Revolutionary Founders: Rebels, Radicals, and Reformers in the Making of the Nation
ed. by Alfred F. Young, Gary B. Nash, and Ray Raphael; Knopf
The founding fathers weren’t the only visionaries dreaming of a new order for the New World. They had to fend off, out-argue, marginalize or suppress competing ideas advanced by the hoi polloi about just what liberty— the dangerous new-fangled concept that breathed life and fire into the American Revolution—meant.
In these 22 provocative essays, leading historians highlight Revolutionary-era people and movements that textbooks and standard accounts skip. They recast the making of America as a bottom-up, widespread set of developments, where common folk spearheaded changes. Often these activists rallied around more radical positions than most founders held. There were clashes between different sorts of patriots, some of them violent.
Ray Raphael navigates the remarkable twists of 1774, when blacksmith Timothy Bigelow of the “middling sorts” helped lead rural Massachusetts dwellers against the British in “so robust a revolution…that Boston’s most famous and effective patriots tried to slow it down.” Michael A. McDonnell explains how Virginia on the Revolution’s eve nearly erupted in civil war: White tenant farmers in Loudoun County rebelled against the wealthy slaveholders who doubled as patriot leaders over regressive taxes, property and voting rights, military service and equality. And Terry Bouton looks at western Pennsylvania in 1794: The Regulators, a militia seen as the popular vehicle “regulating” government power, revolted in the name of Revolutionary ideals against the Philadelphia establishment’s control over taxation and representation. Bouton claims, “The defeat helped confine democracy to forms of political self-expression that did not overtly threaten elite interests.” The uprising’s true depth and breadth were masked ever after by Alexander Hamilton’s derisive title: the Whiskey Rebellion.
More strange turns appear when Jill Lepore revisits firebrand Tom Paine. John Adams wrote, “Without the pen of the author of Common Sense, the sword of Washington would have been raised in vain.” Paine donated his best-selling pamphlet’s profits to buy supplies for the Continental Army, which he served in. But by his death in 1809, his impact on the Revolution had deliberately been erased: The surviving founders repudiated him, and Adams’ friend Mercy Otis Warren relegated him to a footnote in the Revolution’s official congressional history.
Why? Paine helped foment three revolutions; did hard prison time that debilitated and impoverished him; was physically repellent and a nasty drunk; and was alleged (in tabloid headlines on two continents) to beat his wife. But Lepore argues that his overweening sin was his commonplace Enlightenment view of organized religion: He made the mistake of proselytizing about it to the masses, instead of discussing it with like-minded intellectuals, as other founders did. For this, she declares, “He was destroyed.” Six mourners showed up at his funeral. His work was buried in oblivion. Even his bones disappeared.
Revolutionary Founders aims to test the parameters of what we think we know with new and reinterpreted data and fresh theories. It reminds us that understanding history is an open-ended process, and that this is how historians, like scientists, work. Not all these essays unearth pure gold. But they offer challenging, surprising perspectives on the turbulent crosscurrents that shaped our nation’s birth.
Originally published in the October 2011 issue of American History. To subscribe, click here.
