A People's History of the American Revolution: How Common People Shaped the Fight for Independence

PRAISE FOR

A People’s History of the American Revolution

Ray Raphael shows that, like the Civil Rights Movement, the American Revolution was the product of local people, not just Washington, Jefferson, and Franklin.

—James Loewen, author of Lies My Teacher Told Me

This is an exciting distillation of the discoveries of a generation of scholars about ordinary people in the American Revolution. . . . A very readable, thought-provoking book.

—Alfred Young, author of The Shoemaker and the Tea Party

Raphael succeeds admirably in bringing to life the excitement, upheaval, and complexity of plebian Americans’ participation in the War of Independence. Drawing on a broad array of published eyewitness accounts and displaying a firm command of recent social-historical scholarship, he offers a reliable, extensively documented, and frequently riveting account of how various bodies of ‘the people’ tried to make the Revolution their own.

—William and Mary Quarterly

The unique value of Raphael’s work lies in its mining, from extant primary sources, of the extraordinary recollections of ordinary witnesses to history.

—Booklist

"Raphael . . . is relentlessly aggressive and unsentimental. He takes the traditional narrative of the American Revolution and shatters it into rough and contradictory but mesmerizing fragments. If a PBS documentary were ever made of Raphael’s book, exploding cannons and heated arguments, rather than soothing fiddles, would have to provide the soundtrack. . . . The nervy energy of this People’s History is an arresting antidote to the air of self-satisfied triumphalism that so many Americans casually assume each July Fourth."

—Fresh Air (NPR)

Fascinating and scrupulously researched.

—Seattle Times

He has fashioned a mosaic—history from the bottom up—with impressive skill.

—London Times

About the Author

Ray Raphael’s seventeen books include The First American Revolution: Before Lexington and Concord, Founders: The People Who Brought You a Nation, Constitutional Myths: What We Get Wrong and How to Get It Right, Founding Myths: Stories That Hide Our Patriotic Past, and The Spirit of ’74: How the American Revolution Began (co-authored with Marie Raphael), all published by The New Press. He has taught at a one-room public high school, Humboldt State University, and College of the Redwoods and is currently a senior research fellow at Humboldt State University and associate editor of Journal of the American Revolution. He lives in Northern California, where he hikes and kayaks.

Also by Ray Raphael

The Spirit of ’74: How the American Revolution Began (with Marie Raphael)

Constitutional Myths: What We Get Wrong and How to Get It Right

Mr. President: How and Why the Founders Created a Chief Executive

Revolutionary Founders: Rebels, Radicals, and Reformers in the Making of the Nation (co-edited with Alfred F. Young and Gary B. Nash)

The Complete Idiot’s Guide to the Founding Fathers and the Birth of Our Nation

Founders: The People Who Brought You a Nation

Founding Myths: Stories That Hide Our Patriotic Past

The First American Revolution: Before Lexington and Concord

© 2016, 2002, 2001 by Ray Raphael

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, in any form, without written permission from the publisher.

Requests for permission to reproduce selections from this book should be mailed to: Permissions Department, The New Press, 120 Wall Street, 31st floor, New York, NY 10005.

Originally published in the United States by The New Press, New York, 2001

This revised paperback edition published by The New Press, 2016

Distributed by Perseus Distribution

library of congress cataloging-in-publication data

Raphael, Ray.

A people’s history of the American Revolution: how common people shaped the fight for independence / Ray Raphael.—1st ed.

p.cm.

Originally published: New York: The New Press, 2001.

Includes index.

ISBN 978-1-62097-280-9

1.United States—History—Revolution, 1775–1783.2.United States—History—Revolution, 1775–1783—Social aspects.3.United States—History—Revolution, 1775–1783—Personal narratives.I.Title.

E208.R25 2002

973.3—dc21

2002016992

The New Press publishes books that promote and enrich public discussion and understanding of the issues vital to our democracy and to a more equitable world. These books are made possible by the enthusiasm of our readers; the support of a committed group of donors, large and small; the collaboration of our many partners in the independent media and the not-for-profit sector; booksellers, who often hand-sell New Press books; librarians; and above all by our authors.

www.thenewpress.com

Printed in the United States of America

24681097531

For Marie

The research for A People’s History of the American Revolution was made possible, in part, by a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

CONTENTS

Foreword

Series Preface by Howard Zinn

Introduction

1.Rank-and-File Rebels

Street Action

A Shoemaker’s Tale

Country Rebellions

Frontier Swagger

Politics Out-of-Doors

Yankees with Staves and Musick

2.Fighting Men and Boys

The Spirit of ’75

An American Crusade

Forging an Army

In the Face of the Enemy

Cannons Roaring, Muskets Cracking

Death or Victory

Beasts of Prey

Winter Soldiers

Summer Soldiers

Giting Thair Rights

3.Women

Expectations

A Duty We Owe

Women and the Army

Shaming

Where God Can We Fly from Danger?

What Was Done, Was Done by Myself

4.Loyalists and Pacifists

Choosing Sides

The Dogs of Civil War

Tests of Faith

A Rock and a Hard Place

A Lost Cause

5.Native Americans

Western Abenakis

Iroquois

Delaware and Shawnee

Cherokees

Catawbas

Chickasaws, Choctaws, Creeks, and Seminoles

6.African Americans

The Promise and the Panic of ’75

Liberty to Slaves

A Board Game

Two Émigrés

Patriots of Color

Toward Freedom?

7.The Body of the People

People’s History and the American Revolution

Who’s In and Who’s Out

The Human Face of Freedom

Notes

Index

FOREWORD

The libraries are bursting with books on the American Revolution, but not one like this. The publishers and the public never seem to tire of the same old story—the great battles, the military heroes, the wisdom of the Founding Fathers. Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, as I write this, are subjects of bestselling biographies. Multivolume sets of their papers, and those of the other leaders, are being published.

