Abstract
The three books under review underscore the limited role that “urban history” has recently played in shaping scholarly assessments of Revolutionary America. The most useful of the trio for urban historians is a promising first book: Rebels Rising by Benjamin Carp. This crisply written cultural history imaginatively interprets prewar political mobilization in the five largest cities in the thirteen colonies. Carp sets the pace among impressive company, as the other two scholars have previously contributed importantly to the new social history of early urban America. John Alexander pioneered a “bottom-up” interpretation of late-eighteenth-century British American cities in articles beginning in the early 1970s, and his birth-to-death biography of Samuel Adams examines a key popular political leader closely associated with Boston. 1 Our third author, Gary Nash, needs little introduction as one of the most influential American historians of the past several decades whose work redefined the field. The three essays gathered in Forgotten Fifth, examining the 20 percent of the population who were African American at the birth of the nation, continue his recovery of forgotten people in an effort “to construct a more democratically conceived American history” (p. vii). 2
Carp builds on two landmark studies of Revolutionary American cities. The first, Carl Bridenbaugh’s encyclopedic Cities in Revolt, more often cited than read today, presented the thirteen colonies’ largest cities as flourishing sites of a transatlantic Enlightenment and offered a top-down consensus view of American cities as crucial to the coming of the Revolution. In place of Bridenbaugh’s comprehensive early exemplar of cultural history that never hesitated to make sweeping claims built from microscopic examples, Carp offers an anthropologically informed thick description of specific rituals of urban life that fueled political mobilization. Carp not only follows Bridenbaugh’s chronology by starting in the 1740s, with the most intensive examination of the decade from the Stamp Act to Independence, but also centers his narrative on the same five largest cities. 3
The second foundational work for Carp is Gary Nash’s The Urban Crucible, which examined long-term economic changes starting in the late seventeenth century to explain how material forces shaped political life in the northern seaports of Boston, New York, and Philadelphia up to 1776. Nash set the gold standard for the neo-Progressive interpretation of the origins of the Revolution—his urban crucibles were cities at the vanguard of the Revolution, the leading edge of early capitalist development, and a newly emergent articulation of self-interested political consciousness. Carp’s more circumspect approach unpacks political mobilization in specific urban spaces in five core chapters on Boston’s waterfront, New York City’s taverns, Newport’s many religious organizations, Charleston’s domestic spaces, and Philadelphia’s street politics. The British occupation of each city at different points during the war is skillfully glossed in a brief epilogue on “the forgotten city” that explores Americans’ failure to appreciate the crucial role that its largest urban places played in the coming of the American Revolution.
Carp’s plaintive treatment of the forgotten early American city seems apropos for readers of the Journal of Urban History. A review of issues since 2007 finds an overwhelming commitment to the twentieth-century United States, with not a single essay on Colonial or Revolutionary America. Editors can only work with what gets submitted, of course, but even among reviewed books, this journal’s lack of attention to early America seems striking, with only three monographs reviewed in the past four years that center on urban America before 1830. 4 An important exception to this narrowness is Seth Rockman’s provocative review essay “Work in the Cities of Colonial British America” (Journal of Urban History, September 2007), yet he values the liberation of recent early American studies from conventional class-based “labor history” and, implicitly at least, its departure from “urban history” as well. 5 The Industrial Revolution figures so large in the making of the modern and postmodern city and by extension in the conceptualization of urban history as a field of inquiry that one wonders how scholarship on cities in earlier eras can usefully contribute to the field.
That urban people were essential to the coming of the American Revolution has been a staple of Revolutionary scholarship for some time, a core argument that firmly connects the sometimes divergent studies by Bridenbaugh, Nash, and Carp. For Carp, the close proximity of life even in America’s largest cities meant that they were “shared places where people came together” (p. 3) and “were undeniably important as sites of radical change” (p. 9). More particularly, he explores their “interconnected landscape of layered geographies that was ripe for political mobilization” (p. 18). Boston’s place at the forefront of resistance is obviously a staple of U.S. history from grade school to graduate seminars, and not surprisingly, Carp begins his comparative study on the Boston waterfront. The importance of maritime affairs to the peninsular eighteenth-century working city is amply demonstrated as the opening chapter carries the reader from the anti-impressment Knowles Riot of 1747 through four additional crowd actions to close with the arrival of troops and martial law in response to the “Boston “Tea Party”” in 1773. 6 Carp contextualizes his account well with parallel examples drawn from other urban ports and stresses how the “cultural and economic interdependence of the waterfront” (p. 61) shaped Boston’s united response to a common threat. As in each chapter, the contour and tempo of political mobilization is central to Carp’s assessment.
