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CHAPTER 1
The Face of Colonial Society
Hannah Leighton never sought notoriety. In 1835, in fact, one would have predicted that Hannah would die as she had lived, an obscure farmer's wife who had spent most of her days in Acton, a small village in Massachusetts. That was not to be. Because of a surge of patriotic enthusiasm that swept through early-nineteenth-century New England, people turned to Hannah to learn about their own revolutionary heritage. In her eighty-ninth year, members of this small community, most of whom had been born long after Americans first rejected British rule, asked her to tell them what had happened one extraordinary April morning sixty years earlier.
As a young woman, Hannah had been married to her first husband, Isaac Davis. He was the type of American whom the British never understood. In 1775 he was thirty years old, in good health, and, by the standards of the day, reasonably prosperous. He supported a growing family largely through farming. He supplemented his income as a gunsmith. At the time, neighbors seem to have regarded Isaac as a genial man with lots of energy. He was also an insurgent.
Despite her age in 1835, Hannah vividly recalled the events of April 19, 1775. One thing that helped focus her thoughts was the memory of being an anxious mother caring for several sick infants. The youngest child was only fifteen months old. The children suffered from "canker-rash," a potentially fatal condition. Although her own revolutionary moment may have begun with the noise of fussing babies, her neighbors awoke to a much more ominous sound. Shouts of alarm reverberated throughout the sleepy community. A messenger from nearby Concord appeared in the village, slowed down before Captain Joseph Robbins's house, and, without coming to a full stop, beat on the corner of the building with a large stick, yelling as he passed, "Captain Robbins! Captain Robbins! Up! Up! The Regulars have come to Concord."
For Robbins, captain of the Acton militia, the news did not come as a complete surprise. He had prepared for such a possibility. So too had the other people of Acton. Fathers and sons had been training seriously as soldiers for many weeks. If they entertained doubts about the seriousness of the British challenge, they had only to listen to the words of the Reverend William Emerson. This highly regarded minister from Concord had recently delivered at the Acton church a fiery sermon that seemed to endorse armed resistance against tyranny. He asked the parishioners to consider the full implications of 2 Chronicles 13:12, "Behold God himself is with us for our captain, and his priests with sounding trumpets to cry alarm against you."
Robbins immediately galloped off to the Davis home. Isaac had been selected some months earlier as captain of the Acton Minutemen. This special rapid-response force had been busy studying military tactics, and because Isaac was an accomplished metalworker, he had made sure that his men were equipped with state-of-the-art bayonets and cartridge boxes. He had even set up a shooting range behind his house, where the Minutemen practiced marksmanship. Davis was also the kind of person who without effort inspires trust. As Hannah explained many years later, "Between him [and] his Company, there was strong attachment [and] unlimited confidence." She added, "He well knew his danger, but was a stranger to fear."
As the sun rose, Davis's fellow soldiers turned up at his house. Nervous, no doubt a little frightened by the prospect that lay before them, they made cartridges for their guns in Hannah's yard. Two hours passed before they were fully prepared to march for Concord, which lay only a few miles to the east. Hannah watched her husband closely, attentive to subtle shifts of mood that only a wife could perceive. "My husband said but little that morning," she recounted. "He seemed serious and thoughtful; but never seemed to hesitate as to the course of his duty." Finally it was time to move out. Hannah must have waved. Isaac paused. "As he led the company from the house, he turned round, and seemed to have something to communicate. He only said 'take good care of the children,' and was soon out of sight."
The Acton Minutemen joined other soldiers who had rushed to Concord from the surrounding towns. No one was quite sure who had overall command of the Americans who were taking up positions on the edge of the village not far from the famed bridge. Colonel James Barrett eventually took charge, but he looked nothing like a proper soldier. Witnesses remembered Barrett dressed in "an old coat, a flapped hat, and a leather apron." The fidgety troops watched as the British searched Concord for weapons and powder. Smoke began to rise, suggesting that the enemy intended to burn the entire community. One lieutenant from Acton could stand it no longer and asked Barrett pointedly, "Will you let them burn the town?" Davis for one was ready to confront the enemy. He drew his sword, announcing to the assembled insurgents in what may have been his last recorded words, "I haven't a man who is afraid to go." The colonists loaded their guns and began marching toward the bridge. The British fired. One of the first volleys hit Davis in the chest. He probably died on the spot. Another shot killed his lieutenant.