It is an approach to history which, in every society, serves the interests of the privileged and powerful, because, by ignoring ordinary people, it reinforces their feelings of powerlessness. We are not surprised when the narratives given to the public in totalitarian states deify the leaders and reduce the citizenry to ciphers. But we are startled when it is suggested to us that in liberal democratic states such as ours, boasting freedom of expression and a pluralism of ideas, there is a similar exaltation of leaders, with everyone else barely visible.

Surely, it is time to break with that habit in the interests of democracy. And Ray Raphael gives us a good start.

Howard Zinn

SERIES PREFACE

Turning history on its head opens up whole new worlds of possibility. Once, historians looked only at society’s upper crust: the leaders and others who made the headlines and whose words and deeds survived as historical truth. In our lifetimes, this has begun to change. Shifting history’s lens from the upper rungs to the lower, we are learning more than ever about the masses of people who did the work that made society tick.

Not surprisingly, as the lens shifts the basic narratives change as well. The history of men and women of all classes, colors, and cultures reveals an astonishing degree of struggle and independent political action. Everyday people played complicated historical roles, and they developed highly sophisticated and often very different political ideas from the people who ruled them. Sometimes their accomplishments left tangible traces; other times, the traces are invisible but no less real. They left their mark on our institutions, our folkways and language, on our political habits and vocabulary. We are only now beginning to excavate this multifaceted history.

The New Press People’s History Series will roam far and wide through human history, revisiting old stories in new ways, and introducing altogether new accounts of the struggles of common people to make their own history. Taking the lives and viewpoints of common people as its point of departure, the series will reexamine subjects as different as the Renaissance, the Industrial Revolution, the Cold War, the settlement of the New World, World War II, and the American Civil War.

A people’s history does more than add to the catalog of what we already know. These books will shake up readers’ understanding of the past—just as common people throughout history have shaken up their always changeable worlds.

Howard Zinn

Boston, 2000

INTRODUCTION

Real people, not paper heroes, made and endured the American Revolution. Witness:

•In September of 1776, when the Reverend Ammi R. Robbins was making his rounds among patients of the Continental Army, he came upon one very sick youth from Massachusetts who asked the reverend to save him because he felt he was not fit to die. Do, sir, pray for me, pleaded the youth, whose name and age were not reported. Will you not send for my mother? If she were here to nurse me I could get well. O my mother, how I wish I could see her; she was opposed to my enlisting: I am now very sorry. Do let her know I am sorry! Robbins did not send for the boy’s mother; instead, he endeavored to point him to the only source of peace, prayed and left him; he cannot live long.¹

•In 1773, as white patriots complained they were being reduced to a state of slavery, four African Americans from Massachusetts petitioned a member of the assembly:

Sir, The efforts made by the legislative of this province in their last sessions to free themselves from slavery, gave us, who are in that deplorable state, a high degree of satisfaction. We expect great things from men who have made such a noble stand against the designs of their fellow-men to enslave them.²

The slaves were only requesting one day a week to labor for themselves, but the assembly took no action.

•Lydia Mintern Post, a Long Island housewife with strong patriotic feelings, was forced to quarter some Hessian troops during the British occupation. When the Hessians received their monthly ration of rum, the hostess wrote, we have trying and grievous scenes to go through; fighting, brawls, drumming and fifing, and dancing the night long; card and dice playing, and every abomination going on under our very roofs. Whether drunk or not, the soldiers would take the fence rails to burn, so that the fields are left open, and the cattle stray away and are often lost; burn fires all night on the ground, and to replenish them, go into the woods and cut down all the young saplings, thereby destroying the growth of ages. What bothered Lydia the most, however, was that the Hessians made baskets for her daughters and taught German to her son. The children are fond of them, she conceded. I fear lest they should contract evil.³

•In June of 1776, fifteen-year-old Joseph Plumb Martin threatened to run off and board a privateer if his grandparents did not allow him to enlist in the army. Despite some misgivings, he wanted someday to come swaggering back to tell tales of his hair-breadth ’scapes. All his older friends were signing up, and Joseph did not wish to be left behind:

I one evening went off with a full determination to enlist at all hazards. When I arrived at the place of rendezvous I found a number of young men of my acquaintance there. The old bantering began. Come, if you will enlist, I will, says one. You have long been talking about it, says another. Come, now is the time. Thinks I to myself, I will not be laughed into it or out of it. I will act my own pleasure after all. But what did I come here for tonight? Why, to enlist. Then enlist I will. So seating myself at the table, enlisting orders were immediately presented to me. I took up the pen, loaded it with the fatal charge, made several mimic imitations of writing my name, but took especial care not to touch the paper with the pen until an unlucky wight who was leaning over my shoulder gave my hand a stroke, which caused the pen to make a woeful scratch on the paper. O, he has enlisted, said he. He has made his mark; he is fast enough now. Well, thought I, I may as well go through with this business now as not. So I wrote my name fairly upon the indentures. And now I was a soldier, in name at least, if not in practice.⁴

•Dr. Abner Beebe of East Haddam, Connecticut, was known to speak very freely in favor of the Crown. Although he had committed no other crime,

he was assaulted by a Mob, stripped naked, & hot Pitch was poured upon him, which blistered his Skin. He was then carried to a Hog Sty & rubbed over with Hogs Dung. They threw the Hog’s Dung in his Face, & rammed some of it down his Throat; & in that condition exposed to a Company of Women. His House was attacked, his Windows broke, when one of his Children was sick, & a Child of his went in Distraction upon this Treatment. His Gristmill was broke, & Persons prevented from grinding at it, & from having any Connections with him.⁵

•Two months before the battles of Lexington and Concord, the British sent Colonel Leslie with 240 men to seize arms and ammunition which the rebels had stored in Salem. As the troops approached town, residents halted their progress by lifting the Northfield drawbridge. Several inhabitants climbed onto the raised leaf of the bridge and engaged in a shouting match with Colonel Leslie on the other side. William Gavett, an eyewitness, reported the incident:

In the course of the debate between Colonel Leslie and the inhabitants, the colonel remarked that he was upon the King’s Highway and would not be prevented passing over the bridge.

