In telling the story of the revolutionary war its self the author is fairly straight forward and accepts the common narrative of the war. In summary, this is a revisionist and probably much more realistic look the causes of the American Revolution and at the minds behind it and later the minds that created the American Constitution and form of government it created. View 1 comment. Feb 23, Jim rated it really liked it. Longer review coming.
If you have a "Johnny Tremain" view of the revolutionary era, prepare to have many of your illusions shattered.
Taylor does a bang up job looking at the era from all angles. The motivations, and contributions of every class of citizen is reviewed, and much of it is not admirable. Constitutional originalists really need to read this. Like Bible literalists who cherry pick what to ignore, many on the right today do the same relative to the founding and to the Constitution. The Longer review coming. There is no original intent ascribable to the "founders. We are still fighting those battles today.
Recognizing the founding for what it was, and what it wasn't, could go a long way to bringing us together. Unfortunately, adhering to the myth of the founding only drives us further apart. Mar 15, David Eppenstein rated it really liked it Shelves: history , american-history. This was a long book, pages of text, and to say that it gives the reader a lot to think about is an understatement.
First, let's say that this is probably not a book a casual reader of history will enjoy. I have to admit in several places it had me nodding off but it was still fascinating enough to keep me going forward. I have to say of all the books I have read about our revolution this one was unique. While it touches all the major events before, during, and after our revolution it doesn' This was a long book, pages of text, and to say that it gives the reader a lot to think about is an understatement.
While it touches all the major events before, during, and after our revolution it doesn't dwell on them as the focus of discussion. Instead these events are used, dare I say, as a platform for discussing what the author is really interested in and that is the revolutions. By revolutions I believe he means the conflicts that took place between and and indeed still exist today in many respects.
The conflicts he discusses are more than those of the battlefields of the military. The conflicts that he discusses that are the most illuminating are the conflicts of principles, ideas, economic theory, social order, race, gender, property, morality and so on. In treating these various areas and using the events to illustrate their affect on the attitudes and behavior of both the Patriots and the Loyalists as well as the Neutrals.
And in that area alone is this book a wonder to read since the author clearly identifies our revolution as something of a bully boy movement as concerns the civilian population of the time. Neither the Patriots nor the Loyalists ever had anything approaching a majority of the population supporting them. The result was that both sides were frequently disgusted by the ever changing loyalties of the population. And both sides showed their frustrations and rage in very violent and destructive ways.
I was surprised to learn just how brutal and violent our patriotic forebears were toward Loyalists and those suspected of being Tories. It is a mistake to think that our revolution was more civilized and less violent than that of the French which followed a few years later.
There were lynchings, house burnings, tar and feathering, and even the loss of heads. In fact what is especially fascinating about this book for me is that in discussing these conflicting issues the author gives the reader a real sense of what an average person endured living through these events.
This book is not about the great battles or great personages of nation's early years. The great events and people certainly figure prominently but this book is about the abstractions of that era and how these people dealt with those abstractions. A very interesting and thought provoking book especially now since current events seem to share more than an echo of these past events. Oct 08, Jill Cordry rated it it was amazing.
Then this new volume. Oct 08, Ted Hunt rated it really liked it. This is a very interesting and important book on the American Revolution. And to be honest, it moves beyond the Western Hemisphere, as it crosses the Atlantic Ocean to describe the birth of Sierra Leone. Because of the broader frame This is a very interesting and important book on the American Revolution. Because of the broader frame through which it views the Revolution and not simply the "war of the Revolution" , it does not go into as much detail about the military campaigns of the war.
But there are other books that do this extremely well, so the reader can take on this book as a complement to other histories of the Revolution rather than as an all-encompassing volume.
The book does an excellent job of analyzing the impact of the Revolution on groups like Loyalists and slaves, and it truly does show the broad range of impact of the struggle, most notably on the American Indians of the West today's Midwest. Perhaps the strongest part of the book was its final chapter, "Legacies," which describes the impact of the Revolution on American life in the immediate postwar era. It addresses very thoroughly the question of "how revolutionary was the American Revolution".
