From my notion template – the money quote from the entire book is

the revolution began, rather than culminated, a long, slow, and incomplete process of creating an American identity and nation.

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The Book in 3 Sentences

1. A very, very detailed account of the Western Hemisphere in the American revolutionary period. What stood out was the detailed accounting of the disease and environmental, both political and natural, factors and a very good accounting of what the world was like at that point. It was a worthy successor to American Colonies

How I Discovered It

The other Alan Taylor books.

Who Should Read It?

Anyone who enjoys world and American history

How the Book Changed Me

How my life / behaviour / thoughts / ideas have changed as a result of reading the book.

• The top things were the concept of wars as a line item, possible then, not so much now, and a very good look at who the players of the revolution were at the time, their incentives, histories and so forth. America was a much more muddled place then than it is now.
• Also – another reminder that Machiavelli basically nailed it with his division of a country being divided into the the people, the aristocracy, and the monarch. That was very much in play in this time period.

Highlights

Only by the especially destructive standards of other revolutions was the American more restrained. During the Revolutionary War, Americans killed one another over politics and massacred Indians, who returned the bloody favors. Patriots also kept one-fifth of Americans enslaved, and thousands of those slaves escaped to help the British oppose the revolution. After the war, 60,000 dispossessed Loyalists became refugees. The dislocated proportion of the American population exceeded that of the French in their revolution. The American revolutionary turmoil also inflicted an economic decline that lasted for fifteen years in a crisis unmatched until the Great Depression of the 1930s. During the revolution, Americans suffered more upheaval than any other American generation, save that which experienced the Civil War of 1861 to 1865.

the revolution began, rather than culminated, a long, slow, and incomplete process of creating an American identity and nation.

In 1775, Benjamin Franklin recalled, “I never had heard in any Conversation from any Person drunk or sober, the least Expression of a Wish for a Separation, or Hint that such a Thing would be advantageous to America.”

By writing of the American Revolution as pitting “Americans” against the British, historians prematurely find a cohesive, national identity. If we equate Patriots with Americans, we recycle the canard that anyone who opposed the revolution was an alien at heart. We also read American nationalism backwards, obscuring the divisions and uncertainties of the revolutionary era. This book refers to the supporters of independence as Patriots and to the opponents as Loyalists, but many more people wavered in the middle, and all were Americans.

Unable to restrain settlers, American leaders needed to help them. By leading, rather than slowing, the process of Indian dispossession, the federal government could gain influence in the West. Jefferson

But the American Revolution generated many conflicting meanings, and some Americans kept alive an alternative, broader vision of revolution that might lead to a “new birth of freedom” in a later generation.

As the imperial wars became global, the “King-in-Parliament” needed cooperation from colonial governments. In a key compromise, the Crown accepted assemblies elected by property-holders as responsible for setting taxes and appropriations within each colony. Most

Rather than thinking of themselves as a distinct new people in America, colonists proudly claimed the status of Britons who lived west of the Atlantic.

As the protector of his subjects and their rights, this king warranted allegiance. Colonists idealized the king as their champion against their Catholic enemies, the French and Spanish, for politics and religion were entangled in colonial culture. By comparison, colonists felt little fondness for Parliament, where they had no representatives. Proud of their British liberty, the colonists looked south and north to see their supposed inferiors in the more authoritarian Spanish and French empires.

Rival empires measured their strength by the range and number of their Indian allies.

Unable to suppress them, the colonial government sought to contain the maroons by paying them bounties for returning more recently escaped slaves.

To the north on the Atlantic coast of the continent, South Carolina (founded in 1670), North Carolina (1712), and Georgia (1733) also produced commodities for export. Too far

In 1701, feeling cheated by the Carolina traders, some Santee natives tried to take their deerskins directly to England by crossing the Atlantic in dugout canoes. Of course, they underestimated the distance and powerful ocean swells, which swamped their open canoes. They were rescued by passing sailors but then promptly sold into slavery: it did not pay to cross Carolinians, whom, a pious visitor insisted, “walk[ed] the straight path to hell.”19

In the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, the Chesapeake colonists imported thousands of enslaved Africans, who comprised 40 percent of the region’s population by 1750.20

In 1713, the British took Acadia from the French and renamed the colony Nova Scotia.

prospering farms attracted immigrants and promoted a higher birth rate and longer life expectancy than in the sickly West Indies to the south, or the colder, northern outposts of the British Empire. As a result, in 1750 four-fifths of British Americans lived in the thirteen colonies of the temperate latitudes on the continent. Those colonies had 1.5 million people compared to a mere 60,000 in French Canada and 10,000 in Louisiana.

After 1700, British America imported 1,500,000 slaves: more than four times the number of white immigrants. The massive escalation of the slave trade produced an unprecedented, transatlantic displacement of people. A brutal business, the slave trade killed a tenth of the enslaved, primarily from disease, during transit across the Atlantic from West Africa. The survivors then suffered the shock of enslavement in a strange and distant land. Separated from friends and kin, they were ordered about in a new language and brutally punished if they balked, resisted, or tried to escape. New masters put the enslaved to work on colonial farms and plantations raising crops for export. Arriving with many distinct languages and ethnic identities, they gradually created new cultures as African Americans.

Three-quarters of the newly enslaved landed in the West Indies, where the sugar plantations were especially profitable but lethal.

Although the West Indies imported more slaves, by 1775 the British mainland colonies had more living slaves, because of their healthier conditions. In continental British America, a fifth of the people were enslaved, with the largest numbers in the Carolina and Chesapeake colonies. Slavery proved less profitable in New England and the middle colonies, where farmers could not raise the more lucrative southern crops: rice, tobacco, indigo, and sugar. The enslaved comprised only 2 percent of the population in New England and 8 percent in the middle colonies, but slavery was legal in every colony, and only Quakers questioned the enslavement of Africans.28

By 1775, Spanish America had more free than enslaved blacks because the Catholic Church promoted manumission in wills, and imperial policy allowed slaves to purchase freedom by hiring out for wages.

Georgia, early settlers bristled when their paternalistic colonial government initially banned slavery as a security threat. The dissidents prevailed under the revealing slogan of “Liberty and Property without restrictions,” for they insisted that white men became fully free by owning blacks. The British offered just one of several formulas for freedom and race in the Americas.

Nothing in the colonies could compare to the teeming metropolis of London, the largest city in Europe and home to 750,000 people.

Thanks to the swelling volume of trade, the colonial economy grew faster than did Britain’s. From just 4 percent of England’s gross domestic product in 1700, the colonial economy blossomed to 40 percent by 1770, assuming greater importance to the empire.

Only the poorest and most rustic people wore homespun; everyone else donned clothing made from imported textiles.

In the mainland colonies, the genteel comprised about one in every twenty free people; the rest were common.

Per the law of coverture, a British colonial woman passed by marriage from legal dependence on her father to reliance on a husband, losing her last name and gaining no civil rights.

A colonial woman usually married in her late teens or early twenties and bore seven to ten children.

On both sides of the Atlantic, Britons insisted that their constitution preserved the liberties of subjects better than in any other realm on earth. Unlike the later American Federal Constitution, the British constitution was not a written document but, instead, a consensus understanding of political institutions and legal precedents.

Conventional thinking insisted that Britain enjoyed a “mixed constitution,” which balanced the three elements of any civilized society: the one (a monarch), the few (aristocrats), and the many (common people).

Common rioters called themselves “regulators,” for they sought to regulate the law rather than destroy it.72

Washington surrendered on July 4, unaware that the date would later assume a happier meaning for him. Fortunately for Washington, the French wanted to prevent a full-scale war, so they disarmed the Virginians and sent them home.

Resistance crumbled, and the victors tortured and executed more than 100 rebels, decorating crossroads with impaled heads as intimidating examples to other slaves. Given a terrible scare, Jamaican planters clung more closely to the empire, petitioning for more redcoats to garrison the colony.

Britons gloated over their global triumphs, but the French exited the war with a leaner and more effective empire, while Britain took on vast debts and expensive new responsibilities. The leading French negotiator, the Duc de Choiseul, boasted that he had burdened the British with future woes.

Within a dozen years of the peace of 1763, a global conflict would erupt from a surprising source: a rebellion by thirteen British colonies along the Atlantic Seaboard of North America. A Briton later recognized that his empire’s triumph in the Seven Years War had borne bitter fruit: “What did Britain gain by the most glorious and successful war on which she ever engaged? A height of Glory which excited the Envy of the surrounding nations and . . . an extent of empire we were equally unable to maintain, defend or govern.” Because of that triumph, the empire would reap a revolution in British America.

Victory had not come cheap, for the conflict nearly doubled the British national debt from a prewar £74 million to a postwar £133 million. During the mid-1760s, servicing that debt consumed £5 million of the empire’s annual budget of £8 million. The government also needed £360,000 annually to sustain 10,000 troops to garrison the conquests in North America.

During the war, British officers and officials had discovered just how prosperous the colonists had become. Yet on a per capita basis, the colonists paid only 1 shilling in tax directly to the empire compared to 26 shillings per capita paid in England.

British hubris was on a collision course with inflated American expectations of a partnership in the empire. Colonists considered themselves “free-born Englishmen” of tried and true loyalty to their king. As British subjects in America, colonial leaders expected the same rights as their counterparts in the mother country. They balked at the label “American” as implying cultural degradation by association with Indians and enslaved Africans.

If denied equality with Britons, colonists feared that they sat on the slippery slope to dependence, dispossession, and even (they claimed) enslavement.

the eighteenth century, the population grew faster in British America than in the mother country. Thanks to abundant land, early marriages, and healthy conditions, the number of colonists doubled every twenty-five years. In 1751, Benjamin Franklin calculated that, within a century, “the greatest number of Englishmen will be on this side of the Water.”

Britons began to think of the colonists as aliens—as Americans—far sooner than did colonists like Franklin who dreamed of a shared empire of equals.

Between 1760 and 1775, 30,000 English, 40,000 Scots, and 55,000 northern Irish (a total of 125,000) moved to British America. During the same period, 12,000 Germans and 85,000 enslaved Africans joined them, raising the total to 222,000. On average, 15,000 immigrants arrived annually, a tripling of the prewar rate.

In February 1764, 500 armed Paxton Boys marched on Philadelphia to intimidate the leaders of Pennsylvania into adopting harsher measures against Indians. On the outskirts of the city, the vigilantes agreed to return home when promised a redress of their grievances. The colony allocated more money for frontier defense and offered bounties for Indian scalps: $134 for a man, $130 for a woman, and $50 for a child. The bounties promoted indiscriminate Indian hunting, for the scalp of a peaceable native told no tales, paid as well, and cost fewer pains to take.

But colonists longed to crush and dispossess native peoples, if only the British would get out of the way.

The proclamation shocked colonists who, after helping to conquer Canada, had expected the British to help them dispossess the Indians in the West.

To further discourage speculative hoarding of wild lands, the Crown required an annual “quit-rent” of 6 pence per acre, which a productive plantation could better afford than could idle lands.

The rest of Florida remained native country largely settled by Seminoles: Creek Indians who had moved south and developed a new identity during the preceding generation.

The warm climate, long growing season, and supposed fertility allured well-connected Britons, including the colony’s governor, General James Grant, and Lord Adam Gordon, who noted that promotional literature had “sett us all Florida mad.”

In 1768, he settled them seventy-five miles south of St. Augustine at a place ominously known as Mosquito Inlet. Changing the name to New Smyrna failed to fool the millions of biting insects who bled the newcomers.

Shocked by harsh conditions and brutal overseers, the servants rebelled and fled, but Governor Grant’s troops captured and returned them. Grant sentenced three to die but pardoned one who agreed to execute the other two. Within seven years of arrival, three-quarters of the immigrants died from a combination of disease, heat prostration, and brutal treatment.

In a single decade, New York’s population more than doubled, from 80,000 in 1761 to 168,000 in 1771.

North Carolina’s population increased sixfold between 1750 and 1775, while Georgia’s grew by a factor of fourteen.

Husband fled north to Pennsylvania, where he adopted the fitting alias of “Tuscape Death.”

Tall, strong, bold, and profane, Ethan Allen led the Green Mountain Boys. Allen denounced the “great state and magnificence” of New York’s “junto of land thieves,” who sought to exploit hardworking settlers by demanding premium prices for frontier land. He insisted that justice favored possession “sealed and confirmed with the Sweat and Toil of the Farmer.” Confronting “Yorkers,” Allen declared “that his name was Ethan Allen, Captain of that Mob, and his authority was his arms, pointing to his gun, that he and his companions were a Lawless Mob, their Law being Mob Law.” After burning a Yorker’s farm, Allen told him: “God Damn your Governour, Laws, King, Council, and Assembly.” Try as he might, Tryon could never catch and hang the Green Mountain Boys, as he had done to the North Carolina regulators. Allen would outlast the governor and lead Vermont to independence during the coming revolution.

Britons considered Indians blessed with perfect freedom or cursed with virtual anarchy.

Unlike most settlers, who insisted on hard and harsh boundaries between the races, Indians believed that they could convert white captives because natives regarded identities as cultural and fluid rather than biological and fixed.