Old Mr. James Barr, an Englishman and a man of much nerve, then replied to him: "It is not the King’s Highway; it is a road built by the owners of the lots on the other side, and no king, country or town has anything to do with it."⁶

Colonel Leslie was taken aback, but he pressed the issue; James Barr held firm, knowing he was in the right. In the end, Leslie promised to march only fifty rods without troubling or disturbing anything if the residents of Salem would lower the bridge. The bridge came down, Leslie kept his word, and the opening battle of the American Revolution was postponed. Old James Barr had taken on the British empire with a few simple words.

•Phebe Ward, of East Chester, New York, wrote a letter to her husband Edmund on June 6, 1783:

Kind Husband

I am sorry to aquant you that our farme is sold. . . . thay said if I did not quitt posesion that thay had aright to take any thing on the farme or in the house to pay the Cost of a law sute and imprisen me I have sufered most Every thing but death it self in your long absens pray Grant me spedy Releaf or God only knows what will be com of me and my frendsles Children

thay say my posesion was nothing youre husband has firfeted his estate by Joining the British Enemy with a free and vollentary will and thereby was forfeted to the Stat and sold

All at present from your cind and Loveing Wife

phebe Ward

pray send me spedeay anser⁷

•In 1780 the British General Henry Clinton, not wanting to offend the civilian population, urged his subordinates: For God’s sake no irregularities. But animosities ran strong in South Carolina, and the soldiers couldn’t resist; Major James Wemyss, for instance, burned fifty houses as he marched through the northeastern part of the state. In 1781 the American governor, John Rutledge, issued a proclamation against plundering, while General Nathanael Greene threatened to impose the death penalty on any of his soldiers who were caught marauding. But the American calls for restraint were likewise unheeded, and the state legislature, unable to provide support for the troops, soon gave legal sanction to acts of plunder. Each side took its turn running over the terrain, destroying or consuming everything in sight. After the fighting subsided, General William Moultrie reported the net effect: a countryside that had once been filled with

live-stock and wild fowl of every kind, was now destitute of all. It had been so completely checquered by the different parties, that not one part of it had been left unexplored; consequently, not the vestiges of horses, cattle, hogs, or deer, &c. was to be found. The squirrels and birds of every kind were totally destroyed. . . . [N]o living creature was to be seen, except now and then a few camp scavengers, picking the bones of some unfortunate fellows, who had been shot or cut down, and left in the woods above ground.⁸

This was the Revolutionary War: soldiers who were not yet men; women who lost their homes; liberty achieved and liberty denied; a devastated landscape in the South, much like in the Civil War: the American Revolution was our first civil war, pitting neighbors against neighbors and splitting families apart. Much of the violence, unsanctioned by any formal military organization, took place in houses and barns and public streets; even in some of the major battles, British troops were conspicuously absent. After the royal army surrendered at Yorktown in 1781, fighting continued to rage across the South as warring factions refused to lay down their arms and settle up.

Once the war was over, most survivors did not wish to dwell on the myriad human tragedies which clouded the sense of victory. In the words of John Shy, Much about the event called the Revolutionary War had been very painful and was unpleasant to remember; only the outcome was unqualifiedly pleasant; so memory, as ever, began to play tricks with the event.⁹ Almost before the blood had cooled, surviving patriots turned the victims into heroes and created a whitewashed mythology eulogizing the so-called founding fathers. The majestic ideals of Thomas Jefferson, the persuasive words of Samuel Adams and Thomas Paine, the seasoned wisdom of Benjamin Franklin, the inspirational leadership of George Washington—great men with great ideas were the midwives to American liberty. The rebels had dumped tea, issued declarations, and killed a few redcoats who deserved their fates—but they had inflicted no mass carnage. Americans preferred to believe that their nation was conceived in an epiphany of republican glory.

The leaders of the new nation had a particular interest in selective memory as they utilized patriotic fervor to forge a viable union. According to historian Charles Royster,

Charles Thomson, the longtime secretary of Congress, probably knew more about the administration and politics of the Revolutionary War than any other American, but he refused to publish a history of the Revolution: I could not tell the truth without giving great offense. Let the world admire our patriots and heroes. Their supposed talents and virtues (where they were so) by commanding imitation will serve the cause of patriotism and our country. According to another version of his refusal, he concluded by saying, I shall not undeceive future generations. Before he died, Thomson burned his papers.¹⁰

Americans of later generations have commandeered the Revolution. When workers tried to form a labor party in 1829, they pleaded: Awake, then from your slumbers; and insult not the memories of the heroes of ’76, by exhibiting to the world, that what they risked their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor to obtain, you do not think worth preserving.¹¹ When Philadelphia laborers went on strike in 1835 for the ten-hour day, they distributed a circular: We claim BY THE BLOOD OF OUR FATHERS, shed on our battlefields in the war of the Revolution, the rights of American citizens.¹² In a very different cause, William L. Yancey of Alabama called for the white people of the South in 1860 to fight once again for their independence, to produce spirit enough . . . to call forth a Lexington, to fight a Bunker’s hill.¹³ After Lincoln was elected president that same year, confederates in South Carolina tried to form a group of Minute Men to go to Washington and prevent the inauguration.¹⁴ A century later, right-wing anticommunists once again invoked memories of the Revolution as they organized their own groups of Minutemen.

In the American mind, the outcome of the Revolution has always overshadowed the event itself. In 1958 Henry Steele Commager and Richard B. Morris concluded their monumental compilation of primary sources with telling remarks:

The American Revolution was costly in lives and in property, and more costly in the terror and the fear and the violence that, as in all wars, fell so disproportionately on the innocent and the weak. Yet by comparison with other wars of comparable magnitude, before and since, the cost was not high. Notwithstanding the ruthlessness and even the ferocity with which it was waged, it did little lasting damage, and left few lasting scars. Population increased all through the war; the movement into the West was scarcely interrupted; and within a few years of peace, the new nation was bursting with prosperity and buoyant with hope. Independence stimulated both material and intellectual enterprise. . . . Of few other wars can it be said that so much was gained at so little lasting cost, either in lives snuffed out, or in a heritage of hatred.¹⁵

In fact, a greater percentage of the American population perished in the Revolutionary War than in World War I, World War II, or the Vietnam War; only the Civil War was more deadly.