I only have two complaints about the book: 1. In my view, the book would have been just as valuable if it had ended its narrative in and then concluded with its "Legacies" chapter. In any event, "American Revolutions" is a welcome addition to my book shelf. Oct 27, Julian Douglass rated it it was amazing Shelves: history. A great history of not only the Revolution in terms of the 13 colonies, but the entire continent of America as well.
Really shines a light that the American Revolution was a world war in a sense, and that the fate of the North American continent is more intertwined than we were taught in School. The other thing about the bo A great history of not only the Revolution in terms of the 13 colonies, but the entire continent of America as well. The other thing about the book that I like is showing all the sides of the attitude during the Revolutionary Period. Taylor dispels a lot of myths that has been taught about time period in the schools and details a lot more about ordinary American life in the early part of the republic.
Fantastic history and great reading material. Nov 29, Stan Prager rated it it was amazing. Some fourteen years after the publication of American Colonies, Taylor — who has won two Pulitzer Prizes for other fine works of early American history — has written a sequel of sorts: American Revolutions: A Continental History, This too is a must-read for all students of American history.
The plural implication in the title, American Revolutions, is deliberate. We tend to think of the American Revolution as a singular event, but in fact what occurred here in the latter part of the eighteenth century was a series of social, economic and political revolutions, both among its English inhabitants as well as cross-culturally.
Especially unintended consequences. The British decision to permit a French and Roman Catholic element to persist and be tolerated in that portion of Canada that was her prize after the French and Indian War generated a frustrating barrier to conquest and annexation for the English colonials in America who had helped prosecute that war, something rarely noted by other historians.
Stymied in Quebec, their ambition for domination was far more cruelly successful elsewhere, and after Independence the British no longer served as a brake upon the territorial expansion of Americans hungry for new lands and utterly unsympathetic to its aboriginal inhabitants, whom they wantonly displaced and slaughtered with little reluctance.
The other great irony centered upon human chattel slavery, which the British retreated from and gradually abolished throughout the empire, yet which saw great expansion in a newly independent United States, especially in the southern states where it served as a critical component central to the economic model of plantation agriculture. Jefferson and Madison are often credited with the expansion of the rights of white planters and the increase in social and economic mobility that resulted in the abolition of primogeniture and entail that had formerly kept estates intact, but there was also the chilling consequence of suddenly facilitating the breakup of families as African-American human commodities could be sold to other geographies at premium prices.
That was one of those revolutions. But there were many more, especially in the after-shocks of this one that sent legions of despised loyalists to Canada, later followed by numbers of disenchanted rebels struggling in the economic morass that was the byproduct of revolution and separation from the empire; these were the building blocks of what came to be a nation north of the Great Lakes.
That initial financial disaster begat the revolution of Hamiltonian fiscal policies that forged a new economy. At the same time, hints of early instability and fears of mob rule spawned a new revolution against the original loose federation of states under the Articles of Confederation that saw the propertied elite of those states come together to seize the reins of government and force a more structured and perhaps more conservative Constitution upon the masses.
Still, the break with Britain irrevocably loosened social hierarchies and there was truly a revolution in this regard for citizens of the new United States — if they could count themselves as white males, but certainly not if they were women or blacks or Native Americans. There was indeed a great leveling in the game, if you were qualified by complexion and gender to play the game.
Taylor relates this saga in an extremely well-written and engaging narrative of complexity and nuance that never loses sight of all the action on the periphery, including the dramatic way the American Revolution resounded in monarchical France, upon slave insurrectionists in the West Indies, and even in the uprisings of Spanish Peru, as well as how these events sometimes echoed back on the new nation.
Most critically, he returns again and again to the horrific consequences that an independent United States had upon Native Americans and enslaved blacks. A tragic constant was the almost universal disregard for the welfare and very lives of the Amerindians who occupied lands coveted by expansionary white Americans.
Already decimated by Old World pathogens that devastated once thriving populations, their traditional lifestyles upended and reshaped by horses, guns and alcohol, and frequently used as proxy pawns by European powers struggling for control of North America, Native Americans found themselves ultimately powerless to avoid displacement and often extermination by shrewd and ruthless citizens of a new nation who justified brutal tactics on the grounds of race and religion and paternalism.