In 1773, the Virginia Gazette insisted, “Not even a second Chinese wall, unless guarded by a million soldiers, could prevent the settlement of the Lands on the Ohio.”

Unable to restrain settlers, British officers hoped that Indians would take bloody revenge on intruders and murderers. In 1765, John Stuart assured Creeks, “We will set up Marks and if any white People settle beyond them we shall never enquire how they came to be Killed.”

To avert war, Hillsborough directed Virginia’s governor to void all surveys and reject all applications for land in the contested zone. Hills- borough also compelled Johnson to reconvene the Haudenosaunee during the summer of 1770 to renounce the cession west of the Great Kanawha, thereby depriving Virginian speculators of 10 million acres in what is now Kentucky. The frustrated Virginians included Patrick Henry, Thomas Jefferson, and George Washington, who resented the empire’s restrictions on their western ambitions. Their anger grew as squatters began to occupy lands denied to speculators. They also feared competition from an immense rival speculation launched in England by Benjamin Franklin.

In London, Franklin recruited wealthy aristocrats and bankers with political clout by promising them fabulous profits from selling fertile lands to settlers. The British partners included Thomas and Richard Walpole, the wealthy and powerful nephews of a late prime minister. The American investors included Franklin’s son, William, who was the royal governor of New Jersey, Sir William Johnson and his leading deputy, George Croghan, and the wealthy Philadelphia merchants Samuel and Thomas Wharton.

General Gage declared, “I wish most sincerely that there was neither Settler nor Soldier in any part of the Indian country.” Instead, the military withdrawal accelerated settlement. By 1774, 50,000 settlers lived beyond the old Proclamation Line, but Gage washed his British hands of the bloodshed that they would provoke: “Let them feel the Consequences, [for] we shall be out of the Scrape.”

a speculator hoped to preempt prime locations from the competition. But overlapping claims soon rendered the Ohio Valley a lawyer’s paradise and a farmer’s lament.

They were led by Richard Henderson, a backcountry judge notorious for greed. Offended by his treatment of squatters and debtors, regulators had burned his house, barn, and stables in 1770. One former debtor, Daniel Boone, proved more forgiving, entering a partnership with Henderson in 1774. A veteran hunter, Boone knew the best routes over the mountains to the finest lands in Kentucky. Folklore casts Boone as a nature-loving refugee from settled civilization; in fact, he helped land speculators fill the forest with farmers.

Most of the settlers were young men of little property and less reputation. Henderson described them as “a set of scoundrels who scarcely believe in God or fear a devil.”

By 1775, the British Empire had lost all credibility and influence in the Ohio Valley. Imperial authority shrank into a few, small forts scattered along the Great Lakes to the north. When

In June 1774, Parliament endorsed Carleton’s proposals by passing the Quebec Act, which broke with the British constitutional tradition that had excluded Catholics from government. Unlike the Irish, Canadian Catholics could own land and serve on the governing council.

While encouraging common buyers, the new policy also promised greater revenue for the Crown: a doubly damning prospect for colonial gentlemen who speculated in lands and sought to keep the empire weak within the colonies.

that his predecessor had taken the wrong side in the colonial land disputes. Replacing Tryon as North Carolina’s governor, Josiah Martin initially agreed that the regulators had gotten their just desserts, but a tour of the backcountry changed his mind. Writing to Hillsborough, Martin explained, “My progress through this Country, My Lord, hath opened my eyes exceedingly.” He concluded that the farmers had “been provoked by insolence and cruel advantages taken of the people’s ignorance by mercenary tricking Attornies, Clerks and other little Officers.” When “the wretched people,” turned to regulation, crafty speculators and county officials used “artful misrepresentations” to deploy the government against common folk.

Turning the tables, Martin sought to build popular support for the empire by mollifying backcountry farmers. In effect, he played the populist card against the leading men who had supported Tryon. Martin pardoned regulators, sacked extortionate officials, and demanded restitution from embezzling sheriffs. A delighted regulator concluded that, because Martin had “given us every satisfaction,” the county cabals “hate [him] as bad as we hated Tryon.” Throughout British America, regulators wishfully believed that a just king favored them against local elites. Martin gave substance to that legend of the protecting king. During the coming revolution, most North Carolina regulators would either support the empire or at least avoid helping the Patriots. On the other hand, North Carolina’s leading Patriots had supported Tryon’s suppression of the regulation.

In April 1766, hundreds of regulators marched on New York City, seeking to free their jailed leader, Samuel Monroe. They turned back when blocked by the city’s militia commanded by merchants and lawyers who also had led the seaport protests against British taxes. A British officer wryly noted that “Sons of Liberty” were “great opposers to these rioters. They are of opinion that no one is entitled to riot but themselves.”

Cherishing the king rather than Parliament, colonial leaders imagined the empire as a federated body of legislatures united only by a shared monarch. A royal governor noted that colonists claimed to live in “perfect States, not otherwise dependent upon Great Britain than by having the same King.” They even petitioned the king to reclaim the power to veto Parliament’s laws: a power that had lapsed during the preceding half century.

To justify resistance, colonists cited political writings by British critics of Parliament. During the 1720s, John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon published eloquent essays, known as Cato’s Letters, in a London newspaper. Suspicious of all power as selfish and malevolent, Trenchard and Gordon insisted that government officials chronically imperiled liberty: “Power is like fire; it warms, scorches, or destroys according as it is watched, provoked, or increased.” By accumulating power, corrupt officials became rich by impoverishing people with heavy taxes. To preserve property and the liberty that it sustained, people needed closely to watch and strictly to limit power. Rather than blame the king, the critics accused his ministers of distorting the will of a benevolent monarch, who sustained the world’s freest constitution. Trenchard and Gordon declared, “We have a constitution that abhors absolute power; we have a king that does not desire it; and we are a people that will never suffer it.”

They insisted that farmers made the best citizens because they sustained “virtue,” which meant the sacrifice of private interests to benefit the community. Such virtue abounded where people were relatively equal in owning productive farmland (or artisans’ shops). The ideal society maximized the number of modest property holders but denied political rights to anyone without independence: women, children, servants, slaves, and wage laborers. Virtue’s corrosive opposite was corruption, the use of money and luxury to render people dependent on others.

Patriots detected a malevolent plot by British leaders to “enslave” the colonists by imposing new taxes and regulations. Boston’s town meeting insisted that “a deep-laid and desperate plan of imperial despotism has been laid, and partly executed, for the extinction of all civil liberty.” That rhetoric struck Britons as so irrational that it must cover a colonial conspiracy by reckless demagogues out to destroy the empire by seeking American independence. Neither plot existed save in the powerful imaginations of political opponents who distrusted one another. A rare moderate on imperial issues, Benjamin Franklin, lamented, “To be apprehensive of chimerical dangers, to be alarmed at trifles, to suspect plots and deep designs where none exist, to regard as mortal enemies those who are really our nearest and best friends, and to be very abusive, are all symptoms of this distemper.”

The Royal Navy added patrols along the North American coast to search merchant ships for smuggled goods. Entitled to a share of what they confiscated, naval officers were highly motivated to seize suspected ships.

To minimize pushback from the colonists, Grenville set their stamp tax at a relatively low level: only two-thirds of what Britons paid. He also stipulated that the money would remain in the colonies to fund the military, and he appointed leading colonists to the lucrative positions selling stamps. Surely, he reasoned, colonists would pay the new tax with no more than the grumbling that had met the Sugar Act.16 Instead, the stamp tax horrified the colonists, who were suffering from a postwar depression in trade. At war’s end, the empire’s military expenditures dried up in the mainland colonies as the British removed troops, sailors, and their subsidies. Meanwhile, demobilized soldiers and sailors poured into the seaports, depressing wages paid for labor. Facing ruin for want of customers, merchants sued their many debtor-customers, who stood to lose their shops and farms for want of specie. Hard-pressed colonists bristled at paying another new imperial tax, no matter how small.

“The rights of parts and individuals must be given up when the safety of the whole shall depend on it . . . in return for the protection received against foreign enemies.” Patriots, however, refused to sacrifice any rights for the benefit of the whole empire.

Hutchinson’s greatest foe was Samuel Adams, the son of a Boston brewer. Unlike the wealthy and restrained Hutchinson, Adams possessed only moderate means but a fierce focus on his political goals. In contrast to his dapper and slender rival, Adams was stocky and shabbily dressed. “I glory in being what the world calls a poor Man,” Adams wrote. Secretive, patient, and cautious, he cultivated popularity as the basis for power. Instead of putting on airs, Adams carefully learned the names and views of shipwrights and other artisans. A leader in Boston’s town meeting, Adams secured appointment as a local tax collector, where he became more popular by neglecting to collect from his neediest supporters. A political rival characterized Adams as “by no means remarkable for brilliant abilities” but “equal to most men in popular intrigue, and the management of a faction. He eats little, drinks little, sleeps little, thinks much, and is most decisive and indefatigable in pursuit of his objects.” Adams aptly described his political strategy as to “keep the attention of his fellow citizens awake to their grievances; and not suffer them to be at rest, till the causes of their just complaints are removed.”

Rather than denounce all of the rich as a predatory class, Patriots encouraged laboring people to focus their animus more narrowly on a few gentlemen who seemed especially menacing because of their imperial connections. Those connections became a liability as people blamed their economic woes on Parliament’s new taxes.

Far from seeking seats in the distant Parliament, colonists simply argued that only their own assemblies could tax them. Pennsylvania’s assemblymen asserted that colonists were “entitled to all the Liberties, Rights and Privileges of his Majesty’s Subjects in Great-Britain,” and it was “the inherent Birth-right . . . of every British Subject, to be taxed only by his own Consent, or that of his legal Representatives.” In Virginia, a fiery young assemblyman, Patrick Henry, declared “that the General Assembly of this Colony have the only and sole exclusive Right and Power to lay Taxes and Impositions upon the Inhabitants of this Colony.”

Loyal to the king, colonists wanted him to intervene and overrule Parliament.

British leaders had expected little resistance from the diverse mainland colonies with their deep suspicions of one another. But the Stamp Act touched a raw nerve, their aversion to taxes imposed by Parliament, so the crisis generated unprecedented intercolonial communication and cooperation.

Despite the Declaratory Act, colonists exulted in news of the repeal and felt renewed pride in an empire apparently ruled by a benevolent king.

The Stamp Act Crisis taught the colonists how to frustrate British measures by combining protest resolutions by elite writers with violent intimidation by common mobs and economic boycotts by everyone. The three forms of resistance worked together. Boycotts required a common front, which intimidation and ostracism helped to produce. In turn, published arguments by leading Patriots vindicated the boycotters and bully boys as defending colonial liberty against a plot by British tyrants.41

Boston’s leading Patriots organized a club known as “the Sons of Liberty.” By early 1766, similar groups had appeared as far south as Georgia. The leaders were respectable tradesmen and merchants, but most had achieved wealth rather than inherited it, and they often worked beside common journeymen and apprentices in their shops or on their wharves.

Familiarity with common men helped to mobilize hundreds of laborers and sailors for mass meetings, parades, and protests. Sons of Liberty proudly declared that their meetings drew “all ranks and condition,” which was a radical development in a political culture where genteel leaders had long excluded the “rabble” from gatherings by the “respectable.”

But their actions tended to discredit the colonial regime as impotent to keep order. The Sons of Liberty increasingly had to fill a vacuum of authority that they helped to create.

A new consensus denied that colonists should pay any tax, external as well as internal, if levied by Parliament.

Washington noted that many a gentleman feared that “an alteration in the System of my living, will create suspicions of a decay in my fortune, & such a thought the world must not harbour.”

The Sons of Liberty sought to shame, isolate, and ruin as “enemies to their country” anyone who violated the boycott.

British officials marveled at the power of extra-legal committees and mobs to compel colonists to forsake their beloved consumer goods.

In the name of liberty, Patriots suppressed free speech, broke into private mail, and terrorized their critics. In Boston in October 1769, a defiant conservative printer, John Mein, revealed that some Sons of Liberty, including John Hancock, covertly imported goods while exploiting the boycott to drive smaller competitors out of business. Mein’s revelations threatened to discredit the boycott, so a mob of a thousand men chased him through the streets, yelling, “Kill him; kill him.” Mein escaped and sailed away for England. In his absence, Hancock bought up debts owed by Mein and used them to seize control of, and shut down, his offending newspaper. Patriots believed only in the liberty of their press.55

Boston mobs continued to menace redcoats, bully importers of British goods, and tar and feather customs informers.

On the night of March 5, 1770, about fifty men and boys gathered to harass seven soldiers guarding the custom house on Boston’s main street by hurling snowballs, chunks of ice, sticks, and rocks while yelling “Kill them.” The captain in charge tried to restrain his men, but they feared for their lives. One fired and the rest followed suit, hitting eleven colonists, five of whom died. Flocking to the scene, hundreds of angry colonists threatened to kill the captain and his men, so Hutchinson ordered them away to Castle William.58 Patriot propagandists turned the tragedy into “the Boston Massacre.” Three-quarters of the town’s inhabitants attended the mass funeral of the victims.