Even now, popular images of the Revolution continue to focus on its legacy rather than on the war itself. The past serves as a mirror to reflect present agendas: conservatives see the Revolution as a noble struggle against an intrusive government, a precedent (and implicitly a justification) for their own antigovernment leanings; liberals view the Revolution as a critical step towards political democracy and social equality; radicals tend to focus on the failure of the Revolution to achieve those same objectives, particularly with respect to women, African Americans, and Native Americans. Hardcore realists, meanwhile, treat our so-called war of independence as one more chapter in mankind’s struggle for dominance and power, same as it ever was. For each and every political orientation, the American Revolution, always flexible, is there to offer support. Rhetoric and ideology were paramount in our nation’s founding; they remain so today as we try to discover who we are by examining our roots.¹⁶

But what about the people themselves? Behind the myths, concealed by all the political agendas and self-serving talk, lie flesh-and-blood human beings, our real-life founding fathers—and founding mothers, too. Who were these people? That is what I wish to explore in this book.

That very term—the people—is suspect; more often than not, it serves as an invitation to yet more rhetoric. Then, as now, the people were many and varied:

•They were citizens-turned-soldiers, both men and boys, some who fought eagerly in the name of liberty, others who joined the army for lack of better alternatives.

•They were women—some widowed, some who cooked and washed for the troops, many who stayed at home to tend to business while the men went to war.

•They were African Americans who sought their freedom in any way they could—by writing petitions, serving in the army as substitutes for whites who had been drafted, or escaping to fight with the British—but who for the most part remained slaves at war’s end, subjected to treatment at least as harsh as before.

•They were Native Americans—a few siding with the patriots, more siding with the British—who either joined or resisted alliances in search of their own sovereignty, much like the rebellious colonists.

•They were loyalists who endured a merciless persecution—citizens from all locations and classes, their loyalty based sometimes on a pure sense of allegiance, often on selfinterest or prior antagonisms with the local patriot leadership.

•They were neutrals—Quakers and Moravians opposed to all wars, people from various walks of life who saw no particular advantage in joining either side, and countless, nameless individuals from that great mass of humanity which, throughout history, has tried to overlook public affairs in favor of private pursuits.

•They were city dwellers—bakers, cobblers, joiners, laborers, seamen—who took active roles in meetings and demonstrations and who filled the musters (either willingly or not) of local militias.

•They were farmers, mostly small, who left their animals and crops to fight in the militias for short periods of time, or who managed to stay at home, leaving the fighting to others.

•They were lawyers and merchants, local elites who tried to call the shots—some serving as political representatives or military officers, some profiteering from wartime shortages and inflation.

•They were slaveholding planters who held their world together with violence disguised as gentility, and who struggled—some consciously, others not—with the basic contradiction of waging a war in the name of freedom while denying freedom to others.

•They were victimizers and victims—men who started the war, other men who fought the war, men and women alike who died or suffered.

•They were true believers and nonbelievers—and many who had to compromise their patriotic ideals in the struggle for material survival as the war wreaked havoc on the domestic economy.

These and more were the faces of the American Revolution.

In particular, I wish to explore what the Revolution meant for the common people of the times, the men and women who did not enjoy the special privileges afforded by wealth, prestige, or political authority.¹⁷ The surfeit of attention given to famous personalities has eclipsed the stories of lesser known folk and falsely skewed the telling of the Revolutionary War.

A simple shift of the lens—from George Washington to his slaves, to the soldiers he commanded, to the Indians he displaced—reveals incidents and events, facts and figures, portraits and personalities of great historical significance. It is time to replace, or at least supplement, the traditional picture of the Revolution with an elaborate mosaic of new scenes and different characters. This is beginning to happen. Historians today are breaking down the amorphous mass of Revolutionary America into more discrete groups as they try to understand how the idiosyncrasies of location, class, race, relationship, and gender colored the revolutionary experience. Farm wives and shoemakers and slaves and tenant farmers are finally being given their due.

When we look into forgotten corners, we find evidence that helps us deconstruct and reconstruct the American Revolution. There was more to it than Bunker Hill, George Washington crossing the Delaware, and Benedict Arnold’s betrayal. Once we make the simple decision to include common people, we are forced to rewrite the story:

Late in the summer of 1774, more than half a year before the shot heard round the world, tens of thousands of plain farmers seized political authority from Crown-appointed officials in all of Massachusetts outside Boston. Hats in hand, judges and members of the governor’s council resigned their posts; muskets in tow, the farmers took over. This was the true beginning of the American Revolution; the later battles at Lexington and Concord constituted a counterrevolution as the British tried to regain control of a countryside they had previously lost.

Few of the patriots who cried so loudly about taxation without representation bore arms for more than brief periods of time. Buying their way out and hiring substitutes, those with property to protect left the fighting to poor men and boys with no farms or businesses of their own. Militiamen deserted by the droves; Continental soldiers mutinied for lack of food and pay.

While some women spun for the cause of liberty or gave up their tea, others devoted their lives to service in the Continental Army. Although most camp followers, as they were called, joined the Revolution for lack of other alternatives, these poor women contributed more than their share as they starved and froze and fell ill along with the soldiers.

In Maryland, Delaware, New York, and the southern backcountry, many struggling farmers fought their own Revolution—against the patriot elite. It was a time to rise up and rebel, but not all the rebelling was directed against the British. Sometimes, when the rich called themselves patriots, the poor became loyalists in response.

Some 80,000 people—one in every thirty free Americans—belonged to pacifistic communities (Quakers, Shakers, Moravians, Mennonites, Amish, Dunkers, Schwenkfelders) that opposed the Revolutionary War on religious grounds.