Back when philately was my hobby, I recall owning the commemorative stamp honoring George Rogers Clark, the courageous soldier and adventurer of the Northwest Territories. The natives died while singing Christian hymns. For African-Americans, the legacy was no less tragic. Despite the wishful thinking of some members of the revolutionary generation that human chattel slavery would wither over time, it instead gained new traction in an America unburdened by growing British guilt over what came to be called the peculiar institution, a sturdily intrinsic economic building block that was only finally dislodged by Civil War nearly a century hence.
Meanwhile, few — north or south, or across the Atlantic for that matter — could ignore the paradox of Americans crying out in ringing rhetoric for a universal right to a freedom from tyranny while at the same time reserving the contradictory right to enslave others because of the color of their skin.
Patriots toppled the great equestrian statue of George III and melted its lead to make 40, bullets to shoot at redcoats. In that blow for liberty, the Patriots employed slaves to tear down the statue. While sadly the United States in still contains apologists for slavery who sugar-coat its horrific brutality, their mythical revisionism does not bear historical scrutiny.
There is indeed much to champion in the creation of the American Republic, but sound historical scholarship must include more than self-congratulatory patriotism. The history that was foisted upon me in schoolrooms of the s contained precious little of that.
American Revolutions is an exceptional volume that I am proud to add to my collection of books on American history, and I highly recommend it to those who appreciate the complexity of historical studies as well as a truly fine analysis of the same by a gifted historian who never disappoints.
Feb 13, Kim rated it really liked it. Alan Taylor is a great writer and historian of colonial, revolutionary, and Early Republic America. This feels written more for an enthusiastic member of the public rather than an individual who has extensively studied the period. For Alan Taylor is a great writer and historian of colonial, revolutionary, and Early Republic America. But once I returned, I was all in. I read American Colonies for a class, so now I need to look into the rest of his work Dec 24, Susan Paxton rated it it was amazing Shelves: history.
A necessary corrective, and very timely. Oct 08, Steve Middendorf rated it it was amazing. With all the talk lately about defending the Constitution and particularly certain Amendments to it, I was motivated to buy a copy of The Federalist Papers, a series of 85 articles commissioned by Alexander Hamilton as to why the States should ratify this proposed system of government.
What can I say, I'm a middle child. The only date I With all the talk lately about defending the Constitution and particularly certain Amendments to it, I was motivated to buy a copy of The Federalist Papers, a series of 85 articles commissioned by Alexander Hamilton as to why the States should ratify this proposed system of government. The only date I remembered was and the signing of The Declaration of Independence.
What happened in the intervening 11 years? Back to the booksellers I went for a book on the American Revolution. Taylor specialises in the subject, has written 10 books on it and has won the Pulitzer Prize for his writing. I particularly liked this line from the book jacket. From my school boy days, I remembered the American Revolution as a heroic battle of good against evil in the name of freedom, justice and liberty for all.
It was not nearly that. One third of the colonists Loyalists received patronage and remained loyal to England throughout the war. In addition to owning plantations, this group became the first shoddy American Real Estate Developers.
They including Thomas Jefferson and Ben Franklin got million acre grants from the Crown and sold acre blocks to the last group on dodgy financing schemes. The remaining one third were historical Donald Trump supporters: they fought the wars; they paid the taxes; they couldn't get any respect. All the players in this except the slaves, women and the Indians shared the common characteristics of hypocrisy, greed, and the vicious control and betrayal of those with less power.
Now I am ready to read the Federalist Papers. But here are some quotes from the book which include reference to or quotes from all of our whitewashed heroes of the American Revolution. That later civil war erupted over western expansion: whether territorial growth would commit the nation to free labor or, instead, extend slave society and its political power. Per the law of coverture, a British colonial woman passed by marriage from legal dependence on her father to reliance on a husband, losing her last name and gaining no civil rights.
Colonial politics lacked formal parties, but there was an unstable polarity pitting a faction that supported the governor against his more numerous opponents, who resented exclusion from his patronage. We might have been a free and a great people together.