The troops also pulled down a nearby “liberty pole”: a tall post erected as a rallying point for Patriots. When the Sons gathered to counterattack, a massive brawl erupted. Getting the worst of it, soldiers retreated to their fort. While singing “God Save the King,” the Sons of Liberty erected a massive new pole: eighty feet tall, cased in protective iron bands, and topped by a weather-vane inscribed with the word “Liberty.”

Balking at the expense of sending more troops to coerce the colonists, in April 1770, Parliament repealed the Townshend Duties, save for a duty on tea meant to maintain Parliament’s right to tax colonists.

The tax on tea yielded scant revenue because most colonists consumed cheaper tea smuggled in from the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia).

But the Tea Act angered colonial merchants, who stood to lose their profitable business in smuggled tea. They denounced the act as a plot to seduce Americans to sell their liberty for the tea of a British monopoly. This line of attack revived opposition to any tea tax, no matter how small.

In Philadelphia, a Patriot newspaper denounced the chests of tea as “filled with poverty, oppression, slavery, and every other hated disease.” Patriots threatened to turn any colonial collaborators over to “The Committee for Tarring and Feathering,” which persuaded most merchants to reject the company’s tea.

Reversing Patriot rhetoric, Lord Buckinghamshire argued that the issue had become whether the British “were to be free, or slaves to our colonies.”

By crushing resistance in Boston, British leaders sought to save their empire. If deprived of its American colonies, the empire would, they feared, collapse, exposing Britain to domination by the French and Spanish.

Washington insisted that the British meant to “make us as tame & abject Slaves as the Blacks we Rule over with such arbitrary Sway.”

During the 1760s, the colonists imported 365,000 slaves: more than in any preceding ten-year period.

Most of the enslaved lived in the southern, plantation colonies, accounting for 90 percent of the population in the West Indies, 60 percent in South Carolina, and 40 percent in Virginia. But slavery was legal throughout the colonies, including the northern seaports. In Boston in 1761, 1,000 of the city’s 15,000 people were enslaved and only 18 black residents were free. In the mainland colonies as a whole, the enslaved comprised a fifth of the population.

In a particularly obtuse performance, Richard Henry Lee, a wealthy Patriot in Virginia, had his slaves parade around a county courthouse, carrying banners which denounced Parliament’s taxes as “chains of slavery.”

The English writer Samuel Johnson was appalled that colonists likened Parliament’s small new taxes to slavery: “How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?”

Defying efforts to exclude them, blacks joined seaport mobs that attacked officials in the name of liberty. An escaped slave of mixed African and Indian ancestry, Crispus Attucks, died in “the Boston Massacre.”

The legend of a liberating king reflected news of a recent antislavery ruling by England’s highest court in the celebrated case of Somerset v. Stewart. A former customs officer in Boston, Charles Stewart, had brought a slave, James Somerset, to England in 1769. When Stewart subsequently tried to send Somerset away to Jamaica, the slave sued for his freedom with the support of an abolitionist attorney who argued that the enslaved became free when brought to England. In 1772, the chief justice, Lord Mansfield, ruled that slavery had no just basis in “natural law” or in English common law, so it required “positive law,” a statute passed by Parliament, to legitimate the system in England: “It’s so odious, that nothing can be suffered to support it, but positive law.” For want of such a statute, Mansfield ruled that Stewart could not force Somerset to leave the mother country for renewed slavery in a colony. Although technically narrow, Mansfield’s ruling became broadly interpreted as upholding the legal maxim that any slave became free upon setting foot in England, deemed the great land of liberty.

In 1774, most colonists still hoped to stay in the empire while compelling Parliament to rescind the Coercive Acts.

Rural Patriots saw their own grim potential future in the British exploitation of Irish peasants, who lacked political rights, suffered from heavy taxes, and paid rising rents to absentee landlords.

Refusing commissions issued by Gage as governor, rural militia officers answered to local committees and prepared for armed resistance by stockpiling munitions and drilling their young men as “minutemen,” who could rally at a moment’s notice.

But Patriots had hardened their stance against Parliament. In addition to the old insistence that Parliament could not tax colonists, they added that Parliament had no power to legislate for the colonies in any way, not even to regulate trade. Regarding the king as their sole link to the empire, the Patriots would still accept royal governors but would heed no British legislature as superior to any of their own.

For true governance, they wanted only a shared king and their colonial legislatures.

Linked to provincial congresses in each colony and ultimately to Congress, the committees provided new political structures, which initiated a revolution beyond what the delegates had anticipated.

Becoming de facto local governments, the committees took over collecting taxes and managing the militia. Many committees even enforced price controls, inspected merchants’ books, and shunned violators until they publicly confessed and mended their ways.

Acting in the name of liberty, the committees suppressed speech by their critics. The Philadelphia Committee insisted that “no person has the right to the protection of a community or society he wishes to destroy . . . by speeches and writings” which “aid and assist our enemies.” Patriots broke open mail to read letters from suspected critics of Congress. A merchant begged his correspondents to censor their words because “the temper of the people is such that misconstructions are put on the most innocent expressions” by “those who call themselves the Assertors of American Freedom.”

Critics feared that the social upheaval would culminate in a violent anarchy destructive to all property and social order. In New York, Reverend Samuel Seabury concluded, “If we must be enslaved, let it be by a KING at least, and not by a parcel of upstart, lawless committee-men. If I must be devoured, let me be devoured by the jaws of a lion and not gnawed to death by rats and vermin.”

Which is better—to be ruled by one tyrant three thousand miles away or by three thousand tyrants not a mile away? —MATHER BYLES, a Loyalist, 17741

To defeat the British, Patriot gentlemen needed to maximize their popular support, so they promised enhanced respect and opportunities for common men. The Patriot movement created many new leadership roles as committeemen, provincial legislators, and militia officers, which common men often filled.

Merit rather than connections would reap wealth and leadership. But like the paternalism favored by Loyalists, Patriots described an elusive ideal that they often compromised in practice. Interests and connections persisted in the new order, as in the old empire, but in a more egalitarian guise. Those contradictions disgusted some common people, who preferred the elitism of leading Loyalists as more honest and transparent.

The British population of 11 million greatly outnumbered the 2.5 million mainland colonists, and a fifth of the latter were slaves more apt to support the British than help the Patriots. The free colonists were also bitterly divided, for a fifth remained loyal to the empire.

By seeking a commander from Virginia, John and Samuel Adams hoped to consolidate southern support for the siege of Boston. As the largest, most populous, and most powerful colony, Virginia was critical to the Patriot coalition.

Tall, strong, and erect, he looked the masculine part of a commander. Reserved and dignified, he was popular with the other delegates, who preferred to hear the sound of their own voices. “He possessed the Gift of Silence,” recalled John Adams, who did not.

Because rifles were slower to load and quicker to jam, most soldiers, American as well as British, fought as infantry with smoothbore muskets. Only by firing in massed volleys could troops compensate for the relative inaccuracy of their muskets. To achieve group cohesion and a rapid pace of fire required months of drilling, which did not sit well with Americans.

Britain retained the loyalty of half of their empire in America, for fourteen colonies rejected the rebellion embraced by thirteen. While the Patriot cause prospered in the thickly settled mainland colonies, it withered along the northern and southern margins, where Anglophones were few and needed British military aid. East and West Florida, for example, were sparsely settled, depended on British subsidies, and relied on redcoats for protection against Indians and the Spanish in nearby Louisiana. Both colonies also lacked newspapers and active legislatures (West Florida’s assembly did not meet for six years after 1772) to agitate the public.

The empire could pressure West Indian assemblies by threatening to withdraw troops, while it had to send redcoats to cow the mainland colonists.

Southern mainland planters also sustained slavery, but they felt more threatened than protected by the British Empire. They also felt more secure in resisting the naval power of the empire because of the vast hinterland of their continental setting. Where whites were less than a tenth of the West Indian population, they accounted for 60 percent of the people in the southern mainland colonies. North American planters could rally thousands of common whites as militiamen to watch slaves and resist British rule. West Indians, however, could neither resist the redcoats (and Royal Navy) nor do without their protection.

Dunmore’s threat to free and arm the enslaved began as a bluff, meant to spook Virginians into passivity, for he did not wish to ruin the plantation economy of a colony that the British hoped to recover. But the Patriot coup in Williamsburg called that bluff, forcing Dunmore to convert his bluster into black soldiers. He also recognized the military potential of the many runaway slaves who sought haven on his warships during the summer and fall.

Rather than recognize that runaways indicted the slave system, Virginians concocted their own wishful legend: that Britons lured away slaves to resell them in the West Indies, where they would suffer far more than in Virginia. If the British were frauds instead of liberators, the enslaved should cling to their masters as protectors rather than flee from them as exploiters. Masters assembled their slaves to warn of their West Indian peril and invite their renewed commitment to servitude in Virginia.

In the South, the enslaved sought a greater revolution, for they meant to “Alter the World” and regarded Britons, rather than Patriots, as the better champions of true liberty. Although the British performance as liberators lagged far behind the wishful hopes of the enslaved, they could find no better ally.

The catastrophe in Canada had cost 5,000 Patriot soldiers, either dead or captured. A British officer mocked the Patriots for offering “a resistance . . . as flimsy & absurd as were their Motives for taking up Arms against their Sovereign.”

Many moderate Patriots as well as Loyalists still revered the mixed constitution of Britain and cherished the commercial benefits of the empire. In April 1776, Franklin observed, “The Novelty of the Thing deters some, the Doubt of Success others, [and] the vain Hope of Reconciliation, many.” But he also noted “a rapid Increase of the formerly small Party who were for an independent Government.”

That shift in opinion owed much to an unlikely man, Thomas Paine. Hard-drinking, self-educated, cranky, and restless, Paine had accomplished little during the previous thirty-seven years of his checkered life. The son of a poor artisan, Paine had lost his job as an excise tax collector in England in 1774, the same year that his marriage crumbled and creditors auctioned his paltry household goods to pay his debts. At rock bottom, Paine sought a new start by migrating to the colonies. Arriving in Philadelphia in November 1774, he embraced the Patriot cause and became the chief writer and editor of the Pennsylvania Magazine. His forceful prose impressed Dr. Benjamin Rush, a leading Patriot who recruited Paine to publish a political pamphlet against reconciliation.66 On January 10, 1776 in Philadelphia, Paine published Common Sense, which became the most powerful pamphlet in American history. The first edition of 1,000 copies sold out within two weeks. By June, reprints raised the total to 150,000 copies: a phenomenal impact for a public of only 2.5 million people, a fifth of them slaves. Many more colonists read excerpts from Common Sense in their local newspapers or heard it read aloud in taverns and streets. Except for the Bible, no written work had ever been so widely read and discussed in British America.

For Paine, style was also substance, for he sought to constitute a new readership: a broad and engaged public for a republican revolution. He insisted that common people should no longer defer to gentlemen in politics. Aptly titled, Common Sense spoke to and for common people.

Paine pushed for immediate independence, a union of thirteen states, and republican governments for those states. All three goals broke dramatically with past experience and received wisdom. No colonies in the Americas had yet revolted from their mother empire; past bickering by the colonies augured poorly for a union; and almost all former republics in Europe had been small, contentious, and short-lived. In a daring stroke, Paine argued that Americans could triumph by combining all three gambles: on independence, union, and republic. Seeking one alone would certainly fail, but the combination would prove invincible. If united in a righteous cause, he insisted, Americans could crush the corrupt mercenaries of a royal tyrant.

He elevated the Patriot struggle in utopian and universal terms. By winning republican self-government, Americans could create an ideal society of peace, prosperity, and equal rights. That conspicuous success would, in turn, inspire common people throughout the world to seek freedom either through revolution at home or by migrating to America, “an asylum for mankind.” Paine concluded, “The cause of America is in a great measure the cause of all mankind. . . . The birth-day of a new world is at hand.”

Americans now take this soaring rhetoric for granted, but it was new and radical for colonists who had long felt self-conscious about their parochial and provincial status.

Loyalists retorted in their own pamphlets, principally James Chalmers’s Plain Truth, which defended the mixed constitution as “the pride and envy of mankind.” But Loyalist writers struggled to reach readers because Patriots seized and burned most of the opposition’s pamphlets.

Adams delighted in the “high tone and the flights of Oratory with which [the Declaration] abounded.” He later added, “The Declaration of Independence I always considered as a Theatrical Show.” Congress forwarded printed copies to state officials with directions to proclaim and circulate. At 1,337 words, it fit on one long, printed page—a broadside—which proved convenient for posting on the doors of public buildings and the walls of taverns. Newspapers reprinted the Declaration, magistrates proclaimed it at county courthouses, and clergymen announced it from their pulpits. Washington had his officers read the Declaration to their assembled troops.

In New York City on July 9, Patriots toppled the great equestrian statue of George III and melted its lead to make 40,000 bullets to shoot at redcoats. In that blow for liberty, the Patriots employed slaves to tear down the statue.

By declaring independence, Congress gave the conflict greater clarity and raised its stakes. No longer were Patriots absurdly fighting in the king’s name against his Parliament. Instead, they defended an American union of republican states. A Delaware man observed, “I could hardly own the King and fight against him at the same time, but now these matters are cleared up. Heart and hand shall move together.”

