The best books that made me think twice about the American Revolution

What do we know about the Revolution, and why do we think we know it? Sometimes, even canonical events we think we know are not nearly as well-documented as we might think, like the Boston Tea Party.

This book is about history and memory, the gap between what happened when colonists threw the East India Company’s tea into Boston Harbor, and how that event was remembered decades later. Drawing on the as-told-to-reminiscences of Tea Party participant George Robert Twelve Hewes, which were written down over half a century after the Tea Party took place, Young plumbs the gap between the “destruction of the tea,” as the event was known at the time, and the “Boston Tea Party,” a name which only emerged in the 19th century as Americans reimagining that revolt into the story of how America was made. 

Young shows us that accounts like Hewes’s had as much to do with Americans of the 1820s and 1830s, their commemoration of their nation’s creation, and their coming to terms with the Revolutionary generation’s passing as it did with what actually happened. Lists of tea party “participants” created then, or after the 1873 centennial, were, like so many tea party histories, bunk. And you can take those “Boston Tea Party Participant” grave markers as a special kind of bunk at that.

Reading this book was a slap in the face in graduate school. If so much of our received wisdom is false, it was easy for graduate school me to wonder if we could be sure of anything. 

“If ideas like freedom and liberty were important, why didn’t the whole empire rebel?” Undergraduate me asked this question in lecture to Gordon Wood, one of the foremost advocates of the role of ideas in the Revolution. Wood was an amazing lecturer: he brought even cynical students to tears in his last lecture of the term on the Revolution, exiting to applause in what felt like a mic drop.

He answered my question well enough—he mentioned the Royal Navy’s capacity to deter Nova Scotia and island colonies from rebellion—but he hemmed and hawed as he spoke. There was a gap in the armor, the waning authority of an authoritative teacher who suddenly didn’t seem to have all the answers. 

I found my answer when I read O’Shaughnessy’s book. Caribbean planters cared about their political rights. They protested the Stamp Act. But they were also far wealthier than their North American cousins and were unwilling to rebel openly because the sugar system made them rich. They needed British markets for their sugar, British troops to suppress slave revolts, British financing to fund their plantations, British castles to waste their money, and British countesses to bed their sons. The limit of ideas was money.

O’Shaughnessy frames the rebellion not as an American Revolution but a British imperial civil war, reminding us that, while we think of the 1775-1783 war as a war for U.S. independence, it was, for Britain, a war to retain its Caribbean empire. The Caribbean, not North America, was the economic and geopolitical heart of Britain’s empire, and the Caribbean became the focus of Britain’s war.

When European powers joined the conflict, they did it to seek imperial advantage in the Caribbean. Seen from this perspective, Britain won. It kept its most valuable colonies, like Jamaica and Barbados, and cut its losses in revolting money pits like Virginia and New York.

Since North American colonists had so much less at risk than their Caribbean cousins, one might ask: is "freedom" just another word for nothing left to lose?

What about the rest of North America? Stories of the American Revolution in other parts of North America have often focused on the colonies that didn’t rebel—the lack of Revolution in Nova Scotia or the failed Continental conquest of Quebec (surely the source of one of history’s greatest counterfactuals)—and which never became part of the United States. As such, there is a way in which such stories, while framed as looking at might-have-been, inevitably explain how things turned out the way they did, explaining part of the creation of the United States and/or of Canada. 

But DuVal looks elsewhere—to the Gulf Coast and the colonies of British West Florida and Spanish Louisiana, which, between them, encompassed the ports between New Orleans and Pensacola and a much larger “hinterland” of Native communities inland (whose denizens considered themselves nobody’s hinterland). Here was a world of weak empires—a tottering Spain taking over France’s Louisiana, a Britain that reached inward from the Gulf but had little sway and less population in the region, where the imperial peripheries and Native American powers were interdependent, giving local actors greater sway. DuVal here finds individual agency in abundance without having to focus exclusively on “great men” as men and women of the Gulf Coast pursued their own ends during the imperial wars of the American Revolution. 