The colonial land system favored speculators and governors at the expense of Indians, who lost the land, and settlers, who had to rent or buy their new farms.
In the North Carolina back country, settlers faced similar demands for payments from speculators who claimed millions of acres. If settlers balked, they faced expensive lawsuits, which they almost always lost because the county sheriffs and justices were appointed by a royal governor in cahoots with the speculators. Imperial officers also could not control the speculators who defied the Proclamation Line to stake illicit claims to vast tracts. The speculators feared that common squatters were taking the best lands while the Proclamation deprived gentlemen of the legal standing to prosecute and evict intruders.
During the mids, competing elites divided Boston and other seaports. By winning royal favor, some prestigious families had secured the most lucrative and powerful offices. Gentlemen with less clout posed as Patriots to champion the rights of common people.
In Boston in October , a defiant conservative printer, John Mein, revealed that some Sons of Liberty, including John Hancock, covertly imported goods while exploiting the boycott to drive smaller competitors out of business. As poor men filled the ranks, politicians became more indifferent to supplying the army with pay, clothing, and food. Congress also mismanaged the commissary and quartermaster departments, which were supposed to supply the troops.
Confusion, corruption, and incompetence brought rancid meat, spoiled flour, or nothing at all to the encampments. For want of proper uniforms, soldiers often looked like ragged beggars. The post Continental Army belied the myth of heroic citizen-soldiers putting down the plow to pick up their muskets and win the war. In fact, a small regular army of poor men sustained the Patriot cause by enduring years of hard duty and public neglect.
Although often initially conscripted, soldiers developed a commitment to the cause greater than their more fortunate neighbors who stayed home A popular myth casts the revolution as waged by a united American people against British rule. That myth derives from Patriot claims to speak for all true Americans, dismissing Loyalists as a deluded few corrupted by the British. After the revolution triumphed, nationalist historians endorsed the Patriot view, marginalizing or ignoring Loyalists to concoct a unifying American identity.
In fact, the revolution divided families and neighborhoods. Benjamin Franklin hated his son William for clinging to loyalty. Political choices were often unstable and temporary. The ebb and flow of victory and defeat in a long war flipped many people from one side to another and sometimes back again with sojourns along the way in the broad ranks of the wavering. Many profited by selling their produce or services to the likely victors: a probability which changed as one force surged at the expense of the other.
More often, people acted defensively, switching sides to save farms and lives from the power of the ascendant party. He subscribed to the prevailing, although contradictory, conviction that black people were too cowardly to fight and, yet, that training them as soldiers menaced white domination. While waging war in the east against British rule, Patriots fought west of the Appalachians to suppress the independence of native peoples. A year later, much of the foreign debt owed to France and Dutch investors came due, but Congress had nothing to pay.
Austerity policies coupled with high taxes redistributed income from common people to pay wealthy public creditors. In Rhode Island, sixteen men owned half of the public debt. That debt became consolidated in fewer hands because common men rarely could afford to keep their paper certificates issued by government officials during the war. Under subsequent austerity policies, they needed specie to pay taxes and private creditors, so they sold certificates to speculators for hard pennies on the paper dollar.
Then the hard-pressed former holders of the debt had to pay higher taxes to fund the full face value of the certificates to the speculators. By ditching the weak Articles of Confederation and writing a new constitution, conservatives hoped to kill two political birds with one stone.
While rescuing the federal government from impotence and irrelevance, they would also subordinate the state governments. To achieve both goals, nationalists drew on the ideas of James Madison. From a close study of state politics, Madison concluded that a popular majority could act as tyrannically as any king. During the s, Patriots had sought to free the people from the tyranny of executive power. In August, another heated debate erupted over continuing the import slave trade.
On this issue, southern delegates divided. Seeking to expand their operations, planters in the Lower South demanded continued imports from Africa. Americans often romanticize the founders of the nation as united and resolute and then present them as a rebuke to our current political divisions.
Pundits insist that Americans should return to the ideal vision set by the founders. That begs the question, however, which founders and what vision? Far from being united, they fought over what the revolution meant. They like a Hamiltonian military but not Hamiltonian taxes to pay for it.