What happened on April 19 is the stuff of legend. Enraged Americans dogged the retreating British units all the way to Boston. They administered a stinging defeat to an army of occupation. For Hannah, the events of the day profoundly transformed her life. She waited for hours for news from Concord. "In the afternoon," she explained many years later, Isaac "was brought home a corpse. He was placed in my bedroom till the funeral. His countenance was pleasant, and seemed little altered."
For the people of nineteenth-century Acton, Isaac was a hero, a patriot who had died defending American rights and liberty. They were correct. Isaac was also a man whom we would now identify as an insurgent. Long before he led the Minutemen to Concord, he had accepted the possibility — even the necessity — of using armed violence against British authority. When he paused that morning and turned to Hannah, he probably considered parting endearments. Perhaps with his men standing nearby, he felt that such an open declaration of affection might be out of place, a sign of uncertainty. We shall never know. But whatever his thoughts may have been, we can imagine that he did in fact "have something to communicate." More than two centuries after the event, Isaac Davis asks us to reflect on how ordinary people — in families and small communities — became central figures in the overthrow of imperial rule.
Of the many surviving accounts of the fight, one in particular helps us to comprehend the mental world of Hannah and Isaac Davis. It highlights an unfamiliar language of anger and revenge; it takes on board the raw emotional energy needed to mobilize popular resistance. Writing as Johannes in Eremo in a Salem newspaper on the morning of April 20, the Reverend John Cleaveland announced, "Great Britain, adieu! No longer shall we honor you as our mother; you are become cruel ... We have cried to you for justice, but behold violence and bloodshed!" As for General Gage, Cleaveland declared that the demands of the people of New England for revenge "will not be satisfied till your blood is shed, and the blood of every son of violence under your command."
The Reverend Jonas Clark spoke to the people of Lexington exactly one year after the battle. Entitled "The Fate of Blood-Thirsty Oppressors," Clark's sermon invited a Lexington congregation to revisit the April morning when British troops first appeared. "They approach with the morning's light," he explained, "and more like murderers and cutthroats, than the troops of a Christian king, without provocation, without warning, when no war was proclaimed, they draw the sword of violence, upon the inhabitants of this town." The enemy shed "INNOCENT BLOOD" on the nineteenth of April. Americans courageously stood their ground, and Clark assured those who had lost sons and husbands — the Hannah Davises of New England — that the sacrifice had not been in vain. "Surely there is one that avengeth, and that will plead the cause of the injured and oppressed; and in his own way and time, will both cleanse and avenge their innocent blood." Long after the nation had won its independence, Hannah, who bore nine children and survived to the age of ninety-six, continued to remind her neighbors of a time when American patriots had been insurgents.
I
The insurgents who most often go missing from modern narratives of revolution were ordinary people. That adjective, "ordinary," should not carry erroneous connotations — suggesting perhaps that the men and women in the forefront of resistance were somehow mediocre or undistinguished. They were anything but. Other terms, however, are even less satisfactory. To label someone like Isaac Davis a common person or an average American, for example, implies that we possess statistical data that would make it possible to depict a particular colonist as in some meaningful way average. Such records do not exist. Davis and the other militiamen who appeared at Concord probably would have accepted an eighteenth-century terminology, which identified them as "middling sorts." For our purposes, however, "ordinary" works as well as any of the alternatives.
Whatever descriptive language we adopt, we should recognize immediately that we are dealing with a huge percentage of the colonial population on the eve of independence. The insurgents were generally drawn from white farm families — in other words, from a body of people who made up approximately 70 percent of the free inhabitants. What one newspaper reported for Pennsylvania in 1756 was broadly accurate for ordinary Americans as a whole, especially for those who lived north of Virginia: "The people of this province are generally of the middling sort, and at present pretty much upon a level." This middling group of colonists pointedly did not include the large number of African Americans, most of whom were slaves. Nor did it embrace the 3 or 4 percent of the population whom we might classify as members of the provincial elite, the extremely small segment of American society that currently dominates our understanding of the coming of revolution. Like the elite gentlemen, these ordinary men and women made decisions that affect us all; unlike them, they lived in a world that has entirely slipped from popular sight. After 250 years, all that is readily apparent is that Hannah and Isaac Davis — and tens of thousands of people like them — drew upon the ideas and circumstances of their own time when they rejected imperial authority.