The Revolution constituted the most sweeping and devastating Indian war in American history. All Native Americans east of the Mississippi were affected, and many lost their lands. The war accentuated divisions among and within the tribes as the majority sided with the Crown, the minority with the rebels. After the war, when American settlers no longer had to compete with the British, encroachment on native lands proceeded with unprecedented speed.

In the South, thousands upon thousands of enslaved men and women sought freedom by fleeing to the British, while others established their own maroon communities in woods and swamps. In the North, some slaves were freed after serving in the military in place of their masters. Freedom was the name of the game—and the stakes were much higher for African Americans than for patriots who complained they were slaves to Parliament.

These happenings, crucial to a comprehensive understanding of the Revolution, have been ignored in the mythic tale of our nation’s founding. It is time to break from the mold. By uncovering the stories of farmers, artisans, and laborers, we discern how plain folk helped create a revolution strong enough to evict the British Empire from the thirteen colonies. And by digging deeper still, we learn how people with no political standing—women, Native Americans, African Americans—altered the shape of a war conceived by others.

1

RANK-AND-FILE REBELS

Street Action . . . A Shoemaker’s Tale . . . Country Rebellions . . . Frontier Swagger . . . Politics Out-of-Doors . . . Yankees with Staves and Musick

Street Action

In November of 1747 the people of Boston rose up with great anger. The problem started when some fifty British sailors, seeking a better life in the New World, deserted from HMS Lark. Commodore Charles Knowles responded by ordering a predawn sweep of the waterfront to find the deserters and, failing that, to impress other warm bodies into service on the Lark. Later that morning, according to an eyewitness, a body of men arose I believe with no other motive than to rescue if possible the captivated . . . and to protest this form of like barberous abusage.

This was not the first time impressment gangs swept through the wharves and taverns of Boston, and every time they did, they met resistance. In 1741 a crowd beat up the sheriff and stoned a justice of the peace who supported impressment. In 1742 a crowd attacked the commanding officer of the Astrea and destroyed a barge belonging to the Royal Navy. In 1745 protestors beat up the commander of HMS Shirley and battered a deputy sheriff unconscious; later that year they rioted again when a press gang killed two seamen.

Already versed in the art of protesting, several thousand rioters against the Knowles impressment once again challenged authority. They placed a deputy sheriff in the stocks, seized officers of the Lark as hostages, broke the windows of the Council chamber, and confronted the royal governor with very indecent, rude expressions. Governor Shirley, understandably frightened, abandoned his mansion and retreated to an island in the harbor.

On the mainland, the people reigned supreme. They literally shored the British Navy (or so they thought). Seizing a barge which they mistakenly thought belonged to the Crown, scores of burly laborers, brash apprentices, and hardened seamen dragged it, with as much seeming ease through the streets as if it had been in the water, first to the governor’s mansion and then to the Commons, where they set it ablaze.

Governor Shirley called out the militia, but only the officers showed up—the rest of the militiamen, it seems, were part of the crowd. Commodore Knowles then announced he would bombard Boston from his warships, but his threat was empty: the greatest damage would no doubt accrue to the property of the rich, not the rioters. The laboring classes of Boston remained firmly in control of their city for three days until Governor Shirley negotiated the release of most of the impressed seamen.¹

Throughout the eighteenth century, common people who could not even vote engaged in collective public actions concerning issues that directly affected their lives. In the absence of a civil police force, people came together to enforce community norms. They tore down bawdy houses. They kept people with smallpox from entering their towns. Women demonstrated against unfaithful husbands.

Rioters acted in various relationships with the law. Sometimes they became the law, organized into the posse comitatus, the power of the county, which enjoyed the official sanction of the state. At other times they were only the mob, short for mobile vulgus, the rootless lower class of English society. The rich and powerful often tried to discredit crowd action by calling attention to the lowerclass status of rioters, but they could not always suppress the will of the people so forcefully expressed. Riots, with their direct objectives and moral urgency, effectively offset the arbitrary power or inattention of harsh rulers. Common people felt well within their rights to liberate impressed seamen or commandeer a few loaves of overpriced bread.²

Following in this tradition, American colonists took to the streets to demonstrate their opposition to the British taxation which followed the French and Indian War. On August 14, 1765, in response to the imposition of a stamp tax on all legal documents, a Boston crowd numbering in the thousands beheaded an effigy of Andrew Oliver, the Massachusetts stamp distributor. After witnessing the destruction of his personal property, Oliver announced he would resign. Heartened by such quick and clear results, crowds in other cities and towns followed suit. In Charleston, South Carolina, angry protestors hung an effigy of the stamp collector along with a figure of the devil. Whoever shall dare attempt to pull down these effigies, they announced, had better been born with a stone about his neck, and cast into the sea. That evening, two thousand people carted the effigies around town, burned them, staged a mock funeral, and mourned the loss of American Liberty.³ Similar demonstrations were held up and down the continent; in Connecticut, for example, crowds in New London, Norwich, Lebanon, Windham, West Haven, Fairfield, and Milford dramatized their discontent with the Stamp Act. By the end of 1765 the stamp distributors in all colonies except Georgia had resigned their posts.