Instead of offering a single, cohesive, and enduring plan, the diverse founders generated contradictions that continue to divide Americans. Northern racism intensified as the free black population grew. In , New York State abolished the property requirement for white voters but kept it for African Americans, so that only sixteen qualified.
Denied access to education and better-paying jobs, most blacks had to labor as sailors, menial workers, domestic servants, and laundresses. Shall I be a merchant? Drudgery and servitude, then, are my prospective portion. Contrary to the wishful thinking of many Patriots, slavery did not wither away after the revolution. Instead, it became more powerfully entrenched in the southern states. From , in , the number of enslaved doubled to 1. As foreign imports faded after , natural increase accounted for most of the population growth.
Between and , slave traders and migrants herded over a million slaves south and west from the Chesapeake to expand southern society to the Mississippi and beyond. Highly profitable, plantation slavery helped drive the capitalist development of the nation. No aberration from the national norm of liberty, the South was an especially vibrant half of the nation, and, in politics, the more powerful half. Masters would never part with so much valuable human property without a fight.
In his celebrated Notes on the State of Virginia, Jefferson denounced slavery as brutalizing for both master and slave, but he also argued that blacks were innately inferior to whites in their bodies and minds. Opposed to retaining black people if freed in America, Jefferson urged their deportation back to Africa. The great Patriot champion of equality drew racial limits in the name of a supposed science that grew more popular in the nineteenth century.
Racism developed to protect inequality from the implications of revolution. But abolitionists and feminists persisted in seeking broader liberties as a better legacy for our ever-contested revolution. Later in the nineteenth century, Americans reworked the legacy of the revolution to seek different ends, including abolishing slavery and extending political rights to women and African Americans.
In a constant ebb and flow, we will debate and advance competing and partial versions of our contradictory revolutionary legacy The American founding happened within this space, but it was shaped by a much broader web of contingencies. There were not thirteen British colonies on mainland North America in ; there were twenty-three, plus several others in the West Indies.
The thirteen colonies now known to history were simply the ones who declared independence from the British Empire and sometimes sent delegations to the rather pretentiously-named Continental Congress. The Congress took its pretentions seriously, however, as leading Patriots had ambitious designs: not only on the vast interior territory stretching from the Great Lakes to present-day Mississippi—which Britain had acquired from France and Spain in and into which it had prohibited the encroachment of the seaboard colonies—but also on Canada, the Floridas, and the British Caribbean.
The outbreak of hostilities in saw an audacious Continental invasion of Quebec in an effort to detach the presumably-disaffected French population from the Empire and incorporate it into the Union, as well as a seaborne invasion of the Bahamas by the Continental Marines, who managed to briefly capture and occupy Nassau.
But as broad as their geographical claims were, the Patriots struggled to secure the depth of support needed to accomplish them. The Revolution was not only an inter-imperial war between the British Empire and the fledgling United States, but also a civil war between relatively small factions of Patriots and Loyalists who used violence and intimidation to corral a cautiously indifferent majority into their respective camps.
The Patriots prevailed in the struggle—at least in the present-day United States—largely because they were better organized, more ferocious and brutal in their hostility towards Britons and Indians, more capable and severe at punishing defectors, and because they enjoyed almost total control over the flow of information.
The regressive nature of the taxes—which applied to stamps, newspapers, almanacs, playing cards, glass, tea, paper, lead, and paint, among other things—bolstered the Patriot ranks with disaffected merchants and tradesmen all along the eastern seaboard, and especially in Massachusetts. In Boston and other port cities, Patriots led boycotts of British goods and delivered frightening punishments to both their colonial adversaries and the Loyalists who supported them.
Patriots seized and muzzled Loyalist printers and disseminated their own revolutionary polemics, assaulted and humiliated British customs officials, published the names of boycott-breakers who were then intimidated into recanting their Loyalism—or, failing that, were beaten by Patriot mobs or had their homes and businesses ransacked—and staged public spectacles in which hated officials were burned in effigy or tarred and feathered in the flesh.