Samuel Adams appears in Rebels Rising in two main ways. First, as a Boston resident influenced by living near the waterfront who engaged seamen’s issues from impressment in the 1740s to his famed call for action immediately before the destruction of the tea in 1773. Second, Adams receives passing treatment in Boston and in three later chapters on other cities as Carp explores how the mobilization in each city built ties to other urban places and to their own rural and small-town hinterlands. Of these two uses, the former is more successful, while the latter is more suggestive than demonstrated. Unlike the networks of formal and extralegal political institutions, print culture, and leaders’ correspondence that built intercolonial resistance, how ritualized collective practices were shared and communicated beyond the local level remains a pressing topic that deserves fuller treatment.
Most of the resistance activity that Carp discusses in his chapter on Boston also appears in the first six chapters of John Alexander’s biography of Samuel Adams. Alexander situates his work at the intersection of three major commitments of historical scholarship. First, he is attuned to the race, class, and gender issues that guide social history’s assessment of how society and culture take shape. Second, he explores the roots of American political thought. Third, he binds these social and political concerns together in the form of a storytelling biographical narrative, the most traditional mode of historical inquiry, and one, he rightly notes, that is flourishing today among popular and academic historians alike. 7
Alexander writes well and evaluates evidence convincingly but at points seems to fall into the biographer’s trap of loving his subject too much. Alexander offers Adams, “arguably both America’s first professional and its first modern politician” (pp. ix, 222), as a tonic for today’s political cynicism, for here was a consistent and principled leader who eschewed wealth and personal popularity to defend liberty. Alexander is well aware of the tendency for biographers to praise their subjects too highly, yet the flaws he notes (p. 233) are so minor that Adams looms more heroic than real. While Samuel Adams surely merits praise, the somewhat celebratory tone here may arise from the demands of the American Profiles series in which this volume appears. Presumably the series’ format required the exclusion of any direct citation method as well, thus substantially reducing the scholarly utility of the volume. A learned discussion of primary and secondary sources in the Selected Bibliography (pp. 225-36) somewhat offsets this limitation and offers an insightful assessment of wide-ranging primary and secondary sources that will be of considerable use to anyone researching Revolutionary Boston.
In spite of the lack of scholarly citations, Alexander’s biography is revisionist on several points. First, he repeatedly emphasizes that Adams should not be treated as a keeper of the crowd who orchestrated popular actions (pp. ix, 27, 32, 57-59, 81, 164). Second, he rejects Adams’s frequent depiction by other scholars as a politician deeply driven by religious conviction. Alexander finds that Adams primarily turned to religious imagery in his political writings only after the start of the war in April 1775 and that his description of Boston as a “Christian Sparta,” a term often associated with Adams, occurred only once. While religion figured centrally for Samuel Adams, he considered it to be a family and personal matter and emphasized schools as a more important engine for a virtuous society than churches (pp. 146-47, 176-77). Third, Alexander pays close attention to Adams’s relationship with his second wife, Elizabeth, and paints a pleasing portrait of their domestic compatibility, equality, and shared commitments, which are particularly well documented in their correspondence during Adams’ long service in the Continental Congress (pp. 167-70). Fourth, Alexander stresses Adams’s long public career as a state senator and as governor that stretched beyond his prewar leadership and his role in Congress, which remain the best-known aspects of his career. Alexander emphasizes Adams’s consistency as a republican, which helps to explain his strong opposition to the Shays’ Rebellion as an illegitimate uprising against representative government. Similarly, in spite of his dread of centralized national power, Adams became a late and guarded supporter of the Constitution even when he felt that the Bill of Rights fell short of the safeguards needed to protect a virtuous society from potentially overbearing government authority.