More than 700 people signed a “declaration of dependence” affirming their loyalty to the empire. In a proclamation, Howe promised to restore the “free enjoyment of their Liberty and Properties upon the true Principles of the Constitution.”

At least 5,000 men accepted British pardons. The defectors included Richard Stockton, a signer of the Declaration of Independence. Washington grimly understood that the people “will cease to depend upon or support a force, from which no protection is given to them.”

The Patriots suffered no dead and only three wounded to take 948 prisoners in Washington’s first significant battlefield victory of the war.

But Washington understood better than Howe that victory hinged on who could endure a long, hard, and bitter struggle.

abilities. The British writer Horace Walpole described Burgoyne as a “vain, very ambitious man with a half-understanding which was worse than none.”

While Howe won the showy battles, Washington was winning a war of attrition as the British lost men whom they could ill afford to replace. His friend General Nathanael Greene, noted: “We cannot conquer the British force at once, but they cannot conquer us at all. The limits of the British government in America are their out-sentinels,” for they lacked enough committed Loyalists to hold the ground that Howe passed over.

An adept political infighter, Washington built a powerful “interest” among officers and in Congress. Underestimating Washington was a fool’s errand.

Two thousand men, nearly a fifth of the army, perished that winter from a debilitating combination of filth, exposure, malnutrition, and disease.

Admiring Washington’s persistent soldiers, Steuben marveled that no European army would have held together under such suffering.

The Patriot diplomats in Paris included Benjamin Franklin, a famed scientist and talented writer, who made the most of his international celebrity. During the early 1770s in London, Franklin had taken pains to appear wealthy and genteel, but in Paris he shrewdly cultivated a new persona as the plain and honest American of simple but dignified clothes and manners. He deftly appealed to the French fashion for romanticizing America as a land of purer simpletons, early versions of Jerry Lewis. Taken with Franklin, the French mass-produced his image on engravings, medallions, busts, and statuettes.

Shocked by France’s alliance with the Patriots, Lord North sought reconciliation with the Patriots in early 1778. Responding to North’s urgent lobbying, Parliament reluctantly rescinded the Coercive Acts of 1774 and promised to exempt colonists from parliamentary taxation forever (save for duties to regulate trade). In return, Patriots would have to demobilize their army, abandon the French alliance, and restore colonial governments with royal governors.

If offered in 1774, the concessions would have resolved the American crisis short of war. By 1778, however, Patriots would accept no dependence, however limited, on the empire. Clinging to independence and the French alliance, Congress refused to meet with the Carlisle commissioners.

Morris’s threats seemed credible thanks to a real terrorist, a young Scot named James Aitken but commonly known as “John the Painter” because John was his alias and he worked as a house painter. Aitken had spent two years in British America, initially as an indentured servant in Virginia, but he had returned to England in the spring of 1775 just as the war began. Short, slim, hard-drinking, and prickly, he wanted revenge against the many English who mocked his poverty and stutter. He hoped to return to a hero’s welcome in America after burning Royal Navy dockyards in Britain. In 1776, he visited Paris to pitch his plan to Silas Deane, who provided some encouragement and money. In late 1776 and early 1777, Aitkin set fires that damaged the Portsmouth dockyard and the city of Bristol, which spread public terror via the newspapers through England. Arrested in January, he was tried, convicted, and executed in March at the age of twenty-four. Hoisted in an iron gibbet, his rotting body hung for years as a warning to others at the entrance to Portsmouth Harbor on the Channel coast.

The entry of the French and Spanish (and later the Dutch) escalated the conflict into a world war. Facing attacks on colonies and shipping around the globe, the British no longer could concentrate troops and warships in North America to suppress the rebellion. Instead, they had to divert military resources to defend Gibraltar and Minorca, the West Indian sugar colonies, the slaving entrepot at Senegal, and the East India Company’s holdings in India.

A more dreaded draft consigned men to the Continental Army for three or more years. Draftees received a notice: “This is to inform you [that you] are this evening drafted as one of the Continental men to go to General Washington’s headquarters, and you must go or find an able bodied man in your Room, or pay a fine of twenty pounds in law[ful] money in twenty-four hours.” A prosperous conscript paid the fine or hired a substitute, but poor men had no choice but to serve or run away.

A French officer noted that Continental regiments “were composed entirely of vagabonds and paupers; no enticement or trick could force solid citizens to enlist as regulars.”55 Apprentices, transients, beggars, drunks, slaves, and indentured immigrants abounded among the new recruits, as communities thrust military duty on marginal men. A Continental officer described most of his recruits as “only Food for Worms . . . hungry, lean faced Villains.”

For want of gold and silver, Congress and the states printed millions of paper dollars, which rapidly depreciated toward worthlessness. A pound of beef cost 4 cents in 1777 but $1.69 three years later.

Soldiers also could band together to go on strike, which officers called “mutiny.” During mutinies, enlisted men refused to do duty until satisfied for their grievances, or they could march away as regiments bound for home. Rare in the early, active years of the northern war, mutinies became more common between 1779 and 1781. Soldiers usually mutinied during the winter or spring: the hungriest seasons of their service. Rather than embroiling the entire army, mutinies were sporadic and involved regiments from the same state. Not yet thinking of themselves as Americans, soldiers lacked bonds and trust across state lines. Officers relied on the animosities and prejudices between states to suppress mutinies. During the spring of 1780, when Connecticut regiments went on strike, Pennsylvania troops forced them to submit.

The post-1776 Continental Army belied the myth of heroic citizen-soldiers putting down the plow to pick up their muskets and win the war. In fact, a small regular army of poor men sustained the Patriot cause by enduring years of hard duty and public neglect.

Women even collected urine in chamber pots to help produce saltpeter, an essential but scarce component for making gunpowder.

Feeding Arnold’s resentments, Peggy urged him to seek greater justice and rewards with the British. She helped him open a covert correspondence with Major John André, who had been her friend during the British occupation of Philadelphia and later became General Clinton’s spymaster. Through intermediaries, Arnold, André, and Clinton reached a deal in August 1780, when Arnold obtained a new command: of West Point, the pivotal fortification in the Patriot defenses on the Hudson River north of New York City. In return for betraying the garrison and embracing Loyalism, Arnold would receive a whopping £20,000 payment, a lifetime pension of £500 annually, and a commission and command as a major general in the British service. Clinton hoped that such a high-profile defection would discredit Congress and initiate a cascading series of conversions that would doom the revolution. With Arnold’s help, Clinton predicted that “the Rebellion would end suddenly in a Crash.”

Delivering himself but not his post, Arnold received a cut-rate price from the British: £6,000 instead of £20,000. Still, he made more money from his service than did any other American general during the war.

Left behind by her fleeing husband, Peggy gave a masterful, wailing performance of utter shock and raving depression, which fooled Washington and his gallant officers, who pronounced her innocent of everything but great beauty. She left West Point for her father’s home in Philadelphia but later slipped away to join her husband in New York.87

Clinton had hoped that Arnold’s betrayal would discredit the Patriot cause and promote mass defections. Instead, the Patriots spun Arnold’s betrayal as the consummate, but selfish and isolated, act of treason.

Revolutions breed civil wars: triangular struggles in which two sides compete for civilian support. British leaders wishfully believed that most colonists were Loyalists temporarily cowed by a minority of brazen and bullying rebels. “I may safely assert,” General Howe reported, “that the insurgents are very few, in comparison with the whole of the people.” Although committed Patriots were a minority outside of New England in 1775, Howe confused the colonial majority, which preferred to remain neutral, with committed Loyalists, who, in fact, were a minority even smaller than the Patriots.

John Adams famously calculated that, at the start of the revolution, “We were about one third Tories, one third timid and one third true Blue.” Adams overestimated the Loyalist proportion, which probably peaked early at a fifth of the population or about half the proportion of Patriots. He also undercounted the wavering, who comprised about two-fifths of the people.

Patriots demanded far more from common people than Parliament ever had.

we suggest that individuals made quick and definitive decisions based on political principles. Some did, but many more committed slowly, reluctantly, and provisionally. In one North Carolina county, the vaguely divided militiamen decided to cast their united lot based on the result of a fistfight between a Loyalist and a Patriot.

In the most common pattern, Loyalists belonged to local minorities who feared living in a republican society where a distrusted majority could dominate them. Unpopular and harassed by their neighbors, the Scots in North Carolina and Virginia rallied to the king as their protector. Anglicans and Quakers dreaded falling under the sway of their more numerous Congregationalist and Presbyterian rivals, who were early and staunch Patriots.

During the period 1774 to 1776, Patriots seized control of almost all the printing presses and militia units. As in other revolutions, a committed and organized minority led the way, demanded that others follow, and punished those who balked. In a hard fight against a powerful empire, Patriots refused to tolerate doubters and critics in their midst.

After partially scalping Brown, they carted him through the streets for public ridicule. By abusing and shaming Loyalists as despised outsiders, rituals of intimidation helped draw wavering neighbors into the Patriot ranks.

Thanks to superior communication and coordination across counties and colonies, Patriots could bring overwhelming force to bear on pockets of disaffection.

Meanwhile, farms and families suffered from the incarceration of a father or son. When released, a Loyalist often returned home to find it looted and burned and his family scattered. Some courts had Loyalists branded on the face or cut off their ears so that Patriots could recognize enemies in their midst.

A Patriot officer confessed, “Any Army, even a friendly one, if any can be called so, are a dreadful Scourge to any People—you cannot conceive what Devastation and Distress mark their Steps.” General Greene considered it “impossible to carry on a war without oppressing the inhabitants.”

And Patriots were masterful at turning enemy brutalities into vivid stories to demonize the British. Possessing less skilled polemicists and fewer printing presses, Loyalists faltered in the competition to convert atrocities into compelling propaganda.

For hanging Loyalists after quick, mock trials, Colonel Charles Lynch of Virginia turned his name into a verb.

While the invaders drew upon runaways for recruits, Patriots would have to reserve men to guard their slaves, reducing the troops available to resist invasion. With the threat of blacks and Indians, the British hoped to intimidate southern Patriot leaders into quick submission. John Stuart, the British Indian agent, had noted, “Nothing can be more alarming” to southern whites “than the Idea of an Attack from Indians and Negroes.”

In late 1778, General Clinton began the southern invasion by sending 3,000 troops in ships from New York to Georgia. The weakest and most vulnerable of Patriot states, Georgia had a long frontier with native peoples, and the small free population of about 18,000 feared their 15,000 slaves.

By the end of the war, blacks comprised a tenth of the Continental Army, serving at a rate double that of their proportion in the northern population.

wealth.” Despite his private qualms about the plan, Washington similarly assured John, “I must confess that I am not at all astonished at the failure of your Plans. That Spirit of Freedom, which at the commencement of this contest would have gladly sacrificed everything to the attainment of its object, has long since subsided and every selfish Passion has taken its place.” The long, hard war had amplified Americans’ vices at the expense of their virtue.

His men were hungry and unnerved by the summer heat, leading Gates to lament, “Our Army is like a dead whale upon the Sea Shore—a monstrous Carcass without Life or Motion.”

Where British atrocities stiffened Patriots’ resistance, their cruelties spooked the Loyalists, a difference which predicted who would ultimately win the partisan war in the backcountry. A Patriot exulted, “The tories, who after the defeat of Genl. Gates had a full range, are chased from their homes, hunted thro’ the woods and shot with as much indifference as you would a buck.”

Despite the setback on his western flank, Cornwallis pressed deep into North Carolina in pursuit of the Continentals under a new commander: Nathanael Greene. A self-educated and genial former blacksmith from Rhode Island, Greene had a surprising self-confidence that impressed his men and superiors, especially Washington, who became his great patron. No general in the war, not even Washington, could do more with less than Greene, a talent which served the Patriots very well indeed in the embattled South.

The raiders captured munitions and seven state legislators, including Daniel Boone, who represented Virginia’s county in Kentucky.

Plain folk bristled when wealthy planters exempted themselves, their sons, and overseers from militia duty so that they could stay home to guard the enslaved. A common farmer complained, “The Rich wanted the Poor to fight for them, to defend their property, whilst they refused to fight for themselves.”

Desperate for fodder and food, both armies stole from civilians, ruining hundreds of farms and impoverishing thousands of people. On both sides, officers reasoned that any resources left behind would only fall to the enemy. But the worst looting and killing derived from the vicious competition of irregular partisans. Rarely paid, they sought compensation in plunder, which discouraged morality and restraint. They assassinated foes, executed prisoners, and looted and burned the homes of civilians caught in the middle. A Patriot partisan recalled victory in a skirmish where “Not one [Loyalist was] taken prisoner—for that occurred but seldom, the rifle usually saved us that trouble.” Both sides applied to whites the cruelties previously practiced in frontier war against Indians.

At night, both sides attacked houses to kill helpless, sleeping foes in their beds or to haul them out for brutal floggings that could become fatal. Hundreds of desperate families became “Outlyers,” abandoning their homes to live in hovels secreted in forests or swamps. A North Carolinian reported, “Fear of being called into the militia has driven many to hide in the woods, [and] as they have nothing on which to live they resort to highway robbery.” Bandit gangs added to the chaos by preying upon everyone.