In the west, Patriotic fervor was kindled by opposition to the Proclamation Line of , which angered land speculators and aspiring freeholders who sought to purchase or settle the newly-acquired territories and to displace the indigenous peoples who inhabited them.
Much of the land east of the Line had already been claimed by wealthy speculators, who then rented the land at a premium to tenant farmers. Resenting the emerging neo-feudalism of the east, colonists of more modest means hoped to stake their own claims on the expanding frontier. The vanguard classes of the American Revolution were not libertarians, but republican nationalists. Whereas Parliament claimed the right to tax the colonies without giving them political representation on the grounds that America was a collection of corporate or proprietary entities, Patriots claimed the right to self-determination on the grounds that America was a country.
The freedom they demanded was freedom for America; not necessarily for the civil liberties of all its people. The more genteel among them fashioned themselves after the heroes of the early Roman Republic and viewed individual licentiousness and libertinism as indicators of moral decay, especially when these threatened the liberty of the state. As the British aligned themselves with frontier natives and enticed slaves to defect from the cause of their masters with promises of emancipation, this budding American nationalism also took on a racialized element, with white Patriots banding together against nonwhite adversaries.
While the British offered emancipation to slaves, the southern states offered slaves and land to faithful Continental soldiers: major slaveowners feared the distribution of their slaves to other white masters far less than they feared emancipation.
Taylor also uses a wider lens when examining the military conduct of the war. Rather than retroactively focusing on Washington, he places the war in a broader continental and global context.
Washington was certainly important for keeping the tattered Continental Army together, singlehandedly reviving Patriot morale with successive victories at Trenton and Princeton, and dealing the final major blow to British efforts to recover their colonies with the Siege of Yorktown wherein half of the men under his command were French ; but the war would not likely have been won without French and Spanish assistance.
The French navy menaced the British in the West Indies, threatening their most valuable ports and forcing them to shift their military priorities from the mainland to the Caribbean. From onwards, the British sent more reinforcements to the West Indies than they did to the revolting colonies.
The Spanish smuggled military supplies to the Patriots from , extended private loans to the United States, and invaded West Florida, besieging Pensacola in In my estimation, this is the best general survey of the Revolutionary period out there. Nov 19, Hunter McCleary rated it liked it Shelves: genealogy.
Case made. Taylor reviews the run-up and post War years and, of course, the little appreciated internecine warfare that devastated the countryside and civilian populations during the war itself. The more I read about the founding of our country the more I am amazed we exist at all. The horrible things Loyalists and Patriots did to each other; the intolerance of opposing views. Sort of reminds me of what's going on today.
This book just rein Case made. This book just reinforces how little Americans know about their own history. Decisions are emotion not fact-driven. Notes 2 America's first civil war. Today's GOP cherry picked ideals of the founding fathers. May 17, Ross rated it really liked it. This is a very comprehensive and detailed book covering the American revolution in the U.
There was a good deal of information on how the slaves and the native Americans were treated which was very sad reading. Human beings really are overwhelmingly not decent and moral creatures. We are still tryin This is a very comprehensive and detailed book covering the American revolution in the U. We are still trying to make progress on this issue today around the world. Feb 11, Kantemir rated it it was amazing.
Thoroughly enjoyed this book. I find most books on history to be tough reads due to their characteristic 'density' but the way Taylor goes about presenting historic events and their context makes it much more interesting and manageable. May 18, Constantine rated it it was amazing. Totally changed what I thought I knew about how we got started. Cannot reccomend highly enough. Jan 20, Chris Jaffe rated it it was amazing Shelves: us-history , 18th-cen , history.
This was a really good book. Even though I already knew a lot about this period, and even though this book is just meant as a general overview for an average reader without too much assumed background knowledge, I still got a lot out of it. Taylor takes the broad view, looking at the Revolution, it's build-up, and after effects - from a national and international perspective.
I still don't quite know what was picke This was a really good book. I still don't quite know what was picked as an end date. Yes, it was brutal in the South - but it also was in the areas around NYC, Philadelphia, and the frontier. After , British America imported 1. Transatlantic shipping was up three-fold in the 18th century. People here weren't just yeomen farmers growing for themselves.
