American insurgency

 

When did the people in Britain’s North American colonies see themselves as part of a separate country? I’ve just read a book [originally published in 2010] that makes a persuasive case for 1774. Northwestern history prof T. H. Breen has written a lively, people-focused story, American Insurgents, American Patriots. Cornell prof Mary Beth Norton made the same case in her book, 1774: The Long Year of Revolution, but she looked mainly at words and ideas.

Breen shows that ordinary people, far removed from turbulent Boston, felt personally impacted by the early 1774 Coercive Acts [always in America labeled the Intolerable Acts] that closed the port of Boston and put the Massachusetts government under royal control in retaliation for the tea party rampage. Civic and church groups throughout the colonies sent money and goods and even livestock to help Bostonians survive.

As early as September, 1774, when a false rumor spread that the British had bombarded Boston and destroyed much of it, thousands of men throughout the colonies mobilized to come to its defense. This made it even easier to build an army after Lexington and Concord.

Once the Continental Congress in December 1774 passed the measure calling for a boycott of British goods and organized what was called the Association, committees sprang up throughout the colonies to enforce it. These local groups, often called committees of safety or observation, were usually amazingly careful to follow due legal processes before punishing loyalists to the Crown.

I knew from earlier readings that these committees and local militias became the enforcement arms of local governments in suppressing loyalists. But I didn’t realize how little actual violence was used, or necessary. The public pressure to support the boycott and speak of the protection of liberties “for our country” was powerful even before the Declaration of Independence was adopted.

Breen blames John Adams for an 1813 comment that one-third of the colonists favored independence, another third the Crown, and another third waited on the fence to see who would win. A better assessment of the evidence is that a far larger segment of the population saw the colonies as sharing a common fate and a desire for local control of government.