THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION OF 1775

Kevin Phillips, 1775: A Good year for Revolution (New York: Viking, 2012) ("The 'financialization' of America--an ill omen I had written about since 1993--helped bring about a crash in 2008, but postcrash politics did not yield the needed far-reaching reform. Finance continued to sit in the catbird seat. Between 2008 and 2012, the relative economic decline of the United States and the shift of influence to Asia moved from theory to reality." Id. at xi. "Taken together, religion and ethnicity offer the best yardsticks of how Americans chose sides in the political and military clashes that became the Revolution. That is true from the Carolina backcountry through the middle colonies to the white-steepled towns of New England. Not that adequate detail can always be found." "Besides which, it's often difficult to disentangle which identity was the motivating factor." Id. at 67. "The ethnic makeup of British North America in 1775 also complicated Patriot enlistment and mobilization. Over one third of the colonists taking up arms for 'the rights of Englishmen' were German, Dutch, Irish, Scottish, or Scot-Irish. Some never assumed that they enjoyed the 'rights of Englishmen,' cherishing instead Old World ties and relationships to Dutch or German state churches (which often made them Loyalists). Ethnic and religious identification were usually central to colonists' views and loyalties, and they cut in many ways." Id. at 69. "[T]he principal wartime yardsticks and decision-making factors for Germans, as for most other colonials, reflected more religion than ethnicity. The latter was frequently interwoven but secondary." Id. at 72. "[W]e can fairly say, based on the patterns of political faction, that religion--though only a collateral cause of the Revolution--played a major role in guiding its political alignments and loyalties." Id. at 73. "[R]oughly a dozen economic circumstances and resentments played a significant role in 1774-1775 and the run up to revolution. [T]he dozen elements cannot be neatly disentangled, and they also frame two of the Revolution's principal regional motivations. In addition ... a catalogue of the war's economic interest groups and constituencies--mercantile, maritime, plantation, professional, speculative, and debt-ridden--puts further emphasis on the Revolution's commercial ingredients." Id. at 92. "Economic constituencies in the American Revolution must weigh in any practical analysis. The very different responses to mercantilism between whale oil producers and irate pig and bar iron makers, for example, suggest less interest in imperial theory than attention to industry-by-industry economics. As for the role of economics in constituency formation, degrees of proof can be found in each of the dozen economic issues that stirred pre-Revolutionary unhappiness. The legal acrimony surrounding 'taxation without representation' fell away quickly enough when nonimportation and nonexportation moved to the forefront in 1774; and whether these measures were constitutional seem to matter hardly at all." Id. at 131. "Let us conclude with the thesis raised earlier: that by taking control of local government, militia structures, and police power across most of the thirteen-colony landscape in 1774-1775, insurgents established the framework that eventually brought success in the War for Independence. In contrast to the naivete that citizen-soldiers must prevail through virtue, this policy represented a steely realpolitik." "The American rebels of 1775, unlike most other popular revolutionaries before or since, enjoyed the rare benefit of beginning their war in control of the local armed forces, the colonial militias. To be sure, during the years or so before April 19, that achievement required foresight, purging, and strong-arming. 'The colonial militia did not simply slide into the Revolution,' according to military historian John Shy. 'Military officers, even where they were elected, held royal commissions, and a significant number of them were not enthusiastic about rebellion. Purging and restructuring the militia was an important step toward revolution, one that deserves more attention than it has received.'" Id. at 160-161. "But any plausible definition of ideology must include an emerging sense of economic frustration." "Another very relevant underlying theme is simply this: The American Revolution was as much a civil war as a revolution. It did not represent one whole people rising against the overlordship of another. Hundreds of thousands in the thirteen colonies sympathized more with Britain than with Congress, and at least as many in Britain wished the rebels well. Here the Revolution resembled the other two major English-speaking civil wars--the English Civil War of the 1640s and the American Civil War of the 1860s. None reflected a nationwide or popular consensus; to the extent, they pitted region against region; and in places, people of one church opposed those of another. But as internecine conflicts, these wars also pitted brother against brother, and neighbor against neighbor. In divided border areas, many people tried to stay neutral. Ideology was not a day-to-day point of reference." Id. at 197. From the bookjacket: "What if the year we have long commemorated as America's defining moment was in fact misleading? What if the real events that signaled the historic shift from colony to country took place earlier, and that the true story of our nation's emergence reveals a more complicated--and divisive--birth process?" "In this major new work, iconoclastic historian and political chronicler Kevin Phillips upends the conventional reading of the American Revolution by puncturing the myth that 1776 was the struggle's watershed year. Mythology and omission have elevated 1776, but the most important year, rarely recognized, was 1775: the critical launching point of the war and Britain's imperial outrage and counterattack and the year during which America's commitment to revolution took bloody and irreversible shape." "Phillips focuses on the great battlefields and events of 1775--Congress's warlike economic ultimatums to king and parliament, New England's rage militaire, the panicked concentration of British troops in militant by untenable Boston, the stunning expulsion of royal governors up and down the seaboard, and the new provincial congresses and many hundreds of local committees that quickly reconstituted local authority in Patriot hands. These onrushing events delivered a sweeping control of territory and local government to the Patriots, one that Britain was never able to overcome. Seventeen seventy-five was the year in which Patriots captured British forts and fought battles from the Canadian frontier to the Carolinas, obtained the needed gunpowder in machinations that reached from the Baltic to West Africa and the Caribbean, and orchestrated the critical months of nation building in the backrooms of a secrecy-shrouded Congress. As Phillips writes, 'The political realignment achieved amid revolution was unique--no other has come with simultaneous ballots and bullets.'" "Surveying the political climate, economic structures, and military preparations, as well as the roles of ethnicity, religion, and class, Phillips tackles the eighteenth century with the same skill and perception he has shown in analyzing contemporary politics and economics. He mines rich materials as he surveys different regions and different colonies and probes how the varying agendas and expectations at the grassroots level had a huge effect on how the country shaped itself. He details often overlooked facts about the global munitions trade; about the roles of Indians, slaves, and mercenaries; and about the ideological and religious factors that played into the revolutionary fervor." "The result is a dramatic account brimming with original insights about the country we eventually became. Kevin Phillips' 1775 revolutionizes our understanding of America's origins." Often, when we think about the American revolution, we emphasis the role of law and lawyers. A focus on 1776 permits us to do this because the "defining" event of that year is, at best, a quasi-legal document: The Declaration of Independence. A focus on the events of the long year of 1775 takes law and lawyers from the center of the stage. In a real sense, there is no "center" stage, numerous factors motivated, spurred, sustained, etc., the American Revolution.).