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Patriot-versus-Loyalist commitments. This upheld the salience of economic issues. However, the same research into Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Norfolk, and Charleston loyalties has shown how ethnicity and religion split the merchants, rebutting the notion of a largely economic clash of issues.
    Ideally, this information should rebut the insistences of historians who claim a singular and paramount role for politics, economics, or religion. Part of that singularity is also a matter of definitions, which need not detain us here.
    Historians and others who write for a popular audience tend to minimize or eliminate the quotations from scholarly tracts and from others in the field. This book does, too, but not always happily. As with
The Cousins’ Wars
a decade and a half ago, and for that matter
The Emerging Republican Majority
forty-five years ago, the frameworks, general theses, and interrelations in this book are mine. However, when it comes to specifics of the new complexity, be they colonial money supplies, local merchant ethnicity and religion, the European munitions trade of 1774–1775, the evolution of Philadelphia Revolutionary committees, or the intramural tensions betweenCoetus and Conferentie in what is now suburban New Jersey, the original spadework is someone else’s. I have drawn on individual historians whose names and writings should add to the credibility of the points made.
    If those names appear mostly in endnotes, I should acknowledge a particular debt to several groups of specialists in American history. One such combines the scholars and writers who have seen a great turning point in 1774’s fierce response to the several Coercive Acts and its culmination in the First Continental Congress. A second related school hypothesizes an accelerating mid-1770s rejection of George III by American colonials—a psychological version of regicide, which helped the public to embrace republicanism over monarchy. This aided a steady 1775–1776 transfer of legitimacy to a new nation, a Congress, and a new framework of thirteen republican states. Yet another small group of scholars identifies 1775 as the bold, daring year from a military as well as popular opinion standpoint. Their conclusions evoke a vivid “spirit of 1775,” not an ebbing “spirit of 1776.” This early confidence was essential.
    A fourth body of opinion explains the American Revolution as a civil war—a clear display of the sort of bitter fratricide in which existing and emerging religious, ethnic, and sectional divisions deepen in both politics and warfare. In 1774, Thomas Jefferson penned his own fears of “civil” war. Then in 1776 he insisted that a united “people” were separating themselves from another “people” in Britain. This book takes the “civil war” position.
    A fifth category includes authors who have examined an opening year, 1774 or 1775, from the standpoint of one province, Massachusetts, Virginia, South Carolina, or Connecticut, where confrontation began early. Titles include
The First American Revolution: Before Lexington and Concord
(profiling Massachusetts in 1774),
1775: Another Part of the Field
(explaining Virginia during that year), and
The South Carolina Civil War of 1775.
8 Doubtless there are others.
    The Book’s Plan
    This volume’s attempt to set out a new view of the United Colonies and how they managed to become the United States is divided into four parts. The structure can be summarized as follows:
    Part I , the
Introduction,
is a single chapter designed to explain what the future United States was like in 1775, what the key events were between the summer of 1774 and the spring of 1776, and how they have been minimizedor even pushed aside by a fixation on 1776. This discussion also previews several of the book’s subjects, from the international gunpowder trade to Samuel Adams’s backstage role in Massachusetts.
    Part II , headed
The Revolution—
Provocations, Motivations, and