There was a consumer revolution going on. George Whitfield used advance men, handbills, and newspaper adverts to help promote and advertise his revivals. A 2nd round of revivals came in the s and s.
British citizens felt superior to the Spanish and French. Colonists were thrilled by the British win in The UK debt vaulted from 74 million pounds to million. By the mids debt service was most of the UK's national budget. Population in the colonies was doubling every 25 years. Neolin was the prophet of Pontiac's Rebellion, which was really more than an uprising that could be ascribed to just Pontiac.
Raiders killed or captured 2, colonists. The British attempted to settle the newly one Florida. The Quebec Act was the placate the 70, residents there, but the 13 colonies to the south hated it. In Massachusetts, ambitious young lawyers like John Adams felt blockaded by Hutchinson's cabal. Massachusetts's colonial Gov. Bernard thought the UK did it backwards and should've created structural changes to colonial government first and taxes'n'stuff second.
The Sons of Liberty isolated and shamed those who didn't support the boycott. Patriots suppressed their opponents, terrorizing them and breaking into their private mail. Colonial women supported the boycott, which was necessary.
Colonists felt enslaved, and formed the Continental Association to enforce the boycott. Gage requested 20, troops but was denied. Loyalists supported England for various reasons.
The UK demanded less of them than the new pushy mobs of patriots. Loyalism appealed to traditionalists. They saw the Sons of Liberty as the true threat to their liberty. They saw patriot leaders as demagogues. They believed in social order, not the tyranny of the majority. Elite loyalists also resented the social mobility patriots called for. Radicals in the Continental Congress strove for unity, and so let moderates take the fore early on.
Dunmore's Proclamation began as a bluff. It only applied to young men who could bare arms, but they weren't innoculated from smallpox and many died of it as a result. The UK passed the Prohibitory Act to seize all colonial ships on the seas. NYC had many loyalist. By late , the British felt the war was nearly won. There was fear that a foreign ally would make the US dependent on them. Loyalists were plundered and horsewhipped after Saratoga.
Conway and other critics of Washington were marginalzied in the army. The British failed to find allies, and by gave concessions that would've solved things in - but too late.
States started drafting men into their militias in Relations shift with men. Loyalists were more common in the more ethnically diverse colonies - the minorities were usually loyalist. From , patriots seized the printing presses and militias. Patriots often control courts, sheriffs, jails - and they used them.
The war was more small raids than big battles. Civilians in the areas between the armies had it the worst. The British didn't like using loyalist troops. The patriots armed some slaves in Georgia after the UK took it, but other southern colonies refused to do likewise. The Carolinas turned into a nasty fight, with the British in clear control only of the coastal centers.
Kentucky's population went from 1, to 8, from to War in the west became racialized with moderates like Daniel Boone marginalized. Spain was preoccupied by South American rebels in Indians west of the Mississippi gained guns. Comanche expansion occurred, which had a domino effect on the region. More natives were on the Plains, and then came smallpox. The Royal Navy was stretched then and the French had more military forces in the Caribbean, so the UK prioritized that region.
In , the UK declared war on the Dutch. Cornwallis and Clinton had petty squabbling. Yorktown gave harsh terms to loyalists, as Cornwallis wasn't interested in defending them - and that hurts loyalist morale elsewhere. The British lost naval battles in , but then captured France's Adm. DeGrasse in April The UK improved their situation in India. They gave concessions to the Irish, in part to entice North America to return - but that was a no-go. The US got nice terms.
The UK centralized their power in the Caribbean. The UK often abandoned their loyalists. They were often captured and killed in the Carolinas and Georgia. There was a counter-revolution vs. NYC was the last haven for the British army. Land in Canada was virtually free, much cheaper than in the US. Canada ended up with lower taxes than the US. UK gave concessions to the Caribbean. The overall goals were to avoid political discontent and calls for popular political participation.
The empire was more hierarchicial and also more authoritarian and paternalistic. The new US wanted a weak national government. The Articles of Confederation were ratified. There was fear of western states seceding.
