The English Problem of Identity in the American Revolution

Datos Bibliográficos

ID5776588
AutoresDror Wahrman (autor de correspondencia)
Año2001
Volumen106
Número4
Páginas1236-1236
Fecha de publicación2001-10-01
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessNo
TipoARTICLE
RevistaThe American Historical Review (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 0002-8762 • E-ISSN: 1937-5239
EditorialJSTOR (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.2307/2692947
OpenAlexW1990525682
IdiomaEN
Citas recibidas10

IN EARLY 1776, TWO ENGLISH CLERGYMEN had an argument over tea. first was Richard Price, the pro-American Dissenting minister whose Observations on the Nature of Civil Liberty was one of the most influential pamphlets in the run up to the American Revolution. In arguing the case of the colonists, Price commented on their struggles against the tax on tea; at BOSTON, he reminded his readers in passing, persons in disguise buried it in the sea.1 Our second interlocutor was the founder of Methodism, John Wesley, who penned one of the most influential responses to Price. Writing with the angry zeal of recent convert to the anti-American campaign, Wesley could not let such quick and neutral reference to what became known as The Boston Tea go by. This event, he stormed indignantly, was an eminent instance of the colonists' pernicious fraudulence. The famous Mr. John Hancock, some time since, brought into Boston, ship-load of smuggled tea ... All Europe knows what was done: 'Some persons in disguise,' Doctor Price tells us, 'buried the English tea in the sea.' It was not so commonly known, who employed them, or paid them for their labour: To be sure, good Mr. Hancock knew no more of it than the child unborn!2 How predictable: what one pamphleteering minister accepted as part of patriotic ideological struggle, his adversary highlighted as cowardly, self-interested act of fraud. More striking, perhaps, is what this exchange left conspicuously unsaid. As any American child who has ever enacted this originary moment of national mythology in school play knows, the colonists were disguised as Mohawk Indians: fact that has since assumed considerable significance in the narrative of American self-fashioning. To cite one recent example, Philip Deloria has described the powerful imputation of Indian identity at the Boston Tea Party as a catalytic moment ... through which Americans redefined themselves as something other than British Colonists.3 On our two British commentators, however, this power

Argument (complex analysis · Dissenting opinion · English Revolution · Political radicalism · Tea party · Unsaid · American Constitutional Law and Politics