Initially so promising, the British bid to conquer the South withered as they alienated most of the white people, including many formerly inclined to Loyalism. The superiority of Patriot partisans also swayed the wavering majority. Cornwallis complained, “Colonel [Francis] Marion had so wrought on the minds of the people, partly by the terror of his threats and cruelty of his punishments, and partly by the promise of plunder, that there was scarcely an inhabitant between the Santee and Pedee [rivers], that was not in arms against us.” Marion’s mood was not improved when Loyalists captured and executed his son.

Patriot raiders burned fifteen more towns in March 1781. Burning out Indians proved wildly popular with southern settlers, who rallied to the Patriots and despised the British. Cherokees

served the Patriot cause better as enemies than they could have as allies.

This violent redistribution of the enslaved disrupted their families and communities—dividing relatives and friends forever. By flirting with Indians, bandits, and runaways, the British unwittingly alienated most white southerners, who defended private property and white supremacy by rallying to the Patriots.

Although unreliable when thrust into combat with regulars, Patriot militiamen were plenty good at suppressing their Loyalist counterparts.

Despite some showy, early victories, the British forces were big enough to spread chaos but far too small to restore peace.

The Patriot cause merged a frontier hunger for Indian land with a dread of British power. Colonists feared confinement within a boundary patrolled by savage warriors allied to a domineering empire.

In the east, where Indians lived in poverty and small enclaves enveloped by settlements, Patriots demanded their armed support. Bowing to that pressure, southern New England’s Indians sent men to fight and die for the Patriot cause. Indeed, a greater proportion of enclave natives served in Patriot forces than did their white neighbors. Similarly situated in the Carolinas, Catawbas fought beside, and caught slaves for, the Patriots. By serving as allies, eastern natives sought Patriot protection for their enclaves. Instead, they suffered especially heavy casualties, which emboldened white neighbors to grab more native land.

No matter how little the British did to help Indian raids, they bore the blame so skillfully cast by Patriot writers.

Renowned as fertile, Kentucky attracted hundreds of settlers in 1775–1776, just as revolution disrupted the empire.

Exploiting Henderson’s unpopularity, Virginia’s Patriot governor, Patrick Henry, organized Kentucky into counties, appointed magistrates and militia officers, and promised generous land grants at bargain prices.

The Spanish had to proceed carefully because of their weakness in Louisiana. Sprawled along the entire western side of the Mississippi River, the colony stretched across the Great Plains to the Rocky Mountains to include about 828,000 square miles. But Spain had only 500 soldiers and 30,000 colonists: about an eighth of the native numbers within that vast expanse.

Most of the colonists lived in two modest clusters on Louisiana’s eastern margin in the Mississippi Valley. The main cluster occupied the lower river around the capital and seaport at New Orleans. In upper Louisiana, a secondary set of settlements emerged at the confluence of the Mississippi, Missouri, and Ohio Rivers (in the future state of Missouri) with St. Louis as the primary town. Most of the colonists were Francophones who had lingered after the colony’s transfer from French to Spanish rule in 1763. Enslaved Africans comprised the second-largest group. The Spanish-speaking minority consisted primarily of newcomers from the Canary Islands, who settled along the river below New Orleans.

His armed force included more than 400 free blacks, whom the Spanish more readily employed as soldiers than did either Britons or Patriots.

With the conquest of West Florida, Spain dominated the entire Gulf of Mexico.

During the 1770s, Spanish officials tripled their sales tax and applied it, for the first time, to coca, which Peruvian natives depended on to cope with the cold and thin air of their mountainous region.

Although well educated as a Jesuit, José Gabriel Condorcanqui Noguera claimed descent from the Incan royal line and adopted the regal name of Tupac Amaru.

cracked in 1769 under the strain of fighting elusive Indians on the northern frontier. One night, Gálvez burst from his tent to announce a plan to “destroy the Indians in three days simply by bringing 600 monkeys from Guatemala, dressing them like soldiers, and sending them against” the natives. He then assumed, in succession, the identities of Moctezuma, the king of Sweden, St. Joseph, and finally God. But none of them could defeat the Indians. The viceroy decided that Gálvez needed to rest and recuperate. Two years later, he sailed back to Spain and won promotion to Secretary of the Indies, the cabinet post responsible for American policy. Madness in America was no bar to power in Spain.

Faster and nimbler than bison, mounted men armed with bows could maneuver and attack with deadly skill. By killing more bison, the Great Plains natives became better fed, clothed, and housed. Enriched by meaty protein, they raised the tallest children on the continent, taller even than the relatively well-fed people of the United States. The alluring combination of horses and bison drew more native nations to relocate onto the Great Plains. Coming from either the Rocky Mountains to the west or the Mississippi Valley to the east, the newcomers included Osages, Comanches, Cheyennes, Arapahos, Blackfeet, and the especially numerous peoples known to others as the Sioux and to themselves as Lakotas or Dakotas.

Moving southeastward out of the Rocky Mountains, Comanches drove out, killed, or captured their predecessors on the southern plains, primarily peoples known to outsiders as Apaches. Determined to keep their enemies weak, Comanches blocked efforts by French gun traders to push through to deal with desperate Apaches. By 1800, Comanches had grown in number to 20,000—twice as many as all other native peoples on the southern plains and more than the Hispanics of Texas and New Mexico.

Smallpox was deadlier for natives than for Euro-Americans, and people in the close quarters of an earth-lodge village suffered greater losses than did the nomads of dispersed and transient encampments. Often an epidemic affected everyone in a village, so that victims had no one to care for them.

By scalping their diseased foes, victors unwittingly carried away the virus to afflict their own friends and kin. The epidemic probably halved the native population of the Great Plains between 1779 and 1783.75

A commanding admiral tried to coordinate his vessels by means of signal flags from his “flagship,” but the signals often produced confusion during battle

He obtained a commission from Congress in 1776 and raided the Scottish port of Whitehaven in April 1778.

The French and British valued their West Indian colonies more than anything on the North American continent. Sugar cane raised by slave labor enriched planters and the merchants who transported sugar and rum to Europe. Taxes on slave imports and sugar exports generated greater revenue for the rival empires than any other colonial trade.

For the rest of the conflict, the empire sent more reinforcements to the Caribbean than to North America.

The 15 percent annual loss of troops to disease in the West Indies exceeded the 6 percent of those serving in New York or the 1 percent in Canada.

The French and Spanish could sustain larger forces in the Caribbean in part because they more readily enlisted and armed free blacks. These empires also had more free blacks to recruit because the Catholic church and their laws encouraged manumissions.

More pragmatic in tincturing their racism, the Spanish and French recognized that an armed and intermediary caste of free blacks tended to secure, rather than imperil, the slave system.

Cornwallis also crippled British prospects by accepting surrender terms that denied his Loyalist troops the protection of prisoner-of-war status. Unlike the redcoats, Loyalists taken at Yorktown risked harsh punishment, even execution, as deserters and traitors by the Patriots. News of Cornwallis’s indifference shocked and demoralized Loyalists elsewhere.

Giddy with relief, the British public erupted in celebration at the news, particularly the capture of de Grasse and his massive flagship, which multiplied the impression made by the victory. Jamaica’s merchants, planters, and legislators funded an octagonal stone temple to house a neoclassical statue of the heroic Rodney. Medals, ballads, poems, pottery, and prints celebrated him as the greatest of British admirals. “Rodney Forever” became the hit song that summer in London.

Instead of the looter who helped to lose America, Rodney became the hero who saved the more important colonies in the West Indies. The Crown promoted him to the aristocracy as a baronet and awarded a lifetime, annual pension of £2,000. His former critics in Parliament joined in extolling the admiral. Lacking such acclaim, Sir Henry Clinton (rather than Rodney) bore the blame for the debacle at Yorktown because empires need scapegoats as well as heroes.

During the 1760s and 1770s, India grew in importance to the empire as a prime source of commerce and revenue. While native princes controlled the interior, the British held four colonies on the coast: Bombay on the west and Bihar, Bengal (including the overall capital of Calcutta), and Madras on the eastern shore. The empire entrusted their management to the East India Company, which appointed an overall governor-general. Unlike in North America, British settlers were few and redundant in distant and crowded India, so several hundred officials and soldiers relied on thousands of native collaborators to run the colonies. Based in seaports, the East India Company projected power into the interior through military alliances with some princes at the expense of others in a divide-and-conquer strategy. Claiming paternalistic motives, officials insisted that British rule in India protected the Hindu majority from brutal Muslim princes and rapacious French interlopers.

Weak and dependent on French aid, Congress dutifully instructed its diplomats “to undertake nothing in the negotiations for peace or truce” without informing French leaders to secure their “concurrence, and ultimately to govern yourselves by their advice and opinion.” To further restrain Adams, Congress added Benjamin Franklin, John Jay, Henry Laurens, and Thomas Jefferson to the peace commission (but Jefferson declined to go).

By keeping the British in Canada, Vergennes also hoped to perpetuate their frictions with the Americans, who would then have to cling to their alliance with France. “But you will agree, Monsieur,” Vergennes assured a French diplomat, “that this way of thinking ought to be an impenetrable secret from the Americans. It would be a crime that they would never pardon.” But Vergennes would soon find that Americans were his superiors at deception.

In theory, Ireland was an independent kingdom, but its monarch was the British king, and his ministers controlled civil, military, and judicial appointments. Thousands of occupying redcoats dominated the Irish and served as a reserve for deployment overseas in an emergency. Although Catholics comprised three-quarters of the people, they were denied political and property rights. Most were poor laborers and peasants who rented small farms and cottages from Anglican landlords. Presbyterian dissenters prevailed in Ulster (in northern Ireland), and they also resented domination by the Anglican elite based in Dublin. Anglicans owned 90 percent of the land and held almost all government offices, military commissions, and seats in the Irish Parliament, which had less autonomy than a colonial assembly.

Of course, Adams resented the restraining instructions from Congress: “Those Chains I will never wear.” Wearied by Adams’s insistent fears, Franklin characterized him as “always an honest Man, often a wise one, but sometimes and in some things absolutely out of his Senses.”

In late October, Adams and Jay decided to deal directly with the British without consulting Vergennes. To their surprise, Franklin accepted that negotiating strategy. By pursuing distinct and secret negotiations with the British, the commissioners sought the best possible deal, but they did so in defiance of their instructions from Congress.

The war also doubled France’s national debt, creating a fiscal crisis that compelled the king to summon the long-suspended Estates-General, the French parliament. In 1789, that parliament initiated a revolution that destroyed the French monarchy and sucked Europe into a massive new war, which proved especially disastrous for the Spanish.

Likening the empire to an edifice, Lord Macartney declared that without America “the building not only looks much better but is a great deal stronger.”

West Indian planters denounced new imperial restrictions on the slave trade and slavery as attacks on the rights of property. Many regretted that they had not joined the revolution by their fellow slaveholders in North America. But the islanders had lacked that option given their dependence on the British market for their sugar and on the Royal Navy for protection. They were stuck when the empire abolished the slave trade in 1807 and emancipated the slaves during the 1830s.

In one late skirmish, John Laurens died in a reckless charge into a Loyalist ambush outside Charles Town. The Patriot champion of black enlistment and emancipation was shot by runaway slaves in the British service.

Militia victories culminated in many executions, and the heads of dead maroons decorated poles erected outside county courthouses in Georgia and South Carolina.

At the end of the war, Virginia had 236,000 slaves, up from the 210,000 at the start.

Thousands of former slaves sought havens within the British Empire, initially in Nova Scotia and later in West Africa.

Hamilton urged Washington to lead the army’s demand for the nationalist program, but the general balked, lest he “open the flood Gates of Civil discord” that would “deluge our rising Empire in Blood.” Washington preferred to wait and trust the states eventually to do right by soldiers and officers.

If Congress ever did make good on the certificates, most payments would benefit the speculators who bought them from desperate soldiers in 1783.15

But civilians filled the hall and gallery of the statehouse to watch Washington resign. He aptly described his performance as theatrical: “Nothing now remains, but for the actors of this mighty Scene to preserve a perfect unvarying consistency of character through the very last act; to close the Dramma with applause, and retire from the Military Theatre.” An impressed congressman praised the “solemn and affecting spectacle.” Washington projected a dignified and selfless devotion to the republican cause: a precious rarity among his squabbling countrymen. John Adams later described Washington’s performance as “Shakespearean” and praised his “Excellence in Dramatic Exhibitions.”

He got support from London’s abolitionists, led by Granville Sharp, who organized the Sierra Leone Company to found a West African colony as a haven for free blacks. The abolitionists funded Peters to recruit black colonists with assurances of generous land grants and political equality. The company leaders promised, “No distinction is to be made, between them & the Whites.”

Alluringly named Freetown, the colonial capital had, by 1796, four hundred homes on a grid of nine streets. The black colonists relied upon an emotional, evangelical faith that distinguished them from their white neighbors, who were often transported criminals. A governor noted, “While the white inhabitants are roaring with strong drink at one end [of Freetown], the Nova Scotians are roaring out hymns at the other.”