Some of these Stamp Act rioters displayed feelings having little or nothing to do with the British Parliament. For many poor laborers and seamen, the riots afforded opportunities to demonstrate pent-up antagonisms toward rich merchants and officials who flaunted their wealth or abused their power. In Charleston, eighty sailors armed with Cutlasses and Clubs visited the home of Henry Laurens, a wealthy merchant, who claimed they not only menaced very loudly but now & then handled me pretty uncouthly. In the words of historian Marcus Rediker, the sailors were warm with drink and rage.⁴ Rioters in Newport moved from the usual hanging of effigies to the destruction of homes. In New York, hit hard by the postwar depression in the shipbuilding trade, hundreds of unemployed mariners raised the stakes of the protests. On the night the Stamp Act was to take effect they rampaged the city, breaking windows of British sympathizers and announcing to Governor Coldon that you’ll die a Martyr to your own Villainy . . . and that every Man, that assists you, Shall be, surely, put to Death. After hanging Coldon’s effigy, the crowd carted it around in the governor’s own prize chariot, which they later burned. The rioters focused upon images of wealth and pretention. Breaking into the house of Major Thomas James, they chopped up furniture, threw china to the ground, ripped open featherbeds, vandalized the garden. In the end, they forced Colden to hand over all the stamps.⁵

In Boston laborers and seamen leveled their sights on prominent royalists such as Thomas Hutchinson, the lieutenant governor and chief justice of Massachusetts, who justified poverty because it produced industry and frugality.⁶ Twelve days after forcing Andrew Oliver’s resignation, the crowd attacked three luxurious mansions, including Hutchinson’s. Historian Gary Nash reconstructs that second wave of rioting in vivid detail:

Catching the chief justice and his family at the dinner table, the crowd smashed in the doors with axes, sent the family packing, and then systematically reduced the furniture to splinters, stripped the walls bare, chopped through inner partitions until the house was a hollow shell, destroyed the formal gardens in the rear of the mansion, drank the wine cellar dry, stole £900 sterling in coin, and carried off every movable object of value except some of Hutchinson’s books and papers, which were left to scatter in the wind.⁷

According to William Gordon, a contemporary of the rioters, Gentlemen of the army, who have seen towns sacked by the enemy, declare they never before saw an instance of such fury.⁸

Was Boston in the midst of class warfare? Not exactly, but the poor had definitely been getting poorer as the rich got richer. Since the late 1600s, the richest 5 percent of the population had increased their share of the taxable assets from 30 percent to 49 percent, while the wealth owned by the poorest half of the population had decreased from 9 percent to a mere 5 percent.⁹ Throughout New England, increasing numbers of people tried to scratch out a living from depleted farmland, leading to a rise in the number of strolling poor who wandered the countryside in search of work. Each village in turn warned out these migrants to keep them from the local relief rolls; seaport towns also warned them out, but to little avail. Faced with no other opportunities, the poor congregated in the larger ports such as Boston, Newport, and New York where they could work odd jobs or ship out to sea.

The mob was thereby on the increase, getting angrier as well as larger. From your Labour and Industry, wrote a radical from Boston, arises all that can be called Riches, and by your Hands it must be defended: Gentry, Clergy, Lawyers, and military Officers, do all support their Grandeur by your Sweat, and at your Hazard. A New Yorker wrote:

Some individuals . . . by the Smiles of Providence, or some other means, are enabled to roll in their four whell’d Carriages, and can support the expense of good Houses, rich Furniture, and Luxurious Living. But is it equitable that 99, rather 999, should suffer for the Extravagance or Grandeur of one? Especially when it is considered that Men frequently owe their Wealth to the impoverishment of their Neighbors?¹⁰

Not all Stamp Act protesters felt class antagonisms. Many merchants, lawyers, and other colonists of comfortable means objected only to the abuse of power by the British Parliament. These Whigs, as they called themselves, talked about the rights of Englishmen, not violent social upheaval. (The Whigs, who took their name from the liberal political party in Great Britain, labeled their opponents Tories, after the conservative party that was pushing for stern measures in the colonies.) The issue, the Whigs believed, was simple and straightforward—no taxation without representation—and the wanton destruction of property only served to discredit their cause. Historians William Pencak and Pauline Maier have shown that the Sons of Liberty from Boston were at least as wealthy as Boston loyalists, while the Sons of Liberty from Newport, Charleston, and other areas came from the respectable Populace as well.¹¹

These prosperous patriots had more of an interest in protecting property than destroying it. In New York, leading Whigs such as Robert Livingston and several ship captains tried to tame the throngs. In Newport, patriot leaders supposedly tried to quell the riots by offering money, clothes and everything he would have to John Webber, a young transient who appeared to have influence with the mob.¹² Whigs and lower-class rioters vied for control: Who would define the issues? Whose revolt was this, anyway?

In Boston, the leader of the Boston Stamp Act rioting was Ebenezer MacIntosh, a debt-ridden shoemaker from the South End whose father, one of the strolling poor, had been warned out of Boston when Ebenezer was in his teens. Appointed a fireman for Engine Company No. 9 in 1760, MacIntosh rose to prominence in the annual Pope’s Day riots. Every year on November 5, to mark the anniversary of an aborted Catholic conspiracy to blow up Parliament in 1605, Boston’s artisans and laborers staged dramatizations depicting the pope beside a giant effigy of the devil, suitably coated with tar and feathers. Early in the day, working-class youths solicited money for feasting and drinking from more prosperous inhabitants throughout Boston, who dared not refuse. As the day and the drinking progressed, competition between the North Enders and the South Enders turned violent, with paramilitary street gangs fighting for the honor of torching the stage sets in giant bonfires. On the surface, this fighting served no greater purpose—and yet, every November 5, lower-class Bostonians owned the town while genteel society huddled indoors.

Seventeen sixty-five was different. During the Stamp Act riots in August, North Enders and South Enders had worked side by side, destroying mansions in their wrath. Upper-class citizens nervously awaited the approach of November 1, the day the Stamp Act was supposed to take effect, with its close conjunction to November 5. What might happen if the mob ceased to expend its destructive energy upon itself? Boston’s selectmen called out a military watch.

On November 5, 1765, Boston’s working class marched en masse past the statehouse to display its power, with Ebenezer MacIntosh firmly in command.¹³ Refraining from the usual street brawls, the combined North Enders and South Enders, two thousand strong, appeared as a formidable political force. While royal authority quivered, however, affluent Whigs relaxed: MacIntosh and other leaders had been bought. With the avowed intention of uniting the North and South Ends, the Whigs had provided a feast for the street leaders at a popular tavern, carefully dividing the guests into five different classes according to rank. For the Pope’s Day parade they furnished pompous military regalia and bestowed official-sounding titles on key men. When MacIntosh marched at the head, he wore a blue and gold uniform, gilded armor, and a hat laced with gold. There were no riots on Pope’s Day in 1765.