The Davises came of age in a society that had experienced extraordinary population growth. Indeed, at least since the 1740s colonists had pushed the rates of increase almost to their biological limit. Benjamin Franklin, who, along with other accomplishments, was one of the first mathematical demographers, calculated that the American population was doubling approximately every twenty-five years. This finding meant that the number of people alive had increased some 125 percent between 1740 and 1770. The figures varied from region to region. The Middle Colonies such as Pennsylvania grew faster than did those in New England. But about the overall results, there could be no dispute. Franklin fully appreciated the impact that tens of thousands of German, Scotch-Irish, and English immigrants had had on expansion, but he rightly concluded that the key element in population growth was the high reproduction rates among people already living in British America. More couples were having more babies. Franklin claimed that the numbers reflected a lowering of the age of first marriage, a trend that allowed young mothers more years in which to bear children. Other factors were at work, of course. General economic prosperity, reliable supplies of food, and availability of cheap land also contributed to the peopling of the colonies.
When a population expands as fast as it did in America, the overall age structure shifts dramatically. Accelerated growth means that at any given time, a large percentage of the population will consist of young people. We know, for example, that throughout the Revolution about half of the total number of colonists were under the age of sixteen.
The implication of this youth culture for an account of the coming of independence is profound. General treatments of the history of imperial breakdown often begin in 1763, with the formal conclusion of the Seven Years' War, or in 1765, with the passage of the hated Stamp Act. Such narratives of political discontent assume a kind of momentum; discontent mounts year after year as king and Parliament refuse to address the colonists' grievances. But the logic of this slowly evolving story becomes strained when we realize that many of the insurgents of 1775 had been little children during the early 1760s.
John Patten, for example, the young New Hampshire man who died during the abortive campaign against Canada in 1776, had been eight years old when France and Great Britain concluded the Seven Years' War. He was only ten during the Stamp Act crisis. No doubt he and other even younger Americans learned about the significance of these events from adults. As Joseph Plumb Martin, a Connecticut farm boy who served in the army throughout the entire war, recounted, "I remember the stir in the country occasioned by the Stamp Act, but I was so young that I did not understand the meaning of it; I likewise remember the disturbances that followed the repeal of the Stamp Act, until the destruction of the tea at Boston and elsewhere; I was then thirteen or fourteen years old, and began to understand something of the works going on." In short, many of the young insurgents who appeared at Concord had not taken part in previous confrontations with royal authority. Their knowledge of earlier controversies was secondhand. What young insurgents knew — in intimate and direct terms — was a sudden surge of popular violence that occurred during the summer of 1774 and culminated in the killing of Americans at Lexington and Concord. The point is not that the previous generations' conflicts with imperial policy were irrelevant. Rather, it was the case that they did not ignite the anger and passion that inflamed an insurgency.
Late colonial America was a small-scale society. Its approximately two million free white inhabitants had carved out farms and plantations over an immense territory stretching along the Atlantic Coast from the modern state of Maine to Georgia and at most several hundred miles inland. Although the stories we tell ourselves about the Revolution usually concentrate on events that occurred in cities — the Boston Tea Party or the debates of the Continental Congress in Philadelphia — an urban focus is misleading. Most provincial families lived in very small communities, often towns or villages of only several hundred inhabitants. Even such centers of intense revolutionary activity as Worcester, Massachusetts, and Wilmington, North Carolina, numbered fewer than two thousand people.
The overwhelming majority of the revolutionary generation spent its time on family farms, and meetings that brought neighbors together to address common affairs had to be scheduled around the demands of the agricultural calendar. Within these communities, no one was a stranger; families had long histories that, even when not openly discussed, were never forgotten. These were intimate, face-to-face settings — at church, the local store for imported goods, the county courts — in which few secrets, be they religious, political, or personal, were secure, and although ordinary Americans probably tolerated some idiosyncratic beliefs and behavior, they could bring powerful pressure to bear on dissenters who openly defied local norms.
In early America farm families were not economically self-sufficient. People like Hannah and Isaac Davis took for granted an impressive flow of manufactured goods that originated in England and were distributed throughout the eighteenth-century British Empire in ever-greater quantities. Textiles were the major import, about half of the total amount, and small rural stores from Georgia to New Hampshire offered customers — often on easy credit — a wide range of colorful and affordable fabrics. Metal items and glassware, medicines and children's toys transformed the consumer experience at mid-century. Indeed, this period was the first time in which the middling sorts of America, Holland, and England could select from among competing goods that promised anyone possessing even a little amount of money greater beauty, warmth, health, and status. On the eve of independence, Americans spent on average almost a third of their total incomes on imported goods.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "American Insurgents, American Patriots"
by .
Copyright © 2010 T. H. Breen.
Excerpted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
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