1775 Read Free Page A

ideological, and religious forces all influenced local versions of the Revolution.
    The last third of the twentieth century saw the new or further documentation of many innovations, local animosities, and competing interests. Consider the First Continental Congress in late 1774. It called for localities to set up committees of observation and inspection. By mid-1775, some 500 to 600 counties and towns had done so, many of them quickly developing loyalty-enforcement and regulatory mechanisms. The Revolution’s committees, conventions, congresses, and associations, although recalling English Civil War terminology and precedents, were deployed more quickly and in much greater numbers. In Philadelphia, as research published during the 1980s showed, the local committee structure mushroomed between 1774 and 1776. What’s more, as Chapter 5 will illustrate, committee membership became more radical in each stage. True, their politics and practices fell short of what emerged in France during the 1790s. But although the French analogy is limited, the number of Loyalist émigrés who fled the United States ultimately exceeded the count of Frenchmen who fled their revolution. 5
    Military historians have documented the civil war characteristics that the Revolution displayed in many areas. In New York, New Jersey, and the Carolinas, tabulations show that in roughly half of the battles in which militia participated, Americans were fighting Americans. 6 This bitterness continued to the war’s end.
    Population-minded scholars have shown how the rapid growth of the thirteen colonies worried British officials by the 1760s, pushing them toward restrictive measures like the Royal Proclamation of 1763, which sought to prohibit settlement west of the Appalachians. Unless western expansion could be stopped, it was feared that the colonies would soon be too populous to be restrained militarily. Migration to North America was for some years seen as threatening depopulation and loss of wealth in northern Ireland and parts of Scotland.
    As for colonial economic growth and opportunity, it is now clear that especially after 1764, British policies unduly restricting paper money shrank the local money supply in some American colonies to an extent that throttled commerce and forced more people into debt. The expanding ranks of artisans, most notable in Boston, New York, and Philadelphia, grew restive in the pre-Revolutionary decade as their share of municipal wealth and incomedeclined. Remedies they put forward included reducing or cutting off imports from Britain, as well as promoting the growth of American manufacturing enterprises that Parliament discouraged or flatly prohibited.
    Powerful ethnic and religious divisions mocked notions of cultural and political homogeneity. Wartime loyalties were splintered and divided among emergent groups like Germans, Irish Catholics, Methodists, and Baptists, and despite nineteenth- and twentieth-century boosterism determined to praise their Patriotic fervor, probing scholars have documented something less. In New Jersey, for example, bitter divisions set Patriot Dutch Reformed adherents of the Coetus faction against Conferentie-faction congregations who took the Loyalist side. In South Carolina, Regular Baptist clergymen on the Patriot side failed to sway backcountry Separate Baptists, many of whom instead followed an unctuous pro-Tory preacher.
    Sometimes the new detail has been double-barreled in its revisionist effect. Arthur Schlesinger, Sr., in 1917 a young Ohio historian, made a splash that year with his influential volume
The Colonial Merchants and the American Revolution, 1763-1776.
7 Much of the revolutionary impetus of the 1760s, he argued, came from merchants, and the eventual Revolution represented a clashing of economic interests. Late twentieth-century research has amplified how different specializations within the urban merchant communities, not broad overall merchant status, best explained their