Even though Boston looms large in shaping Adams as an urban politician, Alexander’s biography is not an urban history per se, and the same is certainly true of Gary Nash’s Forgotten Fifth, a collection of three essays first delivered as the Nathan I. Huggins lectures at Harvard University. The opening essay frames the American Revolution as “the first mass slave rebellion in American history” (p. 1, a key point repeated on pp. 23, 31, and 39) that initiated the first civil rights movement, first reconstruction, and the first significant body of writing authored by African Americans. Nash writes with grace and insight and ably synthesizes a large literature to explain a complex era of revolutionary transformation for African Americans. While the changes brought on by the war helped to accelerate the urban African American experience, enslaved people still overwhelmingly lived in rural and agricultural settings. The first chapter mostly examines the war itself, and only in a brief postwar discussion do urban places come into focus with discussion of independent black churches and the association of cities with greater possibilities for black freedom.
Nevertheless, this opening chapter makes an important point in relationship to the studies of Carp and Alexander by forcefully demonstrating that liberty was not the exclusive province of patriots. Alexander, for example, too often seems to accept rebels’ views of their opponents as “aristocrats.” Even allowing for a loose use of that term, it has long been established that loyalists drew from all economic ranks of American society and were overly represented among urban Americans. 8 While Carp can fairly choose not to focus on loyalism in his urban case studies beyond noting that loyalists’ commitment to the status quo severely limited their capacity for effective political mobilization, the occupying British Army that terminates Carp’s urban tableaux is by Nash dramatically refigured with open arms to shelter enslaved people seeking freedom—an image that remains “almost too shocking for the American public to contemplate even now” (p. 23). Carp and Alexander both take care to discuss African Americans and slavery in their books but are so wedded to patriots as central subjects that neither treats slavery or African Americans with the insight appearing elsewhere in their books.
Nash’s speculative second chapter is the most innovative of the book as it argues that slavery could have been abolished in the Revolutionary Era if patriot leaders had the commitment and “political courage” (pp. 90-91) to champion antislavery. Nash makes his counterfactual case by stressing five key aspects of Revolutionary society that could have made antislavery viable: slavery was an insult to the Revolution’s embrace of universal rights; South Carolina and Georgia’s postwar weakness meant that they badly needed the nation; cultural environmentalism (as opposed to emergent biological inferiority) was still the dominant theory to explain human difference; the trans-Appalachian west could have been a resource for compensated emancipation; and Saint Domingue, France, and Great Britain all initiated significant antislavery movements in this era (pp. 71-75). The chapter then looks at how a handful of prominent patriots (Franklin, John Adams, Washington, Jefferson, and Madison) wrestled with doubts about slavery and ultimately took tepid steps (at best) to end what they each accepted as a social evil. In a somewhat surprising argument for a leader of the new social history, Nash argues that “the course of history might have changed” (p. 121) had these political elites acted differently, that decisive leadership could have avoided the death, destruction, and ongoing divisiveness of the Civil War.
Nash’s third chapter offers the most sustained attention to urban affairs via a close consideration of two Philadelphians’ writings to explain the worsening relationship between race and citizenship in the early republic and successfully blends the methodological and narrative techniques in his Forging Freedom and more recent Friends of Liberty. 9 Here James Forten (Philadelphia’s most successful black businessman) and Tench Coxe (a onetime loyalist, turned Federalist merchant and political economist, and then Jeffersonian officeholder) serve as useful foils to one another. Forten usually is cast in a heroic vein, though his initial support for African colonization only changed when confronted by popular black opposition at a mass meeting, while Coxe’s transformation is a more damning descent from early antislavery activities to a full-throated rejection of citizenship for free blacks. The book nonetheless closes optimistically for the racist onslaught stimulated further black mobilization in the 1820s that now built on the actions and memories of black founding fathers and mothers in the Revolution to sustain their campaign for equal rights.
