The Politics of War

Post-1960s ‘neo-progressive’ historians have argued that the American Revolution was about ‘who shall rule at home’ as well as about ‘home rule’, in the often-quoted words of Progressive Era historian Carl Becker. Yet, within that approach, revolutionary radicalism was thought to have been the preserve of northern urban middling and lower sorts, rural New York tenants, Green Mountain separatists, Carolina regulators, and the like. If Virginia was divided, it was along racial lines: blacks used the War of Independence to escape enslavement; whites remained united precisely because of the threat of black insurrection. Even ardent progressives therefore regarded Virginia as exceptionally unified and conservative. That is until recently, for, while Woody Holton's Forced Founders (Chapel Hill, 1999) showed how various subalterns pressured leaders into declaring independence, Michael McDonnell has shown how class as well as racial strife defined Virginia's fight for independence from beginning to end. Using government records, martial and civil court records, citizens’ petitions, private letters, diaries, and memoirs, McDonnell finds that social conflict in revolutionary Virginia was deep, endemic, and relentless. From the opening rounds of the revolutionary war in Lexington, Massachusetts, in April 1775 until after General Cornwallis's surrender at Yorktown, Virginia, in October 1781, middling and poorer white Virginians resisted service in local militia and especially as regulars in the Continental Army, and resisted taxes to pay for war. They voted opponents out of office, petitioned representatives, deserted military service, and threatened and committed acts of individual and collective violence against military and civil officers. And these were the patriots. As such, they did not object to military service or taxes per se, but to particular inequities such as unequal pay and length of duty, military hierarchy and discipline, service outside the home state or even county, lower taxes on slaves than other property, taxes on land acreage rather than value, taxes payable in specie rather than paper money or in paper money rather than property-in-kind and the fact that slaveholders had workers at home while non-slaveholders’ farms went untended. Worried about dissent among patriots as well as slave and servant insurrection and defections to British lines, especially when enemy ships roved the coasts and soldiers the coastlines, and yet desperate to raise men and money, legislators made major concessions. They shortened the length of service, resisted Continental Army demands to lengthen service, increased soldiers’ pay, including bounties of land, slaves, and tax exemptions, and enacted tax and debt relief

Economic history · Independence (probability theory · Memoir · New Deal · Political radicalism · Political science · Politics · Spanish Civil War · Surrender · White (mutation · American Constitutional Law and Politics · American History and Culture · History · Law · Race, History, and American Society

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