Although the Whigs prevailed in this instance, their relationship with street leaders remained ambivalent. On the one hand, they issued official disclaimers to the destruction of property, and they even went so far as to forbid Negroes, supposedly more prone to destructive acts, from marching in the Pope’s Day parade.¹⁴ But they also needed to continue some sort of alliance with lower-class elements, and they did make it clear that British officials would receive no help whatsoever in identifying or punishing any of the August rioters. Street fighters needed this kind of protection; legally powerless and vulnerable, they could have suffered severely from sanctions for their actions. Prosperous leaders and lower-class activists each filled their roles, even if they evidenced different types of behavior and expressed different goals. They formed an alliance for their mutual benefit, although the alliance was not permanent, and it did not extend to personal loyalty: when Ebenezer MacIntosh was thrown into debtors’ prison in 1770, not a single rich rebel offered to bail him out.¹⁵ And when Whig leaders celebrated the anniversary of the Stamp Act protests in subsequent years, they did so with expensive feasts to which the actual rioters were not invited.¹⁶

Any effective challenge to British authority required a broad base of support, and class antagonisms helped motivate many who might not have responded to abstract legal issues. Taxation without representation was real for those who voted and paid taxes; for those who did neither, other symbols loomed larger. In Virginia the lower classes resented horse racing and gambling, customs of the plantation gentry. In New York theatrical productions were disrupted by disorderly persons (in a Riotous Manner).¹⁷ A play in the Chapel Street theater, according to newspaper accounts, was interrupted by the multitude who broke open the doors and entered with noise and tumult, shouting Liberty, Liberty. Patrons were driven into the street, their Caps, Hats, Wigs, Cardinals, and Cloaks . . . torn off (thro’ Mistake) in the Hurray. The rioters immediately demolished the House, and carried the pieces to the Common, where they consumed them in a Bonfire.¹⁸ Why was the theater so hated? Theatergoers dressed in high fashion, arrived in carriages, and spent their money on frivolities. A New Yorker writing under the name of Philander complained that season tickets sold for as much as fifty pounds, while poor people starved. Another writer felt it highly improper that such Entertainments should be exhibited at this time of public distress, when great Numbers of poor people can scarcely find means of subsistence.¹⁹

The boycott of tea, the most enduring component of American resistance, was imbued with class connotations. Historian Barbara Clark Smith describes the specific cultural milieu of teatime:

Tea parties in genteel parlors required an elaborate material culture—some if not all of the following items: teapots and their rests, teacups and saucers, tea canisters, teakettles or urns, teaspoons and spoon dishes, sugar bowls, sugar tongs, cream jugs, slop bowls, strainers, tea trays, and tea tables—plus plates and utensils for any food consumed with the tea.²⁰

Although some common folk might enjoy a sip now and again, the major consumers of tea participated in a ritual activity which was prohibitively expensive for the vast majority of colonists.²¹

Abstinence from tea came easily to commoners, but those with a tea-drinking habit had a more difficult time. At issue was not merely the ritual but the tea itself—strong tea, invigorating tea, heavily caffeinated tea. For that morning or late afternoon rush, affluent colonists turned to Bohea and brewed it dark. (Lighter teas such as Souchong and Hyson accounted for only about 10 percent of American imports.) Patriot leaders and newspaper editors, hoping to convince confirmed tea drinkers to change their habits, circulated wild rumors: tea was bad for your health, tea bred fleas, tea was packed tightly into chests by the stomping of barefoot Chinese.²² They touted substitutes such as sassafras, sage, and Labrador, widely hailed as superior to all imported varieties. But real tea drinkers knew the truth: none of the local imitations gave that buzz. Labrador, according to a convention of ladies from Worcester, Massachusetts, had a debilitating quality which led to social frigidity.²³ The only viable substitute for tea was coffee, and it is no mere coincidence that between 1770 and the 1790s per capita coffee consumption in the United States increased more than sevenfold.²⁴ Although it too was imported, coffee did not carry the same social or political stigma as tea. Americans started brewing beans instead of leaves during the Revolution and never looked back.

The politics of tea contributed to a transformation of social relationships. When rumor spread that Isaac Jones of Weston, Massachusetts, had been selling tea at his tavern, thirty patriots disguised with war paint broke all his windows, smashed his bowls, mugs, and china, drank all his liquor, and then forced him to apologize for his crime.²⁵ The lower and middle classes confiscated tea whenever they could, intimidating and humiliating the offenders. Enforcement of the tea boycott turned class rank upside down: by insisting that those who could afford tea cease their indulgences, ordinary people exerted power over their betters.

Tea helped unite opposition to British policy, for the resistance to the tax on tea dovetailed nicely with lower-class resentments. Tea was an easy target, a symbol both of Parliament’s arrogance and a crumbling social hierarchy. By identifying the British and their loyalist allies as purveyors of a decadent European culture—tea drinking theatergoers who dressed in fancy clothes and enforced oppressive laws—Whig leaders and street fighters were able to unite around a common enemy. Some thought they were opposing taxation and protecting liberty and property; others (who paid no taxes and had little property to protect) flailed against symbols of wealth and the intrusive military presence which kept the rich in power. However they defined their issues, colonists of varying backgrounds joined in a crusade infused with a sense of righteousness.