This is a story of the role of the places that are current US states (Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Florida) but weren’t part of the thirteen colonies and so fit into the Revolutionary story differently. And such a story can just as easily be told about other future U.S. states: especially Ohio and Kentucky. Here, too, is the great irony (good historians have an ear for irony): in shaping the creation of an independent United States, these Gulf Coast residents ensured that the freedom and autonomy they had been used to would be “utterly overtaken” by the new United States: independence lost.

This book is a history of the twists and turns of one revolutionary “year”—really, the 16 months between the Boston Tea Party and the Battles of Lexington and Concord—that seeks to answer the question, how did it all fall apart? 

This book is a favorite because Norton wrote it while I wrote Tea. We had many long, and extremely fulfilling, exchanges over sources as we wrote. I knew I could always ask her: what did she think of a particular source, and she would have an answer. I could run a theory by her and she would know every possible source that could test it. I’ve never had such an engaging writing experience.  

Norton is a renowned historian and Cornell professor emerta and has written a half dozen books about colonial and Revolutionary America. She is especially noted for her work on women and Loyalists, wisdom about whom imbues every page. Norton does this with granular knowledge and rich attention to detail that is the product of decades of work: lost newspaper issues and correspondence found in this archive or that library, noted and set aside over 40 years or more as she pursued her other projects.

The result is a story not so much from the “bottom-up” (as 1970s social historians would have it) or from the “top-down” but from the side: there are elites and subalterns here, but more than anything else, there are people in the middle, colonists who made choices to join, oppose, or ignore the Revolution, who were articulate enough to write down their thoughts, but, not knowing how it would all end, didn’t fit our prescribed narrative. 

It is easy to conceive a story about 1774, and especially the politics of 1774, that is dominated by Patriotic men, leaving women, Loyalists, and others as “side shows.” Hundreds of such books have been written, but in 1774 Norton shows that Loyalism was a normal, mainstream view and that women could be and were real political actors. 

Norton points to two different phenomena: the boycott movement, whereby male and female colonists made decisions about what to wear and what to drink, and the militia movement, whereby men chose to solve their problems with arms. While we have long known of the importance of militias, Norton points out the way that, in 1774, the militia movement came to supplant the boycott movement as the main means of resisting Britain. This is an important corrective, for we are wont to imagine a world of tea party protesters, of consumers who refused to consume, and then to jump ahead to the war, which always just sort of “happens.” (We still do not know, to this day, who shot first at Lexington.) 

This is the culmination of a career-long reimagining of the Revolution’s most crucial year.

What were the economic motives behind the Revolution? This question has been a subject of historical debate for over a century, often with the spurious assumption (in my view) that if the Revolution had economic motives, then it could not also have ideological meanings. And yet, even ideologues need money. 

Economic explanations of the revolution have often suffered from being too general. The economies of Massachusetts and Virginia were so different that it is difficult to craft an economic explanation that encompasses both. Holton solves this problem by focusing on Virginia, making a strong argument for the relationship between ideological concerns (especially ideas of race) and economic ones (around debt and the ownership of land, slaves, and commodities).

Holton’s work has been some of the most influential and intellectually productive work of the last generation, making a strong argument about the economics of the Revolution in Virginia (one of the most important colonies in the rebellion). State-level histories of the Revolution that have, since the 1970s, been the most successful at combining original argumentation and intellectual creativity with rich sourcing and specific detail, and this book is a strong example of this.

It forced me to rethink why and how men like George Washington and Thomas Jefferson did what they did—for it seemed like every element of the boycotts and rebellion had an economic dimension that affected Virginia’s most famous great men specifically and their planter/gentry class generally. This forces us to ask: were Virginia’s Founding Fathers fools, economic naifs who had no idea of the financial and commercial consequences of their boycotts, or were they as smart as we’ve long thought?