What's now Tennessee tried to leave North Carolina as the state of Franklin - but only 7 of the 13 states supported it, and they needed 9 to do so. Spain encouraged settlement in Florida and Louisiana. The UK kept their border forts, armed Indians,and wooed settlers. The UK also put trade restrictions on the US.
Pirates were a problem. The US was a joke in Europe. Jay's negotiations with Spain caused some in the south to threaten secession. A new breed of politician emerged, playing to the masses.
State constitutions were written, but still contained property requirements on voting. Conservatives disguised their elitism with the language of republicanism. Inflation happened, and some local committees tried to create price controls.
Two-thirds of state money went to creditors and austerity programs kicked in. Massachusetts had the most regressive fiscal policies. Shays Rebellion happened and sparked an overreaction. Only 15 delegates at the Constitutional Convention spoke with any regularity. Hamilton's plan there was in response to the New Jersey Plan. Anti-Federalists were a diverse lot and lacked ties across state boundaries.
The biggest problem for Federalists was the lack of a Bill of Rights. Federalists were a minority in most states but stronger in population centers where newspapers were. They pressed for a speedy ratification, which helped. Washington's general bearing made him appear as a republican monarch, which helped. A backlash to the Federalist Party's government set in.
Hamilton had his economic plan. Federalists wanted carefully managed western settlement. Tennessee did some flirting with Spain. Opposition to Hamilton organized. A belief in being non-partisan led to extreme partisanship the other guy opposes not just my group, but America! Republicans celebrate the French Revolution, even as it goes off the rails.
Jefferson won in , but then governed as a moderate. The Federalists kept power in the courts, as John Marshall worked to build as strong a concensus as possible. Folks, the founders were NOT united in their ideas. The Revolution opened up the existing hierarchy by promising equal rights in an unequal society. Education expanded, including public education.
Evangelicals were up, and they allied with secularists to disestablish state churches. No single denomination dominated the religious culture.
There was a belief in public manhood and feminine domesticity. A third of all brides were pregnant. An emerging belief in gradual emancipation began. Indentured servitude rapidly declined.
A Republican Revolution -- 3. Revolutionary Constitutionalism and the Federal Union -- 4. Schooling Republicans -- 5. Benjamin Franklin: "American Icon"? Black Emancipation: Confronting Slavery. Uncover the remarkable story of the American Revolution! Who were the Redcoats, and what was the Boston Tea Party? Explore key events like the British surrender at Yorktown, and the writing of the Declaration of Independence.
Written in association with the esteemed Smithsonian Institution, this beautiful visual reference ebook will. The first exploration of the profound and often catastrophic impact the American Revolution had on the rest of the worldWhile the American Revolution led to domestic peace and liberty, it ultimately had a catastrophic global impact—it strengthened the British Empire and led to widespread persecution and duress.
From the. Acclaimed historian Gordon S. Wood presents the first volume in a stunning collection of British and American pamphlets from the political debate that divided an empire—and created a nation In , in the wake of its triumph in the Seven Years War, Great Britain possessed the largest and most powerful. In the wake of American independence, it was clear that the new United States required novel political forms.
Less obvious but no less revolutionary was the idea that the American people needed a new understanding of the self. Sensibility was a cultural movement that celebrated the human capacity for sympathy. Spain's involvement in the conflict formed part of a global struggle between empires and directly influenced the outcome of the clash between Britain.
Drawn from letters, diaries, newspaper articles, public declarations, contemporary narratives, and private memoranda, The American Revolution brings together over pieces by more than 70 participants to create a unique literary panorama of the War of Independence. From Paul Revere's own narrative of his ride in April to an account of George. A Publishers Weekly Most Anticipated Book of Spring From a Pulitzer Prize—winning historian, the powerful story of a fragile nation as it expands across a contested continent.
The American Revolution conjures a series of iconographic images in the contemporary American imagination. In these imagined scenes, defiant Patriots fight against British Redcoats for freedom and democracy, while a unified citizenry rallies behind them and the American cause. But the lived experience of the Revolution was a more complex. This book examines the Spanish response, military, economic and social, to the anti-imperial revolutions of Latin America in the early nineteenth century.
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