Carp’s examination of Philadelphia politics “in and out of doors” in his closing chapter, like the opening one on Boston, covers well-known ground for those familiar with Urban Crucible, especially as amplified for Philadelphia by Richard Ryerson and Steven Rosswurm. 10 The reluctance of formal political leaders in Pennsylvania to join the resistance movement helped fuel a vibrant politics of the street that drew on practices dating back to the seventeenth-century English civil wars, which ultimately pushed established leaders and institutions from power in dramatic fashion. While patriot leaders largely contained political mobilization in Boston, the course of events in Philadelphia brought new men and groups to the fore. Carp compellingly retells this story with an insightful reconstruction of the contrasting use of outdoor space at the town hall and court house versus the yard behind the state house (now Independence Hall). He nicely brings a lived urban landscape to life, yet his sustained attention to the interplay between traditional leaders and the radicals’ outdoor mobilization leaves the energy and force of mass rallies at the state house, which grew as large as 8,000 people in a city of some 30,000, a bit elusive.
The political mobilization of New York City patriots in taverns, and especially the taverns’ proximity to nearby liberty pole sites where civilians and soldiers clashed, provides the most exciting analysis in Rebels Rising. As he also does with the waterfront in Boston and crowd actions in Philadelphia, Carp effectively contextualizes how other cities shared similar spaces but shows that each had a decisive significance in the city where he emphasizes it. 11 While taverns and drink may have encouraged more coercion than the “voluntary” (pp. 63, 98) action and participation that Carp notes in opening and closing this chapter, he convincingly situates contests over tavern sociability as central to prewar political mobilization in New York. The Sons of Liberty emerge here as a tavern-based organization, and key resistance leaders like Isaac Sears, Alexander McDougall, and John Lamb all had close ties to taverns that challenged a more genteel use of urban clubs and hotel spaces into which conservatives and moderate patriots would withdraw as revolutionary mobilization succeeded.
Carp’s treatments of Newport and Charleston are welcome additions as studies of less well-known places in Revolutionary America, but unfortunately these are also the least compelling of his case studies. He argues that Newport’s religious diversity created a “civic impasse” in the Rhode Island city that prevented full-fledged patriot mobilization. While the discussion of Baptist, Quaker, Anglican, Moravian, Congregationalist, and Jewish houses of worship is interesting in its own right, the argument that this created a narrow “landscape of mutual suspicion” (p. 121) is not entirely persuasive and at times seems to draw heavily on the perspective of Congregational minister Ezra Stiles. The chapter also discusses evangelical women like Sarah Osborne and Quaker antislavery, yet this adds to the interpretive unwieldiness of Newport’s treatment. In Charleston, domestic space is the key lens, especially the elite’s use of the “household metaphor” (p. 43), to shape appropriate mobilization. Patriot leader Henry Laurens’s suburban mansion is discussed in some detail, but the often very wide-ranging discussion that includes women’s place in the nonimportation movement and draws on evidence from North Carolina and Massachusetts as well as information about the backcountry Regulation distracts from the sharper urban focus on display in the stronger chapters of this fine book. The Charleston discussion closes by stressing that “racial subjection” helped to maintain “white solidarity” in the South Carolina city, unlike its “more fractious” (p. 171) northern counterparts. While households were surely deeply racialized, the manner in which they were, and how this intersected with rebel mobilization, merits more sustained treatment than was possible in this shortest chapter of the book.
In spite of some unevenness, Benjamin Carp’s Rebels Rising is the best recent monograph on Revolutionary American cities and deserves a wide readership. Carp makes knowledgeable use of a large secondary literature, skillfully handles a complicated five-city comparison, and positions his readers to think broadly about where the urban history of the Revolutionary Era should go next. This is already an ambitious comparative project, and Carp ably and sensibly explains why he excluded large urban centers like Quebec City and Kingston, Jamaica, from his study (p. 235, n. 8), yet one hopes that the recent explosion of early modern Atlantic scholarship will help drive a renaissance of comparative preindustrial urban history that will look beyond national boundaries. 12