REVIEW BY PHIL SHANNON
A People's History of the American Revolution: How Common People Shaped the Fight for Independence
By Ray Raphael
Part of the New Press People's History series, edited by Howard Zinn
The New Press, 2001
386 pages, $55.90 (hb)
The Fourth of July fireworks which officially celebrate American Independence Day each year noisily drown out the real heart and soul of what was a truly radical, if deeply flawed, revolution. More than just a war which ended two centuries of rule by Britain over its 13 North American colonies in 1781, the revolution was also, as Ray Raphael shows in his superb social history of the uprising, a struggle by the common people — the poor, women, slaves, Native Americans — for their own freedom.
Raphael has re-written the history of the American Revolution from the viewpoint of those whose voices have been crowded out by the "Founding Fathers" like General (and first president of the US) George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson and other men of power and wealth.
In Massachusetts the disgruntled were many. While the richest 5% of the population of Boston owned 50% of the wealth, the poor half of the city owned but 5%. Farmers' tenuous hold on their land was in jeopardy from British "justice". These poor and desperate classes found mutual ground with the richer classes over Britain's taxes and colonial power.
Labourers and seamen dominated the 5000 of Boston's 16,000 population who marched on Boston harbour in December 1773, dumping 342 chests of East India Company tea into the water. The militant actions of the poor turned the campaign for non-importation and boycott of British goods into a radical mass movement.
This pre-revolution history of civil unrest also applied to country as well as city, and it was the farmers of Worcester county in rural Massachusetts who began the revolution in 1774 when thousands of armed country rebels broke up the British courts, and dismissed the judges and sheriffs who threatened the farmers' land. Their example was infectious and soon in all colonies British-appointed judges "were humbled before farmers with mud on their boots".
This rural revolution reduced Britain to a mere paper power in areas not under direct military control. Organised into local committees of the Continental Association, the "democratic will of the majority" prevailed in the countryside or forcefully contested British authority through meeting, protest and riot in the cities.
Elected by "the body of the people", seven thousand men, mostly of middle to low socio-economic class, were elected to these committees. Dual power existed.
"Blows must decide", wrote King George III, opening the floodgates of death through counter-revolution. From the outbreak of war in 1775, more than 25,000 or one in eight American soldiers were to die in the next six years before the British surrendered.
For the common soldier, the war soon lost its romantic sheen. The furious patriotism dissipated in the face of disease and dysentry, hunger and cold, bare feet and ragged clothes, boredom and lice, escalating cycles of brutal atrocities.
There were class grievances. Officers did not do without but the poor men and boys who made up the Continental Army received irregular pay and poor rations. If drafted to the Army, rich men could buy out of service by paying for substitutes (their apprentices or employees). As ever, the rich did the talking, the poor did the dying.
The soldiers, however, resisted their army oppression. Taking the war for democracy to heart, soldiers held meetings to decide on military campaigns, and to elect their officers. They rebelled over pay and conditions, from mass violations of military regulations to open mutinies. The officers deplored the "levelling spirit" of their privates — when one company captain was asked how many men he commanded, he responded wryly "Not one, but I am commanded by 90".
The farmer militia fighters who moved in and out of the standing army as the harvest cycle determined, carried their fight for justice from battlefield to home. Whether jailing profiteers or seizing overpriced goods for cheaper resale, they acted as a paramilitary government, imposing the democratic will on "the great and overgrown", whether loyalist or patriot.
In 1776, radical militia fighters forced a change to Philadelphia's patriot government, bringing in a constitution which expanded suffrage and placed more power in the hands of the common people than any constitution in history until that time.
Not everyone, however, was granted admission to the "body of the people". For women, the revolution meant more oppressive labour. They had to weave by hand the cloth that was usually woven by machine in England but was now boycotted. As their husbands and sons left for the war front, women picked up their work on the home front.
If women travelled with the army as cooks, washers, carriers of water and ammunition, they shared all the dangers of death by disease and artillery fire. Army nurses received only 10% of the pay of soldiering men. Women were the ones looted, raped, widowed and made homeless by the war.
Some women contributed to the revolutionary war in direct ways. They hid men and weapons from the British. A handful of women, disguised as men, fought in the men-only army. Sixteen year old Sybil Ludington, matching Paul Revere, rode 65 kilometres at night to rouse the militia against a British march on Danbury, Connecticut. Most women's contribution to the cause, however, was less dramatic. In short, "they toiled".
Many farming and working women shared the sentiment that equality and representation should apply to their sex as well as to the colonies but women received scant reward for their suffering from, and contribution to, the war. It took 50 years after the war for the Continental Congress to grant pensions to widows of army privates (there were few left by then, of course).
Neither did Native Americans find liberty. White settlers had been fighting Indians for land for the better part of a century before the revolution and most Indian tribes backed the British, who cynically promised land, or simply rum. For choosing the wrong side, their crops were destroyed and villages torched by the Continental Army, their land robbed by unjust treaties.
Also excluded from the "body of the people" were the half million African-American slaves. In the south, where 90% of slaves lived, tens of thousands fled to the British in the hope of emancipation, including 30 slaves from the estate of Thomas Jefferson and 17 from George Washington. For the "Founding Fathers", liberty was coloured white.
Slave-owning Britain was no better, receiving the escaped slaves "not as liberated people, but as contraband enemy property". They were discriminated against, housed in separate quarters, fed inferior food and were the first to have their rations cut.
When Britain took control of Virginia during the war, runaway slaves were jailed, impressed to labour gangs, traded for provisions or sold to the West Indies. Britain was not about to undermine the slave system.
In the north, where slavery was not central to the economy, slaves had marginally better outcomes. They could negotiate their freedom in return for soldiering — the 250-strong all-black First Rhode Island Regiment were "brave, hardy troops" who fought for patriot victory as the means to their own. Slow legislative steps were taken by sympathetic whites for the gradual abolition of slavery. For the vast majority of African-Americans, however, the revolution did not deliver.
Despite its serious limitations, the American Revolution was a genuine revolution. Its most radical feature was the assumption of authority from the British rulers by the "body of the people" (albeit with notable omissions). The authority of the American elite, in army and civil society, was contested from below. The revolution also had international benefits — it weakened British colonialism, and the poor and disenfranchised of France looked to its example in their more radical and inclusive revolution soon after.
From Green Left Weekly, February 6, 2002.
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