At no time was this alliance of American interests more evident than during the Boston Tea Party. On November 28, 1773, the ship Dartmouth landed in Boston harbor filled with 114 chests of East India Company tea, subject to minimal import duties. If the tea were unloaded and sold, Parliament’s ability to tax the colonists would be reaffirmed and the boycott of tea would be seriously undermined by cheap prices. Legally, however, the tea could not be returned to England. What was to be done? During the three weeks that followed thousands of citizens from Boston and nearby towns met repeatedly to discuss possible strategies, while some maintained a continuous watch over the Dartmouth and two other ships which joined it at Griffin’s Wharf. The town meeting was extended to include the whole body of the people—women, apprentices, African Americans, and servants were allowed to participate. Thomas Hutchinson described one meeting as consisting principally of the Lower ranks of the People & even Journeymen Tradesmen were brought in to increase the number & the Rabble were not excluded yet there were divers Gentlemen of Good Fortunes among them.²⁶

On December 16, the day before customs officials were entitled to seize the cargo and land it themselves, an estimated 5,000 people traveled through a cold, steady rain to gather at the Old South Meeting House. (The entire population of Boston at the time was only about 16,000, children included.) The deadline for action had arrived. The meeting decided to send Francis Rotch, captain of the Dartmouth, to make one final appeal to the governor to allow his ship to return to England, its cargo intact. In Rotch’s absence, and even as the speeches continued, informal preparations for a dramatic response were in the making. By the time Rotch returned at 5:45 p.m., Old South was lit only by candles. He announced that the governor had refused to bend. Samuel Adams then rose to say that he saw nothing more that the people of Boston could do to save their country. Mid-nineteenth-century historians imagined that this remark was some sort of signal to dump shiploads of tea into Boston’s harbor, but firsthand witnesses told otherwise. According to one, About 10 or 15 minutes later, I heard a hideous yelling in the Street at the S. West Corner of the Meeting House and in the Porch, as of an Hundred People, some imitating the Powaws of Indians and others the Whistle of a Boatswain, which was answered by some few in the House; on which Numbers hastened out as fast as possible. Samuel Adams, John Hancock, and other leaders called out to the People to stay, for they said they had not quite done. Dr. Thomas Young, who had suggested destroying the tea at a mass meeting several days earlier, then delivered a speech of about 15 or 20 Minutes Length on the evils of tea drinking, after which the moderator dissolved the meeting.²⁷

Most likely, Adams, Hancock, Young, and other leaders were establishing a public presence so they could not be blamed for destroying the tea. According to Joshua Wyeth, a journeyman blacksmith, It was proposed that young men, not much known in town and not liable to be easily recognized should lead in the business . . . [M]ost of the persons selected for the occasion were apprentices and journeymen, as was the case with myself.²⁸ Unlike the mob of the Stamp Act riots, however, this was a contained and disciplined cadre. No extraneous looting or destruction of property was permitted. A padlock accidentally broken was supposedly replaced, while the few men who tried to grab some tea for themselves were severely reprimanded and ridiculed.

Indeed, Griffin’s Wharf was strangely quiet that night; according to John Adams, Boston was never more still and calm.²⁹ The rain had stopped, the moon was out. A large crowd gathered on shore, watching in silence as the chosen crews, numbering fewer than a hundred, chopped open 342 chests of tea and dumped them into the chilly water.³⁰ One witness claimed to hear the sounds of the hatchets from a considerable distance. By nine o’clock the mission had been accomplished and the crowd disbursed without any further disturbance. John Adams wrote in his diary: This is the most magnificent Movement of all. There is a Dignity, a Majesty, a Sublimity in this last Effort of the Patriots that I greatly admire.³¹ No small part of that sublimity was the manner in which rich rebels and rabble had joined in common cause. Some made speeches; others dumped tea; all were included in the process.

A Shoemaker’s Tale

Peter Oliver, the Crown-appointed chief justice of Massachusetts, had a simple explanation for the tumultuous events in Boston during the 1760s and 1770s: James Otis, Jr., had vowed that if his Father was not appointed a Justice of the superior Court, he would set the Province in a Flame. The riotous crowds, incapable of thinking or acting for themselves, were just following the commands of Otis and his friends:

They always had their Geniuses, who (by the Mob Whistle, as horrid as the Iroquois Yell . . .) could fabricate the Structure of Rebellion from a single Straw. . . . As for the People in general, they were like the Mobility of all Countries, perfect Machines, wound up by any Hand who might first take the Winch.³²

Anne Hulton, sister of the customs commissioner, also believed the rebellion was directed by the Leader, who Governs absolutely, the Minds & the Passions of the people, although unlike Oliver, she did not state who that Leader happened to be.³³

The notions of Oliver and Hulton seem patently absurd, but history texts for over two centuries have followed their lead every time they explain the actions of the Boston mob in terms of propagandists like Samuel Adams. The theory of diffusion—ideas spreading from top down, from the few to the many—still informs much of our telling of history.

But that’s not always the way history works. Except in totalitarian societies, people (even common people) tend to pursue, of their own volition, their personal interests and the interests of their communities. This was certainly true during the years leading up to the American Revolution. Witness the experiences of George Robert Twelves Hewes, a poor shoemaker who involved himself in the heart of the action.³⁴

As a youth, Hewes said in his memoirs, he was exposed of course to all the mischiefs to which children are liable in populous cities. At the age of six, while gathering wood chips at the waterfront, he jumped aboard some floating planks, fell in, and almost drowned. After nursing him back to health, his mother flogged him. A year later his father died, and young George was sent off to school. He ran away; the school mistress locked him in a dark closet; he dug his way out. Hewes recalled his education at the next school as little more than a series of escapes from being whipped. Unable to control her son, his mother Abigail sent him to live with an uncle in Wrentham, where George was made to endure the monotonous routine of farm life. Upon reaching the age of apprenticeship, he was placed under the care of a shoemaker named Downing who tried to keep him in line with a cowhide. Even so, Hewes recounted incidents of breaking curfew, fooling his master, and stealing food.

Again George tried to escape, this time by joining the military during the French and Indian War. The recruiters, however, were under orders to enlist no Roman-Catholic, nor any under five feet two inches high without their shoes. George, at five-one, was rejected. After heightening his heels and stuffing his stocking with paper and rags, he tried again, but the examining officer was not so easily fooled. He went to the waterfront to enlist on a British ship of war, but his older brothers interfered and sent him back to his master.

In 1763, upon reaching the age of twenty-one, Hewes set up shop as an independent shoemaker. He was never very successful. In 1768 George married the daughter of a washerwoman. During his courtship, he went into debt in order to obtain a sappled coat & breeches of fine cloth. Unable