelphia and Pennsylvania were arguably the most radical city and colony, respectively, in North America.  Their 1776 Constitution strove to keep the legislature tied closely to the electorate’s wishes by making that body very large and instituting annual elections  Proposed legislation had to be “printed for the consideration of the people” before they could be debated or voted on.  No other state constitution would be as radical.

Virginia Tidewater

Virginia’s white population was one of the most unified of the colonies, for both the majority of its great planters and its ordinary citizens embraced independence. Of course the elite gathered the most acclaim, particularly George Washington, who became the nation’s military leader in 1775, and Thomas Jefferson, who penned the Declaration of Independence a year later.

But the hierarchy and deference that had governed relations between white Virginians became less extreme during the war.  Backwoods’ hunting shirts rather than plantation finery became the emblems of independence, a trend that the Revolution’s emphasis on homespun virtue underscored.  But less lofty ideals also nudged white Virginians toward patriotism.  Governor Dunmore’s threat to free patriot slaves and his proclamation that did so in April and November, respectively, of 1775 enraged and alarmed poorer and slaveholding whites alike.  A patriot observed that the proclamation “has had a most extensive good consequence” for “Men of all ranks resent the point a dagger to their Throats, thru the hands of their slaves.”

As elsewhere, many well-to-do Virginians chose revolution in part to put themselves at the head of a movement that might otherwise become radical and inimical to their interests.  Poorer patriots resented unequal access to scarce commodities such as salt and the fact that military service fell more heavily on themselves than on wealthy planters.  The surest route to easing social resentments and forestalling radical acts was to secure independence as soon as possible.

South Carolina Backcountry

South Carolina was strongly divided before the Revolution, and those divisions very much shaped how its white residents, especially, reacted to the Revolution.  The backcountry, despite having roughly three quarters of the colony’s white population, had just three seats in its colonial assembly.  The more respectable elements of the backcountry also resented the coastal elites’ lack of concern over law and order, a problem that had prompted “Regulators” to form their own, extra-legal means of punishing rowdies who stole from and otherwise harassed them and sheltered their runaway slaves.  The Regulators dispersed at the end of the 1760s, but these tensions (both within the backcountry and between the backcountry and eastern part of the colony) remained.

Local concerns tended to trump national or international ones early in the Revolution.  Coastal patriots gained the allegiance of former Regulators not so much through ideology as by offering them political and military posts.  In 1776 the state constitution set aside 76 assembly seats for them.  Backcountry loyalists countered such measured by attempting to, in the words of one patriot, “blind the people and fill them with bitterness against the gentlemen [the coastal patriots] as they are called.”  The fact that some of the most vocal backcountry loyalists were themselves wealthy complicated this attempt.

The Cherokee unwittingly tipped the balance in the South Carolina backcountry by attacking in the spring of 1776.  The patriots quickly raised 1,000 militiamen and countered, one of their leaders urging the force to “cut up every Indian corn-field and burn every Indian town.”  Defeat of the Cherokee promised both to secure the safety of western settlers and to make available to them fertile Cherokee lands.  Backcountry bandits whom the Regulators had organized against before the war often joined the loyalists and sometimes these “white Indians,” as their enemies termed them, joined forces with the Cherokee.  Well before British armies marched into the South, then, the Revolution had fueled renewed clashes in South Carolina’s backcountry.

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7. Conclusion

The American Revolution was a tidy war only in retrospect.  The fighting lasted for seven long years and brought a great deal of death, destruction and strife to the young nation.  The protracted conflict forced most inhabitants to choose sides, but the side one chose owed at least as much to local pressures and perceived self interest as to ideology.  Ethnic and economic divisions and interests drove many people’s decisions, as did simple expediency, calculations of self-interest that shifted as local and national conditions fluctuated.

The year 1776 did mark a radical departure in the history of the world, and radicals well into the twentieth century would identify with and cite the stirring words of the Declaration of Independence that all men “were created equal and endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights.”  But the short and long term implications of those words and of the young nation were far from settled at that date, as the colonies’ diverse peoples struggled with much more immediate concerns.

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8. Bibliography

Akers, Charles W. Abigail Adams: An American Woman  (Boston: Little, Brown, 1980).

Bauman, Richard. For the Reputation of Truth: Politics, Religion, and Conflict among the Pennsylvania Quakers, 1750-1800 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1971).

Berkin, Carol. Revolutionary Mothers: Women in the Struggle for America’s Independence (New York: Vintage, 2006).

Berlin, Ira. Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998).

Brown, Richard D. (ed). Major Problems in the Era of the American Revolution, 1760-1791, 2nd ed.  (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2000).

Calhoon, Robert McLuer. The Loyalists in Revolutionary America, 1760-1781 (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1965).

Calloway, Colin G. The American Revolution in Indian Country: Crisis and Diversity in Native American Communities (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).

Countryman, Edward. The American Revolution (New York: Hill and Wang, 1985).

Ellis, Joseph J. American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson (New York: Vintage, 1998).

Foner, Eric. Tom Paine and Revolutionary America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004).

Gross, Robert A. The Minutemen and their World (New York: Hill and Wang, 1976).

Holton, Woody. Forced Founders: Indians, Debtors, Slaves, and the Making of the American Revolution in Virginia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999).

Kerber, Linda K. Women of the Republic: Intellect & Ideology in Revolutionary America (New York: W. W. Norton, 1986).

Klein, Rachel N. “Frontier Planters and the American Revolution: The South Carolina Backcountry, 1775-1782,” in An Uncivil War: The Southern Backcountry during the American Revolution, ed. Ronald Hoffman, Thad W. Tate, and Peter J. Albert (Charlottesville, University Press of Virginia, 1985).

Middlekauff, Robert. The Glorious Cause: The American Revolution, 1763-1789 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982).

Nash, Gary B. Race and Revolution (Madison,WI: Madison House, 1990).

Nelson, William H. American Tory  (New York: Oxford University Press, 1966).

Norton, Mary Beth. Liberty’s Daughters: The Revolutionary Experience of American Women, 1750-1800  (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996).

Puls, Mark. Samuel Adams: Father of the American Revolution (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006).

Royster, Charles. A Revolutionary People at War: The Continental Army and American Character, 1775-1783 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1979).

Shy, John. “The American Revolution: The Military Conflict Considered as a Revolutionary War,” in Essays on the American Revolution, ed. Stephen G. Kurtz and James H. Hutson (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1973).

Taylor, Alan. The Divided Ground: Indians, Settlers, and the Northern Borderland of the American Revolution (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2006).

Van Buskirk, Judith L. Generous Enemies: Patriots and Loyalists in Revolutionary New York (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002).

Withey, Lynne. Dearest Friend: A Life of Abigail Adams (New York: Free Press, 1981).

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