I'm a subscriber to The Guardian Weekly (Flint's favourite leftist rag), and this review of Ray Raphael's new book about the American Revolution caught my eye.

from: http://books.guardian.co.uk/reviews/history/0,6121,518212,00.html

Adam Sisman
Sunday July 8, 2001
The Observer

The American Revolution: A People's History

Ray Raphael

Profile £20, pp384

'Give me liberty, or give me death,' declared Patrick Henry, the future Governor of Virginia, on 20 March 1775. The received version of the American Revolution depicts a people groaning under an intolerable tyranny, goaded at last into taking up arms to defend their God-given rights. A militia made up of plucky farmers outwits superior numbers of British redcoats, led by unimaginative officers with upper-class accents.

One of the many merits of this excellent book is to show that the reality was a good deal more complicated, and in many ways more interesting, than the cliché. This 'people's history' is the story not of generals and politicians but of ordinary Americans: among them loyalists forced into the role of rebels against the new republic, pacifists who refused to sign oaths of allegiance, women whose very housework became politicised, Indians under pressure from the land-hungry whites, and black slaves who watched bemused as their masters fought in the name of freedom.

The Revolution was the culmination of a series of petty clashes, many of them only remotely connected with the eventual central dispute - riots against smallpox inoculation, for example. Increasingly, however, the authorities' attempts to settle contentious problems brought into question the legitimacy of British rule.

By the time the fighting began, the Crown exercised only a paper power in the areas outside direct military control; rural districts were administered and policed by local congresses, committees and conventions, all of which vigorously resisted any move to re-assert royal rule. Most of the taxes imposed by George III's Ministers had been withdrawn by 1770; only the tax on tea - associated by Americans with European decadence and luxury - remained.

But the British Government could do nothing right. When it allowed tea to be supplied direct from India to the American colonies (and therefore free of British duty), thus halving the price, the lucrative smuggling trade was threatened. The Boston Tea Party was a protest against tea being sold cheaply.

No one knows for certain who fired 'the shot heard round the world' on Lexington Green on 19 April 1775, traditionally taken as the starting-pistol for the Revolution, but it followed a series of confrontations between those resisting British rule and those co-operating with it. What began in civil disobedience and an economic boycott of British goods led - through intimidation and public humiliations such as tarring and feathering, vigilantism and lynching - to armed conflict. Reprisal provoked reprisal. As the population became polarised, families were split and neighbour was pitted against neighbour.

Thus began a civil war, with each side supported by roughly the same proportion of the population. One contemporary estimated that one-third of Americans were patriots, one-third loyalists, and one-third indifferent. Most of the many minority populations preferred the lax despotism of the Crown to the tyranny of the majority. Even Catholic French-speakers sided with the British, though France allied itself with the patriots against its old enemy.

George Washington soon purged the American army of its civilian militia, which he described as 'useless'. The British army consisted mostly of German mercenaries; some of the crucial battles took place without a single British soldier present. As in all civil wars, the civilian population suffered. Both armies lived off the land, plundering, raping and despoiling as they went.

It was also a class war. 'No taxation without representation' was a taxpayers' complaint. When patriots mouthed about 'liberty', what they meant was economic liberty - including the right to own slaves. Samuel Johnson, with his concern for the weak and disenfranchised and his sharp ear for cant, nailed the hypocrisy of such sloganeering: 'How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for Liberty among the drivers of Negroes?' When a landowner or banker declared for one side, his tenants or debtors often chose the other. Then as now, the rich avoided the draft by paying the poor to fight on their behalf.

The signatories to the Declaration of Independence held it as self-evident that 'all men are created equal' - though not women, slaves or 'merciless Indian savages'. For Native Americans, the Revolution proved a disaster. Their crops were destroyed, their villages burnt, their people butchered and their lands seized. Most chose to side with the British, who had tried to restrain the colonists from expanding into Indian-held territories - only to find themselves betrayed by their former allies at the Peace of Paris. All in all, the Revolution hastened the decline of their sovereign status; Indians were reduced to the level of a subject people in a country that had once belonged to them alone.

Slaves could not be unaffected by all the talk of liberty. In 1772 the Lord Chief Justice Lord Mansfield ruled that a slave who escaped to England could not be forcibly returned; thereafter slaves looked to the British to promote their freedom. Many of the patriots who so resented the British yoke were themselves slaveowners: Washington, for example, lost 17 runaway slaves during the war; Thomas Jefferson lost 30. The black man depicted in the painting of Washington crossing the frozen Potomac was a slave.

Fear of slave revolt loomed large in the minds of all Americans, and each side at various times played the slave card. Both were reluctant to arm slaves, except under the strict control of white officers. Nevertheless, blacks were over-represented in both armies and did a disproportionate amount of the fighting. Often these black soldiers were substitutes for whites wishing to avoid the draft; some purchased slaves expressly for this purpose. Though the endless talk about 'enslavement' to the British Parliament eventually embarrassed the victorious Americans into allowing their own slaves some measure of freedom, this was very limited, even in the northern states; in New Jersey, for example, not a single slave was freed until half a century after the Revolution.



-- Anonymous, August 07, 2001

Answers

Howdy Matey:

Ahh, tis fall and revisionism is in the air. I have read 10 or 12 reviews on this book: for the most part they don't lead me to read it. The list of faults are endless and include such things as misquotes and misrepresentation of information. Although I am interested in the area, I think that I will pass on this one.

Best Wishes,,,,

Z

-- Anonymous, August 07, 2001

Ah yes. There are always those who wish to revise and slant history. There was the Marxian view now most passe. Now we get the post- Marxian economic view.

I would like to note that there are always some in the counties North of the U.S. border who must have a deep resentment built into their genes that the American Revolution did not enlarge to include the lands up to the North Pole. But then the power of the Throne and the Trading Companies was a bit stronger than the desire not to bend knees and backs to the "King".

-- Anonymous, August 08, 2001

Z,

Which parts of the review I posted above were guilty of "misrepresentation of information"? I ask this question sincerely; I have not read much in the area of the American Revolution and would be interested in your opinions.

-- Anonymous, August 08, 2001