That ground proved slippery. When Burke discharged a former Loyalist and accused horse thief for lack of evidence, a furious mob rushed in, seized the suspect, and hanged him in front of the courthouse door. This postwar violence troubled some elite Patriots as a threat to social order. Nathanael Greene denounced the “intolerance to persecute men for opinions which, but twenty years before, had been the universal belief of every class of society.”

Eight thousand refugees went to Britain, which one called “The Isle of Liberty and Peace.” But most of them struggled with drenching rain, bitter poverty, a high cost of living, cultural disorientation, and British prejudices against Americans as cunning cheats.

About a third of the Maritime Loyalists drifted back to the United States during the late 1780s or early 1790s, after the hatreds of the civil war had cooled.

Location: 4,996 The revolution led to virtually free land for settlers in British Canada while rendering land more expensive in the United States. Burdened by immense public debts incurred to wage the war, federal and state governments sold vast tracts of frontier land to speculators, who could immediately pay large sums in cash.

Parliament also funded the salaries for the colony’s executive and judicial officers, which ensured the Crown’s control over its servants. This arrangement reflected another British lesson drawn from the thirteen rebelling colonies: that elected assemblies had used their power over salaries to sway Crown officials. In the Canadas after the war, the British government paid those salaries to prolong colonial dependence on the empire.

Thanks to this British largesse, the Canadian colonists paid lower taxes than did Americans in the republican states. In 1794, Upper Canada’s landholders paid only 5 shillings in tax for every £100 in assessed property: a rate of one-quarter of one percent and a fifth of the tax rate in New York. An ironic consequence of the revolution was that the Patriot “winners” had to bear higher postwar taxes to finance their war debts.

Lord Thurlow explained that the British “have given them more civil liberty, without political liberty.” In sum, the British worked to deny the colonists both the civil motives and the political means for agitation.

Under the Articles, the states conceded only a few, limited powers to Congress: to wage war, conduct diplomacy, and arbitrate disputes between them. To satisfy small states, each delegation cast a single vote, so little Rhode Island’s vote matched that of vast Virginia. On the major issues of war and peace, only a supermajority of nine states (out of thirteen) could commit the confederacy. The Articles required ratification by all thirteen states to become operative, and any future amendment also required unanimity, which discouraged any change.

Thomas Jefferson drafted the first “Northwest Ordinance,” which Congress provisionally adopted in April 1784. It subdivided the federal domain into ten territories and stipulated that, once any one had 20,000 free citizens, they could convene a convention to draft a republican constitution and send a delegate to Congress. When the settler population reached the threshold of the smallest original state, Rhode Island, the territory could join the union as an equal partner in its powers and share in the national debt. While holding out future statehood, the ordinance bought time for the federal government to sell land within the territories.

To help the Ohio Company attract respectable settlers from New England, the new ordinance outlawed slavery in the Northwest Territory. To reconcile southern congressmen, the ordinance also mandated a fugitive slave law, requiring territorial settlers to return runaways from the slave states. The ordinance also implicitly kept open more southern territories to slavery. The combination of a partial restriction on slavery’s expansion with a fugitive slave law set a precedent deemed fundamental to preserving the union.

Regarding Congress as hapless and hopeless, settlers fought their own war against Indians in the Ohio Valley. In 1786, Benjamin Logan and George Rogers Clark led Kentucky militiamen in massive raids that destroyed seven Shawnee villages, although their chiefs had cooperated with federal treaty councils. One of them, Molunthy, received an American flag, which he flew over his village as a source of protection. Instead, Kentuckians seized the chief and smashed his skull with a tomahawk. After blowing his body to pieces with gunpowder, they burned his village and its crops. While smashing Shawnees, the raids also discredited the federal government that had promised to protect them.

The growing settlements also alarmed their imperial neighbors: the British to the north in Canada and the Spanish to the southwest in Louisiana. From just 12,000 in 1783, Kentucky’s population exploded to 73,000 in 1790. In

Another Spanish governor regarded the settlers as “distinguished from savages only in their color, language, and the superiority of their depraved cunning and untrustworthiness.”

In effect, the Spanish tried to build a settler fire wall to keep away more hostile settlers from the American orbit. During the 1780s and early 1790s, about 20,000 Americans moved to Louisiana. Some newcomers, including Daniel Boone, settled near St. Louis, but most developed farms and plantations around Natchez, on the east bank of the lower Mississippi. “May God keep us Spanish,” wrote one grateful settler.

McGillivray warned against gambling that Americans could become good Spanish subjects. He insisted that “filling up your country with those accursed republicans is like placing a common thief as a guard on your door and giving him the key.”

In 1784, Robert Morris resigned as superintendent of finance for want of any money to superintend.

Franklin agreed, “Our States are on the point of separation, only to meet hereafter for the purpose of cutting one another’s throats.”

During the revolution, however, they faced growing pressure from common voters, who often favored ambitious men of newly gained wealth. In 1786, the French minister to the United States reported, “Although there are no nobles in America, there is a class of men denominated ‘gentlemen,’ who by reason of their wealth, their talents, their education, their families, or the offices they hold, aspire to a preeminence which the people refuse to grant them.” Gentlemen cast their new rivals as ignorant, vulgar, and greedy men aspiring to more than their due. Robert Morris complained that republican politics favored “vulgar Souls whose narrow Optics can see but the little Circle of selfish Concerns.” This sounded obtuse coming from a man who had gotten rich by manipulating government contracts, subsidies, and land grants.

Common folk also bore the greatest sacrifices and hardships of the war. As the conflict dragged on, they resented their increasing burdens from taxes and militia service. They blamed leaders for waging a rich man’s war by making it a poor man’s fight.

By disrupting traditional networks of trade and political influence, the war created opportunities for daring and ambitious men to wheel and deal their way to new wealth and greater influence. They profited from military contracts and speculation in the confiscated estates of exiled Loyalists.

But Clinton repeatedly won reelection, governing the state for nearly twenty years by consolidating his popularity as the farmer’s champion. Common voters appreciated that Clinton celebrated their way of life instead of displaying the traditional elitism within his grasp.

Alexander Hamilton rose in the approved fashion to win acceptance into the New York elite. Although born poor and illegitimate in the West Indies, Hamilton secured a wealthy patron, college education, high-status wife (Schuyler’s daughter), and the mores and manners of his new peers. Brilliant, short, elegant, and handsome, Hamilton wore a self-assurance that belied his origins. After serving as an officer in the army, he became a lawyer and politician who championed the interests of wealthy merchants and great landlords, obscuring his early poverty. Gentility as well as wealth jointly qualified the proper leader.

To defend liberty, Patriots dispersed power among many legislators and rendered them collectively superior to the governor. Most governors lost their powers to appoint officials and veto laws. No state constitution allowed a governor to prorogue a legislature.

While granting sovereignty to “the people,” the state constitutions insisted that only men with property could vote or hold office. As in the colonial era, a voter had to own enough real estate to support his family, which meant having either a farm or a shop. Because small farms and workshops abounded, about two-thirds of white men qualified to vote. Patriot leaders insisted that only propertied men possessed the “independence” from a landlord or employer required to make judicious political decisions.

The new constitution broadened the electorate to include any man who had resided for at least a year in the state and had paid any tax. Where only two-thirds of men could vote under the colonial property requirement, 90 percent qualified as a result of the new taxpayer standard.

Distrusting human nature, they regarded inaction (or “gridlock” as we would put it today), as preferable to the hyperactive legislation of popular government.

It was folly, he insisted, to deprive the wealthy of all institutional power, for then they would subvert the government—as they were busy doing in Pennsylvania. If concentrated instead in a senate, elite power would become more conspicuous, inviting scrutiny and restraint from the lower house and common voters.

In a stroke of political genius, conservatives packaged a separation of powers as the essence of true republicanism. In New Hampshire, a conservative insisted that the different branches of a properly complex government should, by watching one another, “become centinels in behalf of the people to guard against every possible usurpation.”

The long, hard war had devastated the American economy. Roaming armies and frontier raiders uprooted thousands of people by destroying their farms, plantations, and towns. At least 25,000 Americans died in military service, usually of disease. As a percentage of the population, the mortality exceeded every American conflict but the Civil War of the 1860s. British

Economic historians find a 30 percent decline in national income between 1774 and 1790: a decline which they characterize as “America’s greatest income slump ever,” and an “economic disaster.”

To reduce inflation, radical Patriots favored strict price controls, the confiscation and sale of Loyalist property, and tender laws that punished anyone who refused to take paper money in payment. Radicals blamed inflation on rich merchants who allegedly hoarded scarce commodities and sold them only when paid premium prices. The growing wealth of merchants like Robert Morris bred angry resentment among poor men, who blamed “greedy Muckworms.”

Women often took the lead in riots, gathering to break open merchants’ warehouses to seize sugar, coffee, and flour. Rioters left behind paper money at the price they deemed just. According to Abigail Adams, in July 1777 in Boston, a hundred women “assembled with a cart and trucks” to break open the warehouse of “an eminent, wealthy, stingy Merchant (who is a Batchelor).” They beat him until he gave up his keys. While they carted away his coffee, “a large concourse of Men stood [by as] amazed, silent Spectators.”

In early October, renewed disturbances led thirty armed conservatives, including Robert Morris and James Wilson, to hole up in Wilson’s mansion, which became known as “Fort Wilson.” Radicals and conservatives exchanged gunfire, killing men on both sides. Just as common militiamen broke down the front door, a genteel militia unit, the City Light Horse, arrived to save the mansion and its defenders. The authorities dared not prosecute anyone on either side for the violence. The Fort Wilson riot deepened conservative hatred for the Pennsylvania constitutional regime, which apparently tolerated economic regulation by mobs.

To fund those payments, most states levied taxes at unprecedented rates. In 1786, for example, taxes in Massachusetts were at least four times higher than before the war. The taxes were regressive, with the poor land of common farmers paying at a higher rate than the vast tracts held by land speculators. Many states relied on poll taxes levied at the same rate on every man, poor and rich. Recalling the prewar protests over small British taxes, some rural people complained, “Our Grievances Ware Less Real and more Ideal then they are Now.”

The postwar recession multiplied lawsuits for debts, and court judgments also demanded payment in hard money. If a debtor failed to pay, sheriffs seized his livestock and land for auctions, where property sold for a fraction of its appraised value. If a farmer hid his livestock, a creditor could cast him in jail as a hostage for the debt. A gloomy debtor insisted that New England had become “a country, which holds out nothing but poverty and prisons.” Farmers dreaded losing title to their farms to become the dependent tenants of aristocratic landlords.

The legislature, however, badly represented rural interests because towns had to pay the costs of their representatives, so fifty-two poor towns economized by declining to send any. Naturally, the representatives of wealthier towns saw no reason to heed their petitions.

Across the country, conservatives overreacted to Shays’s Rebellion, which they improbably described as a leveling movement meant to abolish all debts and confiscate great property to benefit the poor. Henry Knox assured Washington, “Their creed is that the property of the United States has been protected from confiscation . . . by the joint exertion of all, and therefore ought to be the common property of all.”

Some states offered more limited measures to delay or reduce taxes or allow payments of debts or taxes in farm produce rather than in scarce cash.

Although no state, save Pennsylvania, was particularly democratic, conservatives did not like to compromise when their property was at stake. They regarded state constitutions as pretty on paper but failures in practice, for too many alleged demagogues won legislative seats by pandering for popularity. Dr. Benjamin Rush detected a new pathology in American minds, a disease he named “Anarchia” and described as “the excess of the passion for liberty . . . which could not be removed by reason, nor restrained by government.” By 1787, conservatives concluded that the revolution had gone too far.

As he saw it, the problem was that too many people could use state governments to shut their purses to him while they reached into his pocket.

The eldest son of the wealthiest man in a Virginia county, Madison inherited hundreds of acres, scores of slaves, and the leisure time to read widely. Attending the College of New Jersey (now Princeton), Madison studied moral philosophy and graduated in 1772. Returning to Virginia, he became active in his county’s Committee of Safety and the colony’s Provincial Congress. Scholarly, sickly, astute, and shy, he worked best in a library or on a committee rather than on the stump in an election. Joining Congress in 1779, he grew frustrated with regional rivalries and the weak confederacy.

Madison defied conventional thinking, which insisted that a republic could only work on a small scale, no larger than a state, so that the legislators could know their constituents and feel the local consequences of their laws. The diverse climates, landscapes, ethnicities, and classes in the vast United States seemed to defy unification in one superrepublic. Past republics had worked best on the relatively intimate scale of a city, a province, or a canton, which enjoyed relative homogeneity. Madison retorted that no American state enjoyed homogeneity and harmony, least of all the smallest one, Rhode Island.

In the New York delegation, Clinton assigned two clients to keep a close eye on the third member, Hamilton.

Through self-discipline and hard service, he became known as the consummate republican leader of virtue, dignity, and honor. Sensitive to his public audience, Washington weighed every word, gesture, and decision with painstaking care. His vaunted reputation gave him great political leverage, but he dreaded losing his impeccable aura with any public controversy.

The fifty-five delegates were mature, wealthy, and well-educated gentlemen from prestigious families. Aside from two Catholics, all were Protestants, and 70 percent belonged to the relatively elitist Episcopal Church. None adhered to the more plebeian evangelical churches. At a time when few men (and no women) had access to higher education, twenty-nine of the delegates held college degrees. Professionally, they were a mix of lawyers, merchants, great planters, and landlords. Twenty-five owned slaves. Aside from the wealthy Pennsylvania merchants, the richest delegates came from Virginia and South Carolina, where they possessed vast plantations worked by scores of the enslaved. Most had federal experience as congressmen (forty-two) or Continental officers (thirty). No delegate embodied the perspective of the American majority: the hinterland farmers of modest means.

To discourage snoopers, delegates kept the hall’s windows and doors shut through the heat and humidity of a Philadelphia summer. By excluding public feedback, they sought frank discussions. Madison later insisted, “No Constitution would ever have been adopted by the convention if the debates had been public.”

A Connecticut delegate declared that Hamilton’s plan “had been praised by everybody” but “supported by none.” The delegates could not afford to embrace a controversial British-style mixed constitution. Citing an ancient precedent, Pierce Butler of South Carolina concluded, “We must follow the example of Solon who gave the Athenians not the best Government he could devise but the best they would receive.”

The heated debates over representation exposed a second, even more dangerous fault line between northern and southern states. Slaves comprised less than 4 percent of the northern population compared to 40 percent in the South. Determined

Some northern delegates argued that only free citizens should count in allocating seats in the House of Representatives. Gouverneur Morris denounced the inequity that the inhabitant of Georgia and South Carolina who goes to the Coast of Africa, and in defiance of the most sacred laws of humanity, tears away his fellow creatures from their dearest connections and damns them to the most cruel bondage, shall have more votes in a government instituted for the protection of the rights of mankind, than the citizen of Pennsylvania or New Jersey who views with a laudable horror so nefarious a practice.

In August, another heated debate erupted over continuing the import slave trade. On this issue, southern delegates divided. Seeking to expand their operations, planters in the Lower South demanded continued imports from Africa. The Upper South’s leaders, however, believed that they had a surplus and could profit by sales to the Lower South. Banning import competition would enhance those profits, but principle also played a role with some delegates, particularly Madison, who insisted that importing more slaves would “dishonor” the nation.

Saving the union and promoting profits ultimately mattered more than any moral principles against bondage for others. Thanks to this compromise, the Lower South would import another 200,000 Africans as slaves during the next twenty years.

Delegates longed to believe that slavery eventually would wither without Americans having to make difficult sacrifices.

They cleverly claimed the popular name of “Federalists,” which previously had meant a supporter of strong states and a weak confederation. Better still, the newly minted “Federalists” cast their critics as mere contrarians called “Anti-Federalists,” whom they characterized as cunning demagogues bent on cheating their creditors. Winning that propaganda battle, the Federalists created labels that stuck with the press and historians ever since.

Anti-Federalists pointed out that the constitution created a national government with greater power than Britain had ever exercised over the colonists.

An American national identity emerged later, slowly, painfully, and partially. It would follow from that constitution rather than lie behind its creation.

Only in Rhode Island did Anti-Federalists have the wit to call the Federalists’ bluff by holding a more direct appeal to the people: a referendum, where Rhode Islanders voted against the constitution by ten to one.

In the national campaign, Federalists enjoyed better networks for sharing information and political strategy. As congressmen, Philadelphia delegates, or Continental officers, many had worked with one another across state lines. A Connecticut Anti-Federalist lamented that the Federalists “have got almost all the best Writers (as well as speakers) on their side.” A New York Anti-Federalist noted, “The great easily form associations,” but “the poor and middling class form them with difficulty.”

Cities hosted most of the nation’s newspapers, and their editors usually agreed with their advertisers and subscribers, who were overwhelmingly Federalists. Eighty of the nation’s ninety-two newspapers tilted toward the Federalists, favoring their essays, particularly the celebrated series, The Federalist, written by Hamilton (51 essays), Madison (29), and Jay (5). Because postmasters doubled as merchants or printers, most supported Federalism, so Anti-Federalist letters and pamphlets often got lost or delayed in the mail. Thanks to distortions by press and post, readers could gain the misleading impression that the Federal Constitution was wildly popular elsewhere. Northerners read that Patrick Henry had endorsed the constitution when, in fact, he was leading the opposition in Virginia.

In the spring, two more states ratified overwhelmingly: Maryland in April and South Carolina in May. In both states, the apparent inevitability of national ratification had deflated opposition.

On June 21, New Hampshire narrowly provided that ninth state, but it was a minor prize compared to two major holdouts: New York and Virginia. A union without them would be painfully incomplete and likely to falter. Both favored Anti-Federalism, for their voters preferred to live in strong states within a weak union. Both states also had especially able, clever, and committed Anti-Federalist leaders: New York’s Governor George Clinton and Virginia’s Patrick Henry, whom Jefferson considered “the greatest orator that ever lived.” Considering his political clout invincible, Jefferson once observed to Madison, “What we have to do I think is devoutly pray for his death.” Clinton feared losing the state’s robust revenues from taxing imports, for his popularity derived from minimizing internal taxes. Henry dreaded that northerners would dominate a powerful nation and could threaten southern slavery.

stronger union would benefit Virginia, he argued, more than any other state. After three weeks of debate, Madison’s dogged optimism trumped Henry’s gloomy eloquence.

As the new administration’s prime mover, Alexander Hamilton cultivated “a principle of strength and stability in the organization of our government, and vigor in its operations.”

The great American nightmare was that foreign powers would exploit the internal divisions of a tenuous union.

Washington dreaded the new office as inevitably contentious and potentially fatal to his cherished reputation. He felt like “a culprit who is going to the place of his execution,” as he exchanged “a peaceful abode for an Ocean of difficulties.” Washington ensured the Constitution’s early survival by administering the new government with careful deliberation, good judgment, and public dignity. John Adams later recalled Washington as “the best actor of Presidency We have ever had.”

Washington went along with the quasi-regal style, acting with cold formality while wearing a dignified, dark suit accessorized with a ceremonial sword. He rode in a richly decorated coach drawn by six white horses and attended by four servants in orange-and-white livery. During public appearances, officials called him “Your Excellency,” and bands sometimes played “God Save the King.”

Rather than alarm southern leaders, Madison also avoided a philosophical preface on human equality featured in the bills of rights adopted by most states. Consequently, no one called Madison’s slate of amendments “the Bill of Rights” until the 1860s.

Madison’s amendments did give North Carolinians enough political cover to enter the union in November 1789. Rhode Islanders remained stubbornly independent until Congress put economic screws to the little republic by barring its trade with the United States in May 1790. At the end of that month a special state convention narrowly voted to rejoin the United States, which once again had thirteen states. The union added a fourteenth state with Vermont’s admission a year later.

Madison’s amendments protected only the free, leaving untouched the slavery suffered by a fifth of the American people. In February 1790, Pennsylvania Quakers and other antislavery activists submitted two petitions to Congress. The petitioners included an aged and dying Benjamin Franklin, who had owned slaves but had developed new scruples.

Overriding state legislatures and courts, the federal law authorized masters or their agents to pursue and seize alleged runaways in another state. Entrusting adjudication to any magistrate, the law denied trial by jury or the protections of habeas corpus to the accused runaways. Tacitly permitting kidnappings, so long as the victims were black, the law empowered southern agents who profited by hunting down and seizing supposed runaways in northern states.

Brash and energetic, he meddled in every department, including foreign affairs, to Jefferson’s disgust. Attentive to details and the big picture, Hamilton designed both policy and the bureaucracy to implement it. By deploying patronage, he built support in Congress and the states. A critic grumbled, “Mr. Hamilton is all powerful and fails in nothing which he attempts.”

Locating the temporary capital in Philadelphia created a problem for slaveholders, who by state law could keep a slave in Pennsylvania for no more than six months. Washington brought a few household slaves to Philadelphia but shuttled them back to Mount Vernon every few months to keep them from claiming freedom. “I wish to have it accomplished,” he explained, “under [some] pretext that may deceive both them and the Public.”

During the fall of 1791, Arthur St. Clair led 1,400 federal soldiers deep into Indian country. Before dawn on November 4, about 1,000 warriors surprised the sleeping troops in their poorly guarded camp. Quickly overwhelmed, they broke and fled, suffering 630 dead in the greatest single victory won by Indians over Americans during their long history of conflict. The victors stuffed the mouths of the enemy dead with soil to mock their fatal lust for Indian land.

By 1800, half a million Americans lived west of the Appalachian Mountains, three times as many as in 1790. The newcomers spilled over the western border into Louisiana, where Spanish officials reluctantly welcomed them for want of any way to stop them.

Federalists regarded the regulation as a rebellion that threatened the new constitutional order. They insisted that “busy and restless sons of anarchy” were bringing “us back to those scenes of humiliation and distress from which the new Constitution has so wonderfully extricated us.”

Standing down, the regulators stayed home rather than confront overwhelming force. Federal troops arrested twenty supposed rebels, whom they hauled back to Philadelphia for trial. They included Herman Husband, an aged religious mystic and a refugee from the bloody suppression of the regulation in North Carolina in 1772. After a year in a frigid jail, Husband was released, but he died of pneumonia on his journey home.

The American Revolution had helped to provoke the French Revolution by generating a massive war debt that the crown could not finance and by setting a republican precedent for replacing that monarchy.

Initially, almost all Americans welcomed the revolutionary creation of a sister republic by their wartime allies. Americans hoped that republicanism would become a moral contagion that could liberate the entire world from kings and aristocrats. Americans celebrated French victories, sang their revolutionary songs, waved the tricolored revolutionary flag, wore tricolored cockades on their hats, and even donned red French liberty caps. In Boston, an angry audience rioted and demolished a theater after concluding that a play had mocked a French character.

As the French and British escalated their naval warfare, both powers pressured the United States for assistance. The British counted on America’s dependence on British imports and its vulnerability to the superior might of the Royal Navy. The French expected American gratitude for their help in defeating the British during the War of the American Revolution. The Washington administration opted for neutrality because the deeply indebted and politically divided United States could ill afford a new conflict. In April 1793, Washington issued a proclamation of neutrality, barring Americans from assisting the French as privateers or filibusterers.

By continuing to celebrate the French Revolution, Republicans terrified Federalists, who dreaded that their rivals meant to copy the bloody French Jacobins. Cultivating a xenophobic American patriotism, Federalists disdained foreign revolutions as perversions. They cast the Republicans as traitors in league with “foreign disorganizers.” Federalists claimed that only the United States could sustain a stable republic—and only so long as they kept European ideas and conspirators away. “Holding

British repression accelerated Irish migration to the United States, where most of the newcomers voted for Republicans as the enemies of their enemies, the British. Disgusted Federalists denounced the newcomers as “United Irishmen, Free Masons, and the most God-provoking Democrats on this side of Hell.” Adopting a nativist position, Federalists derided most immigrants as too ignorant, poor, violent, and brutish to become citizens. A Federalist journalist declared that “every United Irishman ought to be hunted from the country, as much as a wolf or a tyger.” A Federalist congressman insisted, “The time is now come when it will be proper to declare that nothing but birth shall entitle a man to citizenship in this country.”

Federalists also blamed the French Revolution for instigating a massive and bloody slave revolt in the Caribbean. The greatest slave revolt in the Americas erupted on the evening of August 22, 1791, later known as the “Night of Fire.” On the northern plain of the French West Indian colony of Saint-Domingue, enslaved Africans began to kill overseers and masters and torched the buildings and cane fields of a thousand plantations. The revolt caused an international sensation because Saint-Domingue was the wealthiest colony in the Caribbean, for its 465,000 slaves produced richer crops of coffee and sugarcane than in the entire British West Indies. About the size of Maryland, Saint-Domingue occupied the western third of the island of Hispaniola, with the Spanish holding the eastern two-thirds as their colony of Santo Domingo. Because of brutal work conditions and tropical diseases, slave deaths exceeded births in the colony, so the planters imported thousands to replace the corpses. As a consequence, most of the enslaved in Saint-Domingue were Africans by birth.

The French sought to rally thousands of black men to defend the French West Indies while promoting slave revolts in the British West Indies.

Rejecting the racial radicalism of the French Revolution, Napoleon resolved to restore French control and plantation slavery in Saint-Domingue.

Their new country, named “Haiti,” became the second new nation, after the United States, to win sovereignty in the Americas.

To fend off that storm, Jefferson favored emancipating and deporting Virginia’s slaves over the course of two generations. But his fellow southerners rejected his plan as too expensive and economically debilitating.

A few fearful slaves sought to save themselves by revealing the plot to their masters, who alerted militia officers. Called into service, militiamen patrolled the roads and arrested suspects.79 The trials commenced on September 11, and executions began the next day.

Jefferson also tried to pay down the national debt that Hamilton had designed for perpetuity. During their twelve years in power, the Federalists had increased that debt from $76 million to $83 million; during his eight years as president, Jefferson reduced it to $57 million.

In 1811, the United States spent only $1 per capita, a mere twenty-fifth of the public expenditures in Great Britain. A French traveler reported that Jefferson’s administration was “neither seen [n]or felt.”

Hamilton noted that “the courage and obstinate resistance made by black inhabitants” had destroyed the invaders and induced Napoleon to cut his losses in America by selling Louisiana to the United States at a bargain price in 1803. Three years earlier, Napoleon had extorted that vast colony from the Spanish king.

Jefferson feared becoming entrapped by Marshall’s quick mind and rigorous logic. The new president assured another judge, “So great is his sophistry [that] you must never give him an affirmative answer, or you will be forced to grant his conclusions. Why, if he were to ask me whether it were daylight or not, I’d reply, ‘Sir, I don’t know, I can’t tell.’”

Jefferson held the presidency for eight years, while Marshall served as Chief Justice for thirty-four years thanks to a life tenure provided by the Federal Constitution. Marshall participated in more than a thousand decisions, writing over half of them. Thanks to that prodigious output during a critical generation in the consolidation of the federal union, Marshall had an impact at least comparable to Jefferson’s. The president complained that Federalists had “retired into the Judiciary as a stronghold.

By 1819, Jefferson and his Republican successor, James Madison, had appointed most of the Supreme Court justices, but the justices had come around to Marshall’s Federalist philosophy, to Jefferson’s dismay.

But any political victory is temporary. Like a kaleidoscope, we continue in every generation to make new combinations of clashing principles derived from the enduring importance and incompleteness of our revolution. The revolution remains embedded as selective memory in every contemporary debate.

Strained by revolution and migration, old hierarchies had to be reinvented in a new republic. Although excluded from formal politics, poorer colonists and women could protest violently as urban mobs and rural regulators.

Once limited to the governing elite, gentility spread to the middle class. Prosperous tradesmen, shopkeepers, and farmers read more, adopted better manners, and wore nicer clothes. Teacups and saucers, carpets, clocks, and looking glasses proliferated in their homes as they entertained more visitors. Watching closely, they measured one another for signs of refinement or vulgarity. A dread of scorn compelled attention to every detail of appearance and performance.

Numerous in the Northeast and Middle Atlantic, the outposts of middle-class gentility were scarce in the West and scarcest of all in the South, where most rural folk preserved a plain style of life.

In 1786, Jefferson pitched a secular and public system of education for Virginia. He reasoned that “the tax which will be paid for this purpose is not more that the thousandth part of what will be paid to [the] kings, priests, and nobles who will rise up among us if we leave the people in ignorance.” But most citizens preferred to keep their taxes low, so Virginia’s legislators rejected Jefferson’s plan.

Comprehensive, public school systems did not emerge beyond New England until the 1820s and 1830s and only in the other northern states.

The colonies had supported only nine colleges, which each year collectively graduated fewer than 200 students, most of them from the genteel elite. After the war, reformers sought to expand colleges and recruit more middle-class students. By 1815, the United States sustained thirty-three colleges, but that growth barely kept up with the exploding population. Many rustics still distrusted colleges as training grounds for potential aristocrats.

The early republic promoted more self-education than public education as many people exploited the greater availability of print. Thanks to rudimentary education at home, about three-quarters of free American adults were literate: one of the highest rates in the world.

The 69 post offices of 1788 mushroomed to 903 in 1800, when the postal system carried nearly 2 million copies of newspapers to far-flung readers, giving the United States the largest and widest circulation in the world.

Foreign visitors marveled at the number and influence of American newspapers, which became pivotal to republican politics, for shrewd editors could make or break candidates. The French visitor Alexis de Tocqueville noted “Only a newspaper can put the same thought at the same time before a thousand readers.” But many moralists worried that newspapers put the wrong thoughts in too many minds, spreading slander rather than insights. In 1807, Jefferson concluded, “Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper. . . . The man who never looks into a newspaper is better informed than he who reads them.” A free press might threaten, rather than bolster, the fragile new republic.

By seeking European approval, Americans kept their art derivative and prolonged their cultural dependency.

Before 1820, American publishers preferred to pirate books and articles from Britain rather than publish American writers. English texts were more fashionable and less expensive for publishers who, by law, had to pay royalties to American authors but not to foreign writers. Susanna Rowson’s novel Charlotte Temple (1791) sold very well, but she reaped few profits because American printers pirated it from the London edition. Because of that unintended consequence of copyright law, no American novelist could live by her or his work until the 1820s.

If government can answer for individuals at the day of judgement, let me be controlled by it in religious matters; otherwise, let men be free.”

In 1789, a Methodist preacher described “the true disciple of Christ” as “meek in heart, thirsting after holiness, crucified with Christ, and dead to the world.”

While prioritizing spirituality, evangelicals did not withdraw from the world, for they expected believers to work hard and honestly—and then support church and charity. Methodism’s founder, John Wesley, exhorted, “Earn all you can, save all you can, give all you can.”

Conservatives argued that a republic could not survive without the virtuous and moral citizens promoted by state-mandated financial support for religion. In 1784, Richard Henry Lee defended a religious establishment in Virginia: “The experience of all times shows Religion to be the guardian of morals—and he must be a very inattentive observer in our Country, who does not see that avarice is accomplishing the destruction of religion, for want of a legal obligation to contribute something to its support.”

From 1784 to 1786, Madison deftly outmaneuvered the state’s governor, Patrick Henry, who wanted a mandatory tithe paid by all taxpayers to support incorporated churches. In the key move, Madison persuaded Presbyterians that they would lose out to Anglicans under Henry’s proposal. Madison boasted to Jefferson, “The mutual hatred of these sects has been much inflamed. . . . I am far from being sorry for it.” Sectarian rivalry helped Madison make the case for dissolving the church-state alliance.

Virginia’s example proved slowly contagious. None of the new states created after the revolution provided for a church establishment, and those of the old states gradually toppled: New York in 1777; Virginia in 1786; South Carolina in 1790; Maryland in 1810; Connecticut in 1818; New Hampshire in 1819; and Massachusetts in 1833.34

They promoted an emotional, physical style of worship that often provoked convulsions, known as “the jerks,” in listeners absorbed in spiritual ecstasy. This visceral worship appealed to settlers coping with the hardships of frontier life and skeptical of college learning.

To curry favor with France during the revolution, the states had repealed colonial laws barring Catholics from voting and holding office. Catholics made the most of their new legal equality to compete for souls through persuasion.

Protestant theology shifted with the more egalitarian times. During the colonial era, almost all Protestant churches clung to Calvinist doctrines, which emphasized inherent human depravity and utter dependence on divine grace for salvation. The postwar competition for believers led most denominations instead to emphasize individual free will in seeking and gaining salvation. Instead of dwelling on God the all-powerful father, preachers emphasized the mix of the human and divine in Jesus. Under the pressure of competition, most mainstream churches—Presbyterian, Congregationalist, and Lutheran—adopted the new emphasis on outreach, free will, and your own personal Jesus. They founded missionary organizations to compete for believers in the West, where the nation’s future emerged through expansion.

Visitors from Europe marveled that America’s many denominations and lack of a church establishment led to a broader and more intense interest in Christianity. A higher proportion of Americans attended church and adhered to religious values than in any other country of Christendom. Most American households owned a Bible—in stark contrast to Europe.

After 1800, most Americans regarded republicanism and Protestantism as mutually reinforcing, for both preached individual choice and encouraged voluntary association.

By shattering religious establishments, he had sought the triumph of secular thinking. Instead, disestablishment created space for an increasingly evangelical public culture.

In only one state, New Jersey, did some women gain the right to vote. In 1776, the state constitution neglected to specify citizenship as male, instead defining voters as “all free inhabitants” who met property and residence requirements—which qualified widows and spinsters (but not married women). Some eligible women exploited that oversight to vote during the 1780s, which led the New Jersey legislature explicitly to accept the practice in a 1790 election law that referred to a voter as “he or she.” During the 1790s, most widows preferred Federalist candidates rather than Republicans, who favored expanding rights for common white men while limiting those of women.

Republicanism opened all forms of social inequality and domination to criticism in the name of individual rights. More young people had sex before marriage in defiance of their parents. Growing steadily during the eighteenth century, premarital pregnancy peaked during the revolutionary generation at a third of brides. Throwing up their hands, magistrates stopped the traditional prosecutions of young people for fornication. Instead, new mothers sued presumed fathers for support if they had not married yet.

Most states also made it easier for women to seek divorces if abandoned or brutalized by their husbands. More couples simply and cheaply “self-divorced” as one bolted from the other to seek happiness outside of marriage. In one of many elopement notices published by jilted men, a Virginian advertised, “Whereas, my wife Annie Dixon has revolted from my bed, and refuses copulation . . . I will not pay any of the debts she contracts.”

Aside from Quakers, who rejected slavery as a sin, almost all colonists had regarded human bondage as natural and immutable. In the traditional society of British America, slavery was but the lowest rung in a social hierarchy of dependency, below white indentured servants, tenant farmers, women and children, and wage laborers.

John Jay headed New York’s antislavery society, but he continued to buy slaves and freed them only once he felt fully compensated by years of their hard labor. Although George Mason criticized slavery, he clung to his own slaves and, with consummate insensitivity, named one of them “Liberty.”

Jefferson agreed that southerners were “zealous for their own liberties, but trampling on those of others.” Whites especially cherished their own freedom because they denied it to the enslaved.

Most northern states gradually emancipated their slaves through laws designed to soften the blow for masters. In 1780, Pennsylvania’s legislature declared slavery “disgraceful to any people, and more especially to those who have been contending in the great cause of liberty themselves.” But the law freed no slaves then alive, only those born after the law and only once they turned twenty-eight years old. No slave, if properly registered by a master, could become free until 1808. A slave born a day before the act remained enslaved for life. Pennsylvania still had some elderly slaves until 1847, when the state finally and fully abolished the system.

The laws sought primarily (and very gradually) to free northern states of slavery, rather than to ensure freedom for the enslaved. Lawmakers meant to save taxpayers from having to compensate masters for their lost property. Instead, young slaves would pay for their eventual freedom by working without compensation into their mid-twenties. Economic historians calculate that this young labor recouped to masters 95 percent of the slaves’ market value.

Northern legislators acted more from a distaste for slavery than from empathy for the enslaved. Legal loopholes often enabled masters to sell slaves to southern buyers before freedom claimed them.

In the northern states, gradual emancipation laws increased the free black population from fewer than 1,000 in 1775 to nearly 50,000 in 1810. But the northern states still had 27,000 slaves that year because the gradual process of emancipation remained incomplete. The freed tended to gravitate from the countryside into the cities, where they found greater comfort and safety in numbers. By 1810, nearly a third of New York State’s blacks lived in New York City, and two-fifths of black Pennsylvanians resided in Philadelphia. By providing growing numbers for runaways to hide in, black neighborhoods pressured northern masters to sell early freedom to their remaining slaves. In the greatest boon of freedom, by 1820 most northern black couples could live together and keep their children.

Northern racism intensified as the free black population grew. Tocqueville noted, “The prejudice of race appears to be stronger in the states that have abolished slavery than in those where it still exists.”

Slaves could join their masters in genteel parlors and public conveyances, but free blacks faced exclusion. Even the antislavery societies of New York and Pennsylvania barred blacks from joining.

The manumitters included Washington, who freed his slaves in a last will and testament. Most manumitters, however, were Quakers or evangelicals with religious scruples.

The postrevolutionary manumissions modestly increased the free black population in Virginia from 2,000 in 1782 (1 percent of all black people) to 20,000 (7 percent) in 1810. Maryland’s free black population grew from 4 percent of blacks in 1755 to 20 percent in 1810.97

Jefferson and Madison challenged Virginia’s colonial laws of “entail and primogeniture,” which had enabled a great landowner to bind his heirs never to subdivide or alienate any part of a plantation (including its slaves). Aristocratic in design, entail and primogeniture preserved great estates through the generations at the expense of all the children save the first-born son. Reformers denounced the colonial inheritance laws as the tyranny of a past generation overriding the rights of the living to buy and sell land and slaves as they wished.

Minor crop during the colonial era, cotton became profitable and widespread in the Lower South after the invention in 1793 of Eli Whitney’s cotton gin: a machine to separate valuable fibers from their husks.

South Carolina’s cotton exports soared from 9,840 pounds in 1790 to 6,425,000 pounds just ten years later. By 1810, exports surged to 50 million pounds, and planters scrambled to buy more slaves from Chesapeake traders.

In barns and secluded spots, they whipped backs and inflicted “cat-hauling”: dragging a cat by the tail along the bare back of a trussed-up victim.

From 700,000 in 1790, the number of enslaved doubled to 1.5 million in 1820. As foreign imports faded after 1807, natural increase accounted for most of the population growth. Between 1790 and 1860, slave traders and migrants herded over a million slaves south and west from the Chesapeake to expand southern society to the Mississippi and beyond.

Postrevolutionary America was the first society premised on individualism (for and by the free). Only in the United States did most men think of themselves as lone actors making free choices that determined success or failure.

In sum, the revolution generated clashing contagions, of slavery and liberty, and pitted them against one another.

Constitutional crises flared in every generation as one region or another threatened secession until those threats became real and bloody